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(05/20/21 9:58am)
Since the 1960s, Middlebury has conducted intermittent diversity climate assessments every six to seven years, according to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández. The most recent of these initiatives is the Action Plan for Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a multi-year plan published in September by the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (OIDEI).
OIDEI began writing the plan in fall of 2019 and circulated the plan to key stakeholders in the spring. Like many of its predecessors, publication of the 2020 Action Plan followed a discrete campus or national event: in this case, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolisis police officer last summer, which set off a fresh wave of protests about racial justice and equity in communities around the country.
The plan is ambitious in both objective and scope, aiming to “identify and implement strategies that will engage the entire campus community in the work of fostering greater access, equity, inclusion, and full participation for Middlebury students, staff, and faculty.”
Though Fernández and Directory of Equity and Inclusion Renee Wells spearheaded the Action Plan, they consulted numerous constituencies, including students, faculty, staff, administration, trustees, committees and alumni. They also looked at nearly two dozen reports, assessments and data to identify the institutional barriers that are mentioned in the report. From the feedback they received, the original plan underwent several iterations of revision.
“Diversity plans often present lofty goals but lack specificity and strategy and therefore lead to ‘diversity clutter’ with a host of disconnected initiatives,” reads the Action Plan. To avoid these usual pitfalls and increase accountability, the Plan is broken into five foci: Faculty and Staff; Students; Fostering and Restoring Community; Accessibility; and Transparency and Accountability. For each of the 61 initiatives described, the Action Plan details the responsible units, a proposed timeline and a measure of accountability which delegates the responsibilities of the initiative.
Still, the Action Plan introduction specifies the document should be viewed as a “roadmap,” not a “mandate.” When asked to confirm if strategies in the Plan would definitely be accomplished, Fernández acknowledged that fiscal realities as well as student and faculty initiatives could slightly shift the Plan’s approach. Wells said that the timeline may accommodate strategies as they become financially feasible.
“Our goal is that all of this gets accomplished and more,” Fernández said.
This Middlebury Campus investigation reports on the progress of the initiatives in the Action Plan with a particular focus on those with a proposed timeline of the 2020-2021 academic year. This project is split into five sections — one for each the Action Plan — and is the product of dozens of interviews with staff, students, committees and administrators.
“The United States of America has not solved racism or issues of equity and inclusion in 200- plus years. I do not expect Middlebury will resolve it in five years,” said Fernandez in an interview with The Campus. “So I'm sure there is going to be plenty of work to do in five years, [but] I hope we'll be in a much better place.”
Introduction by Hannah Bensen '21.
(05/20/21 3:15am)
The Fostering and Restoring Community section involves strategies that are concerned with creating restorative mechanisms to address harm, facilitating spaces for critical conversations and workshops, creating avenues for dialogue between different stakeholders and providing opportunities to report incidents of bias and discrimination. These strategies are wide in scope, addressing students, faculty, staff, administration and community members.
Director of Equity and Inclusion Renee Wells said that being in a community means that people will both experience and cause harm that is often unintentional.
“Harm is happening all over the campus all the time,” Wells said. “I think that cultural change requires that we acknowledge where systemic, institutional, interpersonal barriers and harms exist and the ways in which we are either unintentionally complicit in or sometimes benefit from that.”
“Due to differences in lived experience, every individual has a different comfort level navigating and talking about harm, and it is important to meet students where they are at in their journey,” Wells said. Though some people may feel discomfort during conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion, ultimately, they are feeling discomfort with a threat to the status quo, Wells explained.
“But what we have to acknowledge is that this status quo is a whole bunch of interconnected systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity and harm,” she said. “So we have to get comfortable with the fact that people are going to be uncomfortable with that.”
Of the 14 strategies detailed in the Fostering and Restoring Community Section of the Action Plan, 10 were scheduled for completion this year. Twelve of the fourteen have either been accomplished or commenced at the time of publication, and eight strategies are ongoing.
Responding to incidents of harm
Strategy #1 is about developing a system for using restorative practices, which is a framework used to proactively build community in response to incidents that cause harm on campus. There is a current framework in place, but the Restorative Practices Steering Committee — which includes several staff and administrators — is constantly tweaking the framework and is still integrating it into bodies around campus.
Associate Dean of Community Standards Brian Lind said that restorative practices, which have been employed by the college for several years in place of traditional disciplinary avenues, consist of three pillars: community building, responding to harm, and leadership. Residential Life and staff members have been trained in facilitating community building circles and restorative frameworks to address breakdowns in community, such as when communities cause harm to each other.
The restorative practices framework can be used in a variety of contexts, but often involves bringing parties who have experienced and caused harm together to discuss the impact of a behavior or breakdown in community.
“Restorative practices give us a meaningful framework to develop relationships so that we have stronger bonds when we cause or experience harm,” Lind said. “And we have a shared practice of how to respond to [harm] appropriately.”
Strategy #12 establishes alternative options for responding to incidents of relationship misconduct outside of the traditional adjudication process. Before this alternative pathway was available, students who wished to report misconduct filed a complaint with the Title IX office and underwent a formal investigation, according to Lind. This strategy creates another option.
“The [adaptable process] gives us a way, I think, to address it in a form that isn't punitive, that will hopefully help repair the harm that's been caused, and help everybody involved kind of process and work through writing the situation.
Establishing opportunities for critical conversations
Strategy #2 is about engaging students in critical conversations around healthy relationships including sexual encounters and consent, and strategy #4 is about critical conversations about consent, sexual violence, and misconduct. These initiatives have commenced and are ongoing.
According to Emily Wagner, assistant director of health and wellness education, their office has already had successful engagement with a variety of programs, including ProjectConnect, a six-week group series where students learn about developing authentic relationships, and Finding Your People, a panel for students to share ideas about expanding your friendship circle and creating community at Middlebury.
Green Dot, a pre-existing program that aims to prevent sexual violence and promote healthy relationships through bystander intervention and conversation, will begin providing training at each of the Middlebury schools abroad. The training will be tailored to the cultural and linguistic differences of that country beginning in the fall of 2021, Wagner said in an email to the Campus.
Sex Positive Education for College Students (SPECS) and confidential advocacy services such as MiddSafe have also sought to create a safer space on campus regarding relationships and consent.
For the past three semesters, the Title IX office has also incorporated Speak About It — a program about consent and communication — into first-year student student orientation. The Title IX office also hosted a book club for students for the book Sexual Citizens, which discusses sexual assault on college campuses, according to Wagner and Civil Rights and Title IX Coordinator Marti McCaleb.
“As we move into the 2021-2022 school year, we are working closely with Residential Life and other campus partners around strategic ways to reach more students in person,” Wagner said in an email.
Avenues for dialogue and feedback
Several strategies in this section are concerned with establishing channels of communication between students and staff, faculty, and administration.
Wells hosts weekly office hours on Fridays from 12 to two and by appointment where students, faculty and staff can share concerns, seek support, and explore strategies to address concerns, an initiative introduced in strategy #6 of the Plan.
Per strategy #7, the Senior Leadership Group (SLG) — a collection of senior-level administrators — has been meeting monthly with a group of BIPOC students who “represent key stakeholders and leadership of different cultural organizations to have collaborative discussions that aim for the implementation of institutional change,” according to a school-wide email from Dec. 15.
Strategy #8 calls for the creation of a Student Advisory Council for the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to provide feedback and recommendations related to campus concerns, barriers to marginalized students on campus and forms of oppression. According to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández, this strategy has not yet been implemented.
Strategy #9 tasks Faculty Council and the Educational Affairs Committee with “explor[ing] the possibility of including a question about accessibility, equity, and classroom climate on Course Response Forms.” This strategy is slated for 2021–2022, and work has not yet begun on this initiative, according to Faculty Council member Natalie Eppelsheimer.
Strategy #13 tasks Community Council (CC) with exploring the role of Public Safety and collaboration with police and security. CC will then present a proposal to SLG outlining their findings. According to Co-Chair of Community Council Christian Kummer, CC has been in conversation with administration to create a formal recommendation on this topic, which will likely be completed next fall.
Workshops
Strategy #5 calls for regular workshops for faculty and staff to better understand the reporting requirements and investigation process for discrimination, harassmaent and sexual violence, and appropriate resources for members of the campus community. OIDEI provides the workshops and has presented them to various offices and groups, including Directors of the Language Schools, faculty and staff at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, staff of the Schools Abroad and incoming new faculty at Middlebury, according to McCaleb.
“Every Middlebury employee has the responsibility to participate in and promote a respectful environment at Middlebury,” said McCaleb in an email. “Our conversations in this area are geared towards individuals understanding their personal impact and obligations within our community.”
Strategy #14 calls for “regular education opportunities related to diversity, equity and inclusion in the local community.”
Wells has spearheaded these efforts, and has facilitated various workshops in the past year about anti-racism, microaggressions and stereotyping for local non-profits, the Rutland NAACP, campus and community members, Middlebury Co-op managers and the Ilsley Public Library.
Communication and Reporting
Strategy #3 is concerned with clear communication about behaviors prohibited under the Non-Discrimination Policy and how to report breaches of this policy. This strategy has already been implemented.
Strategy #10 advises the creation of an online form that can be used to report incidents of discrimincation, harassment and violence. This form has been in use since at least last fall, and can be found at go/bias. As of January of this year, the form had received 28 incident reports representing 16 incidents, according to Fernández.
Strategy #11 recommends that an online form be used to report incidents of discrimination, harassment and violence. This form can be found at go/report and has been promoted through various social media channels and partners, though it is not yet widely utilized, according to McCaleb.
(04/29/21 1:00pm)
The pandemic introduced a new variable to our data this year, one that fundamentally shifted the rhythm of Middlebury students’ existence. While previous Zeitgeist surveys asked students about belonging and how identities coalesce, this year we pondered what tethers Middlebury students together — even when we’ve been asked to keep our distance.
Separated by masks and unable to congregate in the ways we know, it can be difficult to get a read on the pulse of the Middlebury community. Did the policies enacted to protect our physical health affect our interpersonal relationships? How many hours per day do students spend looking at a screen? Has the pandemic changed sexual behavior? Does Middlebury feel like home?
In the third annual Zeitgeist survey, a project that interweaves data and the written word to paint a picture of life at Middlebury, our theme is “connection.” With a 43% response rate, the results represent a cross-section of the student experience, though some student voices — namely students of color — are underrepresented in these results.
Though the struggles of this year have been collective, every individual has learned, languished, and lost differently. As a world beyond the pandemic seems more possible than ever, we hope these Zeitgeist results provide insight about what we should carry into a post-pandemic Middlebury — and the things we should leave behind.
(04/15/21 9:59am)
Dear Middlebury College Administration,
This year has been marked by tragedy, sacrifice and loss for the Middlebury community. We seniors are also mourning the loss of the normal, triumphant ending to our time here, which we and our families have anticipated for the last four years. Senior week, baccalaureate and graduation typically offer students a meaningful way to celebrate their accomplishments and say goodbye to their Middlebury community.
We understand that graduation will look different this year, and we are grateful that Middlebury is pursuing an in-person ceremony. However, recent decisions about the nature of graduation and our final days on campus — and the poor communication about these decisions — left many of us feeling disappointed, frustrated and hurt.
Neither families nor our Feb ’21.5 classmates will be allowed to attend commencement as they typically do. In addition to cancelling senior week, Middlebury recently announced that graduation would be moved forward to 2 p.m. on May 29; seniors will only have until 11 p.m. that same day to leave campus.
We recently conducted an informal social media survey of some of our senior and senior Feb classmates to gauge how they are feeling about the commencement plans and recent changes. While the 64 responses gathered do not represent the perspectives of the entire graduating class, we hope to voice some of our peers’ concerns about graduation plans and open communication with the administration to address them.
We ask the administration to extend the move-out date to at least Sunday May 30, improve communication with the senior class about recent changes, and welcome the senior Febs to attend the ceremony. Please consider signing our petition here if you agree.
Students will only have one day after finishing final exams to pack, graduate and say goodbye to friends.
The original graduation plan — with commencement and move-out on Sunday, May 30 — allowed students one day after finals (which end on Friday, May 28) to be with their classmates without worrying about schoolwork. This new, rushed timeline means that students’ final days and goodbyes will be characterized not by celebration and joy, but by stress and sleep deprivation.
As one student wrote in the survey, “eliminating any sort of time off between finals and commencement has the potential to cause much more harm than benefit because this creates a lot of stress for students who want to focus on doing well on their finals as well as say goodbye to friends ... and pack up all their belongings too. I don't feel as though the college is looking out for seniors' mental health during this time.”
Another student wrote, “With finals right before graduation, it will not feel like a celebration because there is zero time to digest and reflect (however briefly) on my Middlebury experience, or say goodbye to friends here.”
Rather than depriving seniors of this final opportunity to celebrate with friends without the logistical stress of packing and schoolwork, we ask that the administration extend the move-out date to at least Sunday, May 30.
The change in move-out date from the 30th to the 29th is problematic for many students’ travel plans.
As one of our peers wrote, “My mother's saying that I might have to miss commencement, as there are no flights leaving that day at a time that would allow me to both assist commencement and get off campus that same day.” Other students are facing non-refundable or changeable plane tickets or will be forced to get a hotel room Saturday night.
Another student noted, “It’s incredibly unsafe to ask people to drive home the night of graduation. I have a 12-hour drive and likely will stay up the night before to pack.”
While we understand that students typically leave the day of graduation, this is usually after having days of break to get packed and say goodbye.
Many families face logistical challenges to watching the virtual ceremony, as they must travel to pick up their students on the same day.
One student wrote: “Both myself and my parents are really upset that the move-out date has not at least been extended to the day after graduation. Given the new timing, my mom will have to watch graduation from a hotel room after driving up to Midd.”
Another student reported that their family will miss the entire ceremony while in transit. Furthermore, for parents who must travel longer distances, picking up students on Saturday versus Sunday or Memorial Day means they are more likely to have to miss work.
The date change and compressed timeline disproportionately impact less-privileged students and families.
The FAQ page suggests that families “think about staying closer to campus the night before graduation,” and states that individuals must reschedule flights based on the new date. Lower income students and families will feel the financial impact of paying for hotel rooms, purchasing new flights and taking off work more harshly.
Additionally, for first-generation students’ families — for whom graduation may be particularly meaningful — the losses of attending an in-person ceremony or comfortably watching a remote ceremony may be espeically impactful. One student wrote, “This is a huge moment for some families especially for first-gen students, making small changes to allow families to recognize this moment is literally the least you could do.”
Also, as one student pointed out: “The lack of senior week is going to create incredible inequality because wealthy students will rent Airbnbs the week after graduation and some students won’t be able to do that financially.” Forcing students to vacate campus immediately after finals limits celebrations to those who can pay for private accommodations.
Rushing students off campus redistributes risk to less structured contexts, rather than reducing it.
Making students leave campus so quickly will not prevent them from gathering, but will simply move gatherings earlier or off-campus. One student wrote: “I understand their concern about large gatherings on campus, but do they really think moving it one day soon[er] changes anything? They are essentially just pushing off any partying/mass gatherings into the Middlebury community where they have no control.”
Instead of relocating these celebrations to the broader community, Middlebury should utilize the capacity of the institution to facilitate safe modes of celebration.
The exclusion of Febs is deeply upsetting to many while providing little-to-no benefit in terms of safety.
As one student wrote, Febs “were admitted to Middlebury as members of the class of 2021 and should be treated as such.” Senior Febs are typically considered part of the senior class.
These restrictions are particularly distressing to seniors who Febbed themselves due to the pandemic. One student shared: "I’m a Reg who is now a Feb and by these rules, I can’t see my best friends graduate—the very people I was supposed to walk with at graduation."
Risk of outdoor transmission is low, so Feb attendance is not likely to increase risk of Covid-19 spread. Since they will already be on campus, excluding Febs feels both unnecessary and harsh.
Communication regarding recent commencement changes has been unclear and insufficient.
The change in move-out date was not clearly communicated, and the student body has not had the chance to give feedback on or otherwise contribute to commencement planning. Many students have felt unheard in this process. One student noted: “When the school tells us it’s trying its best to make this a time we still can feel celebrated, it’s hard to believe them when they haven’t asked us how they can best do that.”
Despite the possibility that conditions may improve, the college has stated that it will not consider changing plans in the future.
We are encouraged by vaccination rates, and the fact that Vermont’s gathering restrictions are due to relax considerably over the next several weeks. Furthermore, several other NESCAC schools plan to provide more traditional ceremonies; Bates, Bowdoin, Williams and Trinity, for example, are allowing graduating students up to two guests at their Commencement ceremonies. UVM will also be allowing two fully-vaccinated guests per student. With this in mind, we are frustrated by the college's unwillingness to remain flexible in light of changing conditions.
While safety is paramount, we ask that the administration embrace a more optimistic plan for commencement that includes Febs and a delayed departure, while preparing to adjust to a more restrictive model only if conditions were to change.
Students have demonstrated their commitment to community wellbeing; the commencement plan feels disconnected from our current context.
Over this past school year, Middlebury students have consistently demonstrated a commitment to public health and safety. The decision to rush students off campus demonstrates a lack of trust in our ability and willingness to gather and celebrate safely.
As one student wrote, “Seniors have spent all year ... making sure that this year was safe and successful. The school owes seniors the same amount of care and respect.” After all of our sacrifice, the lack of trust seems callous.
Wrote another student, “We have proven time and time again that we are able to spend time on campus without causing a mass-outbreak. Be reasonable, let alone kind, and give us a few days to breathe (and pack) between exams and graduation. If this was your kid, you would do your absolute best to provide that.”
In conclusion
We have collected our peers’ responses and encourage you to read them. We have also created a petition outlining some of the changes we believe should be enacted, where we encourage students and families to share their thoughts and sign if they agree.
Ultimately, we recognize that the college cannot control the pandemic, and we respect the administration’s right to respond to new conditions as they arise. However, we ask the administration to grant us more time to depart campus, allow Febs to celebrate alongside us, and communicate commencement plans and the reasoning behind them with clarity in order to facilitate a meaningful experience in our final days on campus. We ask that you work with your senior class to promote a positive graduation experience in a year that has already been marked by so much loss.
Editor’s Note: Hannah Bensen is the senior data editor and an editor at large.
Kayla Lichtman and Hannah Bensen are members of the class of 2021. Grace Metzler and Tia Pogue are members of the class of 2021.5.
(03/18/21 9:59am)
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When Krysta Rainey, a servery worker in Proctor Dining Hall, reported to work early Thursday morning, she noticed that the milk machine that normally sits in the corner of the hall was damaged. Upon inspection of the bags of milk inside the machine, one of the bags exploded, injuring Rainey’s left shoulder.
According to Dan Detora, executive director of food service operations, the milk machine had a large dent on the front corner, the back panel had fallen off and the handles were damaged beyond use. Nothing else in the dining hall was damaged.
“My guess is that [the machine] was pushed off the counter,” Detora said in an email to The Campus.
The damage to the machines is being investigated as an act of vandalism by Department of Public Safety (DPS) Investigator Lee Hodsden.
“I was upset and angry,” Rainey said in an interview with The Campus about her injury that resulted from the incident. As of Monday afternoon, she said her injury, which she described as feeling like a pulled muscle, had improved but was still bothering her. She did not seek treatment for it.
The college rents the milk machines from Monument Farms and will ultimately have to pay for the damages, Detora said. It is not yet known how much it will cost to replace the machines.
“I just don’t understand the reason for such behavior. [It] seems very disrespectful to our hard working staff,” Detora said. “We hope that it is a one-time incident.”
It is unclear how the person responsible for the vandalism entered Proctor Dining Hall, and it is not known for certain that a Middlebury student was responsible for the damage. According to Associate Director of Public Safety Keith Ellery, the exterior doors to Proctor lock at 8:30 p.m., meaning only authorized students and staff can enter the building. After 11 p.m., only authorized staff has access.
“There were no signs or indication of forced entry into Proctor,” Ellery said in an email.
“An interior door was found unsecured and could have provided access to the area where the vandalism occurred. As part of normal operations, DPS officers check the exterior doors of many campus buildings, including Proctor, during the course of their shift.”
There are no video cameras in the vicinity of Proctor Dining Hall and therefore no video footage of the incident. As of Tuesday afternoon, DPS had no suspects in their investigation. Anyone wishing to provide helpful information regarding this incident are asked to contact DPS at (802) 443-5133.
(02/16/21 4:25am)
Professor of Economics Akhil Rao was named one of two winners of the 2020 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, a prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations.
Awards are given to recent doctoral recipients who have made unusually significant and original contributions to their field. Each year, two winners are announced — one from each of two disciplines that rotate annually — and awardees receive a $2,000 cash prize. Rao received the award in the social sciences division for his dissertation, “The Economics of Orbit Use: Theory, Policy, and Measurement.”
Rao also received the 2019 Wallace E. Oates Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
In an interview with The Campus, Rao said he considers the award an acknowledgement of his work’s relevance.
“One thing that I worried about as I was working on my dissertation was: Am I just going to be shouting into the void? Is anybody going to be paying attention?” Rao said. “Winning the award, to me, means that other people saw it and said, ‘Yes, this could matter.’”
Rao’s dissertation research examines earth’s orbits as a shared resource. In an email to The Campus, Julia Berazneva, assistant professor of economics who also studies environmental economics and natural resource management, described Rao’s research as “pathbreaking and crucial for humanity’s exploration of space.
“Similar to the problems of fisheries management, atmospheric carbon control, or traffic congestion, it is costly to exclude individuals/companies/countries from accessing and using the Earth’s orbit,” Berazneva said. “So that orbit space begins facing problems of congestion and overuse (and to accumulate space debris), which increase the risk of collision.”
Rao’s dissertation researches “orbital-use fees” as a mechanism of managing this problem and shows that implementing such a fee scheme could help align the private incentives of satellite operators with society’s long-term interests. The dissertation is part of a larger canon of theoretical research about natural resource issues and — more broadly — about problems that haven’t occurred yet, Rao said.
“There’s a lot we can learn by looking at the past, and there’s a lot we can say then from that knowledge about what will happen in the future,” Rao said. “I think with a lot of these kinds of natural resource problems, if we can get ahead of the curve, we are doing ourselves and future generations a favor.”
While writing his dissertation, Rao built his institutional knowledge of the topic by reading papers in topics as varied as engineering and natural resources. Then, he wrote and solved simple theory models by hand or on the computer. The next step of his process was to locate a data source and examine the analytical possibilities of that data. At the time, data about space was limited, and Rao’s dissertation is theory-heavy as a result.
Though Rao’s work is both theoretical and empirical in nature, he also considers himself to be a storyteller. He generates many of his research ideas from reading science fiction stories and news articles.
“Rao’s work is unique, technical, daring and fun,” Berazneva said. “The Economics department is incredibly proud of Professor Rao’s achievements and we absolutely love having a space economist in our ranks.”
(01/24/21 1:41am)
Although two-thirds of students said they did not regret their Fall 2020 enrollment decision, 76% of students said their mental health was worse during the fall semester than during a typical semester and nearly two in three students broke Covid-19 health protocols, according to a Campus survey. Other major findings include:
More than a third of students — 38% — said the semester exceeded expectations, while almost 40% said that it was worse than expected.
Almost half of students said that they disapproved of the administration’s handling of the fall semester.
A vast majority of students, 75%, said they felt stressed about their relationships this semester.
Students emphasized increasing social opportunities for students, promoting inclusivity and providing greater clarity on Covid-19 safety rules when suggesting improvements for the spring.
At the end of the survey, we also offered students the opportunity to anonymously share their ideas on how to make the spring 2021 semester better and provide any additional anecdotes from the semester. We have included some of these anonymous responses throughout this article and compiled specific student suggestions for improving the spring semester.
Academics
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The data reveal a striking lack of consensus regarding how the fall semester went: while 38% of students said the semester exceeded their expectations, nearly 40% of students said the semester was worse than they expected. About a quarter of students said the semester was about the same as they expected.
In the anecdotal responses, many students wished for more in-person classes. “Middlebury should prioritize its primary duty, which is to educate its students to the best of its abilities by making every possible effort to make classes in-person,” wrote one student.
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Satisfaction with the fall semester also varied by class year. While one in three members of the classes of 2021 or 2021.5 said the semester was worse than they expected, one half of respondents from the classes of 2023 or 2023.5 said the semester fell below expectations.
The vast majority of respondents, 87.5%, said they took four courses during the fall semester. A third of students indicated that two of their courses had in-person components, while 17% of students said they had zero classes with in-person components. The average student had in-person components in roughly half — 45% — of their courses.
Approval of college entities
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Of the six different entities we asked students to evaluate, Middlebury faculty enjoyed by far the highest approval rating. Still, in their anecdotal responses, students said they hoped that faculty would be more “lenient,” “understanding” and “flexible” during the spring semester. Some students wished faculty would go one step further and lighten students’ workloads.
“It seems like professors are concerned that reducing workloads means that we're learning less and not getting enough for our money,” one respondent wrote. “But the stress and depression of this fall made it so hard to learn that covering less material would be beneficial and we would actually learn more.”
Almost half of students, or 47%, disapproved of the administration, while a quarter approved of it. Some students said they thought Covid-19 policies were unrealistic or unclearly communicated in their anecdotal responses. “I hope that there can be more dialogue between students and administrators to understand how to better create rules that students will actually follow and feel safe,” one wrote.
Fall satisfaction and spring intentions
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Overall, two in three students said they did not regret their enrollment decision. One-tenth of respondents said they regretted their decision, and a quarter of students said they regretted the decision “somewhat.”
“I am not returning Middlebury in the Spring as they never fulfilled most of the things they told us they would throughout the semester,” one student wrote.
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If students’ intended spring plans are an indication of enrollment rates for the spring semester, Middlebury may see fewer students on campus this spring. 68% of students who said they intend to enroll as an on-campus student in the spring, compared to the 87% of respondents who identified as on-campus learners in the fall.
Compared to the 3.5% of students who took the semester off in the fall, 10% of respondents said they would not enroll or take the semester off.
One senior student said they were part of a group of friends leaving campus in the spring as a result of the strict rules. “It’s not how I wanted to spend my senior spring but we can’t deal with the rules on campus and just want to be able to be together for our last few months,” the student wrote.
An additional 9% of students were unsure of their spring plans. The number of remote students and the number of students living off-campus but taking classes on-campus is projected to remain the same for the spring at about 7% and under 3% respectively.
Covid-19 policies, rules, and guidelines
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Almost two in every three respondents — 64% — indicated that they broke Covid-19 safety rules this semester. A third of respondents said they exceeded room or suite capacity during the semester and a fourth of students reported having more than four close contacts. More than one in every ten — 13% — of students said they participated in a party or gathering with more than 10 people.
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One respondent said they were with as many as 30 other people in a house or suite without masks “every weekend.” The respondent added, “The rules were too strict. If I had followed them I would have become depressed.”
Some respondents believed that Covid-19 policies were enforced unevenly. “The inconsistency in punishment for breaking the Covid rules was absolutely unreal,” one respondent wrote. “Do not create a rule if it will not and cannot be enforced consistently.”
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Students greatly differed in their understanding of Middlebury’s Covid-19 policies. Nearly half of students said they felt confused by guidelines, compared to the 43% that said they were clear. “I worried pretty constantly that I would get reported for something that was me misunderstanding the rules and be kicked off campus,” one student responded.
Mental Health
The survey finds a striking decline in student mental health during the fall semester.
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Three-fourths of students said their mental health was worse than it has been during a typical semester. The three factors most likely to affect student mental health this semester were stress about an uncertain future amid the pandemic, stress about academic work and anxiety over friendships or “fear of missing out,” according to survey results.
“The one thing that was amazing was my professors, but it is hard to motivate oneself to do work when you feel miserable all the time,” one student wrote.
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Two-thirds of students reported feeling greater social isolation than in a normal semester, and almost a third of respondents experienced significant changes in their diet which led to either weight loss or gain. Nearly one in 10 students experienced intrusive thoughts of suicide which worsened during the semester.
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Three-fourths of students felt stressed about their relationships. Some students expressed that the Covid-19 restrictions implemented by the college were successful in limiting cases of virus, but did so at the expense of students’ mental health. One student put it succinctly: “Mental health is just as important as physical health.” Others said they experienced mental strain due to the inability to socialize with friends or the fear of being punished for breaking Covid-19 rules.
General Demographics
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This survey was sent to about 2,500 Middlebury students studying both remotely and on campus, and 549 — slightly less than quarter — responded. Eighty-seven percent of respondents were on-campus students this past fall, 2.3% of respondents lived off-campus but took classes on campus and 6.9% of respondents were remote students.
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Respondents were fairly evenly distributed by class year, with a slight majority of respondents coming from the classes of 2022 and 2022.5 at 28.2%.
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Three-quarters of respondents identified as white, 8.4% as Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander, 6% as of Latino or Hispanic Origin, 6% as biracial or multiracial, and 1.6% as Black or African American. Thirty-one or 5.6% of respondents identified as international students.
Slightly more than one-third of respondents said they receive financial aid.
Ideas from Student Responses for an improved Spring 2021 semester
Social Life
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80% of students said that they thought spaces for hanging out or socializing were inadequate. 75% of students said they thought there was inadequate space for hosting events.
In the anecdotal responses, students repeatedly said they hoped for more in-person social opportunities in the spring, either facilitated by the college or through extracurricular activities, and improved access to spaces for socializing. One respondent wanted “more opportunities for virtual students to stay connected to campus events with students in person.”
Other student ideas included having heaters for tents, changing policies so that it is easier to register events and providing “funding for students to figure out how to make their own fun.”
Several students said they would be willing to sacrifice off-campus privileges in order to make on-campus rules less strict.
Inclusivity
Some anecdotal responses mentioned the ways in which rules and policies create different playing fields for different students.
“This semester exasperated the divide between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' because the students who had access to a car to drive places in Addison County tended to have a better experience overall than those who didn't,” wrote the student, adding that they wished the college provided a “rent-a-car” service for students.
“Promote inclusivity,” wrote another student. “White students spend time with white students and are intimidating to students of color. There is an apparent divide.”
Other students felt that they had to exclude friends from social gatherings due to capacity limits. One student felt particularly strongly about Covid-19 policies capping the number of people in a room: “Rules [related to Covid-19] essentially required us to ruin our friendships.”
One student said that they hoped students would be allowed to rank their preferred dining hall. “Some dining halls have a reputation of being predominantly white spaces, whereas other dining halls have a perception of being more inclusive to BIPOC students,” the student wrote.
Creation and Communication of Covid-19 Policies
Some students hoped for student input regarding Covid-19 policies. One respondent recommended that new rules should first be run by Residential Life.
Several students perceived the college’s Covid-19 guidelines to be vague and worried that they would accidentally break a rule. “I wish that it was more clear what people [were] disciplined for,” wrote a student. Another student hoped for “more concise guidelines from fewer sources.”
Editor’s Note: Survey questions pertaining to mental health were designed in conjunction with the Student Government Association Health and Wellness Committee.
(10/15/20 9:55am)
Benjy Renton ’21 has spent the better part of the past six months covering the Covid-19 pandemic with his weekly “Where We Stand with Covid-19” reports. But not even Renton could have anticipated his new beat when, in the early hours of Friday, Oct. 2, his friend and Middlebury Campus colleague James Finn ’20.5 sent Renton a tweet: President Trump had tested positive for the virus.
“We’ve begun the monumental task of contact-tracing the President of the United States,” Renton said in an interview with The Campus.
By the end of the day on Oct. 2, Renton had joined forces with Peter Walker, a data visualization specialist who spearheads the Covid-19 Tracking Project for The Atlantic, and Dr. Jesse Owens, an infectious disease fellow and internal medicine doctor at Emory University, to construct a Covid-19 dashboard that mapped the president’s contacts and infection status.
Although the dashboard is not intended to be a stand-in for the scientific contact tracing process, it is one of the most comprehensive public trackers of the president’s contacts. In two days, the dashboard garnered 370,000 views. As of press time, the dashboard has reached over 764,000 views.
“We’ve decided to do this as a public-facing dashboard,” Renton said. “The American people deserve to have all the information in one place.”
One would think contact tracing the president would be a simple task given his hyper-visibility in public spaces. But prior to testing positive, Trump had been to a long list of places: the White House Rose Garden ceremony, during which Trump announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 26; the presidential debate on Sept. 29; and campaign rallies in Minnesota and New Jersey on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.
Renton and his colleagues have parsed through news media accounts of these events, identifying each individual present and following each thread of contacts as new individuals test positive. They also have a tip line where people can anonymously submit information or contacts to add to the dashboard. The tip line has received 512 submissions since the dashboard was created, and Renton is the one responsible for adding all of this information.
“It’s kind of like a family tree,” Renton said. “But the family tree is the three branches of the U.S. government.”
The dashboard has since been picked up by Forbes, New York Magazine and the BBC.
Walker said Renton has a “doggedness” that allows him to jump into situations that may seem messy. Renton’s work, according to Walker, is “on-par with anything [he has] seen” in the academic or scientific world.
“I think the key is that he’s able to recognize the opportunity and able to fill a knowledge gap,” Walker said in an interview with The Campus. “He has a clear sense of right and wrong, and that has pushed him to do work that he feels is of the moment and not only valuable but necessary.”
Renton’s journey in covering Covid-19 has been a personal one: he was studying abroad in Beijing, China when the pace of the pandemic began to accelerate in mid-January of this year. The study abroad program was canceled and all students were sent home in late January. Renton began his spring semester at Middlebury in February — only to be sent home from Middlebury once again after the college was evacuated in mid-March. Renton returned to his hometown in Rye, N.Y., proximal to the American epicenter of the pandemic in New York City.
“I think I have a unique vantage point of seeing the outbreak in China, seeing the outbreak in New York, and now seeing the outbreak on a college campus,” Renton said. “If you think of phases of pandemics, those are key phases that the U.S. and the world has fought.”
What began in 2014 as a blog called “Off the Silk Road,” where Renton wrote about his trips to China prior to college, soon evolved into an update for friends and family about the state of the pandemic. In mid-April, Renton ramped up his coverage with weekly reports called “Where We Stand with Covid-19,” a forum that is equal parts blog, website and newsletter, drawing from scientific research, op-eds and news media about Covid-19.
Renton said he structures his weekly reports a bit like a news broadcast, with an introduction containing the week’s national news headlines which may or may not be pandemic-related.
Subsequent segments contain information on things like vaccines, the latest scientific studies, K-12 schools and study abroad information. Renton created one unique segment called the College RidicuList, which contains a bulleted list of “quirks of college reopening plans.” Another segment is called “The Good Stuff,” which is a list of Renton’s favorite feel-good headlines from the week’s news.
Renton relies on graphics and visualizations to display this information, and he makes many of these himself. Every week he updates the College Watchlist, which maps incidents of positive Covid-19 cases in higher education across the country during the last seven days. The map tracked 98,965 cases at 91 institutions, according to Renton’s Oct. 11 newsletter. Renton updates these numbers by hand every week. The process of writing these newsletters takes around 7 hours each week, Renton said.
“I think it’s important to see the general pulse of the nation,” Renton said when asked why he combines mainstream news reporting with coverage of the pandemic. “I think it’s really important to acknowledge those events because I think it’s a transformative part in history, and it’s one that needs to be discussed for a minute.”
Renton is a news junkie. At the height of his news consumption over the summer, Renton said he was reading 500 articles per week. He said he pared down that consumption a bit once school began, watching some cable news each day; reading national, local and college papers; and subscribing to a variety of scientific and health publications or newsletters.
“Benjy has a voracious appetite for the news and is really good at hopping on whatever is occurring out in the world and adding his own flair to how it’s reported, whether it’s data or adding analysis,” said Sabine Poux ’20, who served as the Editor in Chief for The Campus last year.
Despite being a full-time student, Renton’s coverage of the pandemic has not slackened. Renton is in the process of co-authoring a scientific paper that analyzes the reopening plans of 500 institutions of higher education across the United States, along with researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University.
Renton also has plans of researching “college” counties, a designation given to counties where college students compose at least 10% of the population.
Nobody is certain when the pandemic will end, not even Renton. For now, he plans to continue carving out his niche in higher education and Covid-19 tracing research, contributing to a historical record of life during the pandemic.
“The pandemic is all of our stories,” Renton said.
Editor’s Note: Benjy Renton ’21 is The Campus’ Digital Director.
(09/10/20 9:59am)
As upperclassmen returned to a campus that felt foreign in many ways, first-year students embarked on a college experience shaped by Covid-19 — a reality that is the only one they have ever known.
During first-year move-in on Aug. 26, students heaved boxes and suitcases into their dorm rooms alone while parents waited in their vehicles and said their farewells wearing masks. A 36-hour room quarantine replaced the square-dance and the ice cream party frenzy that traditionally characterize the first days of Middlebury. Upon their release to campus quarantine, they attended socially distanced meet-and-greets and took sunset strolls to the Knoll in lieu of three-day MiddView trips.
Ella Bode ’24 had never been to Middlebury prior to move-in. After receiving her negative Covid-19 test result the morning of Aug. 28, she ventured onto campus for the first time with her roommate.
“I was just so excited to finally be outside and see everything for myself. I was surprised at how similar a lot of the buildings looked and by how much green there is. There's just grass and trees everywhere,” said Bode, who hails from North Carolina. “My favorite place on campus has to be the Knoll or by the athletic fields where you can see all the mountains.”
First-years only have second-hand knowledge of college life, acquired from movies, books and the stories of those who have come before them — all of which were conceived in a pre-pandemic world. These are their only reference points by which to compare their limited time in college. Many first-years interviewed for this story expressed “typical” first-year-of-college anxieties, but compounding these concerns is the ever-present fear that campus could be shut down, or evacuated, at any moment.
“You’re worried about making friends, you’re worried about acclimating to a new academic environment,” Sarah Miller ’24 said. “But then there’s, of course, the added worry of Covid-19. Am I going to be sent home? Am I going to have to take these classes online? And how [do I] make connections with people in classes when they’re online, and professors too?”
Other students expressed concern that the Covid-19 policies enacted by the college will restrict opportunities to foster social connections. Bode said she experienced the uneasy feeling known as “fear of missing out” (FOMO) after seeing photos on social media of her friends from home going to parties and meeting new people.
“Nobody wants to get kicked out of Middlebury, but everyone wants to make friends,” Bode said. “We just want to be able to experience as much as possible.”
In the past two weeks of orientation, first-year students had significantly more free time than during the typical week-long orientation. Several students said they wished for more scheduled opportunities to intermix with their peers.
“I feel like I never see the people on my hall,” Miller said. “It’s not the kind of environment where people have their door open and you can just wander in.”
“I wish they had more optional programming, like a socially-distanced dance party outside, or projecting a movie on the quad, just stuff where you can meet people,” Bode said.
With college life colored by the limitations and general strangeness generated by Covid-19 restrictions, Matthew Fish ’24 felt that remaining on campus was not worthwhile. Fish was attracted to Middlebury’s history and its reputation as a prestigious liberal arts college, and he was excited to be part of a college community.
Fish was frustrated that he had to remain in his room for 36 hours while waiting for his Day Zero test results after completing a two-week home quarantine. He did not care for the vegan food and had never had a roommate before. Upon his release to campus quarantine, Fish was discouraged by campus limitations regarding where students could go and what they could do.
“I was having a high degree of anxiety,” Fish said. “I was having a real hard time with the situation. The isolation was certainly part of it — the fact that I was spending 90% of my time in my dorm room because there was nothing else really to do, besides the MiddView orientation group.”
After talking to family members and friends about the situation, Fish ultimately made the decision to return home to complete the semester remotely. He left campus on Sept. 2.
“I just don’t think you can treat people like caged animals,” Fish said. “That’s how I felt. I think they should have been more open. Socially distancing and all, obviously, but have buildings open. Have more events outside. Have more in-person gatherings than just orientation groups.”
Fish said he is confident in his decision to take classes remotely. He plans to take a deeper look at the college’s plan for the spring semester and to ask more specific questions before making the choice to return to campus.
“I’m not somebody who throws in the towel at the earliest moment,” Fish said. “I made what I feel was an informed decision and a tactical retreat.”
While there are restrictions regarding the size of group gatherings and what activities are permissible, many first-years have contented themselves with smaller group gatherings or online Zoom meetings. First-year students have been convening in dorm lounges as well as through activities such as frisbee or Spikeball.
“At least for me personally, I find the social scene to be very fitting,” Edwin Fan ’24 said. “ I think [President] Laurie Patton herself said at convocation yesterday that an introverted student came up to her yesterday and said that the social scene for introverts has been better.”
Fan watched convocation, an event that normally takes place in Mead Chapel, with his hallmates on the fourth floor of Stewart Hall. The group viewed the ceremony in their hallway on a T.V., and everyone wore masks and was socially distanced. To older students and alumni, an online convocation might seem strange. Fan, however, described the strong sense of community during the occasion as one of those “cliché college moments.”
“We were just chowing down on ramen upstairs while watching convocation, cheering with our [Middlebury] mugs,” Fan said. “I guess I don’t know what a normal convocation would look like, but from the atmosphere that was up there, I definitely do feel formally welcomed to Middlebury.”
(07/14/20 4:47am)
In addition to the Covid-19-related difficulties all Vermonters face — such as finding childcare or struggling to pay rent — migrant farmworkers in the state are encountering additional challenges during the pandemic, according to Vermont Director of Racial Equity Xusana Davis.
“[Migrant workers] are more legally vulnerable than a lot of other Vermonters because of things like immigration, wage effects, lack of labor protection, et cetera,” Davis said. “So all of these things really compounded to make Covid-19 especially difficult for a population that was already vulnerable for a lot of reasons.”
The roughly 1,300 migrant farmworkers have also been excluded from the $1,200 stimulus payments that were a product of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Congress passed the bill in late March to provide economic assistance to families, businesses and workers.
Federal regulations mandate that states use federal Covid-19 relief funds for U.S. citizens, permanent residents and other qualifying immigrant groups who meet certain specifications. Recipients must also have t a Social Security number, meaning that certain groups, such as undocumented immigrants or F-1 student visa holders, would not qualify for stimulus payments.
In cases of mixed-status families, in which one spouse with a Social Security number is married to an individual with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) and the pair filed taxes jointly, neither individual would qualify for federal payments.
In mid-May, Migrant Justice, an organization based in Vermont whose mission is to organize for economic justice and human rights for the farmworker community, spearheaded a call-your-legislator campaign that advocated for Vermont legislators to create a Covid-19 relief fund for immigrant families.
“We have a population of people we consider to be essential,” Davis said. “But they are essential not just to Vermont’s bottom line. They are essential to our state as a whole, just as people.”
According to Vermont State Senator Ruth Hardy, Vermont received about $1.25 billion from federal Covid-19 Relief Funds (CRF), money distributed to each state to help with economic consequences of the virus. Hardy was involved in discussions with the Senate Agriculture Committee back in May to provide $500 payments to every farmworker in Vermont. These efforts have fizzled as the legislature later learned that providing payments to migrant workers would not be an eligible use of the CRF money “for a variety of reasons,” according to Hardy.
First, states cannot use federal funds for stimulus payments to people who do not have social security or other documentation, Hardy said. The state must also be careful to use the funds for eligible recipients — the state would never want to provide stimulus payment and then be in the position where they would have to ask for that payment back, according to Hardy.
“There isn’t a clear connection between just providing the funds to the workers and the allowable uses of the CRF funds, which have to be for economic harm or expenses due directly from the Covid-19 crisis,” said Hardy.
State funding is not really an option either, Hardy said. Vermont’s General Fund, which is normally used to fund state programs and operations, has been severely depleted due to the declining revenues from sales taxes and other taxes. According to Hardy, the state’s funds are about “$350 million in the red right now.”
Last week, Hardy was among a group of legislators who met with the Vermont Community Foundation, a charity that identifies communities in need and provides financial resources, to investigate the possibility of using private philanthropic funds to assist migrant workers and other workers who were not eligible to receive a federal stimulus payment.
The discussions are still in their early stages, and Hardy said that the Foundation has received inquiries from other groups of people requesting philanthropic assistance. However, Hardy said she believes the private route may be the best option at this point.
“There is a lot of demand for every type of money, whether it is federal money or state money or private money,” Hardy said.
Many of Vermont’s dairy farms, where many migrant workers are employed, have responded with precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the virus. The measures have seemingly been effective so far: the Open Door Clinic, a free health clinic for people who are uninsured or underinsured in Addison County, has documented only one patient with Covid-19, said Julia Doucet, the clinic’s outreach nurse and nurse case manager.
“What [farmers] have done is isolate the farm instead of isolating the individuals,” Doucet said in an interview with The Campus. According to Doucet, the challenges that migrant workers are facing are not unique to the Covid-19 pandemic, but are nonetheless heightened by it.
“They have always struggled with food insecurity,” Doucet said. “They have always struggled with social isolation. They have always struggled with lack of transportation. But Covid-19 has, in some ways, made it worse.”
Doucet said that the coronavirus has diminished the support system that migrant workers have. For example, The Addison Allies, a network of volunteers in Addison County that provides transportation, social interaction and in-person English lessons to migrant workers, has had to hold off on volunteering during the pandemic. Many of the volunteers are considered “higher risk” and therefore have to abide more strictly by social distancing guidelines.
Migrant workers may also face language barriers in acquiring health care or information about the virus. In addition, some workers may not have the necessary materials to identify the symptoms of the coronavirus, according to Doucet.
“There was not a single farmworker that we spoke to who said, ‘Oh, let me take my temperature on this thermometer I have in the bathroom,’” Doucet said.
The Open Door Clinic subsequently put together “Covid Kits” with soap, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen and masks. Many of the supplies were donated, and the masks were hand-sewn by community members. In total, the clinic was able to give 750 masks to 51 farms, according to Doucet.
Doucet also said the Open Door Clinic has been working hard to plan ahead and reach out to farmworkers ahead of the coronavirus spike that is expected to occur in fall and winter. They are also working with the Vermont Department of Health to make sure there is proper language access for contact tracing in Spanish.
“We’re all fairly concerned about what this fall will bring,” Doucet said. “I don’t know if we can get lucky enough and get through a second season with only one worker getting sick.”
Editor’s Note: Ruth Hardy is married to Middlebury College Professor of Film and Media Culture Jason Mittell, who is the Campus’s academic advisor. All questions may be directed to campus@middlebury.edu.
(05/14/20 9:56am)
Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers about “Survivor” season 40, “Winners at War.”
The popular television show “Survivor,” according to season 23 champion Sophie Clarke ’11, has always been a human experiment. Clarke won season 23 back in 2011 and recently competed on season 40, “Winners at War” — an all-champions season. The season 40 finale aired Wednesday, May 13.
“For me, when I watch ‘Survivor,’ you see both humanity’s greatest side as well as it’s underbelly,” Clarke said in an interview with The Campus. “I think it also exposes how far people are willing to go to self-preserve. To stay healthy and fed on ‘Survivor,’ but also to win the [money].”
“Survivor” contestants must live off the land and natural resources, providing their own food, shelter and fire. Competitors are taken to a remote location and are divided into two “tribes” that compete against each other in physical and tactical challenges. The winning tribe of each challenge receives prizes such as food and comfort items, as well as immunity for the entire group until the next challenge. The losing tribe, however, must go to “tribal council,” a forum which eventually culminates in voting one of the tribe members off the island.
Clarke had been an ardent “Survivor” fan since the show premiered in 2000. In the fall of her senior year at Middlebury, Clarke and a friend filmed her audition video in Bicentennial Hall, featuring a lab coat, a ski outfit and an “amp[ed] up” personality. Once Clarke learned she had made the cut, she told her friends she would be leading tours in Russia for the summer after graduation (she was a Russian and Economics double major) and would not be accessible. In reality, Clarke was off competing on — and winning — the 23rd season of “Survivor.”
During her rookie season, Clarke did not enter the game with a firm strategy. She was placed in a tribe with “a lot of egos.” On the first day of the game, she made a strong alliance with four other players. Clarke was a clear foil to the other strong contenders in her season: while the other frontrunners were generally male, outspoken and visibly making strategic moves, Clarke intentionally stayed under the radar, swaying her tribemates’ votes more subtly.
“Make everybody else think they can beat you,” Clarke said of her strategy on season 23. “Don’t be too in-your-face. And then when the time is right, pounce.”
The three final contestants in each season must persuade the jury, comprising the former contestants who were voted off the island, that they deserve to win the game based on their physical, social or strategic game — or some combination of the three. As is typical of the final episode of each “Survivor” season, Clarke learned that she had won the season and the one million dollars live on television.
Reflecting on her victory, Clarke cites her ability to cooperate with all types of people as one of the reasons for her success. Her experience with “small environment experiences” such as Middlebury and her small hometown in New York helped facilitate strong relationships and alliances in both of her seasons.
“[At Middlebury], you make friends with the people on your hall, the people in your class or the people on your sports teams that might not be like you,” Clarke said.
In emails to the Campus, Kevin Moss, professor of modern language and literature, speculated that Clarke’s tenacity assisted in her “Survivor” victory.
“She was persistent — she survived Russian, Russian School, and a semester in Russia! So why not ‘Survivor’ as well?” Moss wrote.
Almost a decade after she won season 23, Clarke has since finished medical school, decided against pursuing medicine and established a career in healthcare management consulting. After making the cut for this year’s season, Clarke speculated that the season would be a champion’s season to mark the 20th anniversary of the show. She prepared by watching old seasons of the show to investigate the competition, working out and brushing up on her survival skills.
Season 40 was different from other seasons, and not only because all the players had won the show before. Clarke said that the “Survivor” community is very connected, and many of the champions have established relationships and friendships over the years. Two contestants on Season 40 were actually married, having met on the show; others knew each other from competing on the same season before, or from “Survivor” charity events.
“It changes [the dynamic] completely,” Clarke said of the pre-existing relationships between contestants. “It was this constant battle of having to gauge what’s happening in the game versus what you know to be true outside of the game. It felt like this web of relationships that you were constantly having to sort through.”
In season 40, because all the contestants were familiar with the rules and process of the game, they relied more heavily on the strategy part of the game compared to the social or physical components, according to Clarke.
“In a returning player season, all of those things are seen as threats,” said Clarke. “The strategy is like reverse psychology 30 times over and you’re constantly having to shift [it].”
The biggest trick, Clarke said, was walking the line between appearing powerful enough to garner enough jury votes for the end of the game, and not being so showy that people vote you out of the game. With the constantly shifting web of relationships, one could only hope to avoid the “invisible target that was moving every day.”
“Survivor is a game of perception,” Clarke said. “[Season 40] was this self-perpetuating story where the more you call yourself a threat, the more you become a threat.”
In season 40, some of the physically bigger, more muscular male contestants branded themselves the “lions” and referred to other seemingly weaker players as the “hyenas,” according to Clarke. Labels such as these are indicative of a large but sometimes hidden subtext of the show: what strategies or “moves” are seen as impressive by other players as well as the audience.
“Survivor” has struggled with a gender problem in the last few years, Clarke said. In the first 25 seasons of the show, 13 men and 12 women were crowned the sole Survivor. However, in the last 14 seasons, 11 men and only three women won the show, according to a January Entertainment Weekly article.
When asked about the role gender plays in “Survivor,” Clarke said that women tend to play the game differently than men. Women may aim to subtly influence social dynamics, while men are more likely to make bigger, flashier moves. The latter makes for more entertaining TV, Clarke said.
Gender also influences the actual roles that contestants tend to have around camp. Women are more likely to prepare the rice and be physically close to camp, giving them less opportunities to privately orchestrate bigger moves. Men usually play a larger role in collecting firewood, allowing them to have a legitimate reason to be away from camp longer. This also gives them the opportunity to find hidden immunity idols, a talisman that, when brandished by a contestant during tribal council, prevents the user from being voted off the island.
However, even once a contestant has a hidden immunity idol, they must be very strategic as to when they play it. Playing the idol may diminish tribe members’ trust in the contestant who plays it and could make them the target during the next tribal council. Clarke knows the should-I-shouldn’t-I psychology of using immunity idols. In episode 11 of season 40, Clarke had an idol in her possession and chose not to play it when she was blindsided — a “Survivor” term that refers to a contestant who didn’t think they would be voted off — by the other contestants.
“The blindside was definitely out of nowhere and felt like a slap in the face,” Clarke said. “I thought I understood who was on what side, where the alliances were, who was going to vote with me, who was not. And so when that didn’t come to be ... it’s like your world is shattered …. You start to question your whole existence and your whole relationships.”
After returning home from filming both seasons of “Survivor,” Clarke said she experienced “the most culture shock I’ve ever had.” On one occasion, Clarke recalls filling up her coffee cup from a machine, and began to cry at the fact that coffee could come out of a machine and didn’t require a long process to prepare like it had on the show.
The survivor experience also had lingering effects on how Clarke perceived and interacted with people: she found that she was a little more suspicious of people’s motivations in the real world, having been used to cross-checking contestants’ stories on the show. In addition, after the relative deprivation of food on the show, Clarke said she developed a serious eating disorder after the show.
“95% of our conversations on the island are about food,” Clarke said. “When I first came home this summer, every morning I would want it planned out, like what are we having for lunch, what are we having for dinner. Are we gonna have a snack, where are we getting it?”
Though “Survivor” has complicated psychological aftereffects, the primality of the show is exactly what makes it so different from reality — and why “Survivor” has developed a cult-like fandom over its two-decade run.
“Because [“Survivor”] strips you down to your core, people are actually able to put aside a lot of things that make them different, that might make them not get along in real life,” Clarke said. “We find that there’s a lot more in common between us than you might have expected.”
(05/07/20 9:52am)
In recent years, colleges across the country have seen increasing demand for mental health resources from students. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of students who receive college counseling nationally increased by 30%. An investigation conducted by The Campus last year revealed that many students have not been able to receive timely support at Parton’s Counseling Center due to high demand for services. Over the past 20 years, counseling appointments at Middlebury have increased nearly 3.5 times, according to data from Parton.
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This year’s Zeitgeist data corroborated the high rates of student counseling appointments highlighted in last year’s investigation: over a third of survey respondents (428 students) said they have been to therapy or seen a counselor at Middlebury. One-third of respondents have sought treatment for depression or anxiety since coming to Middlebury and nearly 20% of respondents said that depression or anxiety “always” impacts their experience at Middlebury.
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A Campus article from January 2020 found that many students have struggled with a campus culture of harmful body and exercise standards. One student from this investigation said that “Middlebury has a very perfectionist culture.” Another student noted a “hyperprevalent” culture of “fatphob[ia]”.
Zeitgeist data reveals that over one-third of respondents have struggled with their relationship with food or exercise since coming to Middlebury, and two-thirds of respondents know a student who has faced one of these struggles.
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Some students turn to substances to cope with mental health struggles. Around 8% of respondents said they “frequently” use drugs or alcohol to cope with stress, and a quarter of respondents said they “occasionally” use drugs or alcohol as a means of managing stress.
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Some respondents felt that mental health resources at Middlebury were inadequate. In total, 29% of respondents felt that mental health resources at Middlebury are inadequate,15% of respondents felt that they are adequate and 56% said they did not know.
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Zeitgeist data suggest that students become more disenfranchised with mental health resources at Middlebury as they get older. While fewer than 10% of respondents from the class of 2023 found professional counseling and mental health resources to be inadequate, nearly 60% of respondents from the class of 2019.5 found these same resources to be inadequate.
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Students from historically marginalized identities had worse perceptions of the mental health resources at Middlebury. Nearly 40% of students who identified as biracial and almost 35% of students identifying as black or African American felt that mental health resources are inadequate at Middlebury, compared to 27% of students who identify as white.
Of the 11 counseling staff members at Middlebury, none are counseling staff of color. According to Gus Jordan, executive director of the Parton Center for Health and Wellness, the center has been searching for an additional staff counselor since this past fall, and had solicited applicants and referrals from over 50 institutions with counselor training or similar programs, including historically black institutions with these types of programs. The search was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
A 2018 survey of university and college counseling centers found that nearly three-fourths of surveyed counseling staff identified as white. Culturally competent counselors have been found to achieve more positive clinical outcomes because psychosocial development can differ based on race, culture, or other demographic factors.
In an email to The Campus, Jordan said that multicultural competence was “essential for any counselor” and wrote that the counseling staff engage in various types of multicultural training every year, and regularly talk about issues of social justice and of difference.
“One of the central components of good counseling is the ability to join with a client, to come to understand and appreciate their world and their unique experiences from their perspective, with compassion and without judgment,” Jordan said. “This requires a deep appreciation for difference. It also requires humility and a desire to learn about others.”
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For students who identified as LGBQ or questioning, 38.6% found professional health resources to be inadequate, compared to the 25.3% of students who are non-LGBQ identifying. LGBQ or questioning students are also more likely to experience mental health difficulties, with nearly 30% of these students saying that depression and anxiety “always” impacts their experience at Middlebury, while fewer than 20% of non-LGBQ students indicated the that they were “always” impacted by depression or anxiety.
Recent developments to mental health resources
In response to growing demand for mental health resources, Parton added a reworked mental health program this past fall. The program, led by the JED Foundation, aims to improve suicide prevention, substance abuse and mental health resources for schools. Although Parton has already expanded its counseling staff five-fold in the past 25 years, the center still hopes to expand further.
The Office of Health and Wellness announced the creation of a group called Mental Health Peer Educators, who will be available in the fall of 2020. According to their webpage, students will be trained to provide peer listening hours for Middlebury students, facilitate workshops on topics related to positive mental health, and facilitate a social connection-building program called ProjectConnect.
In coming years, the center plans to bolster staff for alcohol and drug-related issues, organize peer-and-counselor-coordinated support groups, and increase the availability of online resources, according to The Campus’ investigation around mental health.
(05/07/20 9:46am)
This year, 1,245 students completed the second-annual Zeitgeist survey, an uptick of 42 respondents from last year’s inaugural questionnaire. This figure represents 48.7% of the students who were on campus this fall, according to the Fall 2019 Student Profile; however, students who were studying abroad were also invited to participate in the survey.
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Participation across class years was roughly the same. The class of 2022 had the greatest number of participants, with 270 respondents.
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Nearly 73% of respondents identified as white. Only 62% of domestic students in the Fall 2019 Student Profile identified themselves as white, which may indicate that the Zeitgeist survey results have a skew towards students who identify as white — though the student profile’s number does not take into account international students, who were reported in a separate racial or ethnic category.
The second-largest block of Zeitgeist respondents, at 10.4%, were students who identified as Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. 5.4% of respondents identified as Hispanic or Latinx, and 2.9% of respondents identified as black or African American. 7.5% of respondents identified as biracial or multiracial.
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As might be expected of a liberal arts institution, nearly a fourth (23.3%) of survey respondents had an interdisciplinary major, which includes environmental studies, international politics and economics and international and global studies. The next most popular major category was the social sciences at 22.1%, followed by majors in the natural sciences, with 17.8%, and humanities majors at 8.7%. One in five respondents (19.8%) were undecided about their course of study. 22.4% of respondents indicated having a second major. Economics was the most popular major with 105 respondents, followed by environmental studies with 91, political science with 69, neuroscience with 66 and computer science with 66.
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Nearly 60% of respondents identified as cisgender females while only 36% of respondents identified as cisgender males. Less than 4% of students identified as a transgender male, transgender female, nonbinary, or felt that the options given did not define their gender. According to the Fall 2019 Student Profile, which used a binary classification of gender, 53% of students identified as female while 47% of students identified as male, indicating a skew in the Zeitgeist results towards cisgender female students. Over one in four students identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or questioning.
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Forty percent of Zeitgeist survey participants are on financial aid. Ten percent of respondents are first-generation college students, which is similar to the most recent admitted class’s profile at 11%.
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Almost one in three respondents hail from New England states. One in five students is from New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania. 13% are from the South, 12% are from Pacific states, 9% from the Midwest, and 5% are from Mountain states. Over half of respondents consider their hometowns to be suburban, 29% are from urban hometowns, and 18% from rural.
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Half of the respondents attended a public high school, 31% attended a private high school, 11% attended boarding school and 5% a charter or magnet school.
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One in ten respondents identified as religious; 28% considered themselves somewhat religious, and 60% did not consider themselves religious.
(04/22/20 3:16pm)
It’s exam week in the early 1950s and the endlessly ringing pay phone outside of Mary Peterson’s* room in Battell South is interrupting her studies. Determined to end the disturbance, Mary finally answers the phone.
“I’d like to speak with Mary Peterson,” says the voice on the other end.
“You’re speaking to her,” Mary says.
The voice belongs to John Clermont ’53, a member of the baseball and hockey teams. Mary is impressed by John’s varsity status, but something else entirely is the clincher for her.
“He said that he had seen me at St. Stephen’s church,” Mary ’54 recalled in an interview with The Campus. “Any guy that gets up at the crack of dawn, and goes down to the early service at the episcopal church in the freezing cold … that sealed it for me.”
In those days, Mary said, men lived on the south side of campus, while women attended the women’s college and lived on the north side of College Street. Women had to be inside their dorms by 10 p.m. on weekdays, could not wear slacks or shorts, and had to have a signed parent’s permission slip in order to get into a car with a male driver.
Female students were also outnumbered by men by a ratio of about two to one, due in part to the G.I. Bill, which covered the tuition expenses of veterans who had served in World War II. Because of the bill, Mary said, her freshman class was a mix of 18-year-olds and veterans in their mid-twenties, some of whom had fought in Normandy on D-Day.
Men and women were not allowed inside each others’ residence halls. To pick a woman up from her dorm, a man would press the buzzer of the room of whom he wanted, and the woman would come down.
“Even if your father came inside to help carry a suitcase down, you would have to yell ‘Man on the floor!’ said Mary. “And everyone would scurry because we walked around in our slips.”
Mary and John married in 1954. Mary Peterson became Mary Clermont, and they had four children together, one of whom attended Middlebury. John died in June of 2017.
The dating scene at Middlebury has changed quite a bit since Mary picked up the phone to find John on the other end. We wanted to know how. So, we interviewed Middlebury couples from the class of ’54 all the way through present day to hear their love stories, and find out what love has looked like at Midd over the past 70 years.
*Editor’s note: Mary Peterson and John Clermont are pseudonyms — Mary asked for their real names to remain private, due to the personal nature of the story. All other names in this article are real.
Peter and Julie Parker, both ’54, met driving back to the Midwest from Middlebury during Christmas break, with three other students in the carpool. Julie was drawn to Peter because he was not the “alpha male” type: he allowed another student to drive his car and “contentedly sat in the back seat with two women,” Julie recalled.
“I had fallen in love, head over heels, by the time I walked into my house in Detroit,” said Julie . “I was so wildly in love that I told my parents, ‘I met the man of my dreams.’”
The road trip back to Middlebury cemented each person’s feelings for one another, but it was a few weeks before the couple reconnected. Julie didn’t know how to read Peter, who was a little shy; Peter didn’t think Julie was interested.
Julie would often go to the student union, located in a temporary building where Proctor Dining Hall is now located, with a friend during a break in her classes. She began to notice that Peter was very dependably there when she took her break.
“I’d be watching his eyes,” Julie said, “and I thought I was getting more and more eye contact. So I asked my friend one day, dear as she was, if she would mind letting me go alone. And that was the day Peter asked me out, and everything was lovely from then on.”
The day before their graduation, Peter proposed to Julie in a garden by Hepburn Hall. They were married in 1954 and recently celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. They have three daughters together.
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Fast-forward to parents’ weekend a few years later, where Janie ’63 and Pete Johnson ’62 were having their first date at a Delta Upsilon picnic. It did not go smoothly: Pete and Janie’s mothers began to drink martinis together, and Janie’s father was engaged in a lively discussion with a professor about sex from an anthropological perspective. “So I was really stuck with Pete at that point,” said Janie.
Luckily, Janie and Pete ended up enjoying each other’s company. The two liked to go dancing together and occasionally went to the movies.
Janie was soon pinned by Pete. “Pinning” was a symbolic tradition within the Greek life community in which a fraternity member would give his fraternity pin to his significant other, signifying that the pair are moving towards an engagement.
Despite receiving below-average marks in a sociology class they took together called “Marriage in the Family” (Pete received a D; Janie received a C-), Pete proposed to Janie outside of Battell during his senior year. Upon Pete’s graduation, Janie decided to forgo her senior year at Middlebury to follow Pete to Georgia, where he was starting his career in the military.
“At that point in time, there were [very limited] career opportunities coming out of my graduation from Middlebury,” Janie said. “It was a totally, radically, different time. I wasn’t looking to just find a husband, I just happened to think that Pete was fun and I wanted to be with him.”
“That was the thing,” Pete said. “We had so much fun together, we just said, why would we put an end to it?”
The pair were married in December of 1962. They now have three children together. They live in Danby, Vermont.
“We still have a laugh a day, even now in our old age,” Janie said.
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Nancy ’93 and Don Hunt ’92 became close friends after having three classes together during the fall of 1989. Nancy later found out that Don had intentionally switched into all three of those classes after hearing Nancy’s schedule, but played it off as a coincidence.
Nancy was drawn to her “very shy, but very sweet” classmate, who was raised by his mom and four sisters. Don was struck by the fact that Nancy — who is Italian, with dark, curly hair and a strong New York accent — hadn’t conformed to the style standards of the time for women at Middlebury.
After getting snowed in on the sixth floor of Hadley while studying for their finals in December of 1990, Don finally got up the courage to kiss Nancy. They started dating shortly after.
“I can safely say my grades dramatically improved as soon as we started dating,” Don said. “Nancy wouldn't let me skip class, and we both had an instant study group for many courses.”
Don and Nancy have four children together, one of whom attends Middlebury.
After graduating together last spring, Cece Wheeler ’19 and John Natalone ’19 took their second cross-country road trip of college. Their first week-long drive took place the summer after their sophomore year — Cece needed to drive her car back to Seattle, where she’s from, and John generously offered to join her.
“We took a week-long road trip cross country, which I think is a pretty good litmus test for any relationship. It must have gone well because we did it again with John’s car when we moved to the West Coast after graduation,” Cece recounted.
John and Cece met during their first year in Atwater Commons, and dated for three years at Middlebury. Since moving, they have been enjoying some of the many perks of post-college life together.
“Instead of sharing a bathroom with four people I now only share it with one. and Public Safety has ticketed my car zero times since moving to Seattle,” Cece said.
Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20 hit it off immediately when they met in Proctor during Taite’s very first semester.
“I was listening to a podcast, and my friend Jack told me to stop and come meet the new Febs with him, so I did. I’m glad that I did,” Grace said.
The two only talked for 15 minutes or so, but something clicked. A few days later, Taite received a Facebook message — hey girl, want to get dinner sometime? — and the rest is history.
The foundation of their more-than-three-year relationship? Food. Their first year, the pair cooked together a number of times.
“Our sophomore and junior years, we would cook dinner together every Friday,” Taite said, and for the past school year, “we’ve both been off the meal plan, so we grocery shopped together and made dinner together every night.”
“We made tiramisu together once sophomore year, and we still talk about it regularly,” Grace added. The couple also described a favorite pasta recipe, lovingly nicknamed “our pasta”: chunky tomato sauce, kale, toasted pine nuts, red pepper flakes and a ton of parmesan.
After a month-and-a-half flirtationship, Dula Dulanto ’20 and Melanie Chow ’22 were ready to put a label on their relationship. So, Dula asked Melanie to ask him out.
“Usually the guy does that,” he explained, “so I asked her to ask me out because she’s a very fierce person, and she’s very empowered.”
She asked, and he said yes. The couple has now been dating for four months.
Dula remembered his friends’ surprise when he decided to begin a relationship during his final year at Middlebury. He described feeling pressured by popular “preconceived notions of what relationships are and how they function in college.” But, ultimately, once the two started talking, “that was it,” said Melanie.
“Sometimes [college] can feel lonely, even with a roommate, even with really good friends,” she continued, “but with Dula, I never feel lonely.”
For a Q&A with the couples in this story, click here.
(04/22/20 12:00pm)
We interviewed seven Middlebury couples for another story this week and we were so pleased with all the wonderful anecdotes they shared with us. But unfortunately, we had a word limit.
So here’s an addendum, of questions we asked in every interview and then each couple’s answers. Interviews were all conducted separately, and we condensed responses for brevity.
Check out the companion story first to learn more about the interviewees.
Middlebury Campus: How would you describe the dating scene at Middlebury during your time as a student?
Grace Vedock ’20: I think the queer dating scene is a totally different beast than the straight dating scene. It’s smaller, and it can feel competitive … It feels like there’s always people taking sides. If straight people think that [dating at Middlebury] is hard, I think they would be surprised or humbled by the queer experience at Middlebury.
Julie Parker ’54: Very controlled. There were rules, confines, parietal hours. But any couple that was passionate had plenty of occasions to “mess up,” especially with a car. Sex was feared because pregnancy was such a taboo. Still, a few couples were known to be sexually active, and there were undoubtedly a few pregnancies hastily terminated, or sudden marriages.
Dula Dulanto ’20: A lot of people don’t know how to navigate relationships. It’s easy to brush something off, to disregard others and their feelings. It’s an environment where you don’t have to engage with someone if you don’t want to. It creates this repertoire of mess up and move on to the next person.
Pete Johnson ’62: Archaic.
Janie Johnson ’63: [Laughs.] Archaic is right.
Pete Johnson ’62: I mean, it was different then. The women were very closely monitored and chaperoned. The men, not so much. We pretty much had free run of the campus at the time.
Mary Clermont ’54: The dating scene at Middlebury was very important. It was the social life, really. I always felt bad for the girls who sat alone in the dorm on a Saturday night. You wouldn’t really have big groups of [female and male students] mixed. There was nothing to do [if you weren’t dating someone].
Nancy Hunt ’93: I think there were a lot of people who dated long-term at Middlebury. That's not to say that people weren't also "hooking up" at fraternity and social house parties. That happened all of the time, too.
Don Hunt ’92: The social scene was very much focused around social houses, most of which were fraternities at the time. It was definitely a drinking and hook up scene.
MC: Do you think anything about Middlebury specifically has contributed positively to your relationship?
Pete Johnson ’62: We both moved around. My family moved all over New England. Hers moved because her dad was a professor at several different universities. And so, we never had a longstanding hometown. Middlebury has kind of become that for us, because that’s where the friends that we both know [are from], who knew us when we were in our twenties or younger. That’s sort of our hometown.
Dulanto ’20: Midd brings all these students from diverse backgrounds and equalizes all of them, so Midd provided a platform for us to interact … I immigrated to New York when I was young. My parents don’t speak English. My family has 10 to 15 different aunts and uncles. There are cultural, language and socioeconomic differences [between Melanie and me].
Julie Parker ’54: It has given us shared memories and background and friends that have known us both, cementing the bonds.
MC: Conversely, have there been challenges that you think are specific to Middlebury?
Cece Wheeler ’19: It’s sort of hard to measure a given relationship at Midd, because you’re likely not living together and your time is spread between classes, homework, sports, friends, clubs etc., so that you can “date” someone for a year and in reality not spend that much time together. That’s probably one of the bigger challenges at Midd — just making time for everyone in your life.
Nancy Hunt ’93: I think the challenge with a college like Middlebury, at least at the time we were there, was the lack of diversity. Additionally, there is a challenge that goes with any small school in a rural area and that is the lack of people.
Vedock ’20: I think visibility is a double-edged sword. We’re very visible because we’ve been together for a long time, but that’s not something everyone in a queer relationship necessarily wants or has the luxury of having. That’s something I struggled with at the very beginning, because I was not out when I came to Midd, and not out to my family when we started dating. Feeling very visible in that way was intimidating. Now I don’t feel any pressure or feel scared when I walk around on campus.
MC: What does love mean to you?
Taite Shomo ’20.5: I think love is about knowing that Grace is going to be there for me and I’m going to be there for Grace, and having that constant in my life.
Melanie Chow ’22: I think it just means feeling completely comfortable in your own skin, not having to hide anything. Knowing that no matter what you do or say, that person is still going to be there and want to be with you.
Dulanto ’20: I think of it as an active choice. You don’t make it once, you make it every single day. You’re always wanting to choose the other person for everything they are.
Wheeler ’19: It means that John still hasn’t commented on the cat I brought home six months ago but [he] wakes up at six every morning to feed her.
Parker ’54: I feel an almost mystical connection to Peter, as if cosmic forces operated to bring us together. So Middlebury was the “mise en scène” for one couple's drama.
Pete Johnson ’62: There’s sort of a comfort zone where you can say what you think and be who you are and know it’s going to be okay.
Janie Johnson ’63: Pete was in the military during the Vietnam War. And again, there was no communication, this was way before there were cellphones. He wrote me a letter every single day for 365 days.
Clermont ’54: I don't think I have ever sat around thinking about the meaning of love. It has so many facets and degrees. I remember my mother telling me not to use the word "love" unless whatever you were referring to could return love, so you couldn't love "pizza." So I guess love means, “listen to what your mother said.”
(04/22/20 9:59am)
Cayla Marvil ’13.5 and AC Jones ’12.5 had been dating for only six months when they decided to open a business together. A few years later, the couple co-founded Lamplighter Brewing Co. in Cambridge, Mass.
Marvil and Jones were first officially introduced to one another in a classic Middlebury setting: the basement of Two Brothers Tavern, when Marvil was a senior and Jones a super senior. They began dating in the fall of 2012. Upon Jones’ graduation, and his subsequent realization that he was “chronically incapable of having a boss,'' the pair began thinking more seriously about opening a brewery.
“We both were home brewers and loved beer,” Marvil said. Inspired by the burgeoning craft beer industry in Vermont and with some encouragement from Middlebury friends, Marvil and Jones recall having an “Ah, screw it! Let’s do it” mentality. The pair saw an opportunity in Cambridge because there was not a huge brewery scene there yet, according to Jones.
From conception to completion, their business idea continued to be shaped by Middlebury influences. In the original crew of around eight who pursued the idea, five or six were friends of theirs from college. When asked if there were any aspects of Middlebury that prepared them for running a brewery, Marvil answered with little hesitation.
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“Drinking a lot in college,” she said with a laugh. She then added, “I think truthfully, everyone at Middlebury works so hard all the time, so it brought this work ethic that’s been incredibly important in opening our own business and needing to spend 16 hours for 20 days straight doing something. The work-hard, play-hard mentality [that exists at Middlebury] is pretty prevalent in brewery culture, too.”
Though brewing and bartending are certainly part of the job, Marvil and Jones have come to realize the importance of managing employees and building relationships in a business.
“Before the coronavirus hit, we had 54 employees,” Jones said. “I think one of the really valuable things that we came away from Middlebury with is this respect towards each other and knowing how to deal with people.”
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the taproom at Lamplighter has closed until further notice and 38 employees had to be furloughed. Sixteen employees remain working full-time.
The couple said that respect and trust play an important role in demarcating the boundaries between their personal lives and their business relationship. Though the couple said maintaining a work-life balance is a bit more difficult and working together occasionally has some downs, their shared entrepreneurial spirit and complementary skill sets makes for a good partnership. While Marvil takes on the financial planning, administrative tasks, human resources, and marketing and strategy, Jones “does a lot more hands on work-- designing, building, repairing things, as well as focusing on conceptual ideas and larger picture strategy and thinkin” said Marvil.
Lamplighter has come a long way since the idea was born in 2013, and in December of last year, the couple were named to the Forbes “30 under 30” list for Food and Drink in 2020.
“I wouldn’t want to do this with just anyone else,” said Marvil.
“The business or the relationship?” Jones asked Marvil.
“I guess both,” she answered.
(04/09/20 10:01am)
The Covid-19 pandemic has added additional stress for the 10 faculty members undergoing tenure review this spring and the 80–90 junior faculty members on tenure-track positions.
Candidates currently undergoing tenure review can either choose to continue their review as planned during the spring or opt to halt their review and resume in the fall, according to Provost and Executive Vice President Jeff Cason. The college will also be offering junior faculty the opportunity to delay their tenure clocks by a year, regardless of where they are in the process.
“For the 10 of us under review, the anxiety of a difficult, fraught period has been exacerbated,” Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies Nicolas Poppe wrote in an email to The Campus. While Poppe has chosen to continue the review process, he noted that stress related to Covid-19 compounded existing tenure review anxieties.
[pullquote speaker="Nicholas Poppe, Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]For the 10 of us under review, the anxiety of a difficult, fraught period has been exacerbated.[/pullquote]
Achieving tenure is the culmination of a seven-year process. Tenure-track professors undergo their first review by the Reappointments Committee in their third year at the college. Granted its successful completion, faculty members then undergo tenure review in the spring semester of their seventh year. During this review, the Promotions Committee evaluates candidates’ teaching abilities through several classroom visits that occur throughout the semester, as well as faculty members’ records of scholarship and service to their academic department.
For Poppe, the classroom visits by members of the Promotions Committee had just begun when it was announced on March 10 that on-campus classes would be suspended and moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Of the four visits they were able to complete before March 13 [the last day of in-person classes], only one was done in what I would consider to be normal circumstances,” Poppe wrote. He said the three other visits happened on the Wednesday and Friday of the final week of in-person classes.
“I trust that the Promotions Committee members understand this, but they were abnormal classes conducted at an extraordinary time. Other colleagues had even fewer visits done before we moved online,” he added.
Poppe, like the other faculty who chose to continue with their tenure review, will find out in May whether he has been granted tenure. The decision is based upon the recommendation of the Promotions Committee to President Laurie Patton and with the approval of the Board of Trustees. Upon achieving tenure, the candidate, previously an assistant professor, receives the rank of associate professor with tenure. Tenured faculty members receive, formally, a significant pay increase and, informally, increased academic freedom.
While Poppe expects that the reviews completed this semester will have the same outcome as those from a semester without the uncertainties related to Covid-19, he also noted that this semester’s unordinary events will “impact junior colleagues for years to come,” since they will have one fewer “normal” semester during which they may build up their portfolios and prep for review.
Other colleges and universities have also announced alterations to their normal tenure and reappointment policies to ease the pressure of the semester. Amherst College is offering an opt-in policy that allows candidates undergoing tenure review in the fall to extend their tenure clock by one year; candidates scheduled to stand for tenure in a future year may also extend their tenure clocks. Syracuse University, Ohio State University and Creighton University have announced similar policies.
Recognizing that extending the tenure clock by a year means another year with an assistant professor salary, the University of Massachusetts Amherst took the policy one step further, allowing faculty to delay the tenure clock and implementing a policy that will retroactively pay faculty who achieve tenure the promotion increment in salary for that missed year.
(11/14/19 11:04am)
“Middlebury College has never been considered a hotbed of political activity,” reads an article published in The Middlebury Campus from November 2002. “Its own students describe the atmosphere as ‘sleepy,’ ‘detached,’ and ‘bubbled-in.’ Those who dare to shatter the quiet are a minority that is sometimes scorned for disrupting this remote paradise. ‘Protest’ is something that is debated; ‘activism’ is something that occurs elsewhere.”
The author noted later in the article that this trend was already changing. Now, 17 years later, most students would likely disagree with the notion that Middlebury students are apolitical.
In the past few years alone, student activists, leaders of campus extracurriculars, and campaign organizers have built websites to direct students to resources surrounding sexual health (go/sexysources); they have also successfully petitioned the college to become a “sanctuary campus” after President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Notably, after nearly a decade of work, the student-led effort by Divest Middlebury culminated with Energy2028, a commitment from the college to divest its endowment from fossil fuels companies over the coming years.
These success stories are the glossy stuff of press releases. But the long-winded road to change — enacted by an ever-changing student body amid a minefield of obstacles — is anything but straightforward.
Isolation and insulation: Student activism in the “Middlebury bubble”
The college’s location in rural Vermont can make some students feel disconnected from national and international political issues. Many students reference “the Middlebury bubble” to describe the seemingly impermeable membrane that blocks students from the “real world” and to some, seems to propagate homogenous ideologies.
Annie Blalock ’20.5, current president of Feminist Action at Middlebury (FAM), said that Middlebury’s relative isolation may contribute to the feeling that students are confined in how they can respond to larger issues. Blalock joined FAM to combat this feeling of voicelessness.
“As time passed during my first semester, I felt the weight of the Middlebury bubble every day [in] that new inhumane policies were introduced or protective legislation taken away,” Blalock wrote in an email to The Campus. “I turned to FAM to stay educated about current events and take action in an accessible, fun environment.”
Madison Holland ’21 has been involved with the college’s branch of Amnesty International, an international organization that focuses on human rights, and Juntos, a campus organization that advocates for quality working conditions for local farm workers. She said she enjoys building relationships with members of the community through her activism.
“It’s important to realize the broader picture, that that there are other people off campus with real lives and real stories,” Holland said. “Especially considering we’re only here for four years and there’s a world out there that we’re going to have to encounter eventually, so we might as well start now.”
The college’s small size has other impacts as well: the activist community is very insular, according to Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20, two students with long resumes of campus activism.
Amongst other initiatives, Shomo and Vedock are the organizers of It Happens Here (IHH), a storytelling event that draws attention to campus sexual assault. They also helped coordinate The Map Project, which documents locations of incidents of sexual assault on campus with red dots on a map. Last spring, Shomo and Vedock helped organize the peaceful protest that was scheduled to occur during the Ryszard Legutko lecture that was set for Wed., April 17. The lecture and the protest were unexpectedly cancelled by administration due to “safety risks,” which were left ambiguous when first announced.
“A lot of people who are leading activist charges, it’s the same group of people over and over,” Shomo said. “What I find very frustrating is that I think the Middlebury population constructs itself as aware and involved and liberal. But in my experience, when we have asked people to step up and be part of things, they’re not there.”
According to Shomo and Vedock, the core group of activists — those who organize most of the major protests and campaigns on campus — is so small that students have created various group chats to connect with other students who are committed to using activism as a tool of social change.
“Student activism is difficult for so many reasons. It takes so much time and so much emotional energy. Usually the people that are involved in certain initiatives have been directly affected by those initiatives, ” Vedock said. “If the burden is on the affected population to change the culture, it can be extremely bleak.”
Vedock said that student activism can be “exhausting,” and Shomo said that doing activism takes energy away from friends, school, family and her own health. This is a common constraint that many students face when organizing changemaking efforts on campus: they are students first, with the primary goal to obtain a degree.
With time already a scarce resource in college, it can be difficult to mobilize students for a particular campaign or event.
“Students are stakeholders in so many different areas of campus, so I think that’s a struggle — not necessarily in getting people to voice their support but to act on that support,” Holland said.
Student activists also must navigate the rules set by administration for student organizing, a process which Blalock said is “unnecessarily burdensome.” The consequences for violating college policy, however, can be serious.
Prior to the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Middlebury in 2012, five students who dubbed themselves the “Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee” circulated a mock press release to students, faculty and media outlets announcing that the college would divest from industries of violence. The students were charged and ultimately found guilty by the Community Judicial Board during an open hearing and were given a reprimand, but were not subject to any official college discipline.
In 2013, a student was suspended for one year for uprooting thousands of flags that were put in the ground as part of a memorial to commemorate the victims of 9/11. The student claimed that the memorial sat on top of an Abenaki burial site, and should be treated with respect.
More recently, when students protested and shut down the 2017 lecture of controversial sociologist Charles Murray, the college punished 74 students with sanctions ranging from probation to official college discipline. Students were accused of violating the section in the Student Handbook that prohibits “disruptive behavior at community events or on campus.”
“If we have to be afraid of being suspended because of engaging in protest, that’s a very precarious situation to be in,” Shomo said.
While some students do not engage with student activism, many feel compelled to act, no matter the risks.
“People don’t engage with activist activities for a variety of reasons — maybe you’re working a job, maybe your course load is so difficult — but for some people it takes an enormous amount of privilege to not be concerned about things or to just not think about things,” Vedock said. “When you’re engaged with these initiatives, you have to ask yourself: Who are you fighting for?”
Changing the world … in just four years
Though students encounter unique challenges when trying to create change, some have identified strategies that have proved repeatedly effective in moving their campaigns forward. Megan Salmon ’21 serves as president of Amnesty International and is the student activism coordinator for Amnesty USA, meaning she oversees all efforts by Amnesty chapters at universities in the state of Vermont. She said incentivizing students can be effective in persuading people outside of the core group of activists to show up to events.
“Whether it’s a musical performance, or it’s interactive, or there’s food, or prizes — it gets them off the couch, basically,” Salmon said.
Holland said coalition building can be an effective way to show that an issue is important beyond one group. Early this month, Olivia Pintair ’22.5 and Hannah Ennis ’22.5 organized the Milk with Dignity campaign at the Hannaford supermarket in Middlebury. The campaign was one of about 20 campaigns across the Northeast that was organized by Migrant Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for economic justice and human rights of farm workers.
“Our organizing included… networking with other groups on and off-campus in order to get as many people as possible to attend the action itself,” Pintair wrote in an email to The Campus.
According to Pintair, Middlebury Refugee Outreach Club (MiddROC), Juntos, Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG), a church group in Middlebury, and Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) all “contributed in different ways to the action.” Some members of these groups made signs to display at the event, while others attended the rally. Pintair said activists from Migrant Justice were also present, leading chants in both Spanish and English. They also hand-delivered a letter to the manager of Hannaford at the protest, urging the supermarket to “ensure human rights for the farmworkers behind the company’s milk.”
“I sometimes find student activism challenging on campus with how many different clubs and groups there are at Middlebury, each with their own specialty,” Ennis wrote in an email. “I was really inspired by the action and rally on Nov. 2 at Hannaford because of the way many different student organizations came together for this one cause. I hope to see more events in the future with groups working together.”
Change is slow, Ennis said, and it’s important to “connect with people, create a network, and build outwards.” Students attend Middlebury for four years, but larger structural changes may take longer. According to Vedock, movements must “cultivate institutional memory” to have a degree of longevity.
Divest Middlebury, a movement created to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels, has been able to sustain itself throughout several generations of Middlebury students. The movement can be traced back until at least 2012, when the students from the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee pushed the issue into prominence.
Many activists feel responsible for passing along information and resources to younger students, lest the movement die from lack of participants. Divya Gudur ’21, who has been involved in various environment-focused organizations such as SNEG, the Divest Middlebury movement, and Environmental Council, said that SNEG has a Google Drive folder filled with documents containing information from past events, and that they also have a reliable alumni network.
“Over the recent years we have been more and more intentional about our recruiting efforts and have been working towards making sure that underclassmen feel like they have ownership in the organization and the campaigns,” Gudur said. “SNEG has often struggled with retaining activists not only because of burn-out, but also because there seems to be a dichotomy of you’re either all in or on the outside, and we need to make space ... for all levels of participation.”
Students have also found they can build institutional memory by collaborating with a group of people who will remain at Middlebury much longer than themselves: faculty.
Last spring, research assistants for the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS) Department, Ruby Edlin ’19.5, Elizabeth Sawyer ’19 and Rebecca Wishnie ’20, gave a presentation titled “Collective Memory, Collective Action: Building a Digital Archive of Student Activism” which explained the ongoing efforts to build a digital feminist archive of campus activism. The project was supervised by Sujata Moorti, who was the chair of the GSFS department at the time, and Karin Hanta, director of Chellis House.
(09/26/19 10:03am)
The Title IX office underwent structural changes in the last year, and its newly hired staff hopes the changes will increase transparency surrounding the services and resources they offer to students.
Title IX protects people from sex and gender-based discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive funding from the federal government. The restructuring of Middlebury’s Title IX office was prompted, in part, by the Workforce Planning initiative that began last year. The changes were also made due to recommendations by an advisory group, which prompted the administration to move the Title IX office out of risk management and over to the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and inclusion (OIDEI).
Under the old system, the Title IX Coordinator reported to the Vice President for Human Relations and Chief Risk Officer, Karen Miller. In the new system, the equivalent position now reports to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández.
The changes to the Title IX Coordinator’s job description came with a new job title: the Civil Rights and Title IX Coordinator. This role will be filled by Marti McCaleb, who began her tenure July 15, after Sue Ritter ’83 left the position last November. McCaleb joins Humans Relations Officers Eric Lόpez and Thaddeus Watulak, who began in their positions last spring.
According to McCaleb, the move from Risk Management to the OIDEI reflects the intention of the Title IX act.
“Title IX is very much a thing that is founded in educational equity, not in risk management or compliance,” McCaleb said. “It is not a question of protecting the college from a potential lawsuit, it is about what is right for our campus community.”
Despite the shift in administrative structure, the adjudication process for disciplinary investigations will largely remain the same. The primary difference between the previous and current arrangements is that the new system distances the relationship between the Title IX coordinator and the Human Rights Officers (HROs) who act as “fact-finders” in matters of disciplinary investigation, meaning that they review the information, speak with all parties and ultimately decide if someone is responsible for violation policy.
In the old system, the HROs reported directly to the Title IX coordinator, meaning that the Title IX coordinator directly oversaw the investigation. McCaleb explained that affected parties may have felt less comfortable seeking support from the same person who was overseeing their investigation.
Now, HROs report directly to Fernández. McCaleb believes this will positively affect how experience students, faculty and staff experience the process.
“I am not overseeing the collection of evidence or the daily pieces of the investigation,” McCaleb said. “My role is to be a support rather than to be a supervisor of the investigation. I am more of a conduit for the parties to make sure that the process is fair and unbiased and that all parties know their rights and can access the services and supports they are entitled to while an adjudication is ongoing.”
The move also makes sense, said Fernández, because of the broader capacity of resources in the OIDEI.
“At the heart of title IX is discrimination based on sex or gender,” Fernández said. “The office [of institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion] also deals with anti-harassment and discrimination that is sometimes not based on gender or sex. When you start thinking about civil rights and discrimination, now you start to see the connection to institutional diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Although most people think of funding for sports teams and sexual misconduct when they think of Title IX, McCaleb said the law applies far more broadly.
“It could apply equally to a female faculty member passed over for tenure because of her gender or a female graduate student in a lab that doesn’t get the same opportunities that her male colleagues would,” McCaleb said. “And obviously it applies in the case of a student who is experiencing sexual harassment or has been sexually assaulted.”
McCaleb recognizes that students may have several misconceptions regarding the role of the Title IX office. One is that many people believe that if they report an incident to the Title IX office, they will be forced to initiate a formal investigation. In reality, McCaleb said, the office defers to the wishes of the complainant, unless not reporting poses a danger to an individual or the community.
To help people better understand the Title IX office, McCaleb and other employees began hosting information sessions with various student groups, academic departments and other offices to educate them about sexual norms and interpersonal respect at the beginning of this academic year. With these outreach events, which she plans to continue into the academic year, McCaleb hope to educate students, faculty and staff about the support services available in, and the processes of, the Title IX office.
Based on feedback McCaleb has received during these sessions, she has noticed that many students do not understand how to navigate the system. McCaleb hopes that by being transparent regarding her office’s process, students will be more likely to seek the support they need.
“I am very much on a listening tour this semester of hearing people’s experiences and how they have experienced the office or not experienced the office,” McCaleb said. “Do people consider the Civil Rights and Title IX office a place where they can go, or is it a place that they actively try to avoid? Every institution has its own culture on how it addresses interpersonal violence.”
Now that the Title IX office is located in OIDEI, Fernández hopes that the intersections between Title IX and other identities will become more apparent.
“Part of what we’ve been doing this year is trying to think about the relationship between the different components on campus,” Fernández said. “What’s the relationship between the Anderson Freeman Center and Title IX, and the Scott Center, and disability resources, and education for Equity and Inclusion? We are all working around equity, inclusion, and identity in different ways.”
(09/19/19 10:04am)
When Arabic Middlebury Language student Amitai Ben-Abba ’15 attended an informational session hosted by an organization with which he fundamentally disagreed, the question was not if he would voice his opinion, but how.
Ben-Abba attended the eight-week Arabic Middlebury Language School at Mills College in California this summer. During the seventh week of classes, on July 29, two recruiters from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) held an information session for students. Students could subsequently sign up for individual interviews the next day if they wished to ask additional questions.
“I listened respectfully when the CIA officers spoke,” Ben-Abba wrote in an open letter to the Dean of Middlebury Language Schools (MLS) on August 8. “I raised my hand during the Q&A section, awaited my turn, and when called upon, asked: ‘If accepted to work for the CIA, would we also be involved in destabilizing regimes, kidnapping people, torturing them and sending them to secret prisons around the world?’”
The information session was scheduled to last two hours and to give a general overview of CIA operations, as well as possibilities for internships or employment. During the second hour of the presentation, a few students, including Ben-Abba, began criticizing the operations of the CIA, including its use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Once other students with differing opinions joined the debate, creating heated student-to-student discussion, the CIA officials decided to cut the information session one hour short.
Several students who attended the event expressed to The Campus their disappointment that the session was cut short, which impeded their ability to learn more about job opportunities at the CIA. These students spoke to reporters under the condition that The Campus not publish direct quotes.
Ben-Abba does not feel that he or his colleagues deprived students of an opportunity to learn more about the CIA, noting that the CIA officials “stayed long after the session and answered questions to anyone who came up to them.”
On Aug. 7, Ben-Abba was sent a notice of possible violation of Middlebury Demonstrations and Protests Policy and Respectful Behavior Policy by Dean of the Language Schools Stephen Snyder. The notice, which is posted on Ben-Abba’s Facebook page, alleges that Ben-Abba and the other student asked about “torture, Guantanamo, and toppling regimes” and that they “told their peers in the audience they should be ashamed for being present at the session.” The notice also mentioned that a CIA recruiter “[w]as heckled,” and that “one student took a photo of the signup sheet and was escorted outside where Mills Public Safety asked [the student] to delete the picture.”
The night before his Arabic final exam, on Aug. 8, Ben-Abba crafted a response to Snyder, posted on his Facebook page, in which he denies the latter three accusations.
“Some of the students who complained to you may disagree with the tone or content of my questions, but that is not cause to discipline me. In fact, to police my speech by threat of disciplinary action contradicts with the very policy I am accused of violating, which clearly states that students are ‘free to examine and discuss all questions of interest to them,’ both publicly and privately,’” Ben-Abba wrote, referencing Middlebury’s Demonstrations and Protests Policy.
The next day, Ben-Abba heard from Snyder that he was found not responsible for violating college policy. While the news was a relief to Ben-Abba, he wrote in a Facebook post that he was also alarmed “that Middlebury [was] willing to charge at least one student with false allegations rather than address the issue at hand.”
The damage to free speech, Ben-Abba wrote, was already done, potentially deterring students from voicing critical opinions in the future.
“I wish Middlebury took its own mission of ethical citizenship seriously,” Ben-Abba said. “I wish it protected dissident students who are committed to this mission rather than rush to fulfill the demands of students who support and seek employment with US imperialism.”
According to Snyder, the CIA information session is not unique in language school programming.
“Employers come to campus every summer as well as during the academic year to hold information sessions about employment opportunities for Middlebury students,” Snyder said. “The CIA came to campus as one of those employers.”
In the aftermath of Ben-Abba’s disciplinary notice, which was shared widely on social media among members of the Middlebury community, a coalition of current and former Middlebury Language School students and faculty wrote a petition entitled “To Middlebury Language Schools: End CIA Partnership,” demanding that MLS not renew its partnership with the CIA and make a commitment not to collaborate with the CIA in the future.
The petition reads, “Despite [its] mission, MLS has welcomed the CIA into our community for decades, allowing the Agency to conduct recruitment and information sessions at its programs at Mills College in Oakland, California and Middlebury College in Vermont. The CIA’s presence undermines the spirit of MLS, and we unequivocally condemn this partnership. In pursuing its mission of collecting intelligence and conducting covert action, the CIA has a known record of human rights abuses and international law violations.”
The petition states that the longstanding relationship between the CIA and MLS implies an “institutional endorsement” of the organization. The petition also states that the CIA information session has been the only “career oriented event for MLS students,” a claim that Snyder refuted in an email to The Campus.
According to Snyder, the CIA has conducted information sessions at Middlebury “off and on since the 1980s, at both the college and the Language Schools, and consistently for the last ten years.”
“Middlebury’s Center for Careers and Internships arranges multiple employment sessions for Language School students, as it does at the college during the academic year,” Snyder said.
After language schools ended, several of the students who had attended the information session had a teleconference with Snyder on this subject.
“We had a meeting with students interested in pursuing this issue of helping the college end its relationship with the CIA,” Ben-Abba said. “It seems like [Snyder] took us seriously, and as soon as possible he’s going to talk to the provost and other deans about this issue and take it forward.”
However, Snyder said he is not planning to make changes to CIA-related programming.
“We are not considering changing Language School’s relationship with the CIA or any other current employer that abides by Middlebury’s recruiting policies and procedures,” Snyder said. “This would hold for the college as well.”
For Ben-Abba, his disciplinary record having escaped unscathed, the whole incident is an example of the power of student activism.
“Because disciplinary action is fundamentally political and arbitrary, student activists should be as wildly creative and imaginative as possible in achieving their goals,” Ben-Abba said. “Students have a lot of power and a lot of agency. And they can use that agency to make Middlebury a better place and to make the world a little bit better as well.”
Correction: A previous version of this article did not correctly characterize the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As detailed in the linked article, the phrase has been known to be a euphemism for "torture," and was recently condemned on a legal stage for that reason.