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(09/12/19 10:05am)
Middlebury College will offer a Black Studies major beginning this fall, the culmination of years of effort by faculty, students, alumni and administrators to provide students with a major focused on the black experience.
Beginning this semester, students can choose from a broad list of existing courses — 26 this fall, 15 next spring and two during the interim 2020 winter term — that will count towards completion of a Black Studies (BLST) major. Included in this list are popular courses such as History Professor William Hart’s African American History class and American Studies Professor J. Finley’s course on Black Comic Cultures.
Debate about offering a Black Studies major at Middlebury has been ongoing for years, according to administrators and professors involved in planning the major. An African American Studies minor has been available since 1999, but faculty have long sought to offer a full major that lets students tackle questions of ethnic identity in more depth. According to those involved in the major's development, the current national moment and the right combination of resources at the college were key in making a Black Studies major a reality this fall.
“I can’t overstate the significance of Black Studies being offered at an institution that is 219 years old, whose peer institutions all have Black Studies programs in some way, shape or form,” Finley said. “Middlebury College is taking steps to deepen and sharpen its curriculum.”
The new major also comes after last spring’s student campaign to “decolonize” Middlebury’s curricula, when organizers called on Middlebury’s faculty to better incorporate non-white voices in their curricula. Wengel Kifle ’20, one of the campaign’s organizers, said that the introduction of a Black Studies program constituted an important step towards this goal.
“It is a wonderful and powerful thing for black students to be able to recognize their experiences and their ancestors in the material of what they are learning,” Kifle said. “I believe that it would encourage even more black students to be more confident and passionate in the realm of western academia.”
Students declaring a Black Studies major will be required to take 11 courses, including three “core” courses: a BLST 101 course, a junior seminar on research methods in black studies and a senior seminar. These courses will be available in either the spring or the fall of 2020, Hart said, depending on professor availability. Students will also be required to take either African American History or Intro to African American Culture, both of which are existing courses.
The introduction course was developed by Finley, who specializes in African American studies with a focus on African Diaspora studies. From a pedagogical standpoint, she said, the BLST 101 course will introduce students to sources that seek to convey lived experiences of black people around the world.
“I think approaching Black Studies as a field that is fundamentally rooted in the voices and experiences of black people themselves is something that we all decided should be a central epistemological approach in Black Studies at Middlebury,” Finley said.
Aspects of this approach to Black Studies are reflected in some of the courses already available to students. When Hart teaches African American history, for example, he seeks “as rich means as possible” to convey the past. The best way of doing that, he said, is through an interdisciplinary approach.
“In order to understand the black experience, because black culture has such a rich oral-based tradition, I use documents that historians use,” he said. “But I also use literature, art, painting, photographs, cartoons and illustrations, film clips and other sources to capture stereotyping of blackness.”
As a pedagogical discipline, Black Studies emerged from a push for a broader “ethnic studies” discipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front — a multi-racial collective of students at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University — led a five-month strike from classes to demand reform of admissions offices and protest curricula that largely excluded people of color. Their efforts resulted in the implementation of the country’s first Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley, which in turn led Black Studies, Native American Studies, LatinX Studies and Asian American Studies to emerge as their own disciplines.
Just as they did in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, discussions of ethnic studies played a significant role in the emergence of Black Studies at Middlebury. According to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernandez, who helped mediate discussions about how to best create the major, conversations touched on the possibility of offering a broader “Ethnic Studies” major many times before faculty and administrators settled on Black Studies .
Hart said he remembers discussions about offering a Black Studies major taking place as early as 1993, when he first joined the faculty.
Two key factors made Black Studies a reality this fall, Fernandez said. One, the college has enough professors teaching existing courses that could count towards such a major; and two, the current national moment made offering a Black Studies major a priority.
“The topic of race is a sensitive one and a difficult one, and one that our country has not wanted to engage in,” Fernandez said. “The last five years have forced this country to talk and think about the black experience in new ways ... There’s a greater national consciousness and the need to address it.”
More broadly, Hart said that an increased awareness of the importance of ethnic studies in recent years contributed to the major becoming a reality. He pointed to a more diverse faculty, the creation of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity in 2014, and President Laurie Patton’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity as other reasons Black Studies finally became a reality.
Because the three new “core” courses for the major are not yet available, faculty picture younger students as the best candidates for the major, Hart said. As a program in its beginning stages hoping to attract new students, professors stressed that this discipline is intended for Middlebury students of all ethnicities.
“Black Studies is not just for black people, and it never was and it never started as something only for black people,” Finley said. “People think that you have to have some sort of biological intimacy with black people or blackness to study black life and culture. That’s not the case.”
At the academic forum for new students at Kenyon Arena last week, Hart was disappointed when not a single white student stopped to inquire about Black Studies .
“This major is designed for all Middlebury students, not just students of color,” Hart said. “Learning other people’s histories, cultures, beliefs, values, is one way for this country to heal instead of keeping it bifurcated by keeping certain majors, programs and courses ghettoized.”
(09/12/19 10:04am)
Russ Lewis Reilly, a beloved assistant men’s basketball coach and former athletic director at Middlebury College, died surrounded by family at his New Haven home on July 24.
As a “pillar of the community” who drove the athletic department’s success, in the words of Athletic Director Erin Quinn, Reilly worked for Middlebury athletics for more than 40 years. He served as the head men’s basketball coach from 1977 to 1996, then as athletic director from 1997 until his retirement in 2006. After retiring, he spent 13 years as a volunteer assistant coach for the men’s basketball team.
Those who interacted with Reilly within the sphere of Middlebury athletics saw him as an exceptionally considerate and thoughtful presence, known as much for the kindness he showed players and colleagues as for his sincere love for sports. He pushed for equality between men’s and women’s athletics, was a lead caretaker for Butch Varno (a longtime Middlebury resident and Panthers fan who suffers from cerebral palsy), and was a regular attendee of other sports games as a spectator and announcer.
“Having Russ on staff was truly a blessing for me and the program,” said Head Men’s Basketball Coach Jeff Brown. “I will miss his wisdom, kindness, generosity and humor, but his positive spirit will remain with the many people that call him a friend.”
As a player for the men’s basketball team, I had the honor of being coached by Reilly for two years. Like everyone else on our team, what I will remember most about Coach Russ is the infectious positivity he brought to our practices every day. As players would stretch during warmups before each practice, he was fond of checking in with each of us individually. He always did so with thoughtfulness and sincerity, asking about families, classes and local sports teams.
“He would always ask how I was doing, and I would answer with a ‘Good, how are you?’,’’ said Jack Farrell ’21, a member of the team. “Every single day he would respond, ‘that’s the only way to be’. It wouldn’t matter what was happening that day — nothing could get in the way of his ability to spread positivity.”
Reilly was unrelentingly upbeat, though never overpoweringly so, which was perhaps part of the reason his optimism was so appreciated by his players; he was always understanding when the frustrations that come with a grueling four-month season reared their heads. But when we became frustrated, he was there to offer gentle and genuine reminders of the gift we’ve been given in having the opportunity to play a game we love, and one that was so dear to him.
“I could truly talk to him about everything and anything and I always admired the positive attitude he had every day,” said Eric McCord ’19, a captain of last year’s team.
As an assistant, Reilly developed an affinity for working with the team’s post players, referred to sometimes as “bigs” — centers and power forwards, positions where physicality and hard work are calling cards. He ran position-breakdown workouts for big men in practice that quickly became “one of the most important parts” of practice, Brown said.
“Our approach was to have Russ coach a team within a team,” Brown said. “He developed our post players masterfully, but he also impacted all the players in our program.”
After our 15-minute workout we would huddle up, and Reilly would deliver his favorite mantra: “Good, better, best, never ever rest, till the good gets better and the better gets best.” Every Middlebury big man who plays on the team now has a shirt with that slogan written down the back.
Matt Folger ’20, a three-year starter and captain for the men’s basketball team this upcoming season, remembers designing a shirt emblazoned with the “good, better, best” slogan and preparing to gift it to Reilly, only to find that Reilly had been one step ahead.
“Just a few days before it was scheduled to arrive, we walked on the bus to go to an away game, and he was sitting on the bus with a large box,” Folger said. “He called us over and gave us all t-shirts with that exact quote on it. We were shocked that he had beat us to our own idea, but we gave our own shirt to him a few days later and he still loved what we had done. I laugh about it to this day.”
Fiercely loyal to his players and fellow coaches, Coach Russ also had a fiery side.
“I think sometimes he took it personally when I would criticize in our coaches meetings how one of the bigs played the day before, which I always thought was funny,” said Kyle Dudley ’09, who joined the men’s basketball as Brown’s lead assistant in 2013 after spending his college years playing for Reilly and Brown.
“There is something special about a veteran coach questioning the toughness of a 20-year-old or expressing his dislike of the color purple, like he did in 2011 when we beat Amherst and Williams in a weekend to win the Nescac Championship,” Brown said.
Mostly, though, the men’s basketball program and athletic community will remember Coach Russ for his penchant for fostering close, caring relationships with those who played the game he loved. Coach Russ was fond of inviting players to his home for dinner — he hosted an annual “bigs’ dinner” each February, an occasion where freshmen big men are first given their “good, better, best” shirts.
Some of my best college memories were made on Thanksgiving with Coach Reilly’s family. As one of the few players on our team not from New England, I’m not able to make it home for Thanksgiving and be back in time for post-Thanksgiving practices. In November of 2017, when I was a freshman on the team, Coach Reilly realized this before I did, and invited me to his family’s Thanksgiving dinner after the very first practice of our season.
Last Thanksgiving I was invited back to the Reillys’ home where I was joined by Will Ingram ’21, from Dallas, and Matt Folger. We played Monopoly with Coach Russ’ grandkids, Russell and William, and ate some of the best Thanksgiving food imaginable in front of a window that looked out on the Adirondack mountains.
Coach Reilly and his wife, Jane, welcomed us like family. The kindness they showed me those two Thanksgivings turned what easily could have been dark holidays away from home into some of my fondest college memories.
My teammates and I were recipients of Coach Reilly’s kindness every day, and got to see it more up-close and personal than most. But the impression he made on the broader Middlebury community was still personal and profound for all he interacted with.
“Russ’ impact cannot be defined by any particular role or job he held over his long tenure at Middlebury,” Quinn said. “It is defined more by his sense of humor, sense of service, and his integrity, regardless of his role.”
A celebration of life for Russ Reilly will be held on Saturday, Sept. 21, 2019 at 3 p.m. at Mead Chapel, followed by a reception in Pepin Gymnasium.
(09/12/19 9:58am)
If you thought you and your friends kept up a lively group chat this summer, you should have seen ours.
The flurries of texts we exchanged from the desks of our respective Vermont internships were filled with high-intensity punctuation (!), lots of CAPS and the occasional weird YouTube video. Out of those electronic brainstorms came some of the ideas we so enthusiastically curated for this first issue, from Emma Brown’s map project on the front cover to our new classifieds page. (There were also plenty of ideas we scrapped before getting to campus, too, but we don’t have to talk about those.)
All three of us came to the Campus at a time when the paper was coming into its own. Cumulatively, we’ve worked for a total of five sections, under three editors in chief and four managing editors. We’ve hashed out our collective mission numerous times, and spent what can only be described as an ungodly amount of hours in our little basement office. This paper matters a lot to us.
As does the practice of ethical journalism, to which we have dedicated our time off campus as well. We’ve spent summers reporting in newsrooms across the state, all the while taking lessons from Vermont’s professional journalists and exposing ourselves to pockets of the local community that we could hardly probe as students. Many others on our board have done the same.
Past Campus leadership teams have set us up for success in important ways — establishing greater community trust, taking on projects that matter and focusing on quality of content. For those efforts, we’re grateful.
Now, we hope to bring new direction and creative energy to the work we do here, which is why we’re thinking of new ways to engage our readership across our digital and print platforms. The editors of this newspaper have built close, human relationships with faculty, administrators and other students. We value those relationships immensely hope to leave our successors with these same levels of trust, long after we’ve had our last bite of layout-night Green Peppers pizza.
In brief, we want you to want to pick up this paper. We think it’s pretty cool and we hope you do, too.
(07/29/19 6:00pm)
As Middlebury students hunkered down in the library to work on final exams this May, state lawmakers were gearing up to put Roe v. Wade to the test.
Nine southern and midwestern states captured national attention for passing a wave of abortion restrictions. Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana and Georgia all approved bills that would ban abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat. Arkansas and Utah voted to limit the procedure to the middle of the second trimester.
Alabama’s governor signed a near-total ban on abortion on May 15. The ban would allow no exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Alabama doctors who administer abortions could face up to 99 years in prison if the law goes into effect in November, after a six-month waiting period following the bill’s signature.
At Middlebury and other colleges around the country, students reacted publicly and emphatically. Amidst finals week stress, students shared testimonials and action guides on social media, discussing the implications of the new laws. The news hit particularly close to home for students from affected states.
“This took place over finals for me and it was a surreal moment in time,” said Holley McShan ’19.5, who is from Alabama. “The rage it sparked made it difficult to think about anything else.”
Worlds away from home
That week in May exemplified why many students from the South, where the most restrictive abortion laws were passed, grapple with their relationships to home. Southern states are often maligned by progressives in other parts of the country as trailing years behind states like Vermont — which recently codified protection of abortion rights under state law* — when it comes to women’s rights, abortion access and race relations.
When non-southerners at Middlebury voice these criticisms, some southern students find they miss the mark on how these issues manifest at Middlebury and their own homes. Jess Garner ‘19.5, who grew up in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi, said they have always felt the need to defend Mississippi to non-southerners at Middlebury.
“The worst part is the incapacity of some people to realize how much the liberal or centrist bubble of their upbringing has taught them to scapegoat the South, while ignoring the same problems in their backyards,” Garner said.
When news like Alabama’s near-total abortion ban reached campus, southern students said peers from elsewhere were quick to condemn their home states.
“This spring, I saw peers saying that we should just ‘cancel’ Tennessee,” said Sophie Swallow ‘20.5, who is from Sewannee, Tennessee. “What does that do? What about all the people working for change? What about all the people in need? It’s easy to criticize Tennessee, but it’s harder to go and try to make change.”
Martha Langford ‘20, who is from Jackson, said news of Mississippi's restrictive abortion law reminded her of how isolating it can feel to grapple with such news among people who don’t fully understand what’s at stake in her home state.
“I feel exhausted by the odds stacked against economic, racial and reproductive justice in Mississippi, and I often feel alone in this exhaustion at Middlebury,” she said.
Dani Skor ’20 grew up in Clayton, Missouri, a town in St. Louis County. St. Louis is home to the widely-publicized last clinic in Missouri still able to provide abortion care in the state. A sense of pride for St. Louis has been a central part of her identity at Middlebury, but she has felt the need to reconcile that pride over the past two months.
“I felt like I needed to separate myself from my home, and that hurt,” she said. “Since the law passed, I've realized that just as I can love a family member or a friend who has different opinions than me, I can be pro-choice and still love and take pride in my home state.”
Skor said that watching the news unfold from her study abroad semester in Italy was isolating and made her homesick. Swallow watched the news of Tennessee’s restrictive law — a “trigger law” signed by the state’s governor on May 10 that would ban abortion there if Roe v. Wade were overturned*— unfold from Guatemala City. She has spent the past year there working with an organization that provides contraceptives and sex education to young women.
“Being far away made me forget about the power of conversation and that minds in Tennessee can be changed,” Swallow said.
Closed-door clinics
Abortion remains safe and legal in the nine states that passed restrictive abortion laws in May, due to waiting periods that separate law signage and implementation.
Court battles over the laws’ constitutionality may hold implications for the future of Roe v. Wade. Certain extreme abortion bans, like the one signed in Alabama, were written with the intent of provoking lawsuits that might eventually result in a Supreme Court battle over Roe.
If Roe does fall, 21 states are considered at risk of banning abortion outright.
A recent study headed by Middlebury Economics Professor Caitlin Myers predicts that, in a hypothetical “post-Roe” scenario, the average woman in affected areas — places where travel distances to nearest clinics are expected to change — will experience a 249-mile increase in travel distance to nearest abortion clinic.
Myers grew up Burnsville, West Virginia and LaGrange, Georgia. While analyzing data from the Abortion Facilities Database for her study, she looked at what a post-Roe landscape would mean for her hometowns.
If Roe were overturned, she said, West Virginia’s only remaining abortion clinic would close, and women in Burnsville would have to travel 170 miles to Pittsburgh to access the medical procedure. She estimated that 20% more women would be unable to reach an abortion provider with this increase. That number would be even higher — around 33% — in LaGrange.
“As an empirical economist, my job is to identify, measure and understand causal effects, not to tell people how I feel about them,” Myers wrote in an email to The Campus. “But as a native of Appalachia and the deep south, I do sometimes look at what the results say about my hometown … Roe matters a lot in the places I’m from.”
Students like Langford, McShan and Swallow recognize that their privilege gives them an advantage in retaining opportunities for care as their states restrict abortion access.
“I’m grappling with the fact that I have enough privilege that, if needed, I’d likely be able to get around these bans and still have reproductive autonomy,” McShan said.
Langford said she grew up recognizing that if abortion completely disappeared from Mississippi, she would still have a much easier time accessing care than poor and black women who live in rural areas of the state.
Her feeling of safety shifted in high school, when she realized that the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a low rose-colored building in Langford’s neighborhood, is the last open clinic to provide abortion care in Mississippi. The other remaining clinic closed in 2006.
For Langford and other pro-choice Mississippians, the Pink House represents both hope and anxiety for the state’s future. Simultaneously, the constant possibility of losing the clinic in the face of new regulations brings a fear that this beacon of hope for Mississippi’s future could quickly be dashed.
“I wonder how many other students at Middlebury are limited to hope in a singular pink building,” Langford said. “I don’t know if people in more progressive and affluent states share that kind of political anxiety.”
* Corrections: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the bill guaranteeing legal access to abortion access in Vermont. The bill was passed as a state law, not a constitutional amendment.
Additionally, an earlier version of this story erroneously referenced a “fetal heartbeat law” that passed in Tennessee’s house of representatives in March, then fell before its senate. The legislation that Swallow referenced was a different piece of legislation — a trigger law that passed in May.
(05/09/19 9:59am)
Many students struggle with mental health during their time at college. At Middlebury, receiving mental health support can be an obstacle in itself.
Over the course of a three-month investigation by The Campus, students voiced frustrations with aspects of the college’s mental health services ranging from difficulty scheduling counseling appointments to a lack of specialized care for issues like alcoholism and eating disorders.
At Parton’s Counseling Center, for example, students can sign up for counseling sessions up to two weeks prior to their desired appointment. But demand for Parton’s counselors has surged, and students are hardly ever able to schedule appointments less than two weeks in advance.
“On the online portal you can only sign up for two weeks in advance, but if you’re not on the dot on the day that those two weeks open up, you’re not going to get anything,” said Angie McCarthy ’19, who has used Parton counseling in the past.
College campuses nationwide are facing the challenge of providing services to a generation of students seeking mental health support in greater numbers than ever before. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of student visits to college counseling centers increased by an average of 30% nationwide, according to a 2015 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. Evolving cultural standards have lifted some of the stigma around discussing mental health, and colleges are scrambling to provide enough counselors, focus groups and hotlines for the growing number of students seeking help. Colleges are becoming more competitive, too, suggesting an uptick in student stress levels.
According to Gus Jordan, Parton’s executive director of health and counseling services, Middlebury is no different: Students in 2019 are requesting appointments with Parton counselors at higher rates than ever.
Over the past 25 years, Parton tried to meet growing demand by hiring more counselors, with its counseling staff increasing five-fold during that period. Parton now employs seven counselors and three interns, compared to two counselors in 1995. The counseling center held just under 3,600 counseling sessions during the 2017-2018 school year — compared to 1,130 during the 1995-1996 school year, according to data provided by Jordan. Still, though, demand has outpaced availability of late.
“The number of students requesting counseling appointments has skyrocketed over the last five years,” Jordan said.
Scheduling dilemmas
The rise in requests has contributed to droves of students going to Parton to schedule time with a counselor, only to be met with sometimes excruciatingly long waiting periods. Peter Lawrence ’21, who has used Parton’s counseling service in the past, became frustrated with waiting periods during which he says his mental health worsened.
“I could never seem to see a counselor two weeks in a row,” Lawrence said. “It was bad because I’d have a week and have a productive conversation, then I wouldn’t be able to follow it up for a week or two. Often, during those two or three week periods I would really struggle.”
When students experience particularly low moments, it can be discouraging to head to Parton’s online scheduling portal and see a two-week wait period before counseling appointments are available. These waiting periods can make it feel as though students have to “schedule” mental health episodes, McCarthy said.
“Whenever I started having flare-ups, it’s like, wow, I really need to talk to someone about this right now, but there’s no availability right now,” McCarthy said. “Even if you email and ask for an emergency slot, they kind of make you question whether or not you’re having an emergency.”
Emergency counseling slots can be scheduled for students in dire need of help so that those students can then bypass long waiting times. As evidenced by McCarthy’s experience, though, students’ definition of what constitutes a “crisis” doesn’t always line up with Parton’s.
“I’m not really the type of person to reach out unless I think something really bad is happening,” McCarthy said of the emergency counseling service. “One more person being like, ‘Is this real?’ is an incredibly disheartening response to a request for help.”
According to Jordan, students can see Parton counselors for emergency counseling sessions, available via email or phone request, when they are determined to be at risk of self-harm or are experiencing “significant crisis,” such as death of a family member, sexual violence or harassment. If a dean or CRD expresses immediate concern for a student’s well-being, Parton “works very hard to get the student in quickly,” Jordan said.
Specialized help
Students’ frustrations with the college’s mental health resources go beyond scheduling and availability. Over the course of The Campus’ reporting, students expressed frustration at the lack of care for specific health issues that intertwine closely with mental health.
Substance use is one. A student, who asked to be referred to as John, sought counseling after a period of struggle with alcohol abuse and became frustrated at the lack of specialized attention given to alcohol and drug use within the counseling department. The Campus granted John anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his story and its relationship to drugs and alcohol.
“The fact that they don’t have a drug and alcohol counselor here for students who are clearly overusing, or improperly using, is a shame,” John said. “College drinking habits determine how you’re going to drink for the rest of your life, because that’s when you start to form a certain relationship with alcohol. Having a specialized counselor to help with that would be hugely helpful.”
John was happy with the positive relationship he was able to develop with his counselor, though he said he did experience frustrations with scheduling felt by McCarthy and Lawrence. What continued to bother him was the lack of specialized knowledge his counselor had about substance abuse.
Staff in the office of Health and Wellness Education and some commons deans are trained to deal with substance use issues, but that doesn’t always feel like enough, John said. When alcohol use becomes harmful in the way that it did for him, John said, having a trained expert could be of tremendous help to students.
Though John recognized that hiring a specialized drug and alcohol counselor would pose a financial burden for the college, he said that not doing so ignores the realities of substance use on campus.
“I don’t think this is something malicious or someone trying to save money by not hiring a drug and alcohol counselor, but I think it is a lack of being in tune with the student body,” he said. “The college has people in the commons who are meant to punish you if you overuse drugs and alcohol. In that way, they very much know what’s going on. The difference is they’re choosing not to treat the underlying causes of these things.”
Hiring a specialized drugs and alcohol counselor is not common practice for college mental health programs. Counseling centers like Parton’s instead seek to hire counselors who can address an array of different mental health issues, Jordan said, because counselors must be versatile given the number of students they meet with and issues they confront.
“What we try to do is have staff who are well-enough trained to manage a variety of issues that come in,” Jordan said.
Student support groups
Students feel the need for more specialized care in more areas than just substance abuse, however. Henna Vohra and Amanda Werner, both ’21, work with the student group Every Body, which provides support to students struggling with eating disorders. Like John, Vohra and Werner feel that the administration has largely ignored the prevalence of an issue that plays a huge role in Middlebury students’ mental health.
“The purpose of this club is to get people to talk about eating disorders because it’s an issue that gets pushed under the rug,” Werner said.
Many students end up coming to Every Body for a level of support that might be better suited to a professional, according to Vohra. Students often come to meetings with medical and psychological questions that exceed the expertise of student organizers.
“We’re just a group of students, and we really wish we could help with those types of questions,” Vohra said. “But the fact that students have to dig through all available resources and all they could come up with was reaching out to us is really telling of how hard it can be to get help.”
Werner and Vohra said that students seeking help with an eating disorder can explore off-campus options with Parton’s direction — but that opens a new set of questions about access (geography and insurance coverage pose challenges to students), as well as the college’s responsibility to provide students care.
“I think that at the point that the campus needs to tell the student, ‘We don’t have these resources here and therefore we’re going to put you off campus to find these resources,’ that’s when we need to wake up,” Werner said. “We need to realize these on-campus resources are not enough. We need to improve.”
Solutions
Parton hired a new counselor this past spring. According to Jordan, the newly-hired counselor’s schedule was booked solid almost immediately. Counselors are an important part of any college’s mental health resources, but they cannot address the growing demand for student mental health services on their own.
“Even if we added three more full-time counselors, I’m not confident that that would solve our problems,” he said. “I think that within a month, all of them would be full. We have to think systemically, across the campus for multiple ways of supporting students in these situations.”
Instead of relying solely on counseling going forward, Parton and the Office of Health and Wellness are turning to what Jordan terms “creative solutions” to address concerns of students like John, McCarthy and others. Through improved training for students and Res Life staff, Jordan hopes that students will be able to get help from peers, CRDs and deans — people who live and work in close proximity to them — before they reach a level of “crisis.”
This fall, Parton will work with the office of Health and Wellness to improve care options across three areas. First, Parton is seeking to organize peer-and-counselor-coordinated support groups for issues like anxiety and academic stress. Second, Jordan is hoping to make online resources — phone apps and cognitive behavior therapy online software programs — more widely available to students. Third, the office of Health and Wellness will expand staffing, including new staff focused on alcohol and drug-related issues.
Parton will also work with the JED Foundation, a public health organization that seeks to provide access to mental health services, to improve care options this fall.
“I think that if we engage in a couple of years of increased training around mental health issues for what lay-people can do to help each other, that will help our campus broadly,” Jordan said. “So that student, staff and faculty feel empowered to support a person who is struggling, that might be enough. Then, if it’s not enough, to refer that person into counseling.”
Wonnacott Commons Dean Matt Longman, a member of a campus-wide residential staff that works in close communication with Parton to provide students mental health services, sees it as a good sign that students are seeking out help more actively than in years past.
“I’ve witnessed a trend in students contacting the college in advance of their start at Middlebury to ensure that a connection will be made in accessing counseling support services,” Longman said. “This reflects that many incoming students are entering college with an awareness of what their needs for support will be at Middlebury.”
It’s important to note that not all students arrive on campus knowing how to ask for help with mental health issues, Longman said. Additionally, he said, the increase in students asking for help is likely the product of more than just heightened awareness; increases in anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges likely correlate to Middlebury’s rise as a competitive and high-achieving institution in recent years.
Whether the increase in desire for mental health support is the product of decreased stigma or heightened campus competitiveness — or some middle ground between the two — access to support continues to serve an important purpose in helping students succeed in environments like Middlebury’s. For students who come to Middlebury from high school or family backgrounds in which mental healthcare was unavailable, seeing a counselor for the first time can be a transformational experience.
“The first time I went to Parton and talked about a bunch of issues I’d had in my home life was the first time I’d had an adult say, ‘wow, that’s messed up,’” McCarthy said. “I was a scared 18 year old and I was thinking, why can’t I deal with these things in a way that makes sense to me? Having someone outside of my family, outside of my peer group, say ‘it’s okay that you’re feeling this way because of what has happened to you’ was incredibly affirming, and that’s really what I needed out of that time.”
(04/25/19 9:57am)
The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will release the findings of a yearlong “campus climate assessment” tomorrow. The assessment reviews student, faculty and staff perceptions of diversity, inclusion and other facets of life at Middlebury. In addition to painting an image of dissatisfaction with realities of diversity and inclusion on campus, the 89-page report contains a set of “actionable recommendations” that will serve as cornerstones of a strategic three-to-five year plan to improve campus equity.
The report is the product of interviews with small focus groups and two campus-wide surveys. The study was conducted over the past year by the Washington Consulting Group (WCG), a firm based in Bethesda, MD the college has previously used to conduct campus assessments. WCG remained in contact with the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion along the way.
This report is part of a fairly regular cycle at Middlebury. Campus climate surveys have surfaced roughly every six years over the past two decades, according to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernandez, and they’re usually triggered by a major event like Charles Murray’s visit two years ago.
The 2019 Campus Climate Assessment reflects tensions that have arisen in conversations at Middlebury since Murray visited campus: it paints a picture of a campus that has a long way to go before becoming an equitable space for students, faculty and staff.
In writing the report, WCG sought reactions from those three groups about the state of campus life across six categories: diversity, inclusion, campus accessibility, harassment and bullying, employment practices and meaningful interactions.
The climate assessment was conducted in three phases. First, WCG collected qualitative data last spring from faculty and staff “focus groups” – small groups organized by “social identity” like ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Second, students were brought into focus groups that fall. Focus groups were small, ranging in size from two (the female students focus group) to 12 (female staff). While the focus groups’ small size limited their effectiveness as indicators of campus-wide sentiment, there were also benefits to kicking off the assessment by speaking with smaller groups.
“Sometimes that small size was very effective, because the folks running those groups were able to dig deep,” Fernandez said.
Third, campus-wide surveys were sent out last fall that asked students, faculty and staff questions similar to those posed to focus groups. Fernandez said that since the focus groups were small, more data was needed, and the campus-wide surveys gave all members of the community the opportunity to contribute to the climate assessment.
“Regarding completion rate, 617 students viewed the survey, 398 completed all of the questions and 111 started but did not answer all of the questions,” the report reads. “For the faculty and staff survey, 1010 respondents viewed the survey, 531 completed all of the questions, 145 started but did not answer all of the questions.”
Both surveys asked questions pertaining to “perceptions and experiences of diversity and inclusion, meaningful interactions with individuals of varying socioeconomic status; harassment; bullying and intimidation; physical accessibility; and disability,” according to the report. The staff and faculty survey asked questions about tenure, promotion and annual review process in addition to diversity and inclusion-oriented questions posed in the student survey.
Survey respondents and focus group participants were asked to agree or disagree with statements like “diversity is important to me” and “diversity is important to Middlebury College” on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” In the first section of the report, which showcases responses to questions pertaining to diversity, participants largely agreed with the statement “diversity is important to me.”
While survey participants generally agreed with the statement “diversity is important to Middlebury College,” with 39% of respondents strongly agreeing with that statement, few participants agreed with the statement “there is a positive atmosphere at Middlebury College that promotes diversity among students” – just 4% of students, 8% of staff and 3% of faculty agreed strongly with that statement.
Survey and focus group results also convey dissatisfaction with Middlebury’s inclusiveness. 48% of students responded “slightly dissatisfied” to the statement “Middlebury College is inclusive for students.” White students and students of color responded with striking difference to the statement “Middlebury College is inclusive for students who share my race/ethnicity”: 79% of white students strongly agreed with that statement, compared to just 9% of students of color.
One of the most notable points in the report came in the harassment, bullying and intimidation category, where Fernandez was surprised by how far-reaching the effects of harassment are on campus.
“The statement ‘Middlebury is free of harassment,’ a huge amount of faculty, staff and students disagree with that,” Fernandez said. “Same with bullying and same with intimidation. That was an eye-opener for us, seeing how many people felt that across all groupings. It wasn’t just people from minority groups.”
Data surrounding perceptions of campus accessibility, too, illustrate frustration with accomodations in dining halls, campus housing, computer labs, athletic facilities and classroom buildings.
According to Fernandez, who heads the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the report will serve as much more than a helpful indicator of how community members feel about some of the divisive issues raised in the wake of Murray’s visit in the spring of 2017. It will be used as a cornerstone of a new strategic plan that Fernandez’s office is working on as a way to affect tangible change in the areas that the 2019 report identifies as frustrations for many members of the Middlebury community.
The strategic plan, which Fernandez said will take three-to-five years to implement in full, will draw upon “actionable recommendations” included at the end of the 2019 report. The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will begin work on the strategic plan this summer, and will work with community stakeholders into the fall before presenting the plan by the end of 2019. One of the ways the report recommends changing campus culture is continued education for students around diversity, equity and inclusion, which Fernandez’s office has worked to promote with Director of Education for Equity and Inclusion, Renee Wells.
“Building on education around diversity, equity and inclusion is an actionable step that we believe will have a real effect on campus culture,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez also plans to listen closely to student concerns as the strategic plan is rolled out. A recent student campaign to diversify and decolonize college curricula is an example of a student group whose input the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hopes to hear as the plan gathers steam this fall.
“It’s important to keep in mind that student concerns change rapidly,” Fernandez said, adding that his office should be held accountable for keeping a finger on the pulse of campus opinion as the action plan is written and rolled out.
“We’re talking about decolonizing curricula right now, but that conversation could evolve drastically in three to five years, and we want to take that into account,” Fernandez said.
(04/18/19 5:00pm)
The college canceled a lecture by Ryszard Legutko, a controversial scholar and far right member of the European Parliament from Poland, on Wednesday, April 17. The email announcing the decision was signed by Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor and Provost Jeff Cason three hours before the event.
"This decision was not taken lightly," they wrote. "It was based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response."
In an email to The Campus on Thursday, April 18, Head of Media Relations Sarah Ray clarified the “safety risk” that prompted the cancellation was an inability to crowd-manage the escalating number of people planning to attend the event.
“We canceled the event because we simply did not believe we could respond effectively to potential security and safety risks given the large number of people planning the two events – the lecture and the event the students had planned in response,” Ray wrote.
The planned student protest, a celebration of queer identity, was intended to be peaceful and non-disruptive, and the students planned to allow Legutko’s talk to play out uninterrupted. In a second email on Thursday, Ray clarified that, "The fact that there were students who were planning to hold an event near the lecture was not an issue."
"The safety concerns stemmed from the rapidly growing number of people who had expressed an interest in attending the two events," she reiterated. "We simply did not have adequate staffing to ensure the safety of all the attendees."
When asked whether other students were threatening the protesters, Ray responded that she could not confirm this.
In an email sent on Wednesday evening, Cason and Taylor recognized the protesters' intention to be non-disruptive.
"We recognize that students worked hard and transparently to plan a non-disruptive event that would remain within the bounds of our protest policy," they wrote. "We also recognize that students, staff, and faculty planning to attend and critically engage with Ryszard Legutko's lecture lost the opportunity to do so."
Legutko's talk was scheduled to take place at 4:30 in Kirk Alumni Center on Wednesday, which is housed at the college golf course. The event was moved there from Bicentennial Hall as interest in Legutko's visit grew, and to reduce potential security risks.
The administrators said the college had worked with both events and protest organizers to find a new location.
"However, it became clear with the increased number of participants that we didn’t have the staff capacity to adequately ensure everyone’s safety," they wrote. "We appreciate the thoughtful work of faculty and student organizers, their contributions to the planning process, and their desire to prevent disruption." They said they made their decision based on Middlebury's event policy. The college will meet with organizers of both events in the future.
According to Grace Vedock '20, a protest organizer, the decision to cancel the event was made by the college's senior leadership.
"It was never our intent to prevent the event from happening; we have reiterated at every step of the process that we did not want to impede his right to speak," she said.
Vedock said the protest, which was to incorporate a celebration of queer identity, will be rescheduled once safety concerns are addressed. The protest group's statement can be found here.
Legutko was invited by the Alexander Hamilton Forum, a speaker series founded last year that “aims to foster thoughtful engagement with the ideas that have informed the creation and development of the American polity.” The director of the program is Assistant Political Science Professor Keegan Callanan. When reached for comment on the administration's decision, Callanan said he had already invited Legutko to speak on campus next year.
"The principle of freedom of inquiry must be held inviolable, " he said. "I have asked Professor Legutko to speak at Middlebury College during the 2019-2020 academic year. I have proposed that he speak on totalitarian temptations in free societies. Hundreds of students now wish to hear him speak; their right to open inquiry must be vindicated."
This story will continue to be updated.
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(04/18/19 1:51am)
Despite the cancellation of his public lecture earlier today amid what college administrators described as “safety concerns,” the right-wing Polish politician Ryszard Legutko still spoke on campus this afternoon to a private classroom audience. A peaceful protest originally scheduled to take place outside of the lecture did not occur.
In an email to The Campus on Thursday, April 18, Head of Media Relations Sarah Ray clarified the “safety risk” that prompted the cancellation was an inability to crowd-manage the escalating number of people planning to attend the event.
"The fact that there were students who were planning to hold an event near the lecture was not an issue," she said in a subsequent email. “The safety concerns stemmed from the rapidly growing number of people who had expressed an interest in attending the two events. We simply did not have adequate staffing to ensure the safety of all the attendees.”
When asked whether other students were threatening the protesters, Ray responded that she could not confirm this.
Rather than speak before an audience at the Kirk Alumni Center as planned, Legutko delivered his lecture to Political Science Professor Matthew Dickinson’s “American Presidency” seminar. The talk, initially intended for the nine students in Dickinson’s class, became a pseudo-public event as students arrived over the course of the talk, which continued about 15 minutes after the class period ended. Student protesters, who had originally planned to peacefully and non-disruptively protest Legutko’s talk with a queer celebration, were not present at the event today.
A student in Dickinson’s class who was involved in the Hamilton Forum — the speaker series that brought Legutko to campus, headed by Political Science professor Keegan Callanan — asked if he could invite Legutko to the 1:30 p.m. class in the Robert A. Jones ’59 (RAJ) House. According to Dickinson, the event was entirely impromptu.
“I asked the students, as part of the classroom experience, do you want to invite him in here to critique his argument,” Dickinson told The Campus. When students expressed interest, Dickinson administered a secret ballot. He said that he would not invite the speaker unless there was a unanimous decision to invite him, which there was.
Before Legutko arrived, Dickinson had students research the politician’s views and formulate questions. “We spent the first hour of class conducting our own research to gather questions for discussion,” said Owen Marsh ’20, a student in the class. According to Marsh, Legutko came in to the class about halfway through, at 3 p.m.
Dickinson did not invite students from outside his class because he did not originally intend for the event to be public, but students sporadically filtered into the RAJ conference room throughout the talk. Political Science Professor John Harpham and the students in his “Rousseau” seminar joined the crowd after hearing about the lecture from a student in the class and cutting class short. Some of Harpham’s students, who had planned on protesting the lecture, chose not to attend.
Legutko delivered the lecture he was originally planning to give at the now-canceled event, though it was abbreviated for lack of time. He then took questions from Dickinson and the audience, which was by then comprised of students from his class, students from Harpham’s class and other visitors. A portion of the question and answer period was recorded on live stream by The Campus.
Provost Jeff Cason, who sent the school-wide email earlier about the cancelation of the lecture, told The Campus in an email that the college did not know about Dickinson’s decision to invite Legutko to his class in advance of it happening. Cason clarified that if the college had received a request, they would have advised Dickinson not to host Legutko “given our safety concerns.”
“If we had been approached asking if there were safety concerns, we would have said yes, most definitely,” he said. “We don’t have any policy to shut down a speaker invited to a class; faculty have speakers come to their classes regularly without any centralized approval.”
INSIDE THE CLASSROOM
Dickinson asked Legutko if reinterpretations of marriage over time to include same-sex marriage are a social intrusion. Many of the concerns student activists initially voiced about Legutko’s visit centered around controversial statements he made regarding same-sex marriage and gay rights.
“I am very reluctant to tamper with the meaning of words,” Legutko responded. “Once you change the meaning, you are in for trouble. Marriage as we understood was between a man and a woman. What has happened recently is a radical change. I don’t think that we should be allowed to go as far as changing one of the most fundamental institutions of the world.”
Legutko took more questions about liberal democracy and his views on tradition. One student asked how Legutko felt about the controversy surrounding his visit, and invoked the Charles Murray incident.
“Charles Murray was the first thing on my mind when I was invited ... It was unpleasant information, but it proves what I wrote in my book ... How can these things happen?” Legutko responded. “Why is there this spirit of ideological crusade?"
Dickinson stepped in to inform Legutko that student protesters had no intention of stopping him from speaking. Callanan, sitting in the audience, argued that there were some students who wanted the invitation revoked, claiming it was “not a majority, but definitely some.” Dickinson responded that he respectfully disagreed with Callanan, and that no protesters had an interest in stopping the event.
GOING FORWARD
After the talk, Dickinson expressed concern to The Campus about the administration’s decision to cancel the event. He heard about the decision as he was arriving to his class, and though he emphasized that he did not know the details of any alleged safety concerns, felt that the choice to cancel the talk “validates our fears coming out of the Murray talk.”
He added that the administration’s cancellation of the event denied students the right to protest, another manifestation of free speech.
“In my conversations with the protesters they made it quite clear they were going to voice their concerns about inviting this guy to campus, but they were not going to try to shut him down, which is precisely which should happen,” said Dickinson.
“They lost that opportunity to express that feeling of being violated in their own home, and that’s their right here as students,” he added.
Dickinson also fears that media coverage of the events will reflect poorly on Middlebury.
“[The media] is going to portray this as, once again, Middlebury College not being able to tolerate controversial views, and that’s not the case. The students did not shut this down, they did not prevent him from speaking,” he said.
Callanan told The Campus that he already invited Legutko back to Middlebury next year. Dickinson said he hopes that Legutko will return.
“I would hope students have the opportunity to protest and engage in response to him appearing on campus in a way they weren’t able to this time because of the administration’s decisions,” Dickinson said.
Although the whole college community did not have the chance to listen to and/or protest Legutko’s talk, Dickinson was pleased with how the students in his class engaged with the speaker.
“I was very proud of Middlebury students today, very proud of them,” he said.
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(03/21/19 10:00am)
The steering committee for the How Will We Live Together project, which has worked over the past year to assess strengths and weaknesses of the commons system, released its final report on Monday. The document, the final installment of the first full assessment of the commons system since it was formed in 1998, makes recommendations that if implemented in full “would effectively mean the end of the commons system at Middlebury as it exists now.”
“This represents the first time in 20 years that a comprehensive review of our residential life system has been conducted, something that was long overdue,” wrote Derek Doucet, associate dean of students for student activities and education, in an email to The Campus. “It was done in a collaborative fashion, involving students, staff and faculty.”
The final report elaborates on suggestions proposed in February’s draft of recommendations. The report suggests creating an “office of residential life and education” that would focus on housing operations and health and wellness, as well as improving new student experiences through steps such as geographic consolidation of first-years. Another key suggestion is the implementation of a “student care system overhaul” that would result in a “care database” of students’ well-being across areas such as physical and mental health, academic performance and financial status.
Doucet served as co-chair for the steering committee, a group of students and administrators that worked alongside an external review committee of staff from other liberal arts colleges to develop the project over the past year. The external review committee visited campus last October and published a report containing their findings in January. Over the past year both groups surveyed students, held comment periods and published updates with the goal of proposing improvements to the system that has served as the foundation of students’ residential experience for the past two decades.
The final report is now up for consideration by the college’s Senior Leadership Group (SLG). While full replacement of the commons system is “one possible outcome” of the SLG’s deliberations, it’s more likely that a “refined” version of the present system will emerge in the coming years, Doucet wrote.
“In either case, I’m confident that essential elements of the present system will be preserved,” he wrote.
Some successful elements of the system that might be retained include residential life staff working in close proximity to new-student dorms, a “team-based” and professional training approach to student res-life staffing, and faculty engagement in the commons, according to Doucet.
While the SLG is now tasked with deciding which of the final report’s recommendations to approve, the task of implementing the recommendations will ultimately fall on the residential life staff.
“Depending on which recommendations are ultimately accepted, such a transition plan could take several years to complete,” Doucet wrote.
(03/14/19 9:59am)
Staff at the Middlebury Snow Bowl and Rikert Nordic Center just made skiing twice as affordable for students.
Administrators at both ski sites decided in late February to cut pass prices in half, according to an email sent to students on March 2. Under the new pricing plan, a season pass at the Snow Bowl now costs $97, down from $210, and season passes at Rikert go for $60 (previously $120). Prices for day passes were reduced as well, down to $20 from $50 at the Snow Bowl and $8.50 from $17 at Rikert. Per the terms of the Bowl’s annual March sale, those who purchase season passes between now and the end of the month will be able to use them for next year’s full ski season.
The reduced-price passes are available exclusively to Middlebury College students, a demographic staff hope to draw to the ski areas in greater numbers than have visited in recent years.
“If we have the same revenue with twice the amount of people on campus excited about what we’re doing, that’s a great thing,” said Mike Hussey, director at Rikert and the Snow Bowl. “That’s worth it for me to reduce the price to a more reasonable level.”
The price cuts have been already yielded positive results. Last year, Snow Bowl staff sold 40 season passes during its March sale, according to Hussey. They need to sell 90 March sale season passes this year for the price cut plan to be financially lucrative. As of March 11, they had already sold 70.
The decision to cut prices sprang from years of declining pass sales at the Bowl and a desire to reinvigorate student participation in the exclusively college-owned and operated ski area, one of only two of its kind in the northeastern U.S. alongside the Dartmouth Skiway. Season pass sales at the Bowl have plummeted steadily over the past decade-and-a-half, Hussey said. During the 2004-2005 ski season the Bowl sold 800 season passes; by the 2017-2018 year, that number had declined to 400.
That drop in sales over that period coincided with pricing trends at Sugarbush Resort, according to Hussey. For the past few years a season pass at Sugarbush went for the same price — around $210 — as passes at the Bowl. It made sense, Hussey realized, that Middlebury College students were spending their money on passes at the larger ski area.
But pass prices shouldn’t stand in the way of students skiing at their college’s mountain, administrators agreed.
“Students at Middlebury shouldn’t feel like they would get a better deal financially skiing somewhere else than at their own mountain,” said Ski Patrol director Sean Gryzb. “We want to populate the bowl with as many students as we can, and that’s worth the price reduction.”
Rather than setting the new Snow Bowl pass price at an even $100, Hussey, Gryzb and other administrators settled on $97 as a way to recognize next year’s winter carnival, which will be the 97th of its kind hosted at the Snow Bowl.
“That’ll tie in a little pride, hopefully,” Hussey said. “Winter carnival is one of these incredibly unique events that a lot of ski areas don’t have the way Middlebury does, and we want to recognize it.”
Philip Klinck ‘20, a member of the Bowl’s student ski patrol, conducted a survey along with fellow ski patroller Sam Scatchard ‘20 that asked students about barriers keeping them from skiing at the Bowl. The survey asked students to name their ideal Snow Bowl pass price, and the median response fell around $100, Klinck said. He and Scatchard presented the results of their survey to Hussey and Gryzb several days after the new price plan had been decided upon, confirming the upside of the new $97 price.
“Skiing is a sport with incredibly high barriers to entry,” Klinck wrote in an email to The Campus. “Ticket pricing makes up only a small portion of what keeps the majority of Middlebury students off the slopes, but it this change is definitely a step in the right direction and is in line with Middlebury’s larger commitment to making all aspects of campus accessible to all students.”
Other initiatives to make the Bowl more affordable include a scholarship program the Bowl launched this January to help subsidize costs for students learning to ski.
Ultimately, Gryzb and Hussey hope that students will take full advantage of the ski sites they have access to during their time at Middlebury. The Bowl’s staff is eager to attract students, skiers and non-skiers alike.
“We’re open and willing to work with all kinds of events and activities and recreation for year-round use of the Snow Bowl,” Gryzb said. “If students are interested in having specific events here, they should reach out to us directly and give us ideas. We actively want to attract and retain student patronage up here. Lay it on us.”
Hussey is saddened, he said, when he meets seniors visiting the Snow Bowl for the first time. Though he doesn’t expect every Middlebury student to leave the college a serious skier, he hope that all students at least learn to ski in the space that belongs to them.
“This is a mountain for the kids,” he said of the Snow Bowl. “This is a unique space, the college owns it, and we want to help students take full advantage of it.”
(02/14/19 11:00am)
The Middlebury Board of Trustees unanimously voted to divest last weekend, the culmination of a more than six-year effort by student-activists to rid the institution's endowment of investments in fossil fuels.
Divestment is one of four components of the institution’s new 10-year Energy2028 plan, which also includes a framework for committing to 100 percent renewable energy, reducing energy consumption on campus by 25 percent and expanding environmental education initiatives. President Laurie L. Patton publicly announced the plan yesterday before an energized crowd in Wilson Hall.
"I feel like everything I've learned in all of my classes at Middlebury has led up to this moment,” said Alec Fleischer ’20.5. Fleischer is a member of the student-run Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and works with Divest Middlebury, an SNEG campaign formed in 2012.
“This process has taught me how to be an activist, how to push this institution, and how to create sound environmental policy,” he said. “I'm glad to see this institution implementing the lessons it's teaching its students.”Energy2028, Patton said, is a natural progression in the college’s long history of environmental leadership, dating back to the founding of the nation’s first Environmental Studies program in 1965. Today’s announcement makes Middlebury one of the most prominent institutions to pledge full divestment from fossil fuels, and marks a new chapter in its mission to combat climate change.
The decision does not come without risk, with trustees acknowledging that divestment may pose a small cost to the endowment over time. But the potential loss was a significant part of the trustees’ debate, and Patton described their ultimate decision as the most responsible choice the board could make.
“This plan is true to Middlebury’s culture and values,” Patton said. “It acknowledges that we do not have all the solutions at our disposal at this moment to meet these goals, but it commits us to make every effort to do so. I could not be prouder or more inspired by our institution than I am today.”
DIVESTMENT’S DEEP ROOTS
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(02/14/19 10:59am)
Davis Family Library’s Special Collections archive is about to get a whole lot crunchier. Beginning this semester, Special Collections will save the contents of a favorite student Facebook meme group, Middlebury Memes for Crunchy Teens, to its catalog of digital student life artifacts.
The Facebook group, which was founded two years ago by Katie Corrigan ’19, features memes created and shared by students that poke fun at administrative decisions, joke about dining hall preferences and otherwise reflect on quirks of campus life. Special Collections will begin to “sweep” memes posted to the group once or twice per semester, according to Digital Projects & Archives Librarian Patrick Wallace, and memes will become available in the archive five years after they are collected.
Crunchy Teens came to Special Collections’ attention after a digital archivist at Williams College told Wallace about a meme group there. Preserving artifacts that document trends in student life is one of the cornerstones of Special Collections’ work, according to Wallace, and internet memes — captioned photos of TV characters, distracted boyfriends, grumpy cats and other recognizable personalities — have become a staple of online expression for young people at Middlebury and beyond. It therefore seemed an obvious step to add Crunchy Teens’ memes to the archive.
“The Internet meme is a new type of information container with rules and implications I am not sure we, as a society or as scholars, have fully sorted out,” Wallace wrote in an email to The Campus. “I could be wrong, but I suspect that future scholars will be far more interested in how, sometime in the 2010s, people across the world shared, criticized, and affirmed their ideas by captioning pictures of cats or Simpsons characters than we might presume. If so, Middlebury Memes could be an invaluable resource for students and faculty in the 22nd Century.”
To collect and catalog memes posted to the group Special Collections will use a service called Archive-It, a software run by the Internet Archive that “crawls” the site and captures the page as it loads, according to Wallace. The software will only capture content visible to normal internet users looking at the page in a browser, and is almost entirely automated. Wallace said he will conduct periodic check-ups on Archive-It’s progress in preserving the site.
PRIVACY CONCERNS
When Special Collections approached current group administrator Torre Davy ’21 about archiving the group’s contents, student privacy concerns emerged as a priority for the group administrators and Special Collections staff alike.
“I had concerns about anonymity and how quickly posts were going to be archived, because I do have to remove a fair number of posts that don’t follow the group’s rules,” Davy said. “But I really liked that they were so willing to meet with us and discuss these apprehensions and they really listened to them.”
Documenting student voices in ways that do not punish dissent or criticism of the administration is a process that Special Collections is familiar with, and Wallace was intent on heeding those concerns in cataloging Crunchy Teens.
“I think there is a knee-jerk reaction that includes this notion of Special Collections as a ‘Big Brother’ figure watching what students do so we can report it to Old Chapel or something,” Wallace said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We are focused on preserving student voices with as much of their original context as possible in part because it provides a measure of accountability to administration. If criticisms are being leveled against college administration in Middlebury Memes and that goes into our collection, those criticisms become much harder to sweep under the rug.”
Wallace said that Special Collections also takes privacy concerns into account when planning out the “harvesting” process, as he calls it. The process is automated and will occur infrequently, so people have plenty of time to delete “regrettable” posts. Additionally, access to the material collected from the page will be closed until five years after the time of collection, meaning that any material that could potentially reflect poorly on a student would not be visible outside of the Facebook group until that time.
EARLY DAYS, GROWING SUCCESS
Corrigan founded Middlebury Memes for Crunchy Teens in February 2017 in the weeks following the Charles Murray protest, when she began to feel that political discourse among students had become stilted. Meme groups at other colleges had become popular in recent years, and a visit to a friend at the University of Pennsylvania, where students posted homemade memes in the group “Official Unofficial Penn Squirrel Catching Club,” made Corrigan think that a similar group might benefit Middlebury students looking to engage in dialogue about contentious issues with a lighthearted bent.
“My friend at UPenn showed me their Facebook meme group where students critique their administration, fellow students, and bonded over the funny little things about living in an institution that controls a whole bunch of your life,” Corrigan said. “I was put out that Midd didn’t have one until I realized it was very, very easy for me to make one.”
The group took off the following semester while Corrigan was studying abroad. Now, it has more than 2,100 members and usually features several student posts per day. The group’s most popular memes include takes on walking across muddy Battell Beach in the fall, the add/drop process, divestment, Feb culture, changes to the college bookstore, the blender in Crossroads Café and the recent renaming of the building now officially known as the MAC.
“I feel like this space is unique in its ability to facilitate discussion, because everything is covered with a layer of satire, no matter how thin,” said Torre Davy ‘21, one of the group’s current administrators. “It, to me, feels like a space where people aren’t really worried to voice their opinions and the democracy of Facebook reactions shows agreement or disagreement.”
Corrigan was amused and grateful when she heard that Special Collections was interested in preserving the group she created.
“I received the email during a dance rehearsal and honestly just laughed,” Corrigan said. “I am often overcome with how ridiculous it is that the meme page is probably my biggest contribution to the college during my time here, and now it’s being recognized by an official body.”
Ultimately, Corrigan was appreciative that Special Collections recognized the group as a valuable representation of student life over the past two years.
“When you think about it, the group is this little capsule of what we cared about from tiny moments in time,” Corrigan said of the group. “Given how quickly internet platforms rise and fall, I thought it’d be nice to preserve it so that maybe someday, some Midd kid 60 years from now writing a paper on meme culture of the 2010s would be able to use it and learn something about what it was like to be us.”
Middlebury Memes for Crunchy Teens is one of many student media outlets that Special Collections archives with the goal of preserving student voices, and students who wish to submit a publication, Facebook page or other online media outlets to Special Collections can do so by visiting go/submiturl.
(02/14/19 10:54am)
This op-ed was originally published in the Addison Independent last summer during the author’s internship there. The Campus is republishing it as students prepare for the upcoming summer.
As the school year creeps along, Middlebury College students expend tons of energy seeking summer jobs, internships, travel opportunities or other “substantive” ways to spend the summer months. Career interests are the main part of the equation; bustling cities like New York and Boston are oft-preferred destinations. When summer arrives students flock to these cities to pursue big-time tech, finance or PR internships; or they return to their hometowns where family, childhood friends and smaller-town summer job opportunities beckon.
Students who choose to spend their summers in Middlebury and greater Addison County are, relatively speaking, few and far between.
There are many reasons for this, but I see the main force keeping students from spending summer here as a failure on our (students’) part to realize what this county has to offer. A tendency to get caught up in schoolwork, sports and our ever-important social lives can make it feel difficult to keep in touch with what’s going on in our own families, much less in the towns and communities around us. Many of us also come from big cities, which might make us slow to want to explore Addison County’s emptier, rural space.
As summer nears, we’re left unaware of the wealth of fulfilling, stimulating and engaging pursuits that are open to us right in our proverbial Vermont backyard, and too often we hurry away before looking near by. The same thing happens after graduation.
When I was presented with the opportunity to intern at the Addy Indy this summer, the chance to write journalism every day as a summer job seemed too good to turn down. Besides, a few friends who had spent past summers here painted it as a veritable paradise between May and August: they conjured up images of deep swimming holes, rolling green farm fields and orange sunsets that are scarce during school months. I thought I’d give it a shot.
Looking back, I can say with ease that I couldn’t be happier to have spent my summer here — for more reasons than trips I’ve made to Bristol Falls and the Middlebury Gorge.
Working with the Addy Indy has taken me all over Addison County, and in doing so it’s made me think hard about the mindset to which many (though certainly not all) Middlebury College students subscribe: the outlook that our lives in Addison County don’t extend beyond College Street. This job has given me a fresh look at the complexities, struggles and triumphs of daily life in communities that we college students so often fail to see as anything more than a distant pastoral backdrop to life on the college’s campus.
Writing about the anticipated struggles of Middlebury’s Planned Parenthood health center in the face of Title X cuts lent human reality to the low-income Vermonters who could be affected by the change. Covering the Great Bristol Outhouse Races gave me a look at a Vermont town’s joyous, family-oriented community through the heat-soaked lens of Fourth of July fun. And attending Panton’s July 23 special town meeting (one of my favorite assignments) showed me a glimpse of how shifts in local politics can represent years of complex societal change in Addison County’s small towns.
As a college student, these are stories I wouldn’t have been a part of in any other way. The people I spoke to and the stories they passed on to me have become part of the fabric of my understanding of what it means to live in Addison County, which I constructed in the past purely from interactions with friends, teams, professors, clubs and leisure activities on Middlebury College’s campus.
As a student at a small college in a small rural town, I frequently find myself pondering questions about communities and how we fit into them: When do we stop being residents of the college and start being residents of Middlebury and Addison County? Do we have an obligation to form meaningful relationships with these communities, or is it acceptable for us to withdraw into the bubble of on-campus life for four years before departing with our degrees? Students must also be aware of our transitional status in Addison County and sensitive to the fact that our participation and perspective might not always be welcome.
I’m not fully sure of the answer to these questions and observations. But to me, it’s problematic to live four years in a place without developing a connection with it beyond the one square mile in which you sleep, eat, socialize and study. I know that I don’t want that to be the reality of my four years in Middlebury; working at the Addy Indy gave me the opportunity to ensure it is not.
This summer has been one of my most memorable, enjoyable and fulfilling so far. Thanks to the residents of Addison County for making it so.
(01/24/19 10:58am)
Stroll into a dining hall to grab a sweet treat anytime between November and February, and you’re likely to find an array of desserts meant to give a taste of wintertime in Vermont: maple mousse, maple-walnut brownies, maple cheesecake, and other treats featuring Vermonters’ favorite winter flavor.
Using seasonal ingredients to liven up the dining halls’ dessert selection is one of head college baker Ashley LaDuke’s favorite strategies when it comes to keeping hungry students happy. But although the wintertime gives her plenty of opportunities to experiment with Vermont’s signature flavor, her favorite season to be in the bake shop is the time when normal classes come to a close and language schools begin.
“The summer is by far my favorite season because I’m a huge berry fan,” LaDuke said. “I’m a berry-holic. And It’s very easy for us to get in tons of fresh blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and for me to play up lighter fare desserts that incorporate those fresh fruits.”
Fall offers its own array of delectable seasonal ingredients, while winter presents the baking staff more of a challenge.
“If it’s fall, I’m going to try to highlight things that are growing here at that time of year and are being harvested,” she said. “Apples, pumpkins, squash, things of that nature. This time of year I’m trying to think more of warm, savory notes that I can fit into our desserts, focusing more on maple, chocolates, caramel, coffee, some flavors of that nature.”
On days when she doesn’t need to drop her daughter off at daycare, LaDuke’s morning in the bake shop usually starts at around 5:00 a.m. -- an hour she describes as her favorite time of day. The early morning team in the bake shop, which is located below Proctor Dining Hall, usually consists of LaDuke and baker Peter Halpin, who has worked there for the past ten years (with 21 years’ experience on the college’s dining staff prior to that).
The pair begins their mornings by mixing bread dough for the day, then moves on to making cake batter, garnishing pastries and scaling out dessert portions for lunch and dinner. They are joined later in the morning by two to three more bakers, one of whom is usually a student worker.
On a typical day in the college bake shop, LaDuke’s team uses up to 50 pounds of sugar and 75 pounds of flour in order to produce desserts for three dining halls and over 2,500 students. Her crew bakes bread in an oven that can hold up to 16 loaves at a time. For a pastry chef or baker, that scale is enormous; a 2010 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, LaDuke noticed immediately upon arriving at Middlebury that working as head baker at a small college would bring a set of challenges that differ starkly from those of smaller-scale restaurant work.
“In restaurant life you’re worried about producing enough desserts for, on a busy night, 150 to 200 people,” LaDuke said. “To go from that level to now producing desserts daily for over 2000 students is definitely challenging…but it’s been a great opportunity.”
A native New Yorker, LaDuke worked as a pastry chef at Shelburne Farms beginning five years ago, then spent time at Bristol Bakery prior to earning the position of head baker at the college in June 2017. Though the scale of her work at Middlebury differentiates the college bake shop from her earlier jobs, she finds that the creative process involved in dessert making has been a common thread in her work, one that drew her to baking in the first place.
“I might have a little bit of ADD and I get bored very easily,” she said. “I’m always looking to create something new, create something interesting, so I’m constantly researching when I’m in the office aside from just doing emails and things of that nature.”
Interactions with the students since she began work at the college have been rewarding, LaDuke said. She pointed to improved student conduct in the dining halls after discussions around last year’s 10 o’clock Ross fiasco as an example. One area in which students can continue to improve their relationship with the dining staff, she said, is feedback forms.
“We don’t get as much feedback as I’d like, which makes it challenging because we don’t necessarily know how well received the dessert was” LaDuke said. “I think if students took maybe a little more time to just let us know what we’re doing right or not doing right, because at the end of the day we want to put things out that you guys enjoy.”
Students can give the dining staff feedback on meal and dessert selections at go.middlebury.edu/dining?comment.
For full staff issue coverage, click here.
(01/17/19 10:59am)
An external review committee has released a report evaluating the commons system and delineating areas of potential improvement as a continuation of the college’s “How Will We Live Together” residential life assessment. The committee, which published the report earlier this month, included staff from Connecticut College, Kenyon College, Rice University and Carleton College, and based its analysis on observations from a visit to campus last October.
The committee’s suggestions address the shortcomings of the commons system, many of which were noted in the “How Will We Live Together” self-study report last September. The September report outlined data collected by an internal steering committee of students, staff and faculty from the college and was later shared with the external review committee.
In their analysis, the external committee attributed many of the programs’ failings to financial constraints that severely limited the implementation of certain “Cornerstones” of the commons system in the late nineties. “The consequences of these compromises have played out over the past two decades,” the committee reported. “Leading to the conclusions of the Self-Study, the Terhune report, and those set forth in this report that question the value of continuing the program as it is currently designed.”
After laying out these concerns, the report identified the strengths of the commons system as it exists today, namely the presence of commons deans, First-Year Seminars, commons residence directors (CRDs), faculty heads and regular commons “family” dinners. It pinpointed the commons deans in particular as “one of the greatest strengths of the commons.” The deans, according to the report, have become a “central locus of support for students over their four years at Middlebury.”
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Instead [of commons dinners], [the report] recommended using the heads to host more community events and foster out-of-classroom discussions through events, teach-ins and gatherings.[/pullquote]
The report then notably recommended that the commons be redefined as a first-year program. “Creating a dedicated first-year experience program focused on high-touch and high-impact practices should increase students’ sense of belonging at Middlebury, and reduce some of the tensions related to diversity and inclusion that we heard about during our visit to campus,” the committee said. It noted that students feel connected to their commons during their first years at the college but not in the years following, and suggested redistributing first-year housing to be more centralized, among other changes.
The report also suggested enhancing faculty engagement in the programs, and proposed separating the commons heads from their commons. “The current connection confines the role,” the report said, “Limiting its impact while resulting in large expenses for many dinners with first-year seminars that students do not perceive to be connected to their commons experience and produces minimal sustained faculty-student connection.” Instead, it recommended using the heads to host more community events and foster out-of-classroom discussions through events, teach-ins and gatherings.
The main part of the report ended with seven suggestions for improving the programs more generally, including co-locating Febs into one shared residential space and revising the commons dean structure.
In the conclusion, the committee restated its recommendation for the commons to be a first-year program.
“Middlebury has a tremendous opportunity in the coming years to adapt key aspects of the commons system to develop a signature first-year program that best supports student and distinguishes the college from its peers,” the committee reported. “The proposed changes also maximize the impact of the financial and human resources dedicated to supporting students’ experiences outside of the classroom.”
According to co-chair of the How Will We Live Together Steering Committee and Senior Associate Dean of Students Derek Doucet, the initiative’s Steering and Advisory committees will draft a list of possible recommendations informed by the external review, their own self-study, and feedback on the external review from the Community Council, Student Government Association (SGA) and commons staff and faculty teams. Discussions have already begun, and Doucet hopes the draft will be completed by the end of the winter term.
[pullquote speaker="How Will We Live Together Steering Committee" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Middlebury has a tremendous opportunity in the coming years to adapt key aspects of the commons system to develop a signature first-year program that best supports student and distinguishes the college from its peers.[/pullquote]
Doucet also stressed that the final product will rely heavily on feedback from the community.
“When we have what feels like a solid draft of possible recommendations, we plan, in collaboration with the Community Council and SGA, to make them broadly available to the community for comment,” he said. “This final opportunity for community input feels critical, and is consistent with the approach we’ve taken all along in this process.”
The committees are already soliciting feedback for the other parts of the process on the How Will We Live Together webpage, which students can find at go.middlebury.edu/commonsreview.
Ultimately, the committee will refine the list of recommendations and submit them to Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor, which Doucet hopes will occur early in the spring term. According to Doucet, Taylor and the rest of the Senior Leadership Group will decide which, if any, of the recommendations to implement.
While the reassessment process is only partly underway, there seems to be a sense of optimism and excitement about the road ahead.
“There’s a lot of work ahead before any decisions can be made and it’s too early to predict what the future direction might be,” said Bill Burger, vice president for communications. “But I’m confident these questions will get a lot of attention this spring as Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor and others in the administration focus on the How We Live Together initiative that started last year.”
*Editor’s Note: News Editor Bochu Ding is a member of the How Will We Live Together steering committee. Ding played no role in the reporting. Any questions may be directed to campus@middlebury.edu.
(12/06/18 10:57am)
Discussions during a recent reunion of the department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (GSFS) led alumni to write a letter to President Laurie L. Patton, calling for her condemnation of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ proposed changes to Federal Title IX policy that the letter identifies as “regressive” and “terrifying.”
In a message scheduled to be sent to the community on Wednesday as of press time, Patton commented on the proposed changes to Title IX policy without mentioning the alumni letter. When The Campus asked the college whether Patton would respond directly to the letter, College Spokesperson Bill Burger referred The Campus to Patton’s statement.
The reunion, which took place at the college on Nov. 17, brought graduated GSFS majors and current students in the department together to discuss various strategies of activism against sexual violence at the college. The changes to Title IX that DeVos announced on the morning of Nov. 16 quickly became a focus of discussion, with attendees expressing particular concern about a new policy that would require schools to offer a trial option, in which both parties would be cross-examined by the other party’s advocate.
The discussions at the reunion prompted six GSFS alumni who graduated between 2008 and 2016 to sign a 500-word letter and email it to President Patton. The letter was drafted in the days following the reunion and sent to her on Nov. 20. Their goal, they said, is to ensure that the college would continue to provide survivors of sexual assault support under the proposed new federal laws.
“The policy proposed by Betsy DeVos threatens to return us to an era where campus sexual assault is pushed under the rug,” Maddie Orcutt ’16, one of the letter’s signees, wrote in an email to The Campus. “As someone who lived through an era where campus sexual misconduct proceedings were inaccessible to survivors and opaque at best, let me assure you we do not want to return to that era. It’s important to get the college on record about its policies and procedures because it promotes transparency and accountability.”
Beyond calling for Patton’s condemnation of the cross-examination rule and DeVos’ Title IX policy changes as a whole, the signees reflected on the importance of protest and activism as part of their time at Middlebury, writing that activism was “integral to our educations and to the very formation of our identities” during their time here. Noting the importance of activism to any student’s ability to speak out against sexual assault on college campuses, the letter calls current Middlebury College protest policies “managed and restricted” in ways that the alumni fear may be limiting students’ voices as they attempt to grapple with issues such as sexual assault and Title IX laws on campus.
Through conversations with students during the Nov. 17 alumni reunion, the six alumni signees of the letter — Orcutt, Emily Pedowitz, ’13, Margo Cramer ’12, Kolbe Franklin ’08, Luke Carroll Brown ’14 and Kristina Johansson ’14 — felt that the culture surrounding campus activism had changed over the years and that these changes needed to be addressed in the letter.
“What is clear from our time on campus is that students are terrified of Betsy DeVos’ recently announced Title IX policy. What is also clear to us is that Middlebury students are equally as terrified of speaking out on a campus where protest is now so managed and restricted,” the letter reads. “When we listened to students this weekend, we didn’t see the anger that had been such a catalyzing emotion for all of us. We saw students who were defeated, disillusioned, and shutdown.”
The alumni view current college protest policies as curtailing students’ ability to start conversations and hold demonstrations related to sexual assault on campus, a development they see as alarming in what the letter identifies as today’s “chilly political climate.”
“Based on my understanding of these policies, the effectiveness of activism is likely hindered due to the ways in which these policies restrict the creativity and visibility of necessary forms of activism,” Franklin said.
The letter closes with three demands that the alumni hope to see addressed in Patton’s response.
“We are asking you to go on the record to publicly state the following,” the letter reads.“That Middlebury will continue to adhere to a preponderance of the evidence standard in Title IX proceedings; that live cross-examination in Title IX cases will curb reporting and make our campus less safe; and that Middlebury College does not think that Betsy DeVos’ recently announced Title IX policy is in the best interest of Middlebury students.”
Ultimately, the authors hope that the letter will help survivors of sexual assault at Middlebury receive the recognition and support they need.
Patton has issued statements on controversial Trump administration rulings in the past, such as the amendments to DACA and legal recognition of transgender people. The alumni who penned the letter hoped to see a similar level of recognition for survivors of sexual assault after DeVos’ Title IX announcement.
“In the midst of our current political climate, there is such an importance for schools, organizations and leaders to actively speak up and against policies that fail to protect vulnerable populations and that promote a culture of intolerance,” Pedowitz said. “I believe this allows students to feel safe and protected by their organization when there is so much chaos, unknown and intolerance being perpetrated politically in the national landscape.”
(11/15/18 10:59am)
MIDDLEBURY - Just over 24 hours after President Trump fired his attorney general, area residents and college students gathered on Middlebury’s town green to advocate for an open inquiry into whether Russian operatives influenced the 2016 presidential campaign.
The demonstrators were responding to what many see as a threat to the transparency of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion after Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation on Wednesday, Nov. 7. Sessions’ removal opened the door for Trump to tap Matthew Whitaker, a Trump loyalist who has echoed the president’s complaints about the scope of the investigation, as acting attorney general.
About 70 protesters bearing signs with slogans like “keep Mueller independent” and “no one is above the law” had gathered on the green by 5 p.m., the planned start time for Thursday’s protest. Former Middlebury College Chaplain Laurie Jordan, local volunteer Fran Putnam and Otter Creek Yoga owner Joanna Colwell, who organized the event along with Middlebury resident Dorothy Mammen, greeted demonstrators and made impassioned opening remarks in support of Mueller as the crowd eventually swelled to more than 100.
“I really love this country, I love my community and I care about the constitution,” Jordan said. “We’re a community and we want to come together in support of those ideals. That’s what brought us out here.”
The demonstrators were Middlebury town residents of all ages, college employees and a few college students — all of whom shared a common interest in seeing Mueller’s investigation play out free from interference of officials in Trump’s circle who might seek to alter its outcome, according to Putnam.
“The people who are here are from all walks of life,” Putnam said. “And we all just want the truth to come out.”
After opening remarks the demonstrators crossed Main Street and walked through downtown Middlebury, chanting and waving to passing drivers, before stopping on the Cross Street Bridge — the same place hundreds of protesters stood in silence for the March 14 student walkout against gun violence — for around 30 minutes before dispersing.
Thursday’s protest drew parallels to demonstrations held in Middlebury earlier this year, like the March 14 event and the rally on Sept. 27 in support of Christine Blasey Ford, in more ways than one. Like those events, Thursday’s was just one of hundreds of locally-organized protests that gathered around the country.
Putnam and Jordan organized the demonstration through Moveon.org, an online forum popular among community groups that was used to plan the nation-wide protest.
“This might look like a small group of us standing on a green in a small New England town, but we are one of over 900 demonstrations that are happening at 5 p.m. local time today,” Colwell said to the crowd. “We are just one of many.”
Some of the handful of students present heard about the the demonstration directly from Putnam through her involvement in the college’s Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG). Leif Taranta ’20.5, an SNEG member, said town residents and students can only benefit from working collectively in forums like SNEG and Thursday’s protest.
“I think it’s very important for students to realize that everything we do and learn has a direct relationship to the experiences of people in Vermont,” Taranta said. “We are all stronger when we stand together.”
Organizers were happy with Thursday’s turnout, but also had a message for the coming months as the Mueller investigation plays out: pay attention, keep organizing, and don’t be silent.
“One of our messages for tonight is keep up the pressure,” Putnam said. “One rally is not enough. We need to keep our eyes focused on this and look at the actions that come from this firing.”
(11/10/18 5:04pm)
JAMES FINN
Just over 24 hours after President Trump fired his attorney general, area residents and college students gathered on Middlebury’s town green to advocate for an open inquiry into whether Russian operatives influenced the 2016 presidential campaign.
The demonstrators were responding to what many see as a threat to the transparency of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion after Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation Wednesday evening. Sessions’ removal opened the door for Trump to tap Matthew Whitaker, a Trump loyalist who has echoed the president’s complaints about the scope of the investigation, as acting attorney general.
About 70 protesters bearing signs with slogans like “keep Mueller independent” and “no one is above the law” had gathered on the green by 5 p.m., the planned start time for Thursday’s protest. Former Middlebury College Chaplain Laurie Jordan, local volunteer Fran Putnam and Otter Creek Yoga owner Joanna Colwell, who organized the event along with Middlebury resident Dorothy Mammen, greeted demonstrators and made impassioned opening remarks in support of Mueller as the crowd eventually swelled to more than 100.
“I really love this country, I love my community and I care about the constitution,” Jordan said. “We're a community and we want to come together in support of those ideals. That’s what brought us out here.”
The demonstrators were Middlebury town residents of all ages, college employees and a few college students — all of whom shared a common interest in seeing Mueller’s investigation play out free from interference of officials in Trump’s circle who might seek to alter its outcome, according to Putnam.
“The people who are here are from all walks of life,” Putnam said. “And we all just want the truth to come out.”
After opening remarks the demonstrators crossed Main Street and walked through downtown Middlebury, chanting and waving to passing drivers, before stopping on the Cross Street Bridge — the same place hundreds of protesters stood in silence for the March 14 student walkout against gun violence — for around 30 minutes before dispersing.
Thursday’s protest drew parallels to demonstrations held in Middlebury earlier this year, like the March 14 event and Sept. 27’s rally in support of Christine Blasey Ford, in more ways than one. Like those events, Thursday’s was just one of hundreds locally-organized protests that gathered around the country.
Putnam and Jordan organized the demonstration through Moveon.org, an online forum popular among community groups that was used to plan the nation-wide protest.
"This might look like a small group of us standing on a green in a small New England town, but we are one of over 900 demonstrations that are happening at 5 p.m. local time today,” Colwell said to the crowd. “We are just one of many.”
Some of the handful of students present heard about the the demonstration directly from Putnam through her involvement in the college’s Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG). Leif Taranta ‘20.5, an SNEG member, said town residents and students can only benefit from working collectively in forums like the SNEG and Thursday’s protest.
“I think it's very important for students to realize that everything we do and learn has a direct relationship to the experiences of people in Vermont,” Taranta said. “We are all stronger when we stand together.”
Organizers were happy with Thursday’s turnout, but also had a message for the coming months as the Mueller investigation plays out: pay attention, keep organizing, and don’t be silent.
"One of our messages for tonight is keep up the pressure,” Putnam said. “One rally is not enough. We need to keep our eyes focused on this and look at the actions that come from this firing."
(11/08/18 10:58am)
MIDDLEBURY — A salon in Middlebury that was once a favorite destination for students is calling it quits, presenting those looking to get their hair trimmed with fewer options than ever. O’Brien’s Middlebury salon, part of a chain that includes locations in Burlington, Essex Junction and Rutland, notified customers on Friday, Nov. 2 that it was closing its doors for good. Former customers were sent text messages thanking them for their business and saying that the O’Brien’s in Middlebury was now closed. The same message was posted to the salon’s Facebook page.
Melissa James, a spokesperson for O’Brien’s, said that the Middlebury salon had in recent months seen less business than the chain’s other locations. Two hairdressers who had worked at the Main Street salon were recently relocated to the O’Brien’s location at University Mall in Burlington and a third is planning on working at a different salon, James said.
Along with the Parlour and Joe’s Barber Shop, O’Brien’s was one of Middlebury students’ favorite places in town to get haircuts. Students enjoyed the salon for its proximity to campus, low prices and generous discounts given to those who showed a Middlebury College ID upon paying for their cut, wax or shave.
“It was the only practicably walkable barbershop,” said Spencer Feinstein ’20.5. “Without a car, I’m not really sure where people can go to get their hair cut. I guess now you either have to find someone with a car or wait until you go home.”
There are many options for those seeking haircuts in Middlebury but students felt that the haircuts at O’Brien’s were some of the best in town. Former customers were sad to hear they would have to find places to get cropped.
“Their closing will definitely cause students to seek other salons or barbers in town,” said John Henry Hanson ’20.5. “The closure might cause more students to get their hair cut by fellow students, but I’m thinking I will try Solos Salon for my next haircut,” he said, referring to the salon on Court Street.
The salon’s stay in Middlebury was short; it opened as O’Brien’s in June of 2017 after several years as Bimini Bill’s, according to its Facebook page. Located on Main Street in the same building as the Taste of India restaurant, it was an easier walk from campus than other hair cutting options in town.
Options for students looking for a new salon or barber in Middlebury include the Parlour, Joe’s, Bud’s Barber Shop and Alexandria Beauty Lounge.
(10/04/18 10:00am)
As Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified against Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh early Thursday afternoon, dozens of students, professors and Middlebury residents gathered across the street from Shafer’s Market as part of a cross-country display of support for the California professor.
The demonstrators congregated around noon, many of them carrying signs bearing the hashtag #BelieveChristine and the words “I Believe” — slogans of a protest movement organized by and for survivors of sexual assault that took hold across the nation in the days leading up to Ford’s testimony.
“It felt like a really important moment of solidarity,” said Sophie Taylor ’20, who participated in the demonstration. “If just one of the women who shared their experience with sexual assault got something out of being able to share it in a space that they felt safe, then I think it was really successful.”
College professors Tara Affolter, Laurie Essig and Marion Wells organized the demonstration through the Women’s March online forum, which people across the country used to plan similar events.
Affolter and Essig gave opening statements as demonstrators gathered and invited survivors of sexual assault to share their experiences. After two women had told their stories, the demonstrators walked to the roundabout in the downtown where they joined others across the country in a minute of silence at 12:30 p.m.
Thursday’s demonstrations were the culmination of weeks of national anticipation that led up to Thursday’s hearings.
[gallery ids="40213,40215,40216,40217"]
Ford said on Sept. 16 that she would testify publicly to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the sexual assault she alleged Kavanaugh committed against her at a high school house party in Maryland in 1982.
Then on Sept. 23, The New Yorker broke the story of Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were students at Yale. Conversations about male privilege, drinking culture on college campuses and systemic challenges faced by accusers in Ford’s position dominated national news cycles approaching Thursday morning.
At the Middlebury demonstration, the emotion that drove people across the country to demonstrate was palpable.
“The pain that so many people are feeling in this moment is two-fold….[we are experiencing this] as survivors of sexual assault but also as [people] living in a state where our bodily integrity is not of the state’s concern,” Essig said. “Hopefully these gatherings around the country reminded survivors and women that we do matter even when that is not recognized by our representatives.”
Others said that raw frustration with a political establishment that seems to be overlooking Kavanaugh’s past drove them to join the demonstration.
“The absurdity of this spectacle that we’re seeing is the first thing that brought me out here today,” Affolter said. “The notion that someone is entitled to one of the highest positions of power in our country, and the idea that what that person has done in the past doesn’t matter, that’s absurd.”
Conversations also turned towards parallels between the party culture described from Kavanaugh’s high school and college years, and student life at Middlebury today. Though close to 30 years have elapsed since the incident Ford described last Thursday, Middlebury’s community can still learn from those parallels, Affolter said.
“In so many cases these accusations are explained away as if ‘that was college and I was drunk and I was young,’” Affolter said. “I think that institutions like Middlebury or any undergraduate institution really have to ask ourselves, how are we preparing and supporting young people to be responsible for their actions?”
Most of the demonstrators who gathered Thursday were college students, but town residents joined the event as well. Community members have joined forces with college protesters in the past, like in March when hundreds of Middlebury Union High School students joined college students and professors in a walkout for increased gun control after the Parkland shooting.
[pullquote speaker="Sophie Taylor ’20" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]I think that the power in numbers and silent support and connection with one another was palpable.[/pullquote]
According to Affolter, it was important to her and the other organizers that Thursday’s demonstration be accessible to the town as well as the college community.
Joanna Colwell, owner of Middlebury’s Otter Creek Yoga Studio, helped the professors spread word of the demonstration around town.
“I just really love it when we get town people and campus people together during moments like these,” Colwell said. “I don’t think it happens enough and I’d like to see it happen more.”
Though Essig posted the event to the Women’s March action forum on Tuesday, just two days before the demonstration, the crowd that gathered Thursday was substantial. Thursday’s event didn’t attract the same level of student attention as past protests like the Parkland walkout did, those who went were struck by the intensity of the connection with fellow protesters that they felt during the demonstration.
“I really liked the minute of silence,” Taylor said. “I think that the power in numbers and silent support and connection with one another was palpable.”