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(04/15/21 9:59am)
Dear Middlebury College Administration,
This year has been marked by tragedy, sacrifice and loss for the Middlebury community. We seniors are also mourning the loss of the normal, triumphant ending to our time here, which we and our families have anticipated for the last four years. Senior week, baccalaureate and graduation typically offer students a meaningful way to celebrate their accomplishments and say goodbye to their Middlebury community.
We understand that graduation will look different this year, and we are grateful that Middlebury is pursuing an in-person ceremony. However, recent decisions about the nature of graduation and our final days on campus — and the poor communication about these decisions — left many of us feeling disappointed, frustrated and hurt.
Neither families nor our Feb ’21.5 classmates will be allowed to attend commencement as they typically do. In addition to cancelling senior week, Middlebury recently announced that graduation would be moved forward to 2 p.m. on May 29; seniors will only have until 11 p.m. that same day to leave campus.
We recently conducted an informal social media survey of some of our senior and senior Feb classmates to gauge how they are feeling about the commencement plans and recent changes. While the 64 responses gathered do not represent the perspectives of the entire graduating class, we hope to voice some of our peers’ concerns about graduation plans and open communication with the administration to address them.
We ask the administration to extend the move-out date to at least Sunday May 30, improve communication with the senior class about recent changes, and welcome the senior Febs to attend the ceremony. Please consider signing our petition here if you agree.
Students will only have one day after finishing final exams to pack, graduate and say goodbye to friends.
The original graduation plan — with commencement and move-out on Sunday, May 30 — allowed students one day after finals (which end on Friday, May 28) to be with their classmates without worrying about schoolwork. This new, rushed timeline means that students’ final days and goodbyes will be characterized not by celebration and joy, but by stress and sleep deprivation.
As one student wrote in the survey, “eliminating any sort of time off between finals and commencement has the potential to cause much more harm than benefit because this creates a lot of stress for students who want to focus on doing well on their finals as well as say goodbye to friends ... and pack up all their belongings too. I don't feel as though the college is looking out for seniors' mental health during this time.”
Another student wrote, “With finals right before graduation, it will not feel like a celebration because there is zero time to digest and reflect (however briefly) on my Middlebury experience, or say goodbye to friends here.”
Rather than depriving seniors of this final opportunity to celebrate with friends without the logistical stress of packing and schoolwork, we ask that the administration extend the move-out date to at least Sunday, May 30.
The change in move-out date from the 30th to the 29th is problematic for many students’ travel plans.
As one of our peers wrote, “My mother's saying that I might have to miss commencement, as there are no flights leaving that day at a time that would allow me to both assist commencement and get off campus that same day.” Other students are facing non-refundable or changeable plane tickets or will be forced to get a hotel room Saturday night.
Another student noted, “It’s incredibly unsafe to ask people to drive home the night of graduation. I have a 12-hour drive and likely will stay up the night before to pack.”
While we understand that students typically leave the day of graduation, this is usually after having days of break to get packed and say goodbye.
Many families face logistical challenges to watching the virtual ceremony, as they must travel to pick up their students on the same day.
One student wrote: “Both myself and my parents are really upset that the move-out date has not at least been extended to the day after graduation. Given the new timing, my mom will have to watch graduation from a hotel room after driving up to Midd.”
Another student reported that their family will miss the entire ceremony while in transit. Furthermore, for parents who must travel longer distances, picking up students on Saturday versus Sunday or Memorial Day means they are more likely to have to miss work.
The date change and compressed timeline disproportionately impact less-privileged students and families.
The FAQ page suggests that families “think about staying closer to campus the night before graduation,” and states that individuals must reschedule flights based on the new date. Lower income students and families will feel the financial impact of paying for hotel rooms, purchasing new flights and taking off work more harshly.
Additionally, for first-generation students’ families — for whom graduation may be particularly meaningful — the losses of attending an in-person ceremony or comfortably watching a remote ceremony may be espeically impactful. One student wrote, “This is a huge moment for some families especially for first-gen students, making small changes to allow families to recognize this moment is literally the least you could do.”
Also, as one student pointed out: “The lack of senior week is going to create incredible inequality because wealthy students will rent Airbnbs the week after graduation and some students won’t be able to do that financially.” Forcing students to vacate campus immediately after finals limits celebrations to those who can pay for private accommodations.
Rushing students off campus redistributes risk to less structured contexts, rather than reducing it.
Making students leave campus so quickly will not prevent them from gathering, but will simply move gatherings earlier or off-campus. One student wrote: “I understand their concern about large gatherings on campus, but do they really think moving it one day soon[er] changes anything? They are essentially just pushing off any partying/mass gatherings into the Middlebury community where they have no control.”
Instead of relocating these celebrations to the broader community, Middlebury should utilize the capacity of the institution to facilitate safe modes of celebration.
The exclusion of Febs is deeply upsetting to many while providing little-to-no benefit in terms of safety.
As one student wrote, Febs “were admitted to Middlebury as members of the class of 2021 and should be treated as such.” Senior Febs are typically considered part of the senior class.
These restrictions are particularly distressing to seniors who Febbed themselves due to the pandemic. One student shared: "I’m a Reg who is now a Feb and by these rules, I can’t see my best friends graduate—the very people I was supposed to walk with at graduation."
Risk of outdoor transmission is low, so Feb attendance is not likely to increase risk of Covid-19 spread. Since they will already be on campus, excluding Febs feels both unnecessary and harsh.
Communication regarding recent commencement changes has been unclear and insufficient.
The change in move-out date was not clearly communicated, and the student body has not had the chance to give feedback on or otherwise contribute to commencement planning. Many students have felt unheard in this process. One student noted: “When the school tells us it’s trying its best to make this a time we still can feel celebrated, it’s hard to believe them when they haven’t asked us how they can best do that.”
Despite the possibility that conditions may improve, the college has stated that it will not consider changing plans in the future.
We are encouraged by vaccination rates, and the fact that Vermont’s gathering restrictions are due to relax considerably over the next several weeks. Furthermore, several other NESCAC schools plan to provide more traditional ceremonies; Bates, Bowdoin, Williams and Trinity, for example, are allowing graduating students up to two guests at their Commencement ceremonies. UVM will also be allowing two fully-vaccinated guests per student. With this in mind, we are frustrated by the college's unwillingness to remain flexible in light of changing conditions.
While safety is paramount, we ask that the administration embrace a more optimistic plan for commencement that includes Febs and a delayed departure, while preparing to adjust to a more restrictive model only if conditions were to change.
Students have demonstrated their commitment to community wellbeing; the commencement plan feels disconnected from our current context.
Over this past school year, Middlebury students have consistently demonstrated a commitment to public health and safety. The decision to rush students off campus demonstrates a lack of trust in our ability and willingness to gather and celebrate safely.
As one student wrote, “Seniors have spent all year ... making sure that this year was safe and successful. The school owes seniors the same amount of care and respect.” After all of our sacrifice, the lack of trust seems callous.
Wrote another student, “We have proven time and time again that we are able to spend time on campus without causing a mass-outbreak. Be reasonable, let alone kind, and give us a few days to breathe (and pack) between exams and graduation. If this was your kid, you would do your absolute best to provide that.”
In conclusion
We have collected our peers’ responses and encourage you to read them. We have also created a petition outlining some of the changes we believe should be enacted, where we encourage students and families to share their thoughts and sign if they agree.
Ultimately, we recognize that the college cannot control the pandemic, and we respect the administration’s right to respond to new conditions as they arise. However, we ask the administration to grant us more time to depart campus, allow Febs to celebrate alongside us, and communicate commencement plans and the reasoning behind them with clarity in order to facilitate a meaningful experience in our final days on campus. We ask that you work with your senior class to promote a positive graduation experience in a year that has already been marked by so much loss.
Editor’s Note: Hannah Bensen is the senior data editor and an editor at large.
Kayla Lichtman and Hannah Bensen are members of the class of 2021. Grace Metzler and Tia Pogue are members of the class of 2021.5.
(11/07/19 11:03am)
Displaced professors working out of 75 Shannon Street this year have found that cubicles are not conducive to academic work. With the school-year well underway, faculty describe having difficulties working in the temporary space, largely due to limited privacy and noise issues.
As The Campus reported in March, the college built 75 Shannon Street to accommodate the growing computer science program, which has taken up residence indefinitely on the second floor, as well as to create a temporary space for faculty displaced by the construction to Monroe Hall, Warner Hall, and the other buildings that the college plans to renovate in next few years. This includes roughly 40 professors from the Religion, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Interdepartmental, Economics and Modern Hebrew departments.
The first floor, where the displaced faculty now work, was designed to be flexible. Faculty on this floor work out of cubicles, which are organized by department.
The design, however, has some downsides for those faculty. Perhaps the greatest challenge professors cited was that the new set up changes how they interact with their students. In Munroe, professors could conduct private conversations with students about grades or other personal issues in their offices; at Shannon Street, privacy is harder to guarantee.
“In instances in which students come in and they want to talk about personal stuff, it’s a little more difficult for them to feel comfortable doing so on an open floor,” Political Science Professor Matt Dickinson said. Both Dickinson and his cubicle-mate, Political Science Professor Gary Winslet, make it a point to let students know that they can meet elsewhere if they want to talk about confidential matters.
Many faculty members are coping by holding their office hours in the building’s conference rooms, which they say is not a perfect solution.
“We’ve got the choice of complete privacy in a box or we’ve got the choice of a door open, possibly bothering other people,” Anthropology Professor Mike Sheridan said, noting that some students might feel intimidated to be in such tight quarters with their professors.
Sheridan is in favor of adding a window with a shade to the door of the conference room, to create a balance of privacy and visibility.
For some students, being in the conference rooms has changed the dynamics of office hours.
“I don’t think the quality of conversations have changed,” Mollie Smith ’20 said. “But I do think that [the student-teacher relationship] feels a lot more clinical because of the environment.”
The first floor’s layout also poses another major obstacle: noise. Given how open the space is, noise tends to carry, and there is no option of shutting a door when conversations get loud. Many professors told The Campus that they are very conscious about how their conversations might disturb the work-flow of their neighbors. Some, such as Political Science Professor Murray Dry, have turned to noise-canceling headphones to shut out the sound.
Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration David Provost acknowledged that the noise is a disturbance, but said that it is a “short-term inconvenience to accelerate their ability to move back into a new space.” Ultimately, no faculty will be in the Shannon Street building for longer than nine months.
While the floor is sometimes too loud to be productive, at other times, it is silent for one simple reason: the professors are gone. Unlike other buildings, where professors might spend more time in their offices and therefore be more accessible to students, faculty report they spend less time in their cubicles than they would in an office.
“No one is here most of the time,” Sociology Professor Linus Owens said. “They’re only here when they absolutely have to be.”
Dickinson has also seen less of his colleagues. In his department of 18 or 19, he said, he sees maybe three people regularly. Dry, who prefers to work in the evenings, said that on a recent afternoon he had to turn the lights on when he entered, as there was nobody there.
Having fewer teachers around on a day-to-day basis can have repercussions on departmental cohesion and communication. Some professors feel that they should not drop in on their colleagues to casually chat even when they are at their cubicles because it would not only bother them but it would also bother their neighbors. Others have started relying more heavily on email in lieu of quick down-the-hall office visits.
For many, working at their cubicles simply is not the most productive way to work. Owens, Sheridan, Dickinson and many of their colleagues prefer to do their serious research and writing outside of Shannon Street. This is due both to the noise and available materials.
“I cannot write here, simply because I don’t have all the resources,” Sheridan said, who prefers to write from home.
In Munroe, Sheridan had hundreds of books on his office shelves, as did Owens and Dickinson. Dry said he had thousands. For now, the majority of their books have been relegated to storage units, home garages, boxes on cubicle floors and Armstrong Library, while the books required for current classes fill their cubicle shelves. Dickinson, for example, said he has approximately 12 books on his shelf, with more packed away in boxes below. Not only are books not available for research, they are also not as easily on hand to offer students as references.
On the whole, faculty agree that their situation is not ideal. Although they understand that the challenges they are facing not permanent, they look forward to moving back into the new, improved, and accessible Munroe.
(09/26/19 10:05am)
Curious students on the heels of the global climate strike movement turned out in droves to the three-day Clifford Symposium this past week.
There, they grappled with the future of the global ocean and were introduced to exploratory and conservationist efforts. The symposium brought together researchers, activists, filmmakers and students to offer a multidisciplinary perspective on one of the world’s most precious resources.
“I wanted to strike a balance between sounding the alarm and asking people to share research that would incite a sense of wonder and hope,” said Associate Professor of English and American Literatures Daniel Brayton, one of the symposium’s organizers who also teaches in the Environmental Science Department.
Keynote speaker Dr. Kara Lavender Law, of the Sea Education Association (SEA), struck that balance in her talk, “Reflections of an Oceans Plastic Scientist” on Thursday night in Wilson Hall. Law, a leading scientist in the study of marine plastic debris, spoke about her educational path and discussed the harm that plastics, especially microplastics (pieces less than five millimeters long), can have on marine life.
Law and colleagues recently estimated that between 1950–2016, there were 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced globally. “I can’t even tell you a reasonable number of Empire State Buildings or elephants or football stadiums to give you an idea of how much material that is,” she said.
Scientists don’t know exactly how much of that plastic debris is now in the ocean, what form it takes or how it will impact human health. However, they widely agree that plastics are hazardous to marine animals, who are likely to ingest or become entangled in the material. Some bio-families will even grow on floating microplastics.
To Law, solving the ocean plastic pollution will require a multidisciplinary overhaul of the current system. She suggested the audience start locally, by asking themselves: “What happens to my trash?” Although the question may seem obvious, acting on it can be hard.
“The conveniences of [using plastic] don’t impact us on a daily basis and we’re privileged enough to live in this beautiful clean, green environment regardless of the waste we’re producing and the impact on our earth,” Alex Cobb ’20 said.
[pullquote speaker="Daniel Brayton" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We tend to think of the environment as green. We think of green space, of grassy meadows and forest, and yet 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.[/pullquote]
Outside Wilson Hall, a group of local women from Sewing For Change, a “community effort to end the use of single-use bags,” were working to reduce our collective waste. Since January of 2019, they have sewn 500 bags from reused materials. Bethany Barry Menkart, a group member, said they hope to reach 1,000 bags by the end of the year with the help of students.
On Friday afternoon, attendees crowded the Rohatyn A. Jones conference room to hear about whale watching in New Zealand at a talk comparing previous and present global whale population numbers. Jennifer Crandall ’20.5 and Caitlin Dicara ’20 presented alongside visiting Associate Professor of Maritime History and Literature Richard King of SEA.
The students opened by discussing their experience conducting six weeks of fieldwork on a tall ship off the coast of New Zealand. Crandall described being woken up at 3 a.m. one day amidst rough seas. The waves were over 13 feet high and it was pouring rain and windy. In that moment, Crandall recalled, “the ocean became more alive to me because I saw how powerful it was.”
Over the course of the semester, Crandall, Dicara and their 14 classmates transcribed the log book of Commodore Morris, which detailed where and when the sailor had seen and killed whales in the 1850s. Using data from the log and their own journey, they created a Geographic Information System map and studied shifts in whale populations.
King presented an overview of the history of right whales (or black whales), whose coastal living and bountiful oil made them the “right” whales to hunt. His discussion, like Law’s, struck the balance between underscoring the perils of the present and offering hope for the future. King explained, for example, that from 1927–1963 not a single right whale was sighted off the coast of New Zealand, in large part due to over-whaling. Now, with the population on the rebound, there are around 70 sightings per year.
Throughout the symposium, audiences and speakers alike grappled with the idea of how to get oceanic issues on peoples’ radars. As Dicara explained, “it’s really hard to get people to care who are inland of the ocean.”
“We tend to think of the environment as green,” Brayton said. “We think of green space, of grassy meadows and forest, and yet 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.”
The symposium’s message was clear: If we want to understand environmental issues and advocate for a healthier world, we can start by looking to the ocean.
(09/19/19 10:03am)
Crossroads Cafe was packed Thursday night, Sep. 12 with students interested in taking in the third Democratic presidential debate. The watch party, hosted by the Middlebury College Democrats, invited students to engage with the national political process in advance of the 2020 elections.
The debate took place at Texas Southern University in Houston, with 10 candidates on stage answering questions for several hours. Given the sheer number of candidates vying for the presidency, Thursday’s debate — the third of 12 in total — came with heightened qualifying criteria. To earn their place on stage, candidates had to meet a polling threshold of 2% or more in at least four different polls. They also had to receive donations from 130,000 people, alongside 400 donors per state in at least 20 states.
With the debate broadcast on the big screens, students gathered to watch their favorite candidates discuss their platforms.
“I hope that making it easy and fun for students to watch the debates will help Democratic voters on campus to get clarity on who they want to vote for, and, ideally, create more energy and excitement for the elections,” said Isla Bowery ’20.5, the president of the Middlebury College Democrats, often called the College Dems.
The three-hour-long debate tackled some of the country’s most pressing issues. Moderators from ABC and Univision opened with questions on health care, a highly-contested topic among candidates. Under the attentive gaze of the audience, the conversation shifted to issues of racism, gun control, immigration, the trade war with China and more.
“Hearing many of the candidates not only admit that America has a racism problem, but also suggest policies to try to remedy it makes me cautiously optimistic about the direction our country could go if we flip the White House blue,” said Suria Vanrajah ’22, vice-president of the College Dems.
With each topic, candidates took pains to try and distinguish their policy from their opponents’ platforms. The extent to which they succeeded in that task, however, was up for debate, students at the watch party said.
“The current debate format isn’t made for actually presenting the platforms, I feel like it’s made for pandering and saying things that catch people’s attention,” Nyreke Peters ’21 said. “I feel like when you watch this, you don’t really get a full grasp of the candidates’ policies.”
While some students thought the candidates had similar messages, others felt the debate provided clarity on what makes each candidate unique.
“I think that the differences in the candidates are becoming more apparent, which is helpful for undecided voters,” Bowery said. “In comparison to the previous two rounds of debates, I found that the candidates were putting forth more cogent and well laid-out policy platforms.”
One thing attendees could agree on was the importance of being politically involved at this particular moment in time, whether that means watching the debates, staying up-to-date with the news, looking out for Twitter alerts or volunteering for their favorite candidates.
For many, this feels like an important way of breaking out of the so-called “Middlebury bubble” that can surround the campus. For some students, this will be the first major election-cycle in which they can cast a vote, which makes being engaged feel even more important.
Overall, Vanrajah said, the event was a success.
“We weren’t expecting many people to show up, since it was the first week of classes, but seeing so many people, especially so many freshmen, definitely makes me optimistic about future events during this election cycle and after,” she said.
As the democratic primaries and caucuses near, the College Dems hope to continue to engage students through events such as phone banking, canvassing in New Hampshire and voter registration drives. The club will also continue to host screenings of all the debates alongside talks from professors, straw polls and debate bingo.
(04/25/19 10:38am)
An eager crowd filled the Vermont Book Shop to listen to fiction readings presented by the New England Review (NER) as part of its Vermont Reading Series last Thursday, April 18. Three up-and-coming fiction authors, Kylie Winger ’19, Brad Felver and David Moats read select passages from their works to a mix of Middlebury residents and students.
Carolyn Kuebler, editor of NER, opened the event. Kuebler offered background into the Reading Series, which is now in its eighth year and has featured authors in various genres, from poetry and memoirs to translations and fiction. She introduced Thursday’s writers as “relatively new to the genre but not to writing.”
“I always find that if I hear the author read, it gives me a little bit of an in,” Kuebler told The Campus. “It’s like you know more than is on the page, then. It’s an interesting, extra effect.”
First to the podium was Middlebury senior and NER intern Kylie Winger. Winger is a Literary Studies major whose works have appeared in Middlebury’s Blackbird Literary Magazine, a student-run arts publication. This previous summer, she was a student scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At her current internship, she helps develop and host the NER “Out Loud” podcast.
Winger read the first few pages of a piece titled “Fine.” The reading focused on the relationship between two friends, Ellie and Thea, and their experience visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. Listeners learned just as much about the characters — one with an eating disorder and the other unsure how to navigate helping her friend — as they did about classical pieces of art.
To the smiles of the audience, Winger put on her best audio guide voice to mimic the experience of learning about art through pre-recorded lectures in one’s ears. “Marc Chagall is an artist who we normally think of with these very beautiful, lyrical, dreamlike images,” she imitated in a didactic, lilting tone.
After Winger, Brad Felver presented a short piece titled “Stones We Throw” and a portion of his novel in-the-works, “Mother.” Felver, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, is an award-winning author whose accomplishments include the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his story collection titled “Dogs of Detroit.” He is currently on tour doing nationwide publicity for the collection with the University of Pittsburgh Press.
“Stones We Throw” is the story of a boy at his mother’s wake, doing his best to avoid the grieving relatives inside the house. “I threw stones until my shoulders ached and thought about how I kind of liked the pain right now, like it was helping somehow,” Felver read. The piece explores a brief but meaningful moment between the son and his father at the wake, both of whom are trying to cope with loss.
Introducing “Mother,” Felver explained that he is currently on the third draft of the novel, and wanted to read from the first few pages of his draft. “I haven’t read this out loud to anyone,” he said to the audience.
Similar to “Stones We Throw,” “Mother” also focuses on a father-son relationship after the death of a mother. A son reflects on the different facets of his father’s identity — “father, priest, pugilist” — and their complicated relationship as the years pass. “He was a son of a bitch, but my God how I wanted to be him,” Felver read.
Last to the podium was David Moats. Although fiction is a new genre for Moats, he is already an accomplished writer, with numerous plays and a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing at the Rutland Herald under his belt. In her introduction, Kuebler described Moats as a “Vermont treasure.”
Moats read from his unpublished novel “Fletcher Ambrose.” The reading switched from the past to the present, dealing with the eponymous protagonist’s long-held guilt for having told the husband of the woman he loved as a teenager that she was having an affair. Soon after, the husband is murdered by his wife’s lover.
Moats described a scene between a much older Fletcher and his counterpart, Ellen, as they recall what happened, and narrated Ellen’s perspective on the affair: “From the outside it’s madness, looked back upon it, it’s madness. In the midst of it it’s glorious and horrible at the same time.”
As the event drew to a close, the crowd gathered over cookies and fruit to congratulate the authors and discuss their stories. In total, the three readings ran the gamut of human emotions — curiosity, grief, acceptance, love — and brought readers, for a brief moment, into another world. Kuebler compared the readings to a “sampler,” an apt metaphor for that which draws people in and entices them to read more.
(03/07/19 10:57am)
Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and other environmental justice groups celebrated the college’s decision to adopt Energy2028 and divest from fossil fuels last month. This past weekend, the group held a symposium to examine the issues of justice, diversity and inclusivity that are pervasive within such environmental justice movements.
In a series of events on Friday and Saturday, the symposium organizers, speakers and performers sought to expose students to the various power dynamics involved in environmental justice and opened the floor for them to share their own feelings on the issue, both through open discussion and artistic performances.
The first of its kind, the symposium was organized by members of SNEG, including Sidra Pierson ’21 and Divya Gudur ’21, as well as other students. Their goal was to create a forum to confront the lack of diversity and inclusivity in environmental spaces.
“We hope that environmental activism can be used as a bridge to discuss the more nuanced, systemic marginalization that creates exclusive environmental narratives,” Pierson said.
The symposium kicked off Friday evening with a presentation by Thomas Tonatiuh Lopez Jr., a member of the Apache people and the communications director for the International Indigenous Youth Council (IIYC). His talk, titled “Birth of a Water Protector,” focused on his experiences protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
In 2016, Lopez Jr. quit his job and heeded the call of indigenous youths to join the protests. What was supposed to be a weekend trip to North Dakota turned into a three-week stay and led to Lopez Jr.’s membership in the IIYC.
“It was the first time in my entire life that I found myself surrounded by people exactly like me,” he said.
Though the pipeline protests were grounded in unity, there were also many incidences of confrontation. Only one day after protesters had a violent encounter with the national guard, Lopez Jr. was singled out for arrest at a protest in town.
Lopez Jr., who was the only person of color in the group, said police kicked him to the ground in the middle of a prayer, pointed their guns at his head and dared him to “resist.” Lopez Jr. finished the prayer and was promptly taken to jail, while the rest of the group received no punishment. He said the event was a pivotal moment in which he found his voice.
The symposium continued on Saturday with a panel on the intersections of food and environmental justice. Featured panelists included Lily Bradburn, the local food access coordinator at Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects (HOPE), Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson, Assistant Professor of Environmental studies Dan Suarez and Visiting Assistant Professor of History Lana Povitz, who specializes in food activism.
[gallery size="medium" ids="43611,43612,43614"]
“The same people who are affected by hunger are the same people who are poor, are the same people who are having to drink toxic water,” Povitz said.
Panelists also spoke of the hierarchies present within the system of food production, noting that those who produce food are also those in the most dire situations. In rural Addison County, migrant workers, for example, not only struggle to find affordable housing, but also have difficulty accessing transportation to get to work each day. Additionally, the stress from a low-wage, high-stress job like food production can often lead to sickness, resulting in medical expenses that many migrants cannot afford.
Jonathan Rosenthal, who co-founded the fair-trade companies Equal Exchange and Oké USA, spoke after the panel. Rosenthal urged students to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and walked students through his career journey, which began with his decision to drop out of college to pursue activism. He started Equal Exchange with the goal of paying farmers as high a price as possible for their products.
Despite skepticism about Equal Exchange’s business model from those around him, Rosenthal persisted.
“We had the audacity and arrogance to say that we’re not crazy, our society is crazy,” he said.
Students and professors then engaged in an open discussion about finding courage to believe in change and fostering change on the Middlebury campus.
The rest of the afternoon’s events included a talk on inclusivity and justice in the outdoors, a conversation on conservation and displacement and a workshop on making Middlebury’s environmentalism inclusive.
The last event of the Symposium took place in Crossroads Café, where, through dance, poetry, music and art, students expressed what environmental justice meant to them. Artist Kim Aranda ’22 displayed her paintings around the room, which touched on issues of air and water pollution, oil drilling and environmental racism.
Onstage performances included an a capella rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by Ingoma and original poetry readings by Gudur and González. Students from Riddim performed a dance piece alongside an original poem read aloud by Hawa Adam ’22, titled “An Open Letter to Nature Poems.”
“You want to talk about nature? Well, let’s talk about how the barren trees are a means of oppression and code of depression,” she read.
(02/21/19 11:00am)
MIDDLEBURY - WinterFest, a four-day celebration of all things winter, came to the Middlebury community for the second year in a row this past week. The events, planned by the Better Middlebury Partnership (BMP), brought together Middlebury residents of all ages to enjoy the best of what the cold has to offer, from winter-themed arts and crafts to snow carving. The organization used to put on the much-enjoyed Chili Fest, but has decided to try something new in the past few years.
“We’re just trying to get people to have a good time and be outside,” said Chris Hammond, a member of the BMP. “The winters are so long here — take a break and enjoy the experience of living in Vermont!”
WinterFest kicked off on Friday evening, Feb. 15 with a Lantern Walk that began at Riverfront park. Participants staved off the cold with a warm bonfire and group songs before taking their homemade paper lanterns for a walk through town.
On Saturday morning, Middlebury’s youngest residents enjoyed winter-themed storytelling by librarian Kathryn Laliberte at the Ilsley Public Library. Parents and children sat on pillows as they participated in an interactive reading of “Snowmen at Night,” wondering what it is snowmen get up to when people aren’t watching. (Spoiler: they drink ice cold cocoa and go ice skating). Afterwards, the kids created snow measuring sticks, which they decorated with yarn scarves, and calculated the amount of snow that had accumulated.
Laliberte said that her favorite part of WinterFest is the spirit it brings to the town. “I like that it gives the community a chance to come together and do something for low cost,” she said.
Over the weekend, local residents and college students packed Kenyon Arena to see the ice skating show. Local skaters ages five to eighteen joined Middlebury students on the ice to skate along to Broadway’s most famous hits. In the first act, young skaters in multicolored unicorn onesies swept across the ice to “Best Day Ever” from the SpongeBob Musical and leather-clad Middlebury College Figure Skating club members danced to “You’re the One That I Want” from Grease. University of Vermont’s synchronized skating team circled the rink, arms linked at the shoulders, to a medley of songs.
Alongside the group skates were solo performances by seniors Yiyi Jin and Hannah Krutiansky, alum Lydia Waldo ’18 and local ninth grader Emma Cooley. The special guests of the show were Katarina DelCamp and Maxwell Gart, a skating pair who recently placed tenth at the 2019 U.S. Junior National Championships.
In the audience on Saturday was Susan Veguez, who started the local skating program 45 years ago and for years sewed all the costumes, designed the choreography and selected the music for the show. Back then, the local skaters were performing on Middlebury’s old ice rink, without a proper Zamboni. “We used to have to line up the kids with shovels and clean the ice off before we skated,” Veguez said.
On Sunday, WinterFest continued with a snow carving competition at the College Park in town. Eight teams, competing for a prize of $250, chipped away at large blocks of snow with hammers, ice picks and saws. Team projects varied widely, with the Habitat for Humanity team replicating a house they’re currently building on Seymour Street and Middlebury women’s leadership club BOLD creating a car.
By one in the afternoon, the group from WomenSafe was halfway through creating a protest scene with dyed, multicolor snow-protesters holding signs. “It’s a working together and building a just world protest” said Kerri Duquette-Hoffman, a Women’s Safe employee. Across the park, the team from Carpenter & Costin chipped away at a block of snow over four feet tall destined to become a one-eyed minion from “Despicable Me,” complete with its iconic blue uniform.
Alongside the ice show and the snow carving this past weekend, the community also enjoyed free, winter-themed movies at the Marquis, including “Frozen” and “Happy Feet,” and a brews and BBQ event held at Otter Creek Brewing.
WinterFest concluded on Monday, the first day of school break for students in town, with a free ice skating event at the Memorial Sports Center followed by an afternoon of sledding at the Parks and Rec gym.
(02/13/19 4:20pm)
In the days preceding the Trustees’ approval of Energy2028, the Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and the SGA Environmental Affairs Committee organized a series of events, called the Fossil Free Fest, designed to familiarize people with the proposed plan. The week of activism culminated in Sunday’s vote and Tuesday’s announcement of the board’s decision to adopt Energy2028.
On Tuesday, the groups held a “Divest Your Bank Account” information session about personal divestment from fossil fuels and on Thursday, they ran shuttles between ADK and Vermont Credit Union so students could open accounts there.
Also on Thursday, there was a panel about divestment in Dana Auditorium, moderated by Environmental Sciences Professor Dan Suarez and featuring SNEG co-manager Gabe Desmond ’20.5, Scholar-in-Residence Bill McKibben, founding member of DivestMiddlebury Jeannie Bartlett ’15 and Alyssa Lee of Better Future Project.
The organizing groups called for an Orange Out on Friday, Jan. 25, in which students were asked to wear the hallmark color of DivestMiddlebury in support for Energy2028. The same day, faculty, community members and alumni gathered in Mead Chapel for a letter writing and solidarity event. Orange-clad SNEG club members asked attendees to write letters to the Board of Trustees, thanking them for their support in making Middlebury an example of environmental leadership and sharing why climate change mattered to them. In the second half of the event, attendees were asked to share thoughts aloud at the podium.
Connor Wertz ’22, a member of SNEG, spoke of his first experience with activism protesting a gas pipeline in Massachusetts and expressed his commitment toward divestment.
“I will show up until people are no longer losing their dignity and their lives from climate disasters,” he said. “I will show up until humanity is placed above profit and community above greed.”
While club members spoke positively of how receptive the Trustees and the administration have been toward making the Middlebury campus a more sustainable environment, they also reminded the audience that in many places in the world, progress remains stagnant and climate change continues to disproportionately affect marginalized people.
Joining students on stage was Fran Putnam, a 71-year-old Weybridge resident and longtime SNEG member, who spoke of how climate change will affect her three grandchildren. Putnam offered environmentally friendly recommendations to the crowd, advising people to use public transportation and eat more plant-based meals.
Food Studies Professor Molly Anderson discussed climate change’s disastrous effects on water availability, food production and biodiversity. She referred to Energy2028 as an opportunity to “stand on the side of life” and “genuine economic development.”
The event highlighted the progression of DivestMidd over time, with several alumni returning to campus to stand in solidarity with current students. Isaac Baker ’14.5 and his fellow alums drove up from Boston to show their support.
“Energy 2028 is even bolder and more comprehensive than what was being considered at the time we were here,” he said.
“I hope that Midd is a place that supports its students to critique it, and push it, and support it to be the best version of itself,” said Greta Neubauer ’14.5 in her speech. Neubauer helped start the DivestMidd campaign in 2012.
At the end of the event, attendees walked silently as a group down to Old Chapel to hand their letters to the Trustees.
Even with the success of Energy2028, the students of SNEG will continue their activism. Future efforts include supporting the rollout of Energy2028, opening a Middlebury hub of the Sunrise Movement, an organization that advocates for the Green New Deal, and encouraging town members to vote for the Climate Solutions Resolution, which petitions for climate solutions on a state level.
(01/24/19 10:54am)
Students in the Sociology & Anthropology course Trust and Social Capital recently produced a paper analyzing causes and effects of exclusion on Middlebury’s campus. The department released the paper titled “Trust and Social Capital at Middlebury College: An Analysis of Community and Isolation,” and investigated inequality in four principal sections: race, economic isolation, the queer community and body image.
“I want (this paper) to be a moment of honesty, for us. To look at what our campus culture is right now and for everybody in their own way to do something about it,” said co-author Eva Bod ’20.
The paper combines the results of interview case studies and a 27-question online survey completed by 607 respondents. The survey represents a relatively even distribution of class years, but is more heavily weighted toward female respondents and non-varsity athletes, representing 60.6 percent and 80.7 percent of respondents respectively.
In the section on race, the writers noted the frustration felt by respondents of color, 70 percent of whom revealed feeling a disconnect between the administration’s ideology and practice when it comes to people of color.
The paper describes a “pervasive sense of racially-based isolation on campus.” In particular, students discussed geographical segregation on campus, with certain areas, such as Atwater parties, the central areas of the dining halls and the gym being widely acknowledged as white and/or for athletes. The Anderson Freeman Center received conflicting reviews, with some students lauding the space as accepting, and others feeling as though the center spreads itself too thin in attempting to act as a resource for all minority identities.
“We have a lot of work to do toward supporting students who are historically from marginalized groups,” said Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor, who met with the students to discuss their results. “We all have to work towards building it back and it is not on the students alone to do so.”
Recent administrative efforts addressing these feelings of exclusion include the recent hiring of Renee Wells as director of education for equity and inclusion and the creation of a faculty committee on diversity and inclusion.
The section on economic isolation also echoes ideas of exclusion — especially for students of color, student-employees and first-generation students — discussing how expenses prevent students from fully participating in college life. For example, 49 respondents mentioned being unable to afford concert tickets and 36 noted they were unable to participate in clubs and sports due to the extra costs.
The Snow Bowl, in particular, highlights the economic stratification on campus. Skiing and snowboarding, activities over which students build friendships, are too costly for many students. The paper suggests the school establish gear exchanges or create less expensive activities, such as ice skating, so that low-income students can engage with the Snow Bowl.
For this economically isolated cohort of students, working on campus can be an alienating experience. Not only do students miss out on bonding time with non-working friends, but also the interactions they do have while working may be atypical. An interviewee said, “you’re not always treated as you’d expect to be, and it’s weird interacting with other students as a student versus as a laborer.”
In the section on style and exclusion in the queer community, the writers draw attention to the way queer students use clothing as a form of communication, a way to implicitly broadcast their sexual identity to others and avoid having to explain it out loud.
The paper also highlights the challenge for students who feel on the periphery of the queer community. The question of who is queer enough to be included was a common theme in the survey and interviews. An interviewee said, “I hate when I used to go to [Queer House] events and people in the “queer” community would tell me I looked too straight to be there. [My presentation] doesn’t mean I don’t love women.”
The writers suggest using non-queer spaces for queer events, like holding a drag show in McCullough, as a way to spread acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. They also offer the suggestion of hiring a queer-specific staff member.
The last section, on body image as a source of social isolation, examines perceived attractiveness. According to the survey, 74.1 percent of respondents defined the “good body” at Middlebury to be toned and athletic. Furthermore, 70.7 percent said that being “skinny” is what constitutes the good body.
The data also presents a striking contrast between athletes — over 80 percent of whom identified themselves as “attractive” — and students of color and economically isolated students, who reported feeling less attractive than their white, or more well-off peers, respectively.
Lastly, the section highlights the dining halls and the gym as spaces where students negotiate ideas of thinness and beauty. 58 percent of survey respondents reported thinking that people take note of what they eat, and another 46 percent thought others take note of how often they work out.
“The students have put their fingers on a number of wicked problems,” said Anthropology professor Mike Sheridan, referring to problems that evolve as one tries to solve them. He said there is little chance that his students’ suggestions for improvement would be completely effective. However, he concluded, “without clumsy solutions, we’re just stuck living with wicked problems.”
(11/08/18 10:59am)
The leaves are falling, the sunsets are earlier and the first signs of winter are approaching. For many, this can mean only one thing: hunting season is in full swing in Vermont. Both on and off campus, plenty of Middlebury residents are gearing up for the annual activity.
In Vermont, there are approximately 68,000 hunters, all of whom are required to take a Hunter’s Education class before becoming licensed. Demographically, hunters run the gamut from children participating in a family tradition to health conscious twenty-somethings looking to incorporate local food into their diets.
“Hunting is sometimes viewed as the sport of the old, white man. And that’s not true at all,” said Nicole Meier, theInformation and Education Specialist at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. “Just because it’s a stereotype doesn’t mean that we need to make the other hunters out there invisible. Hunters like me, who are young females,” she said.
Although to many students it may seem as if a passion for hunting cannot be found on the Middlebury campus, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“There are students that are hunting every season in the area. Maybe not a large number, but they’re there,” said Ira Schiffer, former chaplain at the college and teacher of the Hunter Education J-term workshop. These students are joined by a number of faculty and staff members who also enjoy hunting and act as mentors to students looking to learn. There was no lack of interest in the J-term workshop— it attracted over 35 students last year. However, while there are avid hunters on campus, many are reluctant to disclose openly their hobby for fear of criticism.
“[There are] faculty members who are long time hunters who are very quiet about it because they’re afraid of pushback from colleagues,” said Schiffer. This backlash extends to students, as well, many of whom are reluctant to share their interest with friends.
“I did not feel comfortable talking about hunting on campus, and it was a part of me that I tried to hide for most of my time at Midd,” said Hannah Phelps ’18. “I felt like I would get ridiculed or labeled with misconceptions/stereotypes if anyone found out, even though I strongly believe in the practice of hunting and in getting new people involved.”
Their involvement is often made difficult by misperceptions about hunters’ ethics and their relationship to the animals and their environment. In fact, those who hunt consider it a respectful, educational practice, one which is necessary for the conservation of the environment. They see their hobby as part of maintaining healthy habitats. Especially in Vermont, a state with a large deer population and few natural predators, hunting is integral in keeping the population in check.
“People don't always realize the good hunting can do for wildlife,” explained Phelps. “Without hunters, the deer population has the potential to eat themselves out of house and home, leading to huge spikes and plummets in their population and a decrease in plant diversity,” she added.
For many who are unfamiliar with hunting, the act of shooting an animal may seem cruel and unethical. But many hunters in Vermont resist the stereotype. “I think the reality that people who don’t hunt or aren’t part of that community don’t understand is that the hunter really has a warm, empathetic relationship with the animals that he’s hunting,” said Schiffer.
Part of this relationship is understanding the value of animal life; for example, many hunters consider it irresponsible to simply throw away one’s catch instead of eating it. Not only is shooting an animal a deliberate choice, hunters must also know when not to shoot.
“So many times I’ve had a choice to make. I would rather not shoot an animal and go home with no meat for the table than to damage it and have it go off and suffer,” said Wendy Butler, the current teacher of the Hunter Education workshop.
The J-term workshop offered by Butler gives students a chance to learn about hunting and attain a Hunter Education Certification. The workshop stresses safety, ethics and conservation-mindedness. For some students, it is a chance to explore a hobby that family members are passionate about; for others, such as international students, it is an opportunity to learn about an activity that isn’t available at home.
[pullquote speaker="HANNAH PHELPS '18" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]I did not feel comfortable talking about hunting on campus.[/pullquote]
The class allows students to see the positive aspects of hunting. Not only does it provide a local, sustainable meat source, but it also allows people to intimately connect with nature, without the trappings of modern-day technology.
“There is nothing better than walking into the woods before sunrise and watching it come to life around you,” said Phelps.
For both hunters and non-hunters, there are certain things to do to stay safe during hunting season. For one thing, if you’re considering going running around the local trails, do your best to wear bright colored clothing. Meier recommends that people wear some kind of blaze orange apparel. The color has been shown to be seven times more visible, especially during low light conditions, than any other color. If you’re walking your dog, remember to always keep it on a leash. Lastly, avoid being out in low light conditions like dusk and dawn
(10/25/18 9:55am)
The Title IX Office shed light on its procedures and policies, attempting to make more visible what goes on behind the scenes, in the year’s first MiddWorks presentation on Oct. 10. Title IX Coordinator Sue Ritter and Deputy Title IX Coordinator Karen Guttentag explained that the mission of their office is to promote safety and equality, investigate policy violations and ensure that the school complies with legal guidelines.
The presenters expressed their commitment to maintaining the rigor of investigations while recognizing that they are time-sensitive.
While prioritizing depth over haste adds to the length of each investigation, Ritter and Guttentag explained that they don’t believe setting arbitrary deadlines serves any parties well. Throughout each investigation, both parties must have equal access to review all evidence provided in the case. This can include interview transcripts, text messages or other forms of information.
The investigative process is not influenced by public discourse or political pressures, Ritter and Guttentag said. They stressed that their process is one of maximum transparency and privacy for the parties involved.
The Title IX Office is overseen by the Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education. Because of this, many of its policies are dictated by national law, including the policies encompassing sexual harassment and other category-based harassment and discrimination.
Policies apply to faculty, staff and students and form a foundation upon which the Title IX Office conducts its investigations. The college also added the category of “dating or domestic misconduct,” which is not included in the federal law, to give the office more leeway to address harmful or problematic behavior.
Due to the private nature of investigations, the process may appear obscure. Ritter and Guttentag attempted to break down their investigative procedure to give the audience a better understanding of what they do.
When a student files a complaint, the office provides the student specific written information about their rights, regardless of whether the student decides to go through with an investigation. If they do proceed, investigations are required to be fair and impartial and conducted by unbiased, trained officials.
Ritter and Guttentag said that they only enter the investigation process if a reporting student wants them to, except in rare circumstances. When there are factors that could indicate an ongoing, dangerous situation, the office may need to go forward in the name of campus safety contrary to the wishes of the complainant.
The Title IX Office also sometimes handles reports of misconduct committed off campus. If problems occur abroad, in town, or even over the summer, the Title IX Office will pursue an investigation if a hostile environment continues to impact the complainant’s experience on campus.
Ritter also explained that investigations are conducted as paper processes, rather than in the form of live hearings, which some other schools opt for. While Middlebury’s procedure takes longer, it also eliminated the pressure of confronting a live panel.
Ritter concluded by addressing the potential changes the Department of Education has signaled they will implement in the coming months under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Once the new policies are announced, the government will conduct a notice and comment period in which Middlebury will have the chance to respond to the guidelines. Regardless of the outcome, the college will be bound to follow national laws regarding adjudication of sexual assault.
Ritter said it is highly likely that the upcoming changes will lead to any changes in Middlebury’s policies.
The “How Midd Works” initiative is led by the Student Government Association (SGA) and President Laurie L. Patton’s senior leadership group (SLG). The initiative is part of the SGA’s and SLG’s Common Agenda, and was developed to give students a better sense of how the college operates.
The next presentation in the MiddWorks series will be held on Oct. 25 and will describe the operations of the Student Financial Services office.
(01/24/18 10:15pm)
The Middlebury Women Leaders group launched their first ever Middlebury Women’s Leadership Symposium this past week with the goal of empowering women and providing an open forum to discuss women’s issues. Club President Erin Van Gessel ’17.5 said that the “impetus for the symposium was to commemorate the Women’s March from 2017 and keep the momentum around women’s empowerment going into 2018.”
On Friday, keynote speaker Nancy Gibbs sat down with Van Gessel in Wilson Hall to discuss her career in journalism and offer advice to students.
An accomplished writer, leader, author and student, Gibbs makes for a powerful role model. As the first female editor-in-chief of TIME magazine, she led the transition from print magazine to digital media company, introduced the Firsts project and made way for TIME magazine to become the biggest news media brand on Instagram. Before beginning her illustrious career at TIME, Gibbs graduated from Yale summa cum laude with honors in history. She also holds a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She is, as Gessel said, “a fantastic role model for women at Middlebury who want to seek out challenging careers after college.”
Gessel began the discussion by asking if Gibbs had always dreamt of being editor-in-chief. On the contrary, Gibbs told the audience that her ultimate goal had always been to be a writer, as writing “would give you a front-row seat on the most interesting people, the most interesting stories.” This proved to be true for Gibbs. After being hired by TIME as a fact checker in 1985, she was eventually promoted to a writer’s position where, she said, “the view was every bit as fascinating as I had hoped.” In her 32-year career at TIME, Gibbs spent 25 of those years writing, eventually gaining the nickname “Babe Ruth” for logging a mountainous number of cover stories – 175 to be exact – more than any other writer in the history of the magazine.
Gibbs admitted that she had no managerial background or prior experience handling budgets when the time came for her to step into the shoes of editor-in-chief. However, as TIME was undergoing a transition period, she knew it was time to “get the hell out of [my] comfort zone” and tackle the job.
The conversation then turned to the topic of women leaders. When she took the job as lead editor in 2013, Gibbs felt “so accustomed to seeing women in leadership positions” that she felt no obligation to be a role model to women. The glass ceiling, she felt, had already been broken. To her surprise, she received an outpouring of support from women who saw her promotion as a symbol of progress.
Gibb said she owed part of her comfort in taking on the leadership position to her parents, who always told her she could do anything. “If you’re interested in something, do it; if there’s a door closed, bang on it,” she said. This is a message she has passed onto her own daughters as well. While she felt that the importance of her being the first female editor-in-chief was not her gender but the experience she had to offer, Gibbs embraced the role, using her position to fight for equal pay and to highlight extraordinary women.
One of the first things Gibbs did as editor was assess the salaries of women to make sure they were equivalent to men working the same job. “[There were] all kinds of inequities in compensation that I didn’t think necessarily made sense,” she said. Something that became glaringly obvious was the fact that the men on her staff were far more likely to ask for a promotion than the women were. She also noted an unfortunate penalty for loyalty that affected both men and women. “If you come in and do well and are constantly promoted, you still may not be paid as well as someone who is brought in from the outside to do the same job,” she said.
In 2017, under Gibbs’ leadership, TIME launched the Firsts project, celebrating powerful women such as Oprah, Madeleine Albright and Aretha Franklin – all trailblazers in their fields. The idea, Gibbs said, came from watching “glass ceilings being broken and wanting to look at what that experience is like.” The women – artists, athletes, TV hosts, diplomats and more – span a diverse range of careers but comprise a collective array of powerful role models.
During the Q&A session, Gibbs discussed the relationship between President Trump and the press, framing it within the context of previous presidencies. “I haven’t met a lot of politicians who are in love with my profession,” she said, to the laughter of the audience. The difference now, she discussed, is the widening gap between parties in considering whether the press’ enduring role should be that of a watchdog. In any case, Gibbs said that despite the President’s rather tempestuous relationship with journalists, she has “not seen it in any way” stop reporters from doing their job.
Gibbs ended by discussing her guiding principles as a leader and offering advice to the students in the room. As a leader, she advised, “surround yourself with people who are better, and smarter, and more talented than you are. And then you will succeed.” “Recognize that you can’t do everything,” she added, and empower those who can do what you need them to. To students, she recommended “talk[ing] to as many people as you can” before going into any field.
Alongside Nancy Gibbs’ visit, the symposium included a conflict mediation workshop led by President Patton, a “Lean In” conversation about women in the workforce, a discussion on feminism with local Nulhegan Abenaki Native American women and a fashion-show fundraiser for She Should Run, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps women run for political offices.
(01/17/18 11:20pm)
The Middlebury community came together early this week to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. The events spanned three days. A Sunday talk was followed by a Monday breakfast, then by a mural painting project on Tuesday. The Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury, the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, the Center for Community Engagement (CCE), the Commons, and the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs organized the events.
The first event was a talk titled “Meditation vs. Detention: Empowering Youth with Mindfulness.” (See Page A4) Ali Smith, Atman Smith and Andy Gonzalez, founders of the Holistic Life Foundation, delivered the talk. Their nonprofit is a Baltimore-based organization which helps children develop through yoga, mindfulness and self-care.
The three founders explained that after attending college together, they moved to Baltimore, where they began teaching yoga to middle school students after school for free. The neighborhood they lived in at the time was one of the more violent in the city. As the program developed, the organization “started picking up less and less kids at detention,” said Gonzalez. They also noticed they were breaking up less fights. “We started changing dialogue in community,” Atman added.
Their program began attracting more participants, and even trained some to become yoga instructors themselves. The program initially served 150 students per week, but now serves over 10,000 students per week.
“[The Holistic Life Foundation] provided an alternative way of relating to these kids and it changed their behavior, which is just an incredible concept,” said associate chaplain Rabbi Danielle Stillman, who was one of the coordinators of the talk.
In reaction to the presentation, Mikayla Hyman ’20 said that “they had a lot of love, and that’s really what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was based on.” Using the founders of the Holistic Life Foundation as an example, Hyman added, “There’s so much people can do for social change but they don’t often think of themselves as instigators.”
Students, faculty and other members of the Middlebury community gathered in Atwater dining hall on Monday morning to discuss how to create what Dr. King called a “beloved community” here at Middlebury.
Will Nash, professor of American studies, explained that a “beloved community is grounded in the principles of nonviolence and the idea that power is not the most important thing.” Nash then prompted each table to discuss how Middlebury could work toward achieving such a community.
Many students and administrators discussed this question in light of the divisive events that have affected the campus during the past year. At one table, discussion centered around the idea that many micro-communities exist within the larger Middlebury community, making it difficult to feel connected as an entire school. Another table considered if “community is a given” and whether or not “inhabiting the same place makes us a community.”
Dean of spiritual and religious life Mark Orten said we must build a “beloved” community “as we might define it, by means that are present to us now.” He added, “The President’s support for initiatives like Restorative Practices and Mindfulness, as well as events facilitating dialogic processes around inclusivity and free speech, engaged in by many members of this community, are starting to form hopeful sinews.”
Middlebury College students and middle schoolers gathered at Middlebury Union Middle School on Tuesday to paint a community mural honoring Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Artist and visiting winter term professor Will Kasso guided the painting of the mural. Near the school entrance, Rosa Parks is now depicted sitting bravely in her bus seat, surrounded by words like “bold,” “dream” and “impact.”
“That one act of her not getting up made everybody stand up for themselves,” said Kasso. He went on to explain his belief that a community mural acts as an especially good medium for bringing people together and starting a dialogue. “Art should always remain fun,” said Kasso.
Many of the students at the mural painting were in of Kasso’s winter term class, Origins and Politics of Graffiti. Vishawn Greene ’21 added that the mural was a nice way to “cement [Park’s] legacy.” Alejandra Chavez ’19 spoke to its potential to “leave a little mark, as we all hope to do.”
(12/07/17 12:19am)
A black and white picture of a young blonde girl at the beach faced the audience throughout Barbara Amaya’s presentation about human trafficking in Dana Auditorium on Nov. 29. The girl in the picture is a younger version of Amaya, whose lecture was co-hosted by Stop Traffick and the Chellis House to shed light on the issue of human trafficking.
To put her own experience into perspective, Amaya began her presentation by informing audience members that there is no “stereotypical victim of human trafficking”— rather, it occurs across ages, genders, and locations. She also noted that there are roughly 300,000 child sex-trafficking victims in the US and that the average pimp makes $200,000 per year per victim. Trafficking, she emphasized, boils down to “vulnerabilities being preyed upon” and “supply and demand.”
With that, she began to tell her story. Amaya ran away from an abusive home at age twelve.
“I fell through the cracks,” she said. “No one had the time to listen to me.” In D.C., she met a woman who sold Amaya to a pimp who took her to New York. Trafficking, she told the crowd, means “turning a human being into a commodity.”
Once in New York, the pimp had another girl show her the rules of “the life.” Each night, no matter the circumstances, Amaya had to bring in a certain amount of money or else her pimp, “Moses,” became violent, at one point beating her with a wire coat hanger.
“They think they can do whatever they want with you because they bought you,” she said. Amaya was taught to follow certain rules, such as to always give the police a fake name, address, and age any time she was arrested.
“I was told to tell the police I was twenty-one, but to tell people who had sought my body I was younger,” she said. “No one ever asked for an older person.”
A few years later into her young life, Amaya became addicted to heroin. By the time she was around the age of 15, she had been arrested so many times that she was eventually sent to Rikers Island Prison. Unlike the other times she was arrested, Amaya came clean to the police about her real age and situation. Horrified, the police promised to reunite her with her parents. Her parents came all the way from Virginia, only to miss her by five or ten minutes when her trafficker came to pick her up instead.
Amaya said that when she eventually left New York, she didn’t really know how old she was. She checked into a rehabilitation center, where the intake person “treated me like a human being… I didn’t remember the last time anybody treated me like a human being.” There, she discovered her sister was living in Philadelphia and the people at the center helped her reconnect with her family.
“I didn’t tell anybody what happened to me,” she said. “Nobody even asked me.”
Years later, sitting at home listening to the TV, Amaya heard a news story about gang members trafficking young women. The reporters began talking about recruitment techniques that the traffickers used, and Amaya recognized those techniques as the same ones that had been used on her when she was twelve. It was a moment of self-identification.
“[Until then] I never thought I was a victim,” she said.
Amaya said that moment changed everything, and she began to share her story. She built a website and started speaking in front of audiences. She is now the author of a book called “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Lost Innocence, Modern Day Slavery & Transformation”, as well as the 2014 winner of the James B. Hunter Human Rights Award. Amaya currently works actively with legislators to push for anti-trafficking legislation such as the D.C. Safe Harbor Bill, as well as with law enforcement, developing a five-module training program meant to help police officers view victims of trafficking as victims, not criminals.
Amaya said that her current work was about “awareness, education and then legislation,” and that she hoped by putting a face to the issue, her audiences would stop thinking that trafficking only happened in a “far off land somewhere” and confront the realities of the human trafficking trade here in the United States.
(11/30/17 12:01am)
On November 11, middle school girls from Middlebury Union Middle School (MUMS), Vergennes, and Mount Abe, joined female Middlebury students in the Kirk Alumni Center to experience some of Middlebury’s extracurriculars and discuss body positivity and feminism at the Sister-to-Sister Club Annual Summit. The Summit is the highlight of the year for the club, which aims to support and mentor middle school girls in the local Middlebury area.
“This event is supposed to have the biggest curriculum,” said co-president Ivy Geilker ’19, also noting that it allows the girls to “talk about things that middle schoolers don’t [usually] get a chance to talk about.”
Before the start of the summit, the group sat down to create guidelines that would shape their interactions for the day. On a list posted on the wall as a reminder were some rules: stay kind, respectful, positive, open-minded, non-judgmental, and, of course, goofy.
The day kicked off with a short workshop from Midd Masti, Middlebury’s South Asian dance group. Club members taught the attendees some beginner hand motions and the corresponding foot movements in slow motion, then impressed them by speeding up to perform a sneak preview of their dance for the talent show later that day. After that, the middle schoolers chose between participating in a workshop with improv comedy group Middlebrow or heading to the kitchens with a member of the Nutrition Outreach and Mentoring club to create a tasty and healthy snack.
After their first workshops, the group got together for the highlight of the day: an educational talk by Treasure Brooks ’21 on body positivity entitled “Myths, Marketing, and the Metamorphosis of Body Image.” The goal, as she put it, was to have everyone in the room “develop a more critical eye on how they look at the media they’re digesting.” Brooks believed that middle schoolers were “completely capable” of achieving this goal. As she pointed out, when looking at billboards or magazine ads, it is necessary to think beyond the perfection of the image. What is important, she reminded the room, is to look one step further, at how such false perfection is achieved.
Brooks first asked the audience to distinguish between beauty and attractiveness, the former including a combination of qualities while the latter simply connotes visual features. The girls discussed how the qualities perceived as attractive are often unattainable and unrealistic. Then, Brooks asked the room to compare two images, one before photoshop and one after, andpoint out the differences, which were everywhere: noses, cheeks, eyes, butts, thighs, had all been reshaped in order to perpetuate the idea of physical and visual perfection that opposed realistically attainable goals.
The presentation took on a more serious tone, sharing that 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies, and that 42.6% of 15 year-old girls believe themselves to be overweight as compared with only 23% of boys the same age. Brooks then asked each person to share one thing she loved about herself. It was a simple, yet incredibly powerful exercise that brought a smile to everyone’s faces.
“I love that I am a good singer,” one girl shared; “a good friend,” another one said; a good student, a painter, empathetic… the list went on.
As club member Kaila Thompson ’21 said, doing such exercises and holding summits like this allows the girls to “see how diverse people can be and how individualism plays into who you can become.”
After the presentation, the group headed to the second workshop of the day, either facing down the cold to play a fun game of Frisbee outside with the Frisbee club or sitting down to a writing workshop which discussed character development and tackled writing blackout poems.
Ella Dyett ’20 commented that the goal for the day was to “send positive messages to middle school girls [and] to hang out with them.”
While this was a running theme of the whole event, it was especially emphasized in the feminism talks. Club members and students initially broke into small groups to discuss what feminism meant to them. The middle school attendees astutely pointed out that they experienced differences in standards at school during gym tests which set unequal goals for boys and girls. They saw friends field comments and odd looks when they chose not to wear conventional girls’ clothing or have long hair. Coming together as one, the groups discussed this and more.
“It’s expected to be a joke if a boy wears girls’ clothing,” one girl pointed out in frustration. Ideas of acceptance and of fighting for equality abounded as the talks went far beyond the allotted time.
The day came to a close with cupcake decorating and letter writing. Amidst yellow frosting and blue sprinkles, the girls wrote letters to the students of the School of Leadership in Afghanistan, a grade six-12 institute. They introduced themselves and asked some questions in hopes of getting replies in the months to come.
Overall, Ivy said, “[The event] went really well,” Geilker said. “Every girl who left here was super excited about participating.”
Dyett added that was also meaningful to her to give the middle school girls “someone to look up to.” It was a day of thoughtfulness, exploration and bonding that the club plans to repeat next year.
(10/11/17 10:32pm)
Jogging, panting, and feeling accomplished, 83 runners crossed the finish line of the Reproductive Justice 5k on Sunday, Oct. 8. The event, a collaboration by students with support from the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS) and Chellis House, took place under windy conditions, but the rain fortuitously stopped just in time for students and townspeople to set off past the Mahaney Center for the Arts and around the golf course. Along the trail, staked into the ground, were signs with little known facts about the state of reproductive rights and teachings in the United States. The main purpose of the race, as one of the founders, Mika Morton ’19, stated, was education, teaching people that “reproductive justice is a lot more than just abortion…or being pro-choice.”
The creators of the event, Morton, Cicilia Robison ’18, and Miranda-Max de Beer ’19, based their event on SisterSong, a reproductive justice collective comprised of women of color that defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain bodily anatomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” This broad definition takes into account other variables such as race, class, geography, and orientation, which play vital roles in determining who gets what type of access to reproductive rights and procedures. Black women, for example, are four times as likely to die in childbirth than white women, being less likely to receive lifesaving treatments.
The inspiration for the 5k, this being its second year, emerged out of a Politics of Reproduction class taught by Carly Thomsen, an assistant professor of GSFS, last year. As Thomsen explained, all the students “complete a course project through which they translate an academic argument articulated in a course text into an alternative format with the intention of making said argument mobile.”
The founders of the 5k, who were awarded an honorable mention for the Alison Fraker Prize by the GSFS department for their project, intended to create a platform that could explain reproductive justice in its broadest terms. The goal, as Morton said, was to “reach a different demographic,” bringing an academic subject into the realm of athletics..
One of the main hurdles of spreading awareness of reproductive justice is that it is typically considered to be a priority only for women’s rights groups. Katie Cox ’20.5, one of the participants, pointed out that the people fighting for these rights are usually “feminist groups, working to make reproductive rights available to everyone.”
Education was the primary goal of the event, and, for all intents and purposes, the goal was fully achieved. Organizer Miranda-Max de Beer said that, despite the time crunch in getting the race organized, she was “really happy” with the results. The race gave students an open, relaxed environment in which to talk about hard topics, she said. And talk they did. After the race, students congregated in Axinn, where they tie dyed t-shirts over snacks.
Nina Cruz ’21 said that the race changed her perception on the issue. She now has a more, “expansive and inclusive view of what reproductive rights are, which include access to affordable birth control and sex education.” This broadened understanding stemmed from the signs posted along the running route and from pamphlets handed out after the 5k.
Statistics about reproductive justice and access to health care posted on signs around the course included: 45 percent of pregnancies in the US are unintended, some HIV-positive women are sterilized during childbirth without informed consent, 24 states and Washington, D.C. require sex education, yet only 13 states require it to be medically accurate, there have been 57 abortion restrictions enacted in 2017, being child-free can be liberating and the U.S. has the largest gap between parent and non-parent happiness in comparison to 22 other industrialized countries.
For additional information, Morton suggests going to the Guttmacher Institute website. “If you want to go be outraged sometime, go check out their website,” she said.
Thomsen said she thinks the event was a success. “The GSFS department and Chellis are wildly proud of these students and excited to continue to partner on student initiated and feminist theory-informed events,” she said.