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(10/29/14 5:52pm)
Student behavior over Homecoming weekend struck a nerve for many townspeople in Middlebury who were affected by the large and rowdy party on Weybridge St. Angry responses flooded in via Front Porch Forum — an email-based community bulletin — causing Bill Burger, the College’s Vice President for Communications and Marketing, to plan a meeting between local residents and the administration to discuss this relationship.
As we heard in this week’s Campus Voice, some of this behavior is completely appalling. Complaints included anything from lighting fires next to neighbors’ cars to public urination to a general lack of respect for the residents of the town. While many students peacefully coexist with their neighbors, a few notable incidents have come to define the town’s perception of all off-campus residents, and even of all Middlebury students.
The desire to live off-campus is a natural one. After three years of Proctor paninis, linoleum floors, and industrial paper towel dispensers, many seniors want more ownership of their living spaces. The little things like candles and tapestries that are banned in dorms make a room feel more like home. Moreover, living off-campus teaches valuable life skills — how to find an internet provider, how to pay bills, how to navigate the tricky finances of group living when everyone has their own budget, even simply how to buy toilet paper. It’s a chance to take on the freedom of adulthood, while also shouldering the responsibility that comes with it.
But as Homecoming weekend showed us, we have been neglecting that responsibility to our community.
To be fair, there has a significant rise in demand for off-campus parties as the College continues to crack down on on-campus social spaces. This follows a number of changes in our alcohol policy. The recent tailgating ban, the disbanding of ADP and Palmer’s probation are a few examples that stick out in our minds. Following these changes, it is only logical that students would react by moving their drinking and larger gatherings to spaces that are beyond College authority.
While the College is obviously beholden to local and federal law and students should not have free reign to destroy public spaces, parties are part of college life and cannot be fully extinguished. Suppressing parties that are unsafe and inclined towards property damage is one thing — micromanaging student social life through registrations and excessive surveillance is entirely another. Old Chapel and the student body must work together to create safe and manageable parties, and the meeting in Wilson Hall on Sunday Nov. 2 is a great place to start.
One way forward is to create more options for upperclassmen housing and more communal underclassmen housing.
For upperclassmen, despite high demand for stand-alone houses, there are only a handful of options that usually go to the best numbers. This leaves suite-style housing in Ross and Atwater as the main option for group living — or blocks of singles in Chateau, Starr and Painter where students have minimal control or common space. By building or buying more communal housing, the College could concentrate student living into specific areas, and Public Safety could respond to parties rather than the Police. It is true that students have abused these large block spaces in the past, but giving up on them is not the right way to solve the problem. It merely pushes the parties elsewhere, and often to places Old Chapel doesn’t want them to go.
For underclassmen, this means creating more viable communal spaces that are not aggressively regulated by Public Safety. We have historically had more spaces like these in our dorms, but have seen a significant decline due to increasing enrollment as they have been converted into doubles and singles. Common space means more than just the Pearson’s Lounge. More suite-style living gives underclassmen a place to hang out that feels private so they do not have to seek random Atwater parties. There’s a delicate line between allowing students to engage in illegal activities and giving them enough leeway to feel like they have comfortable social spaces available to them.
But at the end of the day, the responsibility to be a good neighbor rests with the students living off-campus, and they have a lot of work to do. Members of our community in town have voiced reasonable concerns — not only about the party on Homecoming weekend, but also about the day-to-day experience of living next to students who rotate through every year.
It’s more than just bringing baked goods the day you move in as a way of apologizing in advance for the parties you’re going to throw. It takes regular engagement, exchanging phone numbers, and creating pathways for dialogue that don’t have to involve law enforcement. Trust has been broken and it will take a long time to repair, but we are the only ones who can do it. Let’s try being good neighbors seven days a week — not just five.
Artwork by SARAH LAKE
(10/22/14 7:26pm)
Everyone is anxious on the first day of school. You walk into a new classroom, you scan the room in the hopes you know some people, you pray the syllabus is reasonable, then your professor walks in, starts to take roll and you settle into the swing of it. But for gender nonconforming students, this process is even more stressful. Most students quietly wait for their name to be called, correcting their apologetic professors when they accidentally botch pronunciations, but genderqueer and transgender students often must explain their identity and gender preferences to their professors and classmates that might not understand, isolating them from their peers from the outset.
The Preferred Names Project is a big step forward for these students and for the LGBTQ cause more broadly on campus. Announced in an all-school email from Andi Lloyd, Shirley Collado and Drew Macan on Oct. 2, this new feature allows students to choose their name and preferred gender pronoun, which will appear on class rosters and in other college communications.
The email states that the change “puts Middlebury at the forefront of gender identity and expression initiatives nationwide,” and it joins a string of recent initiatives, including all gender housing and gender-neutral bathrooms, that make Middlebury a more inclusive space for students across the gender spectrum.
But how progressive are we actually on this issue? As seen in the Oct. 15 New York Times Magazine piece titled “When Women Become Men at Wellesley,” gender inclusivity is being heavily discussed on many college campuses, and these policy changes at Middlebury are certainly big steps in the right direction; however, there are significant areas in which we still lag behind our peers in terms of staff support for our LGBTQ community.
Queers and Allies (Q&A) and other LGBTQ groups have been asking for an LGBTQ coordinator on campus for several years. Many of our peer institutions, including Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Tufts, and Oberlin have such a position. This staff person would support LGBTQ-identifying students and allies personally, academically and socially. The request for this position seems to have slipped through the cracks in the recent round of administrative shifts and hires.
Director of Health and Wellness Education Barbara McCall provides this support for many LGBTQ students and has received high praise from students for her efforts, rightly so. But her job title includes far more responsibilities, including alcohol education, sexual assault awareness and prevention and a host of other pressing issues that do not allow her to dedicate her full energy to the LGBTQ community the way an LGBTQ coordinator would.
While we have focused here on the needs of the LGBTQ community on campus, the kinds of support we are calling for are needed by all minority communities at Middlebury.
For many years, Dean Collado has been a person to turn to for students fighting for greater inclusivity on campus. By working with students on initiatives like the Intercultural Center and JusTalks, as well as her commitment to the Creating Connections Consortium (C3) and to our Posse scholars, she has proved a powerful engine for promoting diversity and inclusivity. However, as seen in President Liebowitz’s email on Oct. 17, her responsibilities will be decentralized for the next year and a half, giving the incoming President the opportunity to shape this role. While we are confident in her replacements’ abilities to carry out the work she has done, we worry about this power becoming so decentralized. When Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Coordinator are no longer tied to Dean of the College, there is inherently less influence in those positions. As this turnover ensues, we must ensure that students are still able to find powerful allies on their projects, be it shaping the future Intercultural Center or changing the AAL requirement.
We hope the new staff person at the Intercultural Center can serve as a point person, but as we stated earlier when looking at Health and Wellness, resources can only be spread so far with one person. We hope an LGBTQ Coordinator will join the staff of the Intercultural Center, as well as a group of support staff for all different student identities.
At Tufts, they have the Group of Six, with the LGBT Center, the Women’s Center, the Africana Center, the Latino Center, the Asian American Center, the International Center and Tufts University Student Affairs. While a larger student body requires more resources, Middlebury could adopt elements of this model to provide specialized support to different campus communities and their allies.
In addition to increasing staff support for students, we can train our existing faculty, staff and students to create a more inclusive campus. For starters, faculty and staff should be well-versed in the Preferred Names Project and respect the preferences that students indicate on the roster. It is no secret that many members of our faculty and staff are not adequately sensitive to students’ gender and identity preferences, which is completely unacceptable. This kind of cultural awareness should to be a part of continuing education for faculty who need new tools to bridge a growing generational gap. Perhaps faculty members who are already engaged — asking for gender pronouns on the first day of class and respecting student preferences — can help educate their colleagues on gender sensitivity.
As for students, JusTalks presents an important opportunity to talk about identity early in a student’s Middlebury career. While JusTalks has grown over the past few years, we recommend JusTalks be mandatory for all first-years and sophomore febs. Now entering its third year, JusTalks has proved its popularity and value. Increased participation would only help create a more inclusive community by exposing students to these concepts early and in a safe space.
By expanding support for students and educational opportunities on inclusivity, we hope Middlebury can become a place where all students feel comfortable being themselves and identifying however they prefer. The Preferred Names Project is an important step, but we have a long way to go. Hiring an LGBTQ staff member and making gender sensitivity an integral part of our language, as both students and faculty, is required for the hallways and classrooms of the College to be a welcoming space for all and uphold our institutional commitment to creating a diverse and safe community for all students.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/08/14 6:04pm)
Editor’s Note: The following text contains vulgarity.
It seems innocuous. An app where you can post something witty, watch it get up-voted and monitor your karma score changing as people respond. But this seemingly harmless “fun” often comes at the expense of members of our community.
When Jordan Seman ’16 submitted her op-ed about her experience being targeted on Yik Yak, found on page seven, it hit close to home for many of us on the Editorial Board. As a news organization, we grapple with anonymity constantly between our policies on anonymous op-eds and sources and the steady stream of sometimes hurtful and often unproductive anonymous comments posted on our website. We also grapple with issues of censorship, and, in our staunch shared belief in freedom of speech, we are hesitant to endorse any policies that threaten it. But Jordan sent us a powerful reminder that there are real people behind the screen in these situations, and that anonymity can devastate individuals and communities.
Jordan is not alone. There are many students on this campus who have been victims of anonymous personal attacks or of attacks on the groups with which they identify. For example, one of the most popular threads on Middlebury Confessional at the time of writing this editorial is “Bitchiest Bitches On Campus,” on which students are actively naming people and discussing who among them is “the bitchiest.” Just a few weeks ago we ran a piece entitled “What Middlebury Should Never Forget,” reminding students of the sexually explicit, threatening and homophobic note that was left on a student’s door last fall. And last spring, Dean Shirley Collado sent the student body an email in which she expressed concern over numerous examples of misogynistic behavior on Yik Yak and one particularly abominable instance of homophobia on another mobile app, Grindr, in which a posted message read, “None are safe, none are free,” and included a photograph of a lynching.
These disturbing comments are not unique to the Middlebury community. A few weeks ago, Norwich University became the first college or university to ban Yik Yak, carrying high symbolic weight but little actual import. Though they blocked Yik Yak from their wireless network, students can still access it with a data plan, as many already do, making it nearly impossible to block this app. Oberlin faced the same dilemmas with Oberlin Confessional, the original Confessional site, which crashed in 2009 and was promptly replaced by ObieTalks, which was equally popular and equally nasty. These two case studies show that an outright ban of these forums do not solve the problem. Moreover, there are still myriad ways to anonymously engage outside of these forums — be it on our website, on Middbeat or even in person as seen with last fall’s note — meaning that banning these sites would be merely a bandaid on a larger problem.
Dean Collado echoed this sentiment in her email last spring, writing that “blocking these sites is not the ultimate answer for our larger community.” But just because we do not believe banning these sites will solve the problem does not mean we can sweep them under the rug.
Particularly as mental wellness becomes a topic of conversation, in part due to brave honesty and openness found both in Jordan’s op-ed and in Hannah Quinn ’16’s widely read blog post about depression, we must think critically about the way our online actions affect this community. When posting, we must imagine the person sitting at their computer in the dorm room next to ours the same way we would if we were having a conversation in the hallway. Even when no face is attached, cyberbullying leaves lingering damage, though the veil of anonymity often makes that easy to forget.
The question then remains, how do we maintain a community where people feel safe and supported while also acknowledging that anonymous forums are inevitable in the digital age? The answers are not easy.
Both the Campus and Middbeat are moderated websites, and both Yik Yak and Middlebury Confessional offer tools to self-moderate, be it through downvoting or through reporting a comment. We must take responsibility for the hateful words that pervade our community and report these comments rather than scroll past after 10 seconds of outrage. It is up to each of us to make these digital spaces safe for all members of our community and to encourage online accountability — there is no one else who is going to do it.
To clamp down on damaging online dialogue, we must provide resources and education to incoming students. In the same way that we promote sexual assault awareness and prevention, we should educate the community about the dangers of online harassment. Bystander intervention means looking out for each other, both online and off. Technological literacy extends beyond clicking “I agree” on the terms of use whenever we update our password. We must reintroduce the term cyberbullying into our vocabularies, because it is not an issue that magically disappears when we graduate from high school.
Being attacked online has direct consequences that result in serious harm. We have all seen news stories of people who hurt themselves or others because of online harassment. We have had countless examples for hateful online comments on this campus — we should not have to wait for Middlebury to become the public face of this problem for us to take it seriously.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/01/14 5:59pm)
Over the last 10 years, accessibility and diversity have become buzzwords in higher education. They are the benchmarks for admissions — signs that elite colleges and universities are doing more than simply securing a future for the already privileged in an era of diminishing social mobility and growing income inequality.
While the College has taken important steps towards attracting a student body that is more diverse on multiple levels and providing supportive spaces for them on campus once they arrive, it is clear that it has not done enough.
Currently, we have clubs and support available for first generation college students; we have the Queer Studies House as a safe space for LGBTQ students; we have PALANA to provide housing and programming for students with an interest in intercultural studies; we have cultural organizations like DMC, WOC, AAA and Alianza; and we continue to expand our Posse Scholars partnership. What we don’t have is a large, public and dynamic space for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds to feel welcome as a broader group, tying together the intersectional oppression that these members of our community experience.
To address this, students have pushed over the past year for the creation of an Intercultural Center — a place where those who have felt uncomfortable in other public spaces can receive the institutional support they need, have an opportunity to expand cultural literacy more broadly on campus and also have a place to just be, to form a community with social and academic foundations that is open and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.
We as an Editorial Board support this proposal and want to keep pressure on the administration to look to students for input every step of the way. Student-led initiatives on this campus tend to fall into the bureaucratic sinkhole once they are successful, turning them into administrative projects that become deprived of the student input that gave them energy in the first place. We have plenty of overly-formal, dead spaces on campus as it is, and this center cannot join that list. The Administration has been clear in its intent to include student input throughout this process, and thus far students have been involved, but we need to be sure all the students who want a voice in this process have a chance to contribute.
It is important to note that socio-economic background and racial or ethnic background are not synonymous when talking about diversity. That being said, average family income in the U.S. does break down along racial lines, reflecting endemic structural inequalities that continue to inform class and social mobility. This is our reality, and while we must work for system-level change to shift this paradigm, today it is up to the College to provide resources for students who come from or identify with historically underrepresented backgrounds. There is no reason for our student body to be substantially less racially and economically diverse than those of our peers. It is simply a matter of priorities.
Earlier last month The Upshot, a New York Times blog, took a deeper look at accessibility among “top colleges” using Pell Grant recipients as indicators of socio-economic diversity. Among peer institutions Middlebury ranked an abysmal 51st, with only 13 percent of our student body qualifying for federal assistance (compared to a college like Vassar with 23 percent).
Here’s another way to look at it: roughly 13 percent of our student body comes from the poorest 40 percent of American families, while over half of our students come from families who can afford Middlebury’s staggering $60k price tag without grant aid. To put this into perspective, this is half the annual income for the wealthiest 10 percent of American families. If Middlebury is committed to bringing a truly diverse student body to campus, changing this picture is the first place to start.
This is not to say that we have not made progress. We should celebrate the fact that within the class of 2018, 14 percent are first generation college students (a new record), 26 percent are students of color from the U.S. and 48 percent received financial aid. We are need-blind for domestic students, and we meet 100 percent of demonstrated need (as determined by the College).
These are impressive statistics, but they are falling behind the trend as other colleges and universities work to extend opportunities to communities with fewer resources. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have endowments that dwarf Middlebury’s and unsurprisingly are able to offer more financial aid and attract a broader range of students. Vassar, however, has an endowment and student body similar to Middlebury’s and has been able to make a much stronger commitment to diversity. Vassar’s class of 2018 has 10 percent more domestic students of color than Middlebury’s and roughly the same number of international students, yet Vassar as a whole ranks first on the New York Times accessibility index. Those are numbers worth striving for, not because they would make Middlebury look better statistically, but because they represent values of equality of access that we claim to have and need to uphold.
But this process does not end with an acceptance letter. Middlebury must support students who do not fit the “typical” profile throughout their four years here. A 2007 internal study found a 19-point gap in the graduation rate for students of color compared with the overall average. Without more recent data, we can only speculate that this significant margin has not been wholly ameliorated. The Intercultural Center is an important and highly visible step towards supporting diversity on this campus.
We as a community need to recognize that cutting the ribbon at Carr Hall and hiring a new staff member are just the first steps. Over time, one of the challenges a space like this can address is the current lack of cultural literacy on this campus by providing institutional support for this education and removing some of the burden from students who may just want to be students. We must push ourselves to think of innovative ways to make the most of the opportunity the Intercultural Center provides.
Creating a more inclusive campus will not happen overnight, and approving the Intercultural Center should not be a sign that we can let this issue rest. Ultimately, this center must signify an increased financial and social commitment to supporting all students on this campus on all fronts, not just attracting statistics and leaving them to sink or swim.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(09/25/14 2:49am)
From SGA to Community Council, we have a system of student liaisons to the administration whose key purpose is to keep the two groups on the same page. Yet last week we were all surprised to receive an email announcing that alcohol would no longer be allowed at tailgating events. Though students are all over the map on the policy itself, and we on the Editorial Board reflect this divide, we all agree that this process was flawed. The decision came directly out of the athletics department, bypassing and undermining student organizations, which are meant to represent the student body’s interests in exactly this type of decision. If the administration wonders why it is receiving such negative feedback, it is because it has failed to properly communicate with the student body. They are treating the student body more like a group of sixteen-year-olds than adults. The email from President Liebowitz, Dean Collado and Director of Athletics Erin Quinn on Sept. 23 acknowledges this failure to communicate, but actions speak louder than words, and what matters is how they will act differently going forward.
There are many other, more transparent paths this could have taken. First, directly following the unacceptable behavior prompting this policy, Erin Quinn, Director of Athletics, should have sent out a message calling out what had happened. He should not have deliberated over this decision for almost a year, as indicated in his email, without ever seriously petitioning for student input. Though the Sept. 23 email mentions consulting Community Council, evidently it was not a thorough enough discussion for the SGA and the rest of the student body to not be blindsided six months later. Quinn should have suggested the policy change and gone to student (and faculty) forums to modify his ideas and brainstorm other ways of dealing with the problem.
The lack of communication shows that the administration does not have confidence in the student body. This could have been an opportunity for students to step up and be more conscious of their actions, which they might have done to preserve tailgating. This disconnect is clear in that by and large, the student body was not aware that the behavior at these events was troublesome, but the Sept. 23 email illustrates the administration’s longstanding concern with tailgating behavior and an inability to self-police. If told that our behavior was out of line, things could have been different. Perhaps students would have found innovative ways to maintain high standards of behavior while still tailgating. The issue at hand here is the lack of discussion and transparency. With one department making a decision for everyone, we are not upholding the ideals of our community.
The loss of tailgating brings questions of Middlebury’s identity to the surface — questions that must be answered as a community. We as a school must consider what football games should look like, whether we want to engage in events that encourage day drinking on our campus and whether this decision was, in fact, the best thing for Middlebury students. Although our Editorial Board does not agree on the answers to all these questions, we agree that they were not one person’s decision to make; they are questions that belong to the school as a whole.
That being said, we need to take responsibility for engaging in these discussions. The forum on Sept. 21 is an example of a failure on our part. Though the WeTheMiddKids petition has 2,500 votes, only 20 students attended the forum, letting an opportunity to meaningfully engage slip through our fingers. Being drunk in the dining halls is not an effective way to make your outrage known.
Moreover, the behavior at last year’s tailgates was out of line. There is absolutely no excuse for this behavior. Although there are only four tailgates per year, and most alumni and parents attend only one, students must deal with the consequences to a far greater degree. Everyone involved in this has caused the many to be punished by the actions of the few. The egregious actions of all offending parties are far more insulting and disrespectful to the Middlebury community than any miscommunication on the part of the administration.
Everyone has done something wrong, from the administration’s failure to communicate to the disrespectful behavior of the students and the alumni at the tailgates. This is an opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes and ensure that going forward, everyone’s voices are heard. Student input should not just be lip service. With the Presidential Search Committee and other decision-making bodies with student representation, we need to know we are valued. Tailgating is the hot button issue of the moment, but effective communication will guide Middlebury into era of the College, and we hope to still be proud to call it our alma mater.
(09/17/14 9:07pm)
This is a public service announcement: registering to vote and voting absentee is now easier than ever thanks to Middlebury College’s recent partnership with TurboVote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that mails students pre-filled out registration forms and vote-by-mail applications and sends text and email reminders that include polling locations to make voting as easy as possible. Plus, the College will pay for the postage on all outbound mail, saving you the hunt for a stamp.
This recent partnership is the product of efforts by MiddVote and the Democracy Initiative of Community Engagement to increase democratic participation on campus. According to the US Census Bureau, only 45 percent of people ages 18 to 24 were registered at the time of the 2010 election and only 21 percent actually participated therein. MiddVote aims to change this so all eligible Middlebury students cast a ballot on Nov. 6.
Just like this year, 2010 was not a presidential election year, which no doubt played a significant role in the dismal turnout (there is something much sexier about deciding on the ruler of the free world than pulling the lever on a county sheriff). Nevertheless, the election had tremendous impact in Congress, proving that midterm elections count. As young people, we cannot run for most offices and we do not have disposable income for political contributions, but our vote is one place where we are equal to everyone else in this country in our ability to make our voices heard, and this year is no different.
Despite our pulpit, even we admit to being susceptible to voter apathy. A quick show of hands among the Campus Editorial Board earlier in the week revealed that, despite nearly full participation in the last presidential election, a mere four of the 21 editors present cast a vote in either the 2013 general elections or 2014 primaries. Such meager practice of our preaching led to a period of self-reflection among the board where we asked each other the question that we hope this piece will prompt you to ask yourselves: why don’t we vote?
Aside from not knowing how and where to register, the answers we heard from each other are the same reasons given by people across the country, and probably all over this campus. With National Voter Registration Day approaching this Saturday and deadlines to vote absentee following shortly thereafter, we ask that you take a look at these arguments before skipping out on another election.
“It’s too tedious to navigate the absentee ballot form.”
• While this process may have been a chore in the past, the new partnership does all of the heavy lifting for you. TurboVote assembles necessary information for your region, either here in Vermont or back home and automatically sends you a ballot every time you have an upcoming election, even primaries and special elections. Plus, the College pays for your postage, so you don’t even need to go into town.
“I don’t have time to research all the necessary information to make an informed decision.”
• This does take time, though the invention of the Internet has made this process much easier. However, what is important to understand is that voting is your civic duty. Living in America affords us certain privileges that the majority of the outside world does not have the luxury to enjoy. These essential freedoms are forged and maintained in the ballot box. To shirk this responsibility is not only to turn your back on your community, but also to abandon its future to the hands of others who may make decisions for the wrong reasons. Twentieth century American drama critic George Jean Nathan once famously said, “bad leaders are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” It is better to have voted and lost than never to have voted at all.
“Non-presidential elections are less important.”
• Not true. With the current gridlock in Congress, more money is being pumped into local elections than ever before. The Citizens United decision means that corporations and high net-worth individuals with unknown agendas can theoretically bankroll the elections of school boards, local legislators and municipal governments; and unless you can counter with a fully loaded Super PAC of your own, your only real weapon against their potentially pernicious advances is your vote. Wield it wisely and bring your friends.
“I live out of state and local elections make no difference to me because I study at Middlebury all year.”
• According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagment (CIRCLE), 23 percent of students who registered but did not vote for in the 2012 election said they were out of town or away from home. Given that the College pulls students from all 50 states, this is likely the case for the majority of students on campus. However, if you do not feel engaged in your hometown, there are plenty of opportunities to get involved here. Vermont is a state with a strong culture of civic engagement and lively town meetings. Combine that with the ease of access afforded by the new partnership between TurboVote and the College, and you couldn’t have better conditions to try your hand in civic engagement.
“My vote doesn’t matter.”
• This is a cynical view that might hold in presidential elections, but when voting at the local level could not be farther from the truth. For example, in the 2009 Vermont Democratic Gubernatorial Primary election, the difference between Gov. Peter Shumlin’s first term in the Governor’s office and him not making it out of the primary was a little less that two Feb classes worth of votes (197). Furthermore, the gap between Gov. Shumlin’s first place finish and that of the fourth place candidate was less than 3,000 votes, which is roughly the sum of all students, faculty and staff of the College. If you really want your vote to matter, vote local.
We commend the College for leading us to the polls and challenge the Middlebury community to think about how to push this initiative even further. Not not only because it is the College’s legal obligation under the Higher Education Act, but also because a liberal arts education should prepare its pupils for a beneficial and productive life in free society, of which thoughtful participation in the democratic process is the crux. Some schools flash the TurboVote link in their football stadiums, while others bus all their students to the ballot box on Election Day. Middlebury can be a leader here too. Regardless of the strategy, it is the duty of the College to encourage and to enable the student body to vote at every possible opportunity, and it is the students’ privilege to seize them. Election season is upon us. Make your vote count.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(09/10/14 8:36pm)
Middlebury Squash Coach John Illig died suddenly on Sunday Aug. 3 in a tragic accident of injuries sustained by a fall in his home.
Illig came to the College’s squash program in the fall of 2007. He had a win-loss record of 210-121 during his seven seasons as coach and was named NESCAC Coach of the Year in 2009.
“John was an exceptional person, coach, and colleauge,” wrote President Ronald D. Liebowitz in a letter to the Middlebury Community on Aug. 4.
There will be a service to honor him on Sunday, Sept. 14 at the Kirk Alumni Center at 3 pm.
(09/10/14 8:19pm)
With the start of every school year comes inevitable change as a new wave of students and faculty arrive, setting the tone for the coming year. This fall, however, the College is set up for even more momentous change than usual. With President Liebowitz and Dean Collado leaving at the end of the year and the end of J-term, respectively, we are hiring into positions that will dictate what Middlebury will look like when we come back for our 10th reunion. The future of Middlebury is further in flux due to the Board restructuring and the conversations we are having about identity.
In an all school email on Sept. 4, President Liebowitz announced a new identity system for Middlebury, bringing all programs — the College, Monterey, Breadloaf, the School for the Environment, the Language Schools and the study abroad programs — under the same umbrella by adding “Middlebury” to their official names.
President Liebowitz and the administration have repeatedly emphasized the importance of preserving the undergraduate program — the flagship of the Middlebury brand — as the community undergoes these changes. We strongly agree that the College must be the heart and soul of the Middlebury brand.
In this vein, we must find innovative ways to extend these opportunities to Middlebury College students. Continuing J-term courses in Monterey and scholarships to Breadloaf are just a few ways. As all of Middlebury’s programs grow and solidify, they should also grow in cohesion and access so we start to think of them seamlessly as an extension of the programs we already have access to on campus. These programs could be another selling point for Admissions and expand what a Middlebury education could look like.
As we learned last year with the linguistic errors in the grandfathered-in Latin courses of Middlebury Interactive Languages, we must tread carefully to ensure that the Middlebury brand retains its strength. As we expand, all of Middlebury-branded ventures must continue to be held up to the same high standards we have for the College, for the value of our diplomas depends on Middlebury’s reputation. One example of this is our commitment to inclusion and diversity. The College is need-blind for most students in the admissions process, and we want to be sure that these other programs, which often carry a similarly high price tag, are held to the same financial aid standards. We want all of Middlebury to be accessible, not just the part that is easily advertised.
Thus far, the programs have increased the value of our education. Often when we tell people we go to Middlebury, they comment on our strong language programs or leadership in environmental initiatives. Continuing to leverage this brand is a smart business decision and will impact us far past commencement as we add a BA to our resumes.
As we restructure the Board of Trustees and hire a new President and Dean of the College, we must further reflect on the values that matter most to us as a community and the values we would like to be perpetuated in the coming decades. For many of us, this includes our commitment to diversity of all kinds, internationalism, environmentalism, and the future of liberal arts education.
For example, in hiring Dean Collado’s replacement, we must remember that as a member of the inaugural Posse class and as a woman in higher education, she has brought a wealth of experience to the position of Dean, championing diversity and inclusion initiatives and anti-discrimination policies for both students and faculty. Continuing her legacy is imperative as we hire our next round of leaders, insofar as attracting a wider range of students is a priority in our branding discussions. Recruiting diverse talent in our students, faculty and administrators must be a priority.
In President Liebowitz, we had a President who was not only a great fundraiser, but also kept abreast of issues on campus by inviting students over for lunch or dinner and commenting on the Campus online. We want the next President to listen to the student voice as well.
We at the Campus will come out swinging this year to bring up-to-date coverage on all of these changes and lend our voices to the campus dialogue. But while we try to encompass a range of opinions on campus, ultimately we are only 30 voices on issues where everyone has their own ideas. We will do our best to facilitate this discussion, but we are all responsible for impactful discussions on the kind of education we would like to receive and the community we would like to foster. Do you want internships for credit and other opportunities for applied education? A return to the strict liberal arts education? Do you want to change the AAL credit, build a multicultural center, or extend Thanksgiving Break?
We challenge everyone to lead us into this new era at the College. The Campus works for you, after all. Stay informed by reading the Campus, MiddBeat, beyond the green and other campus news sources. Participate in the discussion by submitting op-eds or talking with your classmates about their opinions. We are responsible for future generations of Middlebury students, and this year more than any other, we must speak out.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(05/07/14 8:04pm)
At intermission of the opening night of “In the Next Room” (or “The Vibrator Play”), the audience of the packed Seeler Studio Theater collectively sighed with relief upon realizing that despite it’s name, Sarah Ruhl’s Tony Award-nominated play was far from vulgar. Gathering from the chatter of the elderly men seated behind me (who remarked approvingly, “very well done — not scandalized”) and the female students to my right (who nodded in agreement that the show was “tasteful”), it seems audience members came to the production with some reservations regarding its subtitle.
On this point, the name was not misleading; vibrators were in fact central to the plot, as was female masturbation, and orgasms were frequent throughout the show. But perhaps what people were responding to most, as it seemed to me during intermission, was the unexpected level of comfort present in the face of these usually awkward subjects.
This was, in part, crafted by director Claudio Medieros’s ’90 choice of a small, intimate space, the actors’ incredible skill and professionalism and the humor and naiveté scripted for the characters.
The vibrator was treated as a medical device, which contributed in a big way to making the play feel less erotic.
Celia Watson ’17, who attended Wednesday’s opening, said, “The acting was my favorite part of the show. What was interesting was that while the characters’ orgasms seemed very natural and realistic, you never forgot that they were still inside a doctor’s office.”
The major player behind the audience’s ease, in my opinion, was the play’s confrontation of the taboo of female sexuality, and its overriding message that sexual intimacy is a healthy and fulfilling part of life, and should be seen that way, rather than in the harsh light of shame or disgust typically attached to it.
Yet, the fact that students and town residents alike walked into the play bracing themselves for vulgarity speaks to our attitudes toward sexuality, specifically towards the private sexual lives of women. While science has come a long way in understanding the female orgasm since the late nineteenth century — in which the play is set — confusion and silence still rule the masses.
“I think that female sexuality is very much a black box to a lot of people—men and women,” said stage manager Gabrielle Owens ’17.
When I asked a group of male friends how many girls they thought masturbated, estimations ranged from 70 to 98 percent. More telling, however, was that the girls I talked to were just as, if not more, uncertain. Even those more brazen on the topic admitted to feeling a lack of solidarity in their conversations with others.
“In our friend group, I like to think we’re open-minded and it’s true that we do talk about these things,” said Emily Bogin ’16. “But when we talk about female masturbation, there’s definitely a layer of self-awareness that we’re talking about something taboo. This makes it even funnier to talk about, but it also engages the fact that it’s not socially acceptable.”
“And it just isn’t,” she added. “I don’t think that it is socially acceptable in Middlebury or in the world at large or anywhere. It’s sort of just accepted that women aren’t supposed to masturbate.”
This of course, brings up the rift between the general acceptance of male masturbation as a common practice and the resistance to the thought that female masturbation is essentially the same thing. When it comes to male sexuality, the world seems, for lack of a better term, desensitized. But flip the coin in calling the subject a woman, and masturbation holds immense shock value.
This is what Erin Ried ’16 found when testing a female version of an all too common phrase.
“The world seems so focused on penises. My friends and I are tired of hearing ‘suck my dick’ all the time. Nobody goes around saying, ‘lick my clit.’ And if they tried, it wouldn’t go over; it sounds way more vulgar somehow, way less acceptable.”
The world is certainly advancing in its recognition of female sexuality. And while “The Vagina Monologues” and events like this play are opening space for dialogue on our campus, we still have long way to go before male and female sexual experiences are viewed in the same light.
“It seems like a cultural hangover,” said Owens. “For most of the Western world, we’ve gotten past the idea that women aren’t allowed to enjoy sex. But we’re still stuck in this place where we don’t really want to know about them enjoying sex. If you watch commercials and things like that on TV, you see all these women acting sexy, but they’re doing it all for men, basically. I think that’s still a huge issue — that when women enjoy sex, they enjoy it for other people, not for themselves.”
“In the Next Room” presented sexuality as a potential unifier, something with the power to connect groups across different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, as well as individuals, both homo and heterosexual. It showed sexuality as a basic human quality, a shared experience that, like others, should have a voice and a discourse.
So in the spirit of the play, let’s talk about it.
(05/07/14 3:52pm)
Have you ever wondered how the College makes its money? It seems straightforward: students in Middlebury and Monterey pay, the College provides education and the transaction is complete. What is missing is another revenue stream that we have recently added, which currently has the potential to either promote our language programs and generate much needed revenue or seriously undermine our image as an inclusive and forward-thinking institution for the sake of profit.
The initiative is called Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL), an online learning program created by K12, Inc. that offers rigorous language prep to grade school students while promoting the College’s summer language programs. In 2010, Middlebury invested $4 million in cash, the summer Middle/High School Summer Academies (MMLA) and the Middlebury mark in exchange for 40 percent ownership of the company. The College hopes to see a return on its investment in the years to come that will help supplement shrinking alumni gifts and support.
On paper, the investment is a smart one — we are promoting our brand, advertising our programs and joining our competitors in the growing and lucrative field of online education. President Liebowitz and the Board of Trustees are smart in realizing that we need to find additional sources of revenue for the College as we move into the future.
However, we know several issues about K12, Inc. have come up over the past few months.
First, we know that there were numerous errors in one of the Latin courses marketed and sold by MIL earlier this year. The courses were created prior to the joint venture and grandfathered in. It is alarming that there were products being used by consumers who thought they were purchasing a Middlebury product when in fact they were not. Our name was on something that was not up to the College’s standards because we did not help create it. While the College says that these errors were investigated, confirmed and fixed in a timely manner, it is troubling that there were multiple linguistic inaccuracies in programs branded with the Middlebury seal. In an age where brand recognition is crucial, we need to be careful that anything we decide to brand as Middlebury — especially languages — is sterling. Moreover, putting our name on a product that is not ours is not only lying to the consumer, but also contrary to the integrity we are trying to perpetuate through our Honor Code.
Additionally, faculty members have brought up serious allegations about K12, Inc. altering content in MIL videos, specifically LGBTQ references, so that these videos could be used by more conservative school boards in Texas. The Administration and MIL vehemently deny all of these claims. During the course of our investigation, we could neither find any evidence confirming or denying this censorship. Short of going through every MIL video for all five languages offered, there is no way to know for sure. In this case, because of the lack of evidence, MIL and the Administration need to be given the benefit of the doubt. But even without the censoring controversy, our arrangement with K12, Inc. does not pass the smell test.
What we do know is that many faculty members — not just a few fringe radicals — feel strongly that MIL has the potential to indelibly hurt the Middlebury brand name. Next week, they are voting on a motion to sever our relationship with K12, Inc. because their practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation, and educational mission of the College.” Whether or not the vote this coming week is only symbolic — the faculty has no power to cut ties with K12, Inc. — we cannot discount this reaction.
At the end of the day, we need to be extremely careful about what we put our name on. We only get one shot at this, and one mistake could not only irreversibly hurt MIL’s image, but also the College as a whole. We have worked hard to become one of the worldwide leaders in language education, and to think that it could be compromised by a company who does not necessarily reflect our values or our commitment to excellence is troublesome.
Unlike many faculty members, we do not think that pulling out of the for-profit education sector altogether or even cutting all ties with K12, Inc. is the right move. What we need is a change of attitude from both the Faculty and the Administration. Faculty, it is time to realize that for-profit, interactive languages is a crucial part of our future at Middlebury. Administration, it is time to stop jamming MIL down the faculty’s throats and to take a second to have frank conversation about mistakes that have been made and future plans. At the end of the day, MIL will be better if the faculty is 100 percent behind MIL. We need a united front in order to get this right.
When the faculty and administrators return to campus next fall, we expect them to put aside their difference and move beyond in-fighting. We are facing big decisions, from changing the AAL requirement to revisiting internships for credit, and we expect those in power to rise to the tasks at hand and work to fix the issues that we as a student body are facing.
(05/07/14 3:50pm)
Sexual assault on college campuses is making headlines this month as Tufts was found noncompliant with Title IX and the Department of Education released a list of 55 schools currently under investigation, including Amherst, Harvard and Dartmouth. Though many of our peer schools are being investigated, Middlebury was absent from the list. Thanks to the leadership of our Title IX Coordinator, Shirley Collado, as well as Human Relations Officer Sue Ritter and Associate Dean for Judicial Affairs and Student Life Karen Guttentag, we have robust sexual assault policies, in addition to other anti-discrimination measures, that ensure survivors of sexual assault are granted the everything required by Title IX and more.
Throughout the course of this year, the Campus has written numerous editorials taking a critical look at the way we do things here from physical education requirements to granting credit for internships. Many of these editorials focused on the negative and proposed important changes we thought needed to happen. But in our last set of editorials this year, it is important to recognize the progress we have made on combating sexual assault and raising awareness. This past week has been a dark one for many of our peer institutions, and Middlebury should take pride that we are ahead of the curve.
Although we are compliant, the Federal investigation needs to be a wake up call for everyone; simply being compliant is not good enough. We should use this moment to reflect on our own policies and practices to prevent sexual assault on our campus. We have not had cases that sparked campuswide outrage, as Brown or Amherst have seen over the past few years, but as It Happens Here reminded us in January, sexual assault happens on this campus and we must continue to engage with the issue to support survivors and prevent future instances.
Hiring Barbara McCall as Director of Health and Wellness last summer and launching MiddSafe this year are huge steps in the right direction and go a long way to keep us at the forefront of the fight against sexual assault. The grant we received from the Department of Justice earlier this year is testament to the hard work put in as Middlebury’s policies and plans are to be models for other schools.
But there are still areas where more can be done, notably orientation, which MiddSafe has already started rethinking to incorporate more sexual assault prevention programming. For many students, K-12 sex ed looked a lot like the beginning of Mean Girls, with abstinence, pregnancy and STDs dominating the discourse. Many come in with little or no sexual experience, providing a unique opportunity to influence student’s approach to sex. In fact, in some ways, college sex ed is even more important than the middle school or ninth grade where for many, sex still seems far away. But currently discussions of sex on campus are often relegated to the back channels of MiddConfesh and most public forums talk about the dangers of sexual assault.
In addition to conversations about consent, we need to promote sex positive dialogue. Just because a situation does not cross the line into being sexual assault does not mean it is a healthy situation or that it is not damaging. The College should provide more opportunities, either in orientation or throughout the year, for students to learn more about sex, from proper forms of protection to frank conversations about pleasure. Helping students navigate sexuality and be properly prepared to have open conversations about sex can help evolve the way we talk about sex on this campus and chip away at rape culture. This needs to come from multiple fronts. McCall has worked hard to implement more sexual education programming, but we also need support from Parton to help students think about sexual safety without stigma, including questions about sexuality or relationship status.
As we work to graduate students with the “ethical and social qualities essential for leadership,” as our mission statement says, we must think about how our students will promote respectful sexual behavior once we graduate. As we have discussed in our conversations about the honor code, what we build here is reflected in our character after Middlebury and we cannot be apathetic about the values we wish to see. Although national attention has been focused on sexual assault on college campuses, date rape does not end once we are handed our diploma. The lessons we learn here, from how to talk about sex to bystander intervention, will remain with us and allow us to commit to being active opponents of sexual violence.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(04/30/14 6:33pm)
If someone asked you if all six inhabited continents should be equally represented in our distribution requirements, what would you say? There is not much our editorial board agrees on, but on this point we agree. We would maybe distinguish North America, as it is the continent on which we reside, but as for the other five, it seems like a no brainer. This is what students Daniela Barajas ’14.5, Adriana Ortiz-Brunham ’17, David Ollin Pesqueira ’17 and Jiya Pandya ’17 have been pushing through as Midd Included — a reform that would change the AAL credit, one of the four “Culture and Civilizations” requirements, which stands for “Asia, Africa and Latin America,” in a way that would not prioritize Europe over other world cultures. The bill would still require one class on North America, one comparative credit and then two credits from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania or Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently, the initiative has 673 votes on We The Middkids and has been widely accepted by the SGA. Now, it will go to the education affairs committee to become a bill. It will likely be voted on by the faculty early next fall.
If, as our handbook says, our students are truly to “have a broad educational exposure to the variety of the world’s cultures and civilizations,” we must allow for that in our graduation requirements. As a school that prides itself in teaching students to “understand and appreciate difference, commonality and connectedness across cultures and societies around the world,” we should not be privileging European culture over all others. Middlebury needs to move beyond decades of traditional thought and move into the modern world, as we have by expanding our international student population and our number of schools abroad.
As we saw with the internships for credit bill a few weeks ago, these curricular initiatives take tremendous time and push, and the ultimate power to change lies in the hands of the faculty. Internships for credit failed due to a lack of student and faculty commitment. We cannot let that happen again with the changing of the AAL requirement. This is an issue that most people know about on campus, and it is all of our second chance to show that Middlebury students and faculty can effect change around issues we care about at our school.
Credit for internships did not pass because people did not care enough to make sure that it did, or else because everyone was so sure it would pass that no one took the responsibility to see it through. Most of the faculty assumed that the initiative would pass, to the point where most people who showed up were the ones strongly opposed to it. The fact that very few people knew what was happening was a failure itself, and the reason it did not pass. Now, immediately after that failure, we must learn from our mistakes. We need to continue putting pressure on the administration to pass the AAL initiative and on faculty to vote for it.
Some people may argue that at a certain point it is out of our hands, but that kind of thinking is nothing but a lack of motivation. When the students have done all we can to push through the bill, we can start talking to our professors. We see them every day. We are a part of their daily lives, so engaging them in discussion and constantly reminding them that we care about this is the best way to make them care about it too. If they hear enough from us, and if enough of us tell them to vote, perhaps we can make sure there is a higher turnout for this initiative than on the last one.
Popular bills such as this one have the potential to lose momentum over the summer. We at the Campus intend to do our part to make sure that does not happen. We will continue to cover the bill as it progresses through the Middlebury bureaucracy, and we will write about it again in the fall when it needs renewed support. We encourage the rest of the student body also to step up to pass the things we believe in. This is our school, and if we want to get the most out of it, we first have to invest in it ourselves.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(04/24/14 3:30am)
(04/23/14 2:51pm)
In this issue every year, the Editorial Board talks with all the candidates running for SGA President and endorses one. This year, however, for the first time in as long as we can remember, there is only one candidate: Taylor Custer.
We fully support Taylor for President and encourage everyone to vote for him and to vote generally in the SGA elections. But what does it say about the SGA and about the student body that only one person is interested in running?
Being SGA President is a big, and often thankless, job. It is a huge time commitment on top of a full course load, and, while there are perks, it is hard to balance with everything else. On such a small campus, it is hard to escape the constant pressures of everyone knowing who you are and wanting something from you. While some students view this as glory, the job is exhausting. And that is part of the reason our current president, Rachel Liddell, is not running again even though she is only a junior.
In addition to the lack of competition in this race, the scale of the platform has changed. Last year, Rachel ran on an ambitious platform, looking to secure internships for credit, increase local food in the dining hall, revitalize 51 Main, overhaul distribution requirements and provide more equitable access to athletic trainers. Taylor’s platform is significantly scaled back, looking to extend Thanksgiving Break, provide access to syllabi to give more information when we are picking courses, and partnering with local restaurants to create a revamped system of the MiddKid card. While these are all good ideas, what does this reflect about what the SGA believes that it can accomplish?
While Taylor’s platform would increase quality of life for most Middlebury students, he did not touch on the major issues that we think the next SGA President should tackle, including the incoming dining swipe system, the push to change the AAL requirement and the search for President Liebowitz’s replacement. In addition to addressing these issues, we hope to see Taylor contribute to the important dialogue around sexual assault on this campus and engage with the growing concern around student body image that MiddBeat has been working to highlight.
Though this year’s SGA has made progress — creating MiddCourses, adding printers, setting up cafes in BiHall and the CFA — the larger efforts of Rachel’s platform have been sidetracked or flat out rejected, like the internships for credit proposal was voted down by the faculty. To many students, the SGA allocates student organization funding, and it does not seem like they have the power to do much else. A quick look at We the Middkids yielded two standard responses: “we asked around and it just won’t work” or “that isn’t in our jurisdiction, try this person.” This further begs the question of what the SGA actually has the power to change.
Much of the SGA’s power comes through recommendation. The SGA can pass along bills, but for many changes, including the curricular changes that have been pushed for over the past few years, the real power lies with the faculty. Internships for credit is a prime example. The SGA put in a ton of legwork to get the faculty to bring a bill to a vote, but it still failed because most faculty members did not bother to show up and vote. With big faculty decisions on the curriculum coming up next year, notably on changing the AAL requirement, we must learn from our mistakes and be a bigger voice next time around.
Even though we already know who will win, it is important to vote for Taylor to show that there is student power in the SGA and that Taylor stands for us. We cannot let Faculty apathy set a precedent for our engagement. In a vote that lost by five, what would have happened if the SGA President sent out an all-school email the night before imploring students to talk to their professors about voting yes? We have the power to influence these decisions, but we have to exert it. We at the Campus can do a better job of tracking these meetings and presenting the relevant information, the SGA can do a better job of increasing transparency so students know what they are doing, and we the students, the consumers of this education, must stay engaged and informed to hold the College and the faculty accountable for the changes we wish to see here.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(04/09/14 4:32pm)
Do you have plans this summer? This stressful question resounds across campus far beyond the signs posted by the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI). As students scramble to pull together summer plans, post-graduation plans and funding proposals, many engage with the CCI or their resources for advice and opportunities.
Despite their reach and funding, the CCI seems to have limited effect with the exception of a few fields. While tracks like consulting and finance have a clear career path and hire early, for students looking to go in a different direction, we have often been disappointed – from limited internships on MOJO to being repeatedly referred to MiddCore, which if done over the summer is an additional $9,500. We know the CCI makes a great effort to provide programming and other opportunities that are under-attended. We see this as a disconnect between what students need and what is offered and hope to make this resource with tremendous potential more useful for all parties involved.
Funding deadlines are one example of the discrepancy between the CCI’s plans and the reality of the job market. While many students have not yet heard back from potential employers, the funding deadline was April 6, leaving students who need this already limited funding to pursue an unpaid internship searching for other opportunities. This gives internships with earlier notification deadlines, which tend to require a more formal application process than opportunities discovered through more unconventional routes, priority for funding. This is a give-and-take, for students who have secured internships early need to know if they can commit, but students who have not yet decided also need these funding options.
The appointment system is another example of a system out of touch with student needs. Instead of being able to choose the advisor who most closely reflects our career interests, we have to go to a drop-in meeting, hope the CCI is not busy and hope we get a useful advisor, who will likely just tell us to return for a longer meeting with someone else. This becomes an inefficient use of everyone’s time.
The smattering of options on MOJO also reflect a very narrow swath of pathways. We have noticed, for example, a lack of media opportunities. Moreover, they are not often updated, with students on our Editorial Board going to discuss a posting with advisors, only to discover it was a few years old. These MOJO internships are also prioritized in the funding process, leaving students who want an internship outside what is available on MOJO with fewer options. Students could also use more support for careers with complicated application processes and tests, like certain military career paths and the foreign service, just as we have pre-professional advising for careers in medicine and law.
We all receive a deluge of emails from the CCI to the point where we tune them out, leaving us uninformed about the useful workshops and opportunities. Better coordination among the CCI’s platforms would help address this problem, so students receive one relevant newsletter a week that they know to read. A more streamlined, judicious use of email would help us pick and choose what is useful. Better coordination with departments and clubs would also help push these opportunities through different channels so we receive relevant information.
Take the Campus for example. Many of us are interested in useful discussions about careers in media, but we have very little contact with the CCI. Career discussions co-hosted by the Campus and other media outlets on campus could help draw a bigger audience and make the programming more dynamic. There is a reason the Goldman-Sachs information sessions can pack a room and that most other career paths cannot. People see value in attending finance events. We should make other events equally beneficial and soliciting student organizations is a good place to start.
The Project on Creativity and Innovation (PCI) has done a great job trying to address many of the problems outlined above, working to provide a pathway for students to enter innovative and creative fields or organizations post-graduation. They held their first call last month with five different alumni working at startups to discuss their experiences with interested students. This kind of consolidated call in other fields sponsored by the CCI would allow for students to prioritize just one call with five different people instead of attending five different career conversations and would bring a broader group of people in who cannot necessarily travel to our remote campus.
As students, we must do a better job of engaging with the resources the CCI has to offer, but by adapting the program to be more relevant to what we are looking for and what our schedules require, we can enhance the value of the CCI and make the internship and job search process less stressful for all involved.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(03/26/14 3:59am)
The Middlebury Panthers' season has come to a close, cutting their NCAA Tournament hopes short. But the Road to Salem was never a guarantee, nor was it limited to one season. The future is bright for the men's basketball program and the Road to Salem may be just around the bend.
(03/19/14 3:40pm)
What does $60,000 mean to you? Perhaps a couple new cars, a good chunk of a house, an annual salary in tech or finance for a recent grad or the rounded comprehensive fee at Middlebury College. In 2009, colleges like Middlebury were cresting the $50,000 mark; now five years later, we are approaching $60,000, a change that has been met largely with silence and indifference.
We look around the world and see riots and protests over tuition increases in places like England, France and Canada where people are still fighting for democratic access to higher education. Take a school like McGill, where in the summer of 2012, thousands of students took to the streets to protest a $1,625 tuition increase—almost exactly the same hike we saw at Middlebury this past year. The difference of course is that tuition at McGill was under $3,000 prior to increase, but at the end of the day, these increases represent the same amount of money out of our pockets, or our future pockets, as the loans pile up. When does the price go from ridiculous to unacceptable?
To the College’s credit, we have mostly stuck to our “CPI plus 1” rule for the past five years, which means that we have limited our tuition increases to inflation plus 1 percent. In addition, awarding financial aid to 42 percent of the student body this past year shows an impressive commitment to college accessibility. These measures have slowed our annual tuition bumps, reduced financial burdens for a number of families, and brought us from being one of the most expensive schools among our competitors to being in the bottom quartile. But is that enough? Should we really be wedded to a model of infinite growth?
Maybe it is unavoidable. Maybe a college of Middlebury’s caliber needs to continue to grow — to build a new school in Korea or offer new programs like MiddCore in the summer. But are we paying for that? Adjusting for inflation is one thing; tacking on the additional 1 percent each year seems to imply growth somewhere in Middlebury’s global offerings.
But what if we as consumers are not satisfied? What if we even ventured to say that we already have too much? Between the Snow Bowl, the Golf Course, 51 Main, the Athletics Department, the Grille, the Museum of Art, or the Commons system, we have places and programs across all walks of life on campus that we sink money into.
The hard question that we as students can and should entertain is, how much of our considerable programming is essential and how much could we do without?
As an editorial board, we have in the past used this space to make concrete policy recommendations. But as we discussed how to cut costs and ultimately make Middlebury more accessible, we found it impossible because we did not have the information. All we have are broad assumptions and educated guesses. That needs to end. We want to know where our tuition goes. It is not good enough to say that it costs $80,000 a year to educate one Middlebury student, and so we should just be happy with what we pay. We want the College to open up its books so that the student body can follow the money and have a say in where that money goes and how it is spent.
As the College looks to choose a successor for President Liebowitz this year, we need a candidate who is committed to cutting costs and making accessibility a bigger part of the College’s mission. As we look at the goals associated with the ongoing branding effort, notably becoming more global and diverse, we cannot continue to ratchet up costs and increasingly cater to families in the top 5 percent of the income bracket in this country who can afford to pay full freight here. Access will be a barrier to becoming a national household name.
John McCardell Jr., one of the College’s most influential presidents, went to work at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., which made national news in 2011 for “bucking the trend” and cutting tuition. This is the kind of leadership we need to see here at Middlebury, but in the foreseeable future, tuition cuts do not seem likely. As long as there are multiple high school applicants glad to shell out $60,000 for every one student that is admitted, what incentive is there to critically evaluate the tuition? Even the Board of Trustees, the people charged with a fiduciary responsibility for the wellbeing of the college, seem content with the annual hike. But there is a breaking point, and it will come.
We should not sit idly by and watch Middlebury’s price tag grow exponentially. It is time for more transparency. While the comprehensive fee has served as an equalizer for incoming students, it is also a veil that obscures the College’s costs and prohibits dialogue.
Here is a place to start. Included in this year’s tuition hike was a 4.5 percent increase to room and board — the first departure from our CPI plus 1 rule in five years — bringing the total up to $13,116. Where is this increase being spent? Are we covering the salary of the new head of dining? Are we upgrading a dorm? Will this help to bring much-sought-after local foods to the dining halls? And where could we tighten the belt to prevent further increases?
These are the kind of questions we want to entertain, and yet we cannot with the current lack of transparency. Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Patrick Norton and President Liebowitz, please break down this amorphous comprehensive fee and give us the facts. We are the ones paying the price for these rises, yet we are left in the dark with no say in where that money goes. As consumers of the Middlebury experience, we are in the best position to see what’s being utilized and what is wasted. While we enjoy and value the services and opportunities that $60,000 allows us, it is time to take control of our wallets and be critical of what we are paying for.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(03/12/14 6:49pm)
With pricey tutors who teach you to game the system and a strong correlation between income and higher scores (average score rises with every $20,000 of additional family income), the SAT is flawed, and its prestige is falling as the ACT and other options rise in popularity. This week, the College Board announced that it will try to address these problems through scrapping the writing section, focusing on “evidence-based reading and writing,” not penalizing incorrect answers and offering free online test-prep, spurning high-level conversations about the potential efficacy of these changes and the true merit of standardized testing.
Despite these changes, privileged students will still have an unfair leg-up in the testing process and a four-hour test will not always work for all students, regardless of how “college-ready” they are. We must reevaluate how we at Middlebury view testing in the admissions process.
We are already testing-flexible, allowing students to submit either the ACT, the SAT or three SAT IIs in different areas of study. Moreover, we advertise on our website that we are aware of the failings of standardized testing in the admissions process, listing socioeconomic factors, test prep and schooling as outside influences that could change scores.
If we are already discounting the importance of these tests, why are we requiring testing at all? Peer institutions including Bowdoin, Holy Cross, Pitzer and Smith have all elected to be test-optional, finding the same flaws with testing that we account for in our admissions process.
According to the Council for Aid to Education, GPA is across the board a better predictor of college success, even when little is known about a student’s high school, and correlates less with income. GPA shows how hard a student is willing to work, particularly when put into the context of their peers.
After becoming test-optional, Wake Forest found that diversity in the applicant pool rose after they became test optional. A study by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling found that the students not likely to not submit their scores are minorities, women, first generation applicants, Pell Grant recipients and students with learning differences. As we reevaluate our brand and try to attract a wider swath of applicants, it appears becoming test-optional reaches the populations we are working to bring in.
Of course becoming testing-optional limits the amount of information our admissions readers receive about an applicant, but does a four-digit number really reveal as much as we are looking for? We must, therefore, compensate for this dearth of information with a more comprehensive application.
Our current supplement is basic. It asks if you would like to be a Feb., if you are a legacy and what activities and majors you are thinking about. Some of our peer institutions are far more creative. Tufts’ supplement has even helped boost the schools image when the supplement question, “What does #YOLO mean to you?” made national news this summer. Tufts applicants may choose from six essay prompts in an attempt to allow students to show off their best side, from celebrating the role sports plays in their lives to responding to a Virginia Woolf quote through a medium of their choice, with slam poetry, a video, or prose as suggested forms.
An innovative supplement would allow applicants to play to their strengths and highlight what they will bring to the table if accepted to Middlebury, giving us a more holistic view of whom we are admitting. Furthermore, adding a supplement will limit students applying to students who truly want to be here, not just students who throw in an application because it requires minimal effort. This may decrease the applicant pool, but that will only free up capacity within Admissions to spend more time on these additional materials.
While we commend Middlebury for looking outside the on-site interview model as to not disadvantage students who cannot visit, our current model is a missed opportunity with little weight given during the admissions process. We should also find a way to bolster our alumni interview process into something admissions officers can truly use. None of the members of our Editorial Board remember a meaningful alumni interview; this is not a reflection on the people we have interviewing students, rather a reflection of the support Middlebury provides. We can strengthen these interviews by providing more rigorous training or giving a list of questions that sparks productive conversations or solicits the critical engagement that we want from our students in a classroom.
If we are trying to foster a diverse community in all senses of the word, we need to understand that people’s personalities cannot be confined to a bubble filled in with a No. 2 pencil. For some students, testing comes naturally, and by all means they should be able to show that off. But for other students, the application process should reflect the community we foster once they are admitted to Middlebury, one that celebrates an array of talents and skills. A thoughtful supplement that highlights what we value as a community and a more informative interview process could add the additional insight that the Common App cannot provide and attract a student body that brings more to the table than a number.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(03/06/14 4:58am)
To guarantee themselves a spot in the NCAA Tournament, the Middlebury men's basketball team needs to win three straight NESCAC tournament games and claim the conference crown. The Road to Salem followed the team for a weak as they fight to keep their season alive.
(03/05/14 4:56pm)
You cannot use the word “faggot” and not mean it offensively. You cannot say “no homo” around your friends and say it doesn’t matter because none of you are gay. You cannot claim that because “some of your best friends are gay,” that you are an ally. Last Tuesday, Queers & Allies and the SGA Athletic Committee co-sponsored an event to combat these issues in athletics entitled “Homophobia in Athletics”. The event, inspired by Wade Davis’ recent talk at the College, drew 97 student athletes.
Sixty percent of our student body is involved in athletics, either at the club or varsity level. As such a large part of our school, Middlebury needs to utilize this arena to investigate and combat homophobia. As athletes make up such a large portion of the student body, they are in a unique position to lead the way in fighting homophobia. An event like this is not meant to blame athletes for having a higher incidence of intolerance than the rest of us. Whether they do or do not is something too intangible to measure. But these discussions are good in themselves, for any large group of people.
By telling stories about their own sexualities, organizers Katie Linder ’15 and James Clifford ’14.5 set an honest tone for the event. Splitting into small groups separated from teammates furthered this goal by creating a non-judgmental environment. This format countered the traditional large panel or classroom discussions that set a high barrier to entry in such personal conversations, similar to JusTalks or Midd Uncensored. In a year where the community has struggled for productive conversations, this should set a precedent for future discussions.
We recommend that this event, or similar events, become a regular, yearly occurrence. Students turn over every four years, but homophobia carries on and is not a problem that will be resolved in a day. The admirable student leaders of this event will not be here forever, and it falls to the administration and younger student leaders to pick up where they left off.
Such facilitated conversations should reach more students. For starters, suggesting two players from each team attend is too small a sample. Five members, or even a percentage of a team, should have to attend. They should then bring the discussion back to their teams to make sure the conversation doesn’t end in that room. These discussions could occur when coaches are not around so the discussion can be as honest as possible. One way to integrate this is to have coaches dedicate the first part of practice to discussing homophobia the day after the event.
Coaches should also take themhelm in combating homophobia on their teams. No efforts will be truly effective until coaches recognize and assume their role. While coaches are not necessarily part of the “locker room” culture, they are responsible for making their teams a safe space and must be attuned to the many ways homophobia can manifest. To jump start this, the athletics department should run a similar workshop just for coaches, emphasizing their role in this effort.
This event was student run and no coaches, administrators or faculty members were present. While this presents an opportunity for unprecedented openness among athletes, the athletics department needs to play a more active role. A similar event with a larger audience and some level of participation from the athletics department should happen every year. It should also be extended to other student organizations. Homophobia does not exist solely in athletics.
Homophobia is not a problem that goes away overnight. Combating it requires constant vigilance and increased awareness, and this duty does not fall solely onto the LGBTQA community. For both homophobia and other discriminatory issues on this campus, this format of discussion spreads the responsibility to where it should fall — to all members of the Middlebury community regardless of identity.
Artwork by AMR THAMEEN