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(03/14/24 10:03am)
Ninety-eight percent of Middlebury students were registered to vote for the November 2020 presidential election. That number doesn’t surprise us. Comparable liberal arts schools, including Bowdoin College, St. Olaf College and Bates College are also high on the Washington Monthly list. Perhaps Middlebury naturally tends to attract politically active and engaged students — or the work of civic engagement-focused groups such as MiddVotes and Civics in Action has been successful in increasing student voter registration.
(03/07/24 11:02am)
Last week, we reported on grade inflation at Middlebury. The average GPA among Middlebury students has risen substantially in recent years, from 3.00 in 1987 to 3.35 in 2005 to 3.65 in the spring of 2023. There are a variety of potential explanations for the grade inflation issue, from technology’s ability to aid students in cheating to Middlebury’s increased selectivity and a higher number of incoming students in the top 10% of their high school class.
(02/29/24 11:03am)
As we trudge through the final week of February and see some glimmers of sunlight, it’s worth considering what intentional decisions we can make about how to spend the rest of the semester. What habits do we wish to leave behind in the winter and fall, and what lessons and goals do we wish to bring forth into the coming weeks?
(02/22/24 11:02am)
The administration sent an email titled “Inclusive Admissions and Incoming Class Update” to the Middlebury community on Feb. 7, which contained preliminary information about the demographics of the incoming classes of 2028 and 2028.5, and reaffirmed the college’s admissions approach after receiving its first round of applications since the Supreme Court barred colleges and universities from employing affirmative action last June.
(01/25/24 11:03am)
Following a fall semester spent beset by email after email from the college administration recognizing personal and international tragedies, we have begun to reevaluate the importance of Middlebury’s administrative statements to the goals of the college as an academic institution. As we’ve watched other universities come under fire for various controversies in recent months, there is an imminent need to address the possibility of such attention returning to Middlebury — and what we can do to anticipate that.
(01/18/24 11:04am)
Middlebury’s first student- created anthem came in 2010, when Charlie Taft ’11, of The Allen Jokers — a Middlebury-founded music group — released the Midd Kid music video, which received a whopping 1.7 million views on YouTube. The Windward Entertainment team created original music, wrote original lyrics and filmed a video featuring Middlebury parties, college boys in sunglasses and the Davis Family Library. This past fall, wishing to recreate the 2010 video “to reflect the Middlebury [they’d] come to know and love,” directors and editors Jordan Saint-Louis ’24.5 and Malick Thiam ’24 spent their fall semester behind a video camera, filming a video for a new Middlebury-themed song, which was produced by Professor of the Practice McLean Macionis and written by a collection of friends and lyricists.
(12/07/23 11:05am)
As the sun begins to set ever earlier in the afternoon, and the bitter chill creeps into students’ dorm rooms, the reality of winter in Vermont slowly but surely sets in across campus. These last two weeks of the fall semester and the looming reality of J-Term represent significant changes to student life on campus.
(11/16/23 11:04am)
Ivan Valerio ’26 passed away last Tuesday. Evelyn Mae Sorensen ’25 passed away in mid-September. Yan Zhou ’23 passed away of apparent suicide on Oct. 20, 2021.
(11/09/23 11:03am)
At Harvard University, the administration and student groups have been engulfed in controversy and doxxing after issuing statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict. At Dartmouth College, two students were recently arrested for camping out to protest the school’s approach to the war. And at Columbia University, student organizations have staged huge protests, while professors have come under national scrutiny and faced petitions calling for their removal.
(11/02/23 10:04am)
With the Board of Trustees on campus and meeting throughout this week to discuss institutional priorities and planned spending, we want to take advantage of this opportunity to directly address the people who have a major role in deciding how the funds raised by “For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury,” will be used. As the first major fundraising campaign since 2015, aimed at raising $600 million, $383 million of which has already been received, this presents a unique opportunity to consider where Middlebury currently stands and what its future will look like.
(10/26/23 10:02am)
With the Early Decision I deadline approaching on Nov. 1, we want to address this editorial to prospective students considering applying to make Middlebury as their home for the next four years. It is both an advantage and a privilege to apply early. Students are more likely to be accepted in the Early Decision rounds than in the Regular Decision round, but the contractual commitment to attend when applying this way often privileges those who can afford to visit campus or pay the $83,880 sticker price.
(10/12/23 10:04am)
It has been two years since Middlebury removed the name of John A. Mead from the Middlebury Chapel following a unanimous vote by the College’s Board of Trustees. In 1914, Mead and his wife made a donation — equivalent to more than two million in today’s dollars — to build a new chapel on the “highest point” of campus. Mead, however, was an advocate of eugenic theory both in policy and in legislation, speaking in favor of the potential benefits of marriage restrictions, sterilization and segregation. The chapel renaming followed the Vermont government’s efforts earlier in 2021 to “sincerely apologize and express sorrow and regret” for the state’s complicity in the eugenics movement, including the forced sterilization of over 250 Vermonters.
(10/05/23 10:03am)
This week, our Editorial Board reflected on how Covid-19 continues to affect campus life. Trust us, we are just as tired of editorializing on this issue over three and a half years since the start of the pandemic as you are of hearing about it. Unfortunately, however, a recent surge in student cases indicates that the virus is still very much present on campus and retains the power to substantially impact our lives. We call for the administration to share with the student body any information they have on Covid-19 cases, make test kits and masks more accessible and establish clearer guidelines to how professors and students should deal with the virus.
(09/14/23 10:01am)
The student body is now very familiar with Middlebury’s pandemic-related over-enrollment issues. We have previously editorialized and reported on how the consistently larger-than-usual student body over the past three years has affected class size, dining hall lines, parking spaces and housing. Middlebury has taken numerous steps to manage over-enrollment, including purchasing the Inn on the Green and using the Breadloaf campus for upperclassmen housing.
(04/27/23 10:04am)
Most current Middlebury students are familiar with a college that is understaffed. In addition to some academic departments being low on faculty, Facilities Services, Custodial Services and Dining Services have battled persistent understaffing since 2020. The degree of this staff shortage has fluctuated over the past few years, in part due to large-scale forces such as the pandemic and the state of the national economy. However, local factors like Middlebury’s remote location, the lack of affordable housing in Addison County, non-competitive wages and the new skill matrix and disrespectful student behavior have likewise continually threatened the size of the college’s workforce. These past couple of weeks have brought new urgency to the understaffing issue as dining operations, including the Grille, Crossroads and MiddXpress, Davis Family Library, and the International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) office have had to reduce their hours or the availability of certain services, leading to frustration among the student body.
(10/13/22 10:01am)
This summer, Middlebury implemented a new compensation system for staff that seeks to promote “ownership and impact” for employees. The plan centers on a “skill matrix” which places staff in one of four categories — ‘learning,’ ‘growing,’ ‘thriving’ and ‘leading’— which then is used to determine their pay grade.
(09/22/22 10:00am)
The recently reported admission statistics for the class of 2026 and 2026.5 illustrate a significant increase in the prevalence of first-generation students: 21% of these incoming students are the first in their family to attend college, compared to 11% of the class of 2023 and 2023.5. The percentage of domestic students of color is also the highest in the college’s history at 38%.
(09/15/22 10:00am)
As a residential college in which 95% of students supposedly live on campus, Middlebury states that their “residential system embodies that culture of living, learning, and growing together.” The close-knit, intimate housing community on campus is widely touted as one of the hallmarks of student life on our liberal arts campus. Yet, after the last two housing draws, students have found themselves in singles far away from their friends, forced to live off campus at places like the Inn on the Green, or placed en masse in August draw. Over-enrollment coupled with a lack of housing availability continues to jeopardize the residential student experience that our college professes to hold so dear.
(05/05/22 1:43pm)
Around the midway point of the 2022 Zeitgeist survey, our 1,134 respondents encountered a rather blunt question: “Are you happy?”, with only “yes” or “no” answer options. While we acknowledge how this binary greatly oversimplifies this inquiry, we were curious as to how Middlebury students would opt to characterize their happiness when confronted with only two choices.
(05/02/19 10:00am)
Middkids encounter many tough decisions throughout their time at the college: which courses to take, when to study, when to party, what career to pursue after graduation, etc. However, perhaps the most divisive and controversial decision students must make boils down to one simple question, asked daily between 4:30 and 8:30 p.m., Proctor or Ross?
As an editorial board, we are here to tell you that Proctor is the better dining hall. (We are definitely not biased by the fact that it’s like a hundred feet from our office.) Proc has got it all, so if you’re a Ross-er, go ahead and check your Ross privilege at the door and listen up.
First up: lines. Proctor conveniently has two lines serving the same dinner food while Ross’s single line is so long that you need a new haircut and have to make another tuition payment by the time you finally get your food. The lengthy Ross queues also create an epidemic of line-cutting. Don’t be one of those people. You aren’t sneaky. We all see you.
Ross’s layout feels more like a high school cafeteria than Proctor’s. The long tables, the drab color scheme, the panini machines all the way at the back. It’s just sad. Proctor has cozier — albeit stuffy — feel. (No joke, one of our editors has to bring her inhaler just to breathe there.) When you’re in Proc and decide to go for a panini, it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. In Ross? Difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult. Only once you assemble your materials and then walk the runway in between all of the sports teams, friend groups, classmates, and people you’d rather never see again do you finally make it to the panini press (and only two out of the four are EVER turned on?! What’s up with that?). That’s if you make it there without tragically stumbling and falling, causing a dish to crash to the floor and receiving thundering applause from your merciless peers.
“Ross is treacherous,” said one member of the editorial board. We have confirmed reports of pizza-slips and coffee tumbles, of ice-water-dispenser-overflows and awkward run-ins. One of our own editors got physically squished between two varsity basketball players hugging on her very first day of college four years ago. That would never happen in Proctor.
Proctor has a versatility of seating arrangements that Ross just can’t match. Because of its multiple seating options (circle tables, long tables, the booth room, the lounge if you’re a Feb), Proctor is much more conducive to eating alone than Ross. When we want to get away from our friends for just a few minutes of solace over a meal or a coffee, Proc is the place to go.
Does upper Proc occasionally feel like you’re inside one of those croissants you put in the toaster even though it says not to and is about to catch on fire? Yes. Does the women’s soccer team have a permanent stranglehold on one of the circle tables? It appears so. (If you have any insight as to how we can get that setup as well, let us know.) Do you have to sleep there overnight to get a booth? Potentially.
You may say all of this is a bunch of baloney, but we actually have the data to back it up. According to Zeitgeist findings, students prefer Proctor (39.2%) compared to Ross (26.6%) and Atwater (33.0%). To those students that haven’t hopped on the Proctor train yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. In the Proctor vs. Ross debate, there can only ever be one winner: Proc forever and always.