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(09/27/18 10:00am)
MILLIE VON PLATEN
When someone is about to enter a public office, it is essential that we consider the implications that their new position of power will have for communities far beyond the insulated spheres of places like Washington D.C.
Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and the two sickening sexual assault allegations that have accompanied it have many troubling — but unsurprising — systemic similarities to Middlebury as an institution. These similarities must be addressed.
Kavanaugh grew up in Washington D.C. and attended Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda, MD. Earlier this month, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who attended Holton-Arms — the all-girls sister school to Georgetown Prep — accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a party while they were both in high school.
Then, this Monday, another former classmate of Kavanaugh’s came forward: Deborah Ramirez, who was a student at Yale University with Kavanaugh, spoke at length in a New Yorker piece about how Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a college party.
The allegations brought forward by Blasey Ford and Ramirez bear striking resemblances to those of many Middlebury students.
The party culture at Georgetown Prep, which, according to recent accounts provided by Kavanaugh’s former classmates, bred a culture of binge drinking, hypermasculinity and abuse, closely resembles that of Middlebury.
Reports at the college in years past of “Predator and Prey”- themed parties exemplify a party scene that perpetuates rape culture. Older students often warn first-year women of the dangers of Atwater parties. They encourage them to attend parties in big groups and to avoid drinking from cups that are not their own. This should not have to be the case. These trends are not unique to Middlebury, but they are unmistakably part of our culture.
When a national moment bears so many similarities to the community we inhabit, it is imperative that we use it as an opportunity for self-reflection and growth.
Kavanaugh’s defenders have asked whether he deserves to be held accountable for something he did 30 years ago, while under the influence of alcohol and during his teen years — a time when “boys will be boys,” when young men aren’t quite adults yet and, apparently, are allowed to escape the consequences of causing the lasting pain that sexual assault inflicts. In a tweet, President Trump questioned why Blasey Ford had waited so many years to come forward.
To voice these arguments is to delegitimize the longevity and intensity of the pain that survivors of sexual assault — whether at Middlebury in 2018 or Maryland and Connecticut in the 1980s —feel years later.
And if there’s ever a point at which something you did 30 years ago should be placed under the microscope of public scrutiny, it is when you are about to be appointed to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Another common trend in media coverage of Kavanaugh’s nomination is the discrediting of the experiences relayed by Dr. Blasey Ford and Ramirez.
“New Yorker hit piece on Kavanaugh is not journalism, it’s a bizarre political stage show,” read a Fox News opinion headline Monday, the day after Ramirez’s story was published in The New Yorker.
And sadly, but, again, unsurprisingly, discrediting and delegitimizing the struggle of survivors, rather than supporting them, is a pattern that is all too common at Middlebury.
Last December, a Middlebury student posted a list of men on campus who had been identified by other students as sexual assailants. Discussion of “The List” centered around defending the innocence of the accused instead of attempting to understand why individuals on campus feel so trapped that they turned to a public Facebook post for support.
In recent years, Middlebury has no doubt made progress in improving recognition and support for sexual assault survivors.
Attendance of the “It Happens Here” event, during which survivors detail their experiences of sexual assault on campus, has improved significantly in the past two years. The last event reached full capacity; people were turned down at the door.
Programs like Green Dot on campus have also provided survivors with more support and have been proven to increase reporting of assault.
But despite these steps, if a Facebook post appears to be survivors’ best option, we are failing survivors of sexual assault miserably.
Sexual assaults on college campuses in the United States are reported only around 12 percent of the time, according to a 2015 study by the Washington Post. Survivors need more support.
Institutions — whether the public courts of the United States in which Kavanaugh has made his living, Washington D.C. as a whole or Middlebury College — are bad at acknowledging their own flaws. In order for Middlebury, Washington or the United States to provide survivors the support they deserve and hold assailants accountable, we must acknowledge the stories of survivors as infinitely more important than covering cracks in the institutions that have historically silenced them.
(09/20/18 10:00am)
Just one week into the Fall semester, a sense of crowdedness has overtaken Middlebury’s campus. Classrooms feel more packed than in years past, peaktime mailroom queues extend outside McCullough, and dining hall lines feel longer than ever.
Despite its marketable emphasis on the value of smaller, intimate educational settings, Middlebury has a growing student body that appears to be creating an increasingly inflexible student life framework, threatening to jeopardize some of the more intimate aspects of campus culture in the process.
In 2018, a total of 765 students accepted Middlebury’s offer of admission and enrolled at the College as members of the Class of 2022, the highest number of students to accept admission in college history. This year’s yield rate of 45.1 percent is 2.3 percent higher than that of 2017, a year when students already began to notice that campus was feeling overcrowded.
Traditionally, many students choose Middlebury College for its small student-to-faculty ratio. Indeed, admissions materials emphasize professor availability and course flexibility as defining characteristics of the college’s small liberal arts culture.
Professors have already noted effects of this year’s over-enrollment. “It does feel like I have more students showing up to add and fewer students ready to drop a spot in a class,” American Studies professor Deb Evans said in an email.
Professors are now forced to make a difficult choice: either reject students hoping to add their class or agree to excessive amounts of grading and class preparation.
“I feel terrible having to turn students away,” Evans said. “In that sense, it’s harder.”
An expanding student population poses additional problems for common areas on campus, particularly in first-year residence halls.
Many former common spaces in dorms such as Battell, Hepburn and Coffrin have been converted into sleeping spaces as a way to accommodate over-enrollment. These room conversions both prompt overcrowding in the few common areas that remain and decrease the total number of social spaces accessible to first-year students.
Based on the experiences of this editorial board, common areas play a central role in the first year experience, allowing for students to develop close, personal relationships with one another.
The fact that these spaces are being lost due to enrollment numbers forces us to question whether recent over-enrollment will be detrimental to new students’ experiences as they attempt to situate themselves in their new home.
Dining halls have also confronted the negative repercussions of a larger student body. Lunch lines have become unreasonably long and frantic, forcing staff members to work overtime to accommodate increased demand. Last week, during the notorious Thursday 12:15 p.m. lunch rush, Atwater Dining Hall staff stopped scanning students’ IDs to avoid making lines longer. Further, dining employees no longer have time to spend conversing with students.
“Sometimes [the dining rush gets] so crazy that you can’t get to know students,” said Proctor Manager Dawn Boise, “and my staff would like to.”
In that same vein, simple errands, like picking up a package at the mail center, can become challenging. Last Friday afternoon before the mail center closed for the weekend, students rushed to pick up their packages. A line formed at the mail center and stretched outside of McCullough and around the building.
While it’s certainly tiresome to have to wait in a line for half an hour after a day of class, what deserves most attention is the effects on the mail room staff whose job it is to process packages; when lines stretch down the hall and outside day after day, their job becomes more taxing than it likely should be. Though the beginning of the year is traditionally a busy time at the mail center, this year seems to be a special case.
A larger freshman class certainly provides a set of campus-wide advantages, specifically increased extracurricular participation, additional admission opportunities for diverse and first generation students, in addition to more overall social engagement. That this year’s freshman class was the most diverse in the college’s history should not be ignored, and the financial upside to admitting more students is understandable. However, this school’s population appears to be growing at a rate that encroaches upon the intimacy that is fundamental to the liberal arts experience.
We encourage the administration to be more aware of the ways in which over-enrollment has begun to affect our campus and the intimacy traditionally associated with it. If Middlebury is to preserve the essential aspects of a small liberal arts culture, it should not continue to increase enrollment without first implementing additional measures to adequately accommodate that growth.
Correction: An earlier version of this editorial said that the student-to-faculty ratio had increased from 8:1 to 9:1. This number was based on a fact sheet found on the college's admissions webpage. A college spokesman informed The Campus that this is not true and the college has no intention of seeing the ratio increase. The ratio remains 8:1 and it has since been corrected on the college website.
(05/09/18 7:01pm)
This weekend was the first Nocturne, a late-night, student-run arts festival. From Saturday night at 9:00 until 2:00 a.m. the following morning, Middlebury’s lawns and buildings transformed into outdoor art galleries, performance spaces and screening rooms.
A projector issued a wall-length projection of a fish tank onto Painter Hall, glowing a deep, underwater blue against the gray stone. A variety of student musicians invited dance party after dance party outside of McCullough. Beyond mere unconventional fun, Nocturne’s success also seems cause for two important considerations: first, the student body wants (and is eager to participate in) more inclusive arts programming; and second, the school ought to commit more funding to the arts.
Those who attended Saturday night’s festivities were struck not only by the scale of the event, but also the diversity of performers and participants. Spectators flowed in from all corners of campus, be they artists, athletes, physics majors, or all of the above. This was due in large part to the event’s open nature; since anyone could submit work, artists beyond those enrolled in studio art, music or theatre classes could display or perform pieces, and their friends came in support. Not only that, but the event was entirely free, inviting students of all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate.
As it stands, Middlebury offers a number of spaces for performance and studio art. That said, these spaces can be extraordinarily isolating. The CFA is located in the far corner of campus, and aside from classes and the occasional performance receives little traffic. While Johnson is relatively central, the classrooms within are isolated and barred by heavy, locked doors. Not only that, but Johnson’s very infrastructure is failing. The building is plagued by leaky ceilings and inaccessible freight elevators. The physical abandonment of Johnson is reflective of our community’s general apathy toward the arts on campus, at both a physical and fiscal level.
The problem isn’t just Johnson: it is the lack of modern, innovative spaces in general for the arts. The arts community at Middlebury needs more than the lukewarm support it currently receives. The reality is that we simply don’t have a space for all students to share in communal art. The current college museum has collections that far outnumber the gallery spaces, meaning that many pieces of art in storage never actually see the light of day.
Seniors in the architecture department dedicated their thesis studio to solving this problem. Over the course of J-term, 15 students developed designs comprehensive plans for a new art museum. If Middlebury committed serious funding to the arts, perhaps donors would be encouraged to fund bold projects like this new museum. If on the other hand the arts are not made a priority here, Middlebury will continue to fall behind peer schools like Colby and Williams that are quickly becoming leaders in the arts.
There are some ongoing spaces on campus that, like Nocturne, strive to offer opportunities for collaborative artwork that strengthen community bonds. The Anderson Freeman Center (AFC) is decorated with student-made art. Members of the community were allowed to help memorialize and decorate the building. Last year, the artist Will “KASSO” Condry, along with senior studio art major Zarai Zaragoza, collaborated to design and complete a large mural.
Since its inception three years ago, the AFC has been a space for the underrepresented communities at Middlebury. The new mural in McCullough, for example, was part of an initiative to bring the voices of POC artists to Middlebury. Spaces like the AFC and the new mural in McCullough are a part of the initiative to showcase art representative of the minority voices here. Through art, these students are given a platform for illustrating and validating their experiences.
The administration has voiced its desire to build community, and arts initiatives like murals and Nocturne contribute to this process. Nocturne was expansive enough to provide a space for cultural groups dance performances to hand controlled kaleidoscope projections to poetry readings.
Nocturne is what a vibrant student life looks like. As that event showed, the arts are a mode through which we can all share our lived experiences, build community, form identity and examine ourselves. This cannot happen without dedicated support for students’ artistic endeavors. In short, the arts at Middlebury deserve serious funding, not just token acknowledgment.
(05/02/18 11:02pm)
For students, summer internships are a large source of stress. Undergraduate college students devote increasing amounts of time to procuring “impressive” internships or embarking on exciting opportunities. As this trend develops, the question arises: Should colleges and universities grant credit for summer internships? Does the educational value of an internships merit formal academic recognition? The SGA, in a bill submitted by Senator Kailash Raj Pandey on April 8, argues yes.
Many colleges recognize the educational value of the extracurricular experiences that students engage in when they pursue internships and reward the pursuit of these experiences with academic credit. Schools such as UC Berkeley, University of Michigan and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all afford students the chance to accrue credits while working at an internship, according to their websites. At Middlebury, however, this is not the case. Although students pursue internships for academic credit during J-Term, summer internships are not eligible to receive academic credit toward the fulfillment of any requirements.
At its core, we feel that Middlebury’s lack of provision of credit for summer internships runs counter to its educational mission as a liberal arts institution. At Middlebury and other liberal art colleges, a defining component of the educational mission is a belief that varied, self-motivated, worldly experience forms an essential piece of each student’s liberal arts education. The Middlebury mission statement reflects this objective: “Through the pursuit of knowledge unconstrained by national or disciplinary boundaries, students who come to Middlebury learn to engage the world.”
When pursued with care and intentionality, summer internships may perfectly fulfill the designation of educational experiences “unconstrained by national or disciplinary boundaries.” Internship experiences are rooted in real-world work, demand reflection and self-evaluation, and provide us with educational moments that we simply cannot get while working as full-time students at Middlebury College. Regardless of whether the internship is paid or unpaid, any professional position conducted with introspection, intentionality and rigor supplements the mission statement’s vision of education at Middlebury. Offering credit for internships would demonstrate that the administration recognizes their academic value.
In order to ensure the jobs they perform are worthy of receiving credit, students participating in these internships could be subjected to a check-in process similar to the one that students who receive CCI internship funding have to go through. This process calls on students to submit photos, written reflections and employer updates to the CCI in order to uphold their funding grants. Given the correct screening and check-in measures, it’s entirely possible to construct a system under which internships that are pursued with care and rigor are granted appropriate academic credit.
Beyond Middlebury’s educational mission, we see a number of other reasons that summer internship experience should be able to count toward a student’s academic credits. For one, many companies and businesses that offer so-called “unpaid internships” will not allow students to take unpaid positions unless they are earning academic credit for the work they perform (usually for legal reasons). Granting academic credit for internships would allow students to take positions that would otherwise have been unavailable to them by virtue of the college’s current policy.
Furthermore, providing academic credit for summer positions would aid many students who might wish to graduate early from Middlebury for financial reasons. Rather than taking on five-class semesters or taking summer classes at other schools, these students would be able to accumulate credits for meaningful experiences earned during summers in working toward graduating on their own schedule.
The internship process for international students, however, is entirely different. When applying to study in the United States, prospective students must obtain an F-1 visa. This visa is a non-immigrant visa; those who hope to study in the United States must have official residence in their home country and intend to return back to their country of citizenship. The purpose of this visa is to educate the student and then allow them to bring this newfound education back to their country of origin, not the United States.
When applying for internships in the US, F-1 students can apply for Optional Practical Training, which is temporary employment directly related to an F-1 student’s major area of study. Eligible students can apply to receive up to 12 months of OPT employment authorization before completing their academic studies (pre-completion) and/or after completing their academic studies (post-completion).
In order to use OPT effectively, an international student must carefully ration out their time in the United States; each student is limited to only 12 months of this form of authorization at each degree level, so the use of it prior to graduation significantly affects these students’ future options in the United States. As stated in senator Pandey’s bill, an international student must pay a $410 filing fee each time they want to engage in an off-campus internship experience that is not for academic credit. This significantly limits who is able to apply for internships; an international student may have to turn down the same opportunity that a U.S. peer student is able to accept and benefit from.
If this bill is passed, international students will be afforded the same opportunities as their American peers. As a board we endorse the idea of this bill; international students should be able to receive academic credit for internships without having to jump through hoops to do so.
That said, there are a number of technical questions that must be answered if the college is to take this step: How many credits might a single internship count for? What exactly would an effective screening process look like in order to ensure a position’s validity? How should communication between the college and employers factor into the process? While these details must eventually be worked out, we call upon the college to first recognize that, on an ideological level, granting academic credit for internship aligns with the mission statement of this institution.
For many faculty and staff, the prospect of granting students academic credit for experiences undertaken away from lecture halls and discussion circles will no doubt seem like a drastic step, as it contradicts many conceptions of what it means to be a traditional college student.
But from an ideological standpoint, granting credit for these positions aligns with what it means to be a college student today, in a world where experience is deemed to be of the utmost value for students entering the workforce. It also aligns with what it means to be a student at a liberal arts institution, where these experiences are valued as components of each student’s personal education.
(04/26/18 8:53pm)
On April 8, the SGA passed a bill requesting the addition of a second student constituent to the college board of overseers. This initiative arose in response to what the bill identifies as “limited and lacking student representation and consequential engagement with the Middlebury college board of trustees,” and aims to increase student involvement in the college’s decision-making process.
But the Patton administration has final say in the matter. In the spirit of collective governance, the administration should embrace the plan — but not just stop there. Inside and outside the boardroom, trustees need more points of contact with students, especially when they make decisions that impact the student experience.
Middlebury’s governance structure can be confusing, but in short the trustees oversee the institution’s long-term health. The board of trustees is split up into three boards of overseers: one for the undergraduate college, one for the language and abroad schools, and one for the Monterey Institute. Several trustees make up the college board of overseers, as well as one faculty member, one staff member and a number of partners.
As it stands, the SGA president serves as the sole student constituent to the college board of overseers enjoys no voting power. This bill aims not only to add a second student, but to grant both the ability to vote. In addition, the board of trustees has six standing committees: prudential, programs, resources, trusteeship and governance, and risk and strategy. If approved, the plan will add student representatives to the programs, risk and strategy standing committees.
On Monday, the editorial board met with the co-authors of the resolution, SGA president Jin Sohn ’18 and chief of staff Ish Alam ’18 to discuss the value of student constituents.
“Speaking from my own time on the board,” Sohn said, “I can attest to the fact that there’s not a lot of student representation.” Still, she went on to detail how her experiences with trustees have been positive.
“I feel as though they always want the conversation to keep going on,” she said, “like they’re genuinely interested in what students have to say.”
Still, the trustees can always benefit from firsthand input about campus life — input that extends beyond informal meals and into the boardroom itself.
The bill aims to increase the term length of student constituents as well, a smart way to better integrate students onto the board. Under the current system, the SGA president serves on the board for a single year (in other words, for three meetings). Under the new bill, this term would be extended to two years, such that student constituents overlap for a year. This is a sensible solution to ensuring the kind of continuity that faculty and staff constituents already have.
As the bill proposes, students should be better prepared for the processes involved with sitting on the board. They would be able to more effectively establish meaningful relationships with other board members. This is crucial; in the past, Sohn explained, the board has been against having a larger student proxy because board members have to feel comfortable in the room in order to engage in constructive conversations. With longer terms, both board members and students will feel more established in their roles, allowing each to speak freely.
This plan would make students privy to upcoming changes, and thus better able to stand up for student interests when it matters. This is particularly important with standing committees, where many of the ideas which actually come into effect on campus originate. For instance, when the construction of a new temporary building to house the computer science department was first floated, no student was present. Since such a change will affect students’ lives, this seems like an unacceptable disconnect.
Voting power is perhaps the most democratic way to give students more say in Middlebury’s governance. “There’s indisputable value when it comes to having a student in the room,” Alam said. While he and Sohn acknowledged that voting power may be a long shot with this administration, we commend the SGA for including the idea. Though it may seem ideal, it’s actually feasible. A substantial student voice in college affairs is necessary; even better if it were met with voting power.
The bill specifies the appointment of two student constituents. Indeed, it’s difficult to pick two students to stand in for such a diverse student body. We urge the SGA to consider carefully who would best serve as student constituents — students of color, for example, or those who have demonstrated a passion for Middlebury but might not be considered a “typical” student. Also, the two year term might eliminate juniors who want to go abroad. To that end, it might make sense to elect rising seniors, who could serve their last year and then the year after they graduate.
The SGA’s plan must be part of a larger project of widening communication channels between the board of trustees and students. This means more frequent events, both informal meals and focused meetings — not only with athletes or first-generation students but a wider sampling of Middlebury students. Before deciding policy on particular issues, like divestment, the trustees could even invite knowledgeable students to present in the boardroom — where the decisions themselves are made.
Finally, we call for more clarity and transparency within the trustees’ decision-making process. Adding student constituents to the board is a necessary — and long overdue — first step in putting governance at Middlebury closer to the students, but it should not stop there. We urge the administration to approve the SGA’s plan, and to work proactively to increase transparency on all levels between students and trustees.
(04/18/18 10:49pm)
Each year, The Campus endorses a candidates for Student Government Association president. This comes after a sit-down with candidates, in which each is allowed 15 minutes to present their platform and answer questions. Our subsequent endorsement reflects who we as a board feel is best suited for the position — someone who represents the interests of all Middlebury students. This year, the candidates for SGA president are Rae Aaron ’19.5, Charles Rainey ’19 and Nia Robinson ’19.
Once elected, the SGA President serves as the first line of communication between the student body and Old Chapel. Should an issue (say, a contentious debate or student outcry on-campus) arise in the Middlebury community, administrators turn to the SGA President first, in order to gauge student sentiment and craft a response. As such, it is imperative that the president in question not only communicate well, but hold the interests of Middlebury students at heart. Beyond that, the SGA President shoulders a vast array of responsibilities and must be committed to working diligently in order to convert visions, ideals and values into tangible institutional change.
In the 2018 SGA Presidential race, the editorial board believes Nia Robinson best suits this role.
Until two weeks ago, Nia herself was an opinion editor at The Campus. Rather than see this as a conflict of interest, we believe this affords us unique insight into Nia’s suitability for the position, one for which we eagerly endorse her campaign.
All three candidates presented impressive platforms. Rae Aaron offered a platform centered around campus life, accessibility and inclusivity. In addition, her extensive SGA experience as Feb senator and speaker renders her highly qualified for the position. Rae’s weekly email updates are beloved by the Feb community for their humor and informativity, and demonstrate her communication ability. Charles Rainey presented an incredibly thorough platform focused on three areas: social life, community and support. His proposal consists of 15 total points, with five specific points he hopes to achieve for each of these three main areas. He aims to weave ideals of inclusion and accessibility into his platform (for example, hiring a counselor of color at Parton). Yet, while the breadth and detail of both Charles’ and Rae’s campaigns were impressive, Nia emerged as the stronger candidate.
Nia has deep and varied experience in working with students and administrators. As a member of the college’s Judicial Board, Nia understands well the inner workings of bureaucratic systems at Middlebury. And as a former co-president of the Black Student Union, she has already built the relationships needed to work with cultural organizations and bolster inclusivity initiatives on campus. In short, she has worked both inside and outside of the system to make Middlebury a better place.
Unlike Rae and Charles, Nia has never before served as a member of the SGA. Rather than see this as a shortcoming, the editorial board believes this presents an exciting opportunity for a fresh and unique perspective Instead of spending her time exclusively working within the SGA, Nia has lived and worked through many valuable and authentic Middlebury student experiences. Who better to lead us?
During her time at The Campus, Nia proved to be incredible writer, eloquent speaker and meticulously thoughtful participant in discussions about the state of the Middlebury community. During these discussions, Nia displayed a sincere and unwavering desire to create a Middlebury that serves all students equally, pushing time and time again for transparency, accessibility and social inclusion on campus. She entered each discussion with an intense focus and presence that conveyed not only her values and vision, but a sincere desire to follow up and convert her visions into tangible change.
On a more personal note, Nia’s work on campus has demonstrated what a thoughtful, focused and good-humored individual she is; we on the board believe these qualities make her aptly suited to the role of SGA president.
Anyone who has watched Nia at work in Crossroads Café or witnessed one of her admissions tours cannot possibly fail to notice the efficiency, grace and responsibility with which Nia conducts herself.
Responsibility aside, the way that Nia interacts with other students is nothing short of special. Nia not only makes it her project to connect with as many of her peers as possible, but to do so on a genuine, personal level. As a result, she is known and loved by the Middlebury community — professors, deans, students, staff and administrators alike. We on the editorial board are excited by the value Nia places upon building authentic individual relationships, and we are sure she would pursue honest, empathetic communication with every member of Middlebury’s community.
Above all else, what makes Nia most suited to the role of SGA president is the breadth of her experience at Middlebury. Nia possesses unparalleled knowledge of day-to-day student issues. This will be crucial in balancing community members’ perspectives, which, as a board, we identify as the single most important requisite for SGA president. We are excited to endorse Nia’s candidacy in this year’s race.
(04/11/18 9:52pm)
Last Friday, the SGA announced the creation of a new program called Middworks. “Middworks,” an email sent to all students explained, “is a new program created [...] to share information and experiences and to build a greater common understanding among students, faculty and staff.” In short, the program aims to foster better relationships among students and staff at the college. As the email attested, “this process starts not only with sharing our worldviews, but also with sharing our different lived experiences at Middlebury College.”
In addition to outlining the new program, the email called for students to sign up for Work Alongside One Another. This, the first Middworks-sponsored event, offers students the opportunity to work shifts with Dining and Facilities services staff on April 16 and 19. Held in concert with Staff Appreciation Day (April 30), the event provides students with the opportunity to “learn more about the challenges and rewards experienced by the staff who help the campus function day-to-day.”
Those who sign up for shifts on April 16 will join President Patton and the facilities staff to learn about the work done by facilities workers to maintain campus cleanliness and safety. On April 19, the opportunity likewise exists for students to work with treasurer David Provost and the dining staff to learn about the challenges of preparing meals for over 2,500 students. After shifts, participants are invited to share a meal and discuss community interests, issues and experiences which arise. This is a great idea, and the SGA and administration deserve credit for putting it together.
This paper’s March 22 editorial “Our Staff Deserve Better” called for students and administration to increase efforts at recognizing the value of our facilities and dining staff. In light of widespread mess and vandalism in dorms, dining halls and other locations, we asked that students be more thoughtful about their treatment of the college environment, particularly spaces whose cleanliness forms the supposed responsibility of wage-earning staff.
For years, the staff members in question have shouldered preventable messes in dining halls and dorms. This reflects poorly on the student body as a whole. Simply put, we can do better. In recognition that true improvement necessitates collective effort by students and the administration, the same editorial called for improvements in staff wages. Just as students can do their part, so too can the administration. Only then can we demonstrate to Middlebury’s wage-earning staff that they are more valuable to our school than current conditions suggest.
We believe that both Middworks and Work Alongside One Another constitute the first step in such a project. As was pointed out in the March 22 editorial, inconsideracy and carelessness on the part of students formed the core of the problem. As such, students themselves must take the initiative in order to reverse these trends. Work Alongside One Another provides students an opportunity to appreciate firsthand the work that wage-earning staff perform.
Listening as staff explain the intricacies, difficulties and joys of their job cannot be anything but rewarding for both parties involved. It allows the worker to convey the challenges involved in the tasks they perform, so that students might better understand the ramifications of their actions. If enough students attend, a tangible difference might be made in the system of student-staff relations on campus.
Although there are many more steps that our administration can and should take to better convey the value of our dining and facilities services staff, the most obvious being wage increases, the fact that Patton and Provost have chosen to dedicate their time to this program deserves recognition. We hope that their decision to participate is an indicator that more substantive action will come soon.
And so we call upon students to sign up for Work Alongside One Another. Put simply, it is the least we can do. Workers in facilities and dining services take pride in their jobs and are often eager to share their experiences, and the Work Alongside One Another presents us a valuable opportunity to listen.
Students can sign up through the survey in the email sent out by the SGA on April 6.
(04/04/18 2:22pm)
Note: This editorial was accompanied by a news report about Sander’s lecture, which two Campus reporters attended. The editorial was written before the lecture took place.
Once again, Middlebury finds itself at the center of a loud moral debate. Richard Sander, author of the contentious “mismatch theory,” visited Middlebury Tuesday afternoon to discuss his research, urging attendees to ask the following question: Does affirmative action hurt more than it helps?
At the heart of Sander’s work lies affirmative action, a process he claims hurts students of color by placing them in “overly competitive situations” without adequate skill sets to match. Implications of Sander’s theory aside, a number of questions arise surrounding the event itself: How are we supposed to read student-conservatives’ decision to invite Sander a year after Charles Murray? What do we actually stand to gain from speakers like Sander coming? Above all else, how are we supposed to reconcile an event like this with simultaneous goals of healing post-Murray and creating a platform for diverse and productive dialogue?
The invitation of Sander in the wake of Charles Murray reveals a troubling fixation with racial science on campus. To be clear, there are crucial differences between the events of Murray and Sander. For one, Murray was not invited to speak about “The Bell Curve,” a book which argued for the existence of fundamental differences between people of different races. But these controversial conversations remain inextricably tied to Murray’s figure, and occupy much of the limelight of the controversy surrounding his talk. In contrast, Sander was invited to talk about his well-known “mismatch theory.” Both speakers therefore serve as figureheads for contentious racial science, Sander arguably even more so.
As such, conservative groups on campus appear intensely preoccupied with the question of whether or not students of color belong at Middlebury, or any institution of higher learning. (Sander’s “mismatch theory” for instance, focuses on law school admissions.) This reads as oddly specific, even pointed; following the 2016 presidential election, a wide range of conservative issues have assumed the spotlight, including topics like LGBTQ rights, abortion and religion. Why not invite speakers whose specialty lies in these areas? Why the apparent obsession with race on a campus which makes ardent claims at inclusivity?
We do not protest the right of Sander or others like him to speak. We do, however, call into question the productivity of the event. Are there not greater questions about conservatism and the state of American politics? What does Middlebury stand to gain by repeatedly undermining the status of students of color on a campus where they already form a minority?
Following the Charles Murray incident, calls echoed across campus, not to mention a number of national publications, for “diverse thought and dialogue.” Yet if our collective goal remains to facilitate dialogue alongside the process of healing, student organizers of the event must know that inviting Sander specifically was not the way to accomplish it.
Since Murray, Sander is the most highly-publicized conservative figure to come to Middlebury. In advance of the talk, students were not asking, “I wonder if affirmative action really does or does not help,” but instead or “Will Sander be the next installment in the Murray saga?”
Caitlyn Myers, who served as the moderator on Tuesday, identified her role as attempting to “engage in a substantive, rigorous, and critical dialogue.” Yet are students in attendance genuinely invested in the “substantive” dialogue in question, or simply interested in making a statement by either supporting or protesting the event? And so with an opportunity to move forward, student conservatives have apparently chosen instead to feed the fire, prioritizing their “right to free speech” over healing, or hosting a conversation in which students might actually engage with the topic at hand.
We are left wondering how we can encourage conservative speakers to come to Middlebury. Beyond that, how might students attend talks in a productive manner?
For one, there are various forms of conservatism that go beyond widely-refuted racial science. The AEI club has invited numerous speakers to campus since their founding. Yet for whatever reason, these are not as widely advertised. At best, there are fliers and a mention of free food. There should be more of a push for those events. Why is that the hot button or controversial topics are the events that are widely advertised? Murray and Sander belong to an emerging phenomenon of statement speakers, whose loudest proclamation ostensibly stems from their being on campus, rather than anything they may or may not have a chance to say onstage. If these are the only talks that receive advertisement, how can conservatives hope to have their side of the debate heard?
There is, of course, a painful irony at play here. Conservatives on campus complain of political oppression, forming a small minority relative to their liberal counterparts. And yet their response to such marginalization is to target students of color, a group which faces marginalization well beyond the confines of College Street.
If conservative students are genuinely interested in racial science or similar questions, more of an effort should be made to collaborate with cultural organizations in order to carry out these events in a thoughtful and enlightening rather than alienating manner. Just as conservatives deserve to have their voices heard, so too do cultural organizations or minority groups on campus. As it stands, cultural organizations like the Black Student Union received a mere email asking for permission. This is not collaboration; this is ticking a box, and — in light of the past year — this is inadequate.
We hope that moving forward, Middlebury student groups are more thoughtful about who we ask to come speak. We hope that those seeking to bring a speaker devote considerable time to the question of whether or not that person is what we need. The issue is not any one group feeling attacked. The issue is what seems a deliberate furthering of troubling divisions which have arisen on campuses surrounding speakers, one which requires consideration on every point of the political spectrum in order to repair.
The invitation of speakers like Sander in Middlebury’s current context does not read as an opportunity for growth, but a deepening of painful divides. There is a difference between free speech and productive speech; if we truly desire to move forward, Middlebury must start to make attempts at the latter.
(03/21/18 10:43pm)
In an op-ed published in last week’s edition of The Campus, Professor Noah Graham discussed the massive paychecks allotted to top administrators at the college. During the 2015–2016 fiscal year, these included numbers like $482,773 for the Monterey President/Special Advisor for Initiatives and $458,932 for the Vice President for Finance and Treasurer. A commenter on Graham’s op-ed wrote that they were “embarrassed, infuriated, and pained by this information. Everyone knows that Middlebury College is not a beacon of equity and inclusion, but I did not realize that the situation was this dire — that our own administrators were perpetuating the income gap that I am sure they speak frequently of closing.” Truly appalling, however, is the stark contrast posed by a comparison of these paychecks to those on a spreadsheet of Middlebury staff pay ranges, where some yearly salaries amount to as little as $22,165.00. (It should be acknowledged that some staff work part time, thereby lowering this number.) Such inequality, while extremely pronounced, is not surprising; income inequality exists across the U.S., and the Middlebury College community is no exception. At the same time, Middlebury compares itself to 21 institutions — NESCAC and other liberal arts colleges — and finds itself among the upper echelon for exempt (salaried) workers, but just above the median for non-exempt (hourly) workers.
The workers who belong to the latter category form the vanguard of day-to-day staff interaction with students at Middlebury College, and wage inequality is just one injustice they face: we are all aware that the students with whom the dining hall and custodial staff interact on a daily basis behave disrespectfully and embarrassingly towards these workers. As a board, we would like to call for the improved treatment of Middlebury’s wage-earning staff on the part of both the administration and the student body. The administration, on its part, should increase non-exempt workers’ abysmally low wages. We as students can, and must, elevate our behavior in dining halls, dorms and other campus spaces from that of children to that of the college-age adults we are.
A recent example of student misconduct came last week when the SGA sent out an email announcing the suspension of 10 o’clock Ross. The email identified issues with “cleanliness, including ice cream spills, dirty dishes, and general disarray.” The email went on to point out how “the Ross Dining Hall Staff trusts the student body by allowing us to enjoy late-night snacks in the dining hall after hours and we have failed to step up to the task.” This is not the first cancellation of 10 o’clock Ross: last year, the discovery of beer bottles and other uncleanliness led to a similar suspension.
Students’ behavior indicates a severe lack of consideration for our staff, which manifests weeknight after weeknight. We are better than this; dining hall staff should under no circumstances be called upon to clean up childlike messes made by adult students. It’s hard to blame Ross Dining Hall for a suspension that seems so fitting; students are acting like elementary school kids, and as a result are having their ice cream and sugared cereal privileges taken away.
A similar pattern of thoughtlessness occurs in dorms. The custodial staff routinely has to deal with problems beyond what should be reasonably expected of them. Among these are dirty dishes, left out in the hallway by students too lazy to return them to their rightful dining hall. An email to residents of Coffrin Hall called for improved student behavior in light of beer cans being left in hallways, signs being ripped off of doors and vomit in bathrooms. On a floor in Milliken Hall, a custodial staff member has taken to leaving notes, often humorous in nature, in an attempt to make students realize that their actions have tangible consequences. “My mother works with disabled elementary school kids,” reads a note above the hall garbage cans, “and even they know how to recycle.” This indicates that the normal systems of response — which consists largely of hall-wide emails sent out by RAs — are not enough to keep students mindful of staff. Whether it be food fights in Ross, people drunkenly leaving behind their plates on St. Patrick’s Day or students leaving dirty dishes in hallways, students constantly act in ways that make the lives of staff members more unpleasant.
Another example of this lack of respect has arisen with the new swipe system implemented in dining halls. Students interact with dining hall workers every time they get a meal, swiping in inches away from a seated staff member. “If people forget their card, they get pretty upset with me,” says a worker at Ross who is responsible for overseeing the new swipe system. “I don’t make the rules, I’m just following them.”
Overall, the significance of students’ lack of consideration for staff cannot be overstated. Staff are working diligently to perform duties beyond the scope of their responsibilities while receiving inadequate compensation for the duties within their job descriptions. We are not arguing that paying non-exempt workers more would justify current student treatment towards them — regardless of income level, this treatment is unacceptable. Paying them more would, however, demonstrate that the Middlebury community values them and their jobs.
The President of Kentucky State University set a glowing precedent in 2014, taking a $90,000 pay cut and distributing it among the university’s lowest income employees. As a result, 24 employees salaries raised from $7.25 to $10.25 per hour, representing a huge increase in yearly earnings. “This is not a gift,” said President Burse, “it’s an investment.” We are not asking for anyone at Middlebury to take a pay cut, as such band-aid action does not challenge or alter systemic issues at the root of wage inequality. However, the ethos of Burse’s action applies; by treating staff with financial respect and care, we invest in the school the same way we do when paying out large “stay bonuses” to various administrators. Middlebury’s administration should apply this same ethos in considering future pay rates for non-exempt employees.
While profound disparities in Middlebury’s pay scale staff are beyond students’ ability to change, treatment of staff remains very much within student control. This means recycling, so that custodial staff do not have to do it for us. This means returning our own dirty dishes to the dining hall when we’ve finished our most recent unlimited meal. And it means recognizing that the staff are not in charge of systems like swipe-ins, however personally irritating we might find them. We as students may not be able to increase paychecks, but we can at least try to account for the difference in basic human decency.
(03/15/18 2:47pm)
Two recent SGA bills proposed changes to the way that existing SGA funding is distributed to student clubs. One bill, put into effect last weekend, altered an existing bill concerning management of club sports funding, removing a $1,000 budget cap that previously limited funding to newly formed club sports teams. This bill would effectively allocate existing student activity funding to new sports teams. Another bill, which has yet to take effect, calls for the existing funding to go towards providing more financial aid for students who can’t afford the travel costs that many clubs incur. (See story on page A1 for more details on the contents of the respective bills.)
Travel presents a valuable component of many student organizations’ agendas. But clubs often lack the budget to pay in full for student travel to off-campus events that constitute such valuable components of their respective missions. As a board, we believe that students should be able to enjoy the benefits of traveling for club events even if they are unable to self-fund the price of transportation, food, and other travel costs that club members so often have to pay out of their own pockets. We stand with the bill submitted on March 11 that calls for the formation of the Off Campus Food Financial Aid Program, which would provide a direct remedy to the plight faced by the students who aren’t able to pay for club travel expenses.
In a perfect world, the two aforementioned bills would be implemented simultaneously: there would be no budget cap on newly-formed club sports teams and students in need of financial aid for club trips would receive all the compensation they need. Unfortunately, there is a finite amount of SGA funding allocated to clubs. $416 of each student’s annual tuition is allocated to club funding (giving the SGA an annual budget of a little over $1 million to provide clubs) and that number would have to go up for both of these bills to be viable simultaneously. Given the already bloated (and rising) cost of tuition, the option of increasing overall funding frankly isn’t feasible.
As a board, we believe strongly that allocation of funding for student activities holds huge implications for the construction of more equitable spaces at Middlebury. Pursuit of constructing equitable spaces should be at the forefront of the SGA finance committee’s mission as it works to determine where this funding is spent. Of the two bills, we see the March 11 financial aid bill as making the greatest strides in constructing more equitable student spaces in which students are able and encouraged to pursue the activities that ignite their interests.
For all of the incredible resources that Middlebury presents us here in Vermont, leaving campus to pursue one’s interests still holds tremendous value for students. Traveling with clubs allows students access to a wealth of illuminating events such as conventions visited by J Street U, games against opponents that push athletes’ boundaries or debate competitions in nearby cities. These experiences matter and can be just as valuable to a student’s educational experience at Middlebury as classes and club events on campus. But for students who already rely on financial aid in order to study and live here in Middlebury, these trips simply aren’t accessible.
When a club’s budget is unable to cover the cost of travel to locations far away from Middlebury, wealthier students participating in club travel often pay the cost of travel themselves. This makes many clubs elitist institutions whose benefits can only be enjoyed by those who have (or whose parents have) extra money to invest in educational experiences beyond classes and residency at Middlebury. This bill presents the SGA a valuable opportunity to curtail this elitism and allow existing organizations to make all of their activities accessible to students who are interested in participating in club activities. This bill isn’t calling for more money — it’s simply asking for existing funds within the budget to go towards financial aid for travel as opposed to funding new club sports teams.
Furthermore, students often feel trapped at Middlebury in a space that is both geographically isolated and ideologically isolating for many. Being a full-time Middlebury student is exhausting and incredibly discouraging at times. Getting away from campus, especially for pursuits as constructive and valuable as those offered by clubs, is a valuable opportunity to temporarily escape the struggles of finding one’s place here. No one student should be provided that opportunity over another purely because of their wealth or their parents’ wealth.
We acknowledge that both bills are fighting for student equity and equal opportunity on campus. The bill proposing the removal of the budget cap for new club sports teams would no doubt provide increased opportunity to students looking to pursue their interests outside of the classroom. However, the financial aid bill more directly addresses a pressing situation that needs to be addressed: There are many, many spheres at Middlebury in which disparities in opportunity provided to students based specifically on class needs to be evaluated. These range from participation in secret frat activities to Atwater parties to sports formals that require fancy clothing. Club activities constitute one of these spheres, and the bill that was presented on March 11 presents a more-than-feasible solution that would have significant benefit for students who are presently prevented from joining in club activities because of their financial standing.
(03/08/18 12:00am)
This September, the Middlebury College Bookstore announced that all textbook sales would take place online rather than through the on-campus bookstore. Beginning in the spring 2018 semester, textbooks were to become available for sale through the MBS online platform.
In order to quell anxieties which arose around the new system, the store assured students that they would retain the ability to use their financial aid, and that the turn-around for book orders would be approximately two to three days. This last piece is crucial for students who, at the start of the semester, find themselves still shopping for classes, much less books.
While this shift was initially championed in the name of convenience for students, the first few weeks of this spring semester under the new system have disproved any such claims.
To begin with, nowhere in a college-wide email did the bookstore actually announce that there would no longer be physical textbooks available for purchase. Middlebury’s own website claimed that “During the summer [2018] session, the campus bookstores will not be carrying any textbooks.” This resulted in high levels of stress at the semester’s start, an already trying adjustment for students.
Further, gone is any pretence of two to three day shipping; books ordered through MBS Direct take as many as 10 days to arrive, eating up crucial class time. While there are faster options, such as Amazon and other online outlets, these can be increasingly expensive.
The new system also creates challenges for students navigating the add/drop period. As anyone who has taken a class at the college can attest, Middlebury’s add/drop period is vital for those attempting to construct their schedules at the beginning of each semester. The online bookstore has proved an enormous obstacle to what must remain a flexible process, as books are no longer immediately available for purchase. As a result, students are forced to gamble — either order books in advance for classes to which they have not yet committed, or wait until their schedule has solidified and endure the subsequent shipping period.
The reality is that even if students order their books on day one, classes move too fast for 10-day shipping — the cheapest option — and this makes it harder for a student to join a class a few days late, even if there is room for them.
In addition, a complicated return policy makes it harder for students to drop a class.
“Having already ordered the textbook played a huge role in my deciding to stick with Intro to Modern Logic this semester,” says Ellie Eberlee ’20, an opinion editor. “I’d already paid $171 for it and had no ability to return it for free.” Not only is this incredibly restraining, but it is wrong, as the logistics of obtaining required materials should play no part in students’ course decisions.
Some students have even refrained from buying books as a result of the new system. They claim to be ordering books they think they need versus all of the required texts, and then finding PDF versions of the text online.
“The system change this year made it seem like such a hassle, and I found a slightly older version so easily online,” says Jordana Solomon ’20. “It seemed silly to spend more money and time on a new book I would never use again.” The majority of students, however, look to buy from outside sources.
“They used the same system at my high school, so I’m used to it,” says Eve Labalme ’20. She shrugs. “I just ordered my books on Amazon for half the price.”
Amazon offers free two-day shipping for students, as well as a variety of used and reduced prices. What does it say when a global corporation can more adequately cater to students’ needs than the college itself? As a result, the mail center staff has been overworked, and lines to pick up packages have become noticeably longer. This is a clear signal that the new system is irredeemably inconvenient; the college should aim to provide the simplest and most direct route to course materials.
At its core, the new system makes a number of socioeconomic assumptions. First, it assumes that all students are paying (or have the ability to pay) for books using a credit or debit card. Second, it gives priority to students who have the means to pay for expedited shipping. Those for whom the extra fee is one sum too many are left sitting in class at the the start of semester, panicking for lack of access to required materials and wondering why their situation does not appear to be a concern for the college.
While the library offers a cost-free alternative, most courses only put a single textbook on reserve. In classes with up to 35 students, this is nowhere near sufficient. The library’s lack of on-reserve texts may have been a pre-existing problem, but the shift to virtual book shopping (temporary or otherwise) has foregrounded the issue.
The obvious solution? Bring the books back. The physical bookstore may not have been perfect, but problems associated with the new system far outnumber the old ones. An on-campus bookstore with a full stock of the texts the required by the college is not an unreasonable request.
In returning to the physical bookstore, students and staff could work together in order to streamline the process and strike a realistic compromise that is both economically feasible and convenient. Barring that, a more functional system involves increased communication between the bookstore and professors. If a professor is teaching a class they’ve taught for the past several years, perhaps they could upload or share their syllabus more than a few weeks in advance.
Some students have to borrow money or budget, processes that take more than a few weeks. This would help with lowering costs (students can buy a book for less if it means they can save more on shipping) and add a buffer zone for incorrect texts or editions. Professors also could refrain from asking students to buy books when they plan on assigning only a few chapters for reading; photocopying is an effective alternative.
Outside of the college, there are ways to reduce the burden on Middlebury’s bookstore. Professors could send their syllabi to bookstores in town; not only would the college be supporting local businesses, but this would open another relatively immediate avenue for students to purchase books.
Additionally, students or the college could facilitate the “selling forward” of books from student to student, a practice which currently takes place largely through “Free and For Sale,” a student Facebook group. Members of the town could participate, as they often audit classes or else own old copies of books required for literature classes. Retired professors could also use this platform to get rid of books they have collected over the years.
Beyond logistics, we believe there is immense value in having physical books in a bookstore. How are we, as students, supposed to read this latest move on the part of the college? Our college campus no longer includes a functioning bookstore. Instead, we have more shelf space for a fifth iteration of the Middlebury-brand water bottle.
That seems like an apt metaphor for the college’s priorities, which appear more in line with running a profitable business than an institute of higher learning — otherwise they would do everything in their power to make required texts as accessible as possible. If there is one place a school can afford to lose money, it is on books.
(03/01/18 12:02am)
High school students across the United States have participated in organized protests against elected politicians who have not worked to enact gun control legislation in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. Students who survived the shooting have admirably led the charge in calling their generation to action, using social media to organize marches, demonstrations, protests and walkouts of high school classes.
Many high school students who have already participated in walkouts and protests have been punished by their high schools for missing class, as CNN has reported. In response to the discipline faced by protestors, various colleges and universities across the country have assured prospective students that discipline inflicted upon them by their schools as punishment for participation in peaceful protests will not affect their chances of admission. Brown University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and others all posted such statements to Twitter in the days following the shooting. On Monday, Middlebury followed suit, publishing its own statement on its admissions website.
Each statement varied in tone and style. Most notably, the posts referenced school shootings, gun control, free speech and protest in different ways. For example, Brown assured students that “peaceful, responsible protests against gun violence will not negatively impact decisions of admission to Brown.” Bucknell, however, tweeted that students who “receive disciplinary action due to participation in peaceful protests” would see no impact on their admissions decisions, omitting mention of gun control.
Middlebury’s statement places itself between the two sides, but in a vaguer category. It claims to respect free-speech rights of students and student applicants, including the right to engage in peaceful protest and civil disobedience. Ending its statement by addressing student applicants, the announcement guarantees that the admissions committee will consider situations with the belief that students are active citizens with political rights and obligations. The statement explicitly says this is true without regard to any specific political or social issue.
As a board, we believe deeply in the value of demonstration as a fundamental method for affecting change on college campuses and beyond, and we stand with the high school students across the country who have bravely chosen to strive for this change in their communities through protest. We have continually voiced our belief in demonstration since the protests against Charles Murray last February ignited a national debate about the limits of students’ right to demonstrate.
In response to Middlebury’s statement, this board would like to offer thoughts to the conversation. To be clear, we are in no way supporting or denouncing the statement. Rather, the board would like to use this opportunity to offer ideas that encourage people to question their definitions and beliefs regarding forms of protest and treatment of protesters.
While the college officially published this statement, we hope that it continues to apply to students in the future as we continue to work through this time of political and social tension. While this step can serve as an expression of support for young Americans navigating the debate over gun control, it should ultimately be implemented as a broader means of acknowledging how essential open, non-violent demonstration is as a fundamental right of students in America.
This policy should apply both to students protesting for gun control in the wake of the Parkland shooting and to those engaged in non-violent, non-hateful demonstration for other causes, now and in the future. From this, we should expand our definition of violence. It should include not only physical violence, but discriminatory abuse, structural violence and institutional violence — to name a few.
We also invite people to question what people mean when they say “peaceful.” Is a protest only not peaceful when it is inconvenient for someone? When do the ideas become too radical, and therefore deemed “non-peaceful”? For example, Middlebury administrators have looser restrictions with how to respond to student protests that do not publicly undermine its authority as an institution.
The Charles Murray protests are an example of a student-led movement to reject complicity. We must protect form above content of protests to ensure that future student protestors at Middlebury are not disciplined more harshly for protesting an issue with which the college administration does not agree.
We should also look to this institution’s history when considering the novelty (or lack thereof) of the issue of students’ rights to protest. According to “A People’s History of Middlebury,” most of the student body went on strike in November 1879 in support of a fellow student who accrued over 50 demerits as a response to his irresponsible antics against the demerit system introduced the year before. The result was a decision to suspend every student who protested. Soon after, negotiations continued and all punishments were rescinded, except for those of the student behind the reason for the protest.
Charles Murray showed that Middlebury was more willing to denounce those standing up for what they believed to be violent — whether the methods can be agreed upon or not — than to take the opportunity to be clearer on what we will and will not allow in our community.
History also shows how undecided the college is in how they treat protesters. This reality should be considered with how we respond to the college’s statement concerning “peaceful protest and civil disobedience.” Does the college support civil disobedience as long as it doesn’t expose the fractures in the institution’s foundation? Is the protest peaceful until those in charge feel like their authority is attacked?
The debate over students’ right to demonstrate, so closely tied to the national debate over freedom of expression on college campuses, has been a pertinent topic on this campus for longer period than most of us are aware. The college administration has repeatedly voiced its belief in free speech as essential to intellectual freedom, going further to connect that freedom with the freedom to protest in its most recent statement. In this era of political activism, moving forward has to come at some cost.That includes the risk that in making a brave announcement, Middlebury’s institution may assume some risk.
We hope that administrators will consider actions such as these as central to the mission of the college, rejecting the fear of risk that bolder actions may produce. This moment provides Middlebury with a valuable opportunity to confront our values — especially when they differ — and acknowledge the struggles of future students by validating their right to exercise their freedom to protest.
(02/22/18 2:31am)
Last Wednesday, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz entered Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and shot and killed 17 people. Many of us were devastated. When innocent people (to say nothing of children) lose their lives, we are compelled to hold loved ones close and consider who we are and what we value.
On learning of the events in Parkland, few of us were shocked. This latest school shooting comes in the wake of a litany of others over the past several years. Our generation has grown up all-too-familiar with horrors like these, and as the headlines continue to accumulate we do not merely grow more and more hopeless, but we are left increasingly disheartened by the lack of action on the part of elected officials.
The response to tragedies such as these has become ritualized. We read the article, we like the Facebook status. For those of us lucky enough not to be personally affected, we do our best to move on. This is a tragedy in and of itself. Violence on this scale should not and cannot be normalized.
The current generation of young people has barely known a world without mass shootings. We practiced active shooter drills and rehearsed lockdowns alongside the alphabet, before we were old enough to differentiate between which was normal and which was not. Children should not grow up in a society that forces them to think devastation like this is inevitable.
Many are not hopeful that the school shooting in Parkland will be the last, fearing instead that this cycle will continue. Many of the survivors have taken to social media themselves, calling for the government to take steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again. And this is at a time when ordinarily they should be worrying only about the pressures of high school. There is a note of hope in this: Perhaps our generation will fill the void left by passive politicians who are too afraid to take any bold political action, who offer nothing more than “thoughts and prayers.”
We have grown up in a world that is reactionary, not proactive, in the face of such violence. As the last few days have proven, 17- and 18-year-olds are taking this issue more seriously than adults. They see how this country feigned outrage once again without working toward a solution. They read about certain members of Congress receiving substantial donations from the NRA.
What it increasingly comes down to is whether you value the lives of schoolchildren over people’s claims to military-style weapons — and this board does, without question. If these tragedies are the manifestation of the gun rights advocates’ ardent protection of the people’s right to bear arms, we will not stand it. The ubiquity of mass murder must end.
Legislators should start by banning the AR-15, which happens to be America’s most popular rifle, according to NPR and NRAblog.org. It is a military-inspired rifle that is designed to kill efficiently and is accurate, customizable and reliable. We saw this on display in Parkland, as it was Nikolas Cruz’s weapon of choice. Equally horrific was its role in the death of 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
According to Time Magazine, mass shooters also used AR-15s or comparable weapons — such as the SIG MCX — in shootings in Aurora, Colorado (death toll: 12); San Bernardino, California (death toll: 14); Orlando, Florida (death toll: 49) and Las Vegas, Nevada (death toll: 58). Why do we value a person’s right to access these types of weapons over so many lives?
AR-15s and similar high-performance weapons were not part of the Founding Fathers’ reality when they wrote the 2nd Amendment. It is time for us to stop defending all types of arms. There are hunting rifles, and then there are AR-15s — between them are profound differences, and these differences need to be recognized in the development of gun legislation that more accurately reflects the capacities of modern weaponry. The 2nd Amendment was not created for these styles of weapons and we should not treat it as such.
Many on the left have been criticized for inserting politics into the national conversation surrounding tragedies like these. Why wouldn’t we insert politics into an issue that so desperately needs better policy? These challenges require immediate preventative action. This can only occur through aggressive and proactive policy change.
We are all well-aware of the long list of opportunities we have had to make tragedies like these less likely in the future. From organizing sit-ins to forming coalitions to promoting new legislation, citizens have been stepping in where the people elected and paid to do so haven’t.
It is time the U.S. government asserts the right of children to attend school without fear of bodily harm over the right of some to own military-style weapons. It is time that we value life over tools used increasingly to bring about death. As the social media presence of students of Stoneman Douglas High School has shown, we are the ones who have the courage to make change — something NRA-bought politicians lack.
We refuse to become numb to tragedies like these. We will tolerate them no longer.
(02/15/18 1:45am)
Transparency in the administration is an issue our board has raised numerous times over the past years, yet we still find ourselves writing the same editorial.
In the aftermath of recent discussions that have taken place in community forums and town halls, this issue has been raised again. The question we ask now is, How can administrators improve in order to make community discussions more valuable?
Many students feel that attending town halls and forums is not a worthwhile use of their time because they leave feeling more confused, angry and ill-informed than when they entered. Statistics, financial numbers and linear timelines often are skimmed over, ignored or diverted to examples of administrative successes.
There are significant opportunities for college administrators to exhibit greater transparency when discussing issues pertinent to student life and general operations of the college. Doing so would prompt a more fruitful discussion that leads to the “formation of community” that administrators have consistently called for.
We would like to acknowledge administrators who we feel could be emulated in providing students with transparent dialogue. College treasurer David Provost has provided a stellar example of administrative transparency that other administrators could aspire to when engaging in community discussions.
During a forum on Jan. 24, Provost thoroughly and transparently explained the reasons behind the September closing of college-owned restaurant 51 Main (now The Rough Cut). Instead of falsely painting 51 Main as a successful project, he told students candidly that the restaurant had been a financial disaster that had lost the college $250,000 per year.
Many feel that administrators often divert difficult or pressing questions about mistakes they have made to point out successes they have had. During the forum, Provost did the opposite when discussing issues like student diversity. He was engaging, funny and self-deprecating, answering student questions thoroughly and honestly.
Provost works with financial information that is often easier to disclose than the work of other offices such as judicial affairs, and we recognize that his candid style isn’t appropriate in every setting for community discussion. But aspects of Provost’s honest approach could still easily be translated to many other forums. If more forums are like last month’s, we gurantee more and more students will actually show up.
At the same time, this paper recognizes that complete and utter transparency is not always an attainable goal for every administrative position. The college may be legally obliged to maintain confidentiality when discussing certain topics, and is not always free to disclose details about sensitive issues that students might want to know during community discussions — for example, specific details of judicial cases, which are often bound by Title IX regulations.
The ability to disclose information in student forums depends upon the department of the given administrator engaging in discussion, the particular topic at hand, and a wealth of other factors. The Campus recognizes this fact.
Still, when these constraints around disclosure are present, administrators could provide students with thorough, transparent explanations of exactly why certain details aren’t available to the general public, as well as thorough background information that at least leaves students informed about the discussion they are engaging in.
This is another area in which Provost has excelled. During the Jan. 24 forum, he provided a wealth of background information that students found beneficial. Students who attended said they felt well informed about the topic they were discussing. Provost clearly and patiently provided background information concerning issues that gave the students the knowledge they needed to engage in a productive discussion.
This approach could be seen as a baseline for all administrators leading or engaging in challenging community discussions. When a sensitive question arises about a student engaged in a judicial process, for example, the administrator being questioned could provide as many facts as necessary and allowed. When they find themselves unable to disclose information, this point would ideally lead into an explanation of why certain information cannot be disclosed, rather than diverting the question to a discussion of administrative successes.
This open style of communication is also important because student dialogue and general gossip that circulates on campus has sometimes placed unfair blame upon administrators such as President Patton. More background and patient explanation during discussions would be a step towards remedying this.
Leaning into transparency are the first steps towards creating a community that is empathetic, supportive and committed to change. Time and time again, members of our administration have called for students to take on a role in “building community” and rebuilding a broken campus in which many of us feel isolated and alienated. It would be much easier for students to do this if they felt the respect granted through authentic, transparent conversation in student–administrator forums.
Without this transparency, students are left to draw their own conclusions, leading to false accusations and gossip. We hope this is the last editorial we have to write asking for transparency, and that we can work to fight for the future The Campus has sought to resist — one in which Middlebury dies in darkness.
(01/25/18 3:35pm)
Even though not all students spend time as part of the Residential Life staff, they all have contact with them over our four years. Whether it is putting in work orders or feeling homesick as a first-year, the Residential Life team spends hours of their time upholding the Middlebury’s values as a residential college. They are being asked to do more, but their pay and training does not reflect that.
Last year, it was announced that the position of the Commons Residential Advisor (CRA) would be replaced with the creation of the Commons Residential Director (CRD). While the name change is insignificant, the changes to what the roles entail are not. The main differences are the CRDs do not live in the First-Year dorms, they need to have a masters degree or higher, and take on a less personal role overall due to the less direct interaction they have with students. The CRDs now also did not attend Middlebury. The CRAs were described as the connective tissue, bridging the gaps between students, deans, and all of the Residential Life staff. CRDs function closer to administrators and disciplinarians. Now that this integral part of Residential Life is gone, student staff, mainly First Year Counselors (FYC) are left to fill in the gaps.
Some of the responsibilities of FYCs have grown to include increased hours on duty, more formalized rounds, fire safety checks, regular programming for their halls and dealing with any crisis their first-years are facing. While these all seem like they should be under the job description of FYCs, CRAs used to be in charge of or assisted with many of these tasks. Further, CRDs are officially supposed to handle programming, but there is no time or accountability to make this happen. Another issue that arises from CRDs not living in First-Year dorms is the FYCs are often the first responders to incidents of assault, alcohol and sexual misconduct. There is a deficit in training that makes FYCs unqualified to handle these situations. If the lack of training is not enough, Residential Life staff are also underpaid. This year, FYCs made $2,400 with an extra $200 that came after asking. This is around 58% of what they should be paid – about $4,500 – under Vermont’s minimum wage law. However, since they are classified as student leaders, there is a loophole that allows the college to pay them less. After a series of meetings this past semester, the stipend was raised to $3,150. A position on Residential Life is advertised as an employment opportunity, and for students who need to work, this is a disincentive. Even if students do not need to work on campus, they are being told to do more, but their pay and training are not reflecting the increase in tasks.
The SGA, with the help of many concerned Residential Life staff members, has proposed a bill that will attempt to address the gaps. First, the pay for the job should reflect the minimum wage law in Vermont. The college cannot ask students to do more, like have a required amount of hours, without raising how much they are paid. Also, training for Residential Life should include CPR and First Aid. FYCs are often first responders since the CRDs do not reside in the First-Year resident halls. They should not be dealing with violence, injuries and alcohol without training. Finally, a position should be created for a Senior Residential Advisor (SRA) that mirrors what used to be the role of the CRA. This position could be a recently graduated student who contracts with the college to fill in the support gaps. The SRA could also be a senior student who does this job in exchange for a lighter course load or as credit for a class. While the specifics of the role has not been communicated, living in First-Year dorms could be included.
Over winter break, there was an email sent out with an updated pay scale, but it did not address the issues in training or support. The SGA and Residential Life staff members hope this bill can attempt to address the remaining issues. The purpose of a Residential Life team is to foster and support a robust residential learning community, an important counterpart to academics, but they cannot do that without the skills or pay. We as The Campus Editorial Board propose that this bill passes. If this bill is not approved, people will be less inclined to apply and Residential Life will be in crisis.
Editor’s note: Our board includes members of Residential Life staff, past and present. We invited Kyle Wright to our editorial meeting to help us understand his legislation, and our News team met with administrators to discuss the issue. Our managing editor, Will DiGravio, played no part in the discussing, writing or editing of this editorial due to his past involvement in Residential Life negotiations.
(01/24/18 11:56pm)
As our campus entered finals period a month ago, a list, inspired by the #MeToo movement, was published on Facebook. This list cited many male students, approximately 35 of them, as being complicit in gender-based violence, describing each of their behavior in parentheses next to each name. The list looked like this: “John Doe (rapist), John Doe II (sexual harassment, emotional abuse), etc.”
The Facebook list has spurred further dialogue about sexual assault, patriarchy and sexism on campus. #MeToo, among many efforts in Hollywood and other spaces to empower women to come forth and speak out against abuse they have experienced, puts the list into context.
The time is apt, and long overdue, for society, and our community specifically, to critically assess the ways we tacitly condone sexual assault and violence against women. For too long, women have suffered abuse from men and few systemic steps have been taken to name or address it.
This paper’s fall editorial, “It Happens Everywhere,” touched upon how our community needs to do more to prevent harassment and abuse done onto women. Clearly, sexual assault happens on our campus. Regardless of how we feel individually about the actions of the person who published the list, that choice highlights the broken nature of situation on campus.
Someone in our community felt compelled to compile this list of men who are allegedly guilty of sexual violence on multiple occasions, not to mention all the unnamed men. It’s also important to note that not all of the aforementioned survivors consented to having their stories shared, a fact that demonstrates yet another troubling aspect of the situation.
One common critique of the list is that the publisher did not authenticate claims because survivors who spoke out against the listed men were not named, nor was an accompanying narrative about the incident. It is unfair to ask survivors to make themselves so publically vulnerable and risk their health and safety. They do not need to reveal themselves. They did not ask for the abuse they experienced; they are not required to publicize their pain.
No doubt it was jarring for all of us to see the names of those we know on that list. As members of this community, our indignation is colored by the anecdotes of our friends and peers who say the college’s legal system has failed them.
While we understand that the legal framework (particularly Title IX) is central to the operation and responsibilities of the administration, we are frustrated by the way in which it prioritizes careful legal-speak over empathy. Issues of sexual violence are treated like legal complexities, as ambiguous gray areas, and often eclipse the actual experiences of survivors.
Though the school has advocated its judicial processes and reporting procedures, these are not for everyone. There are other roads to healing for victims of sexual violence, including Parton’s counseling center and MiddSafe. To speak of one process as the predominant form of support fails to accommodate the nuance of these situations.
The way society reproduces notions of patriarchy and bestows young boys with sexist, problematic understandings of sex and intimacy needs to be part of the framework. These same notions of patriarchy persist at the college, so the college could help students unlearn these insidious lessons through more thorough sex and consent education for first-years. Once such work is incorporated and built upon, then perhaps Middlebury can better support those who have experience sexual violence, and prevent it in the first place.
But the college’s orientation program cannot be the only place where this issue is addressed. Students have a responsibility to end rape culture on this campus. We need to set new standards for how we uphold ourselves in our interactions.
We already have such a framework for understanding microaggressions and cultural appropriation. Many of us come to Middlebury without a sufficient understanding of these issues, but we quickly learn what actions or statements are offensive. Calling out these instances is a part of our campus culture. Indeed, we students have the collective power to establish norms and to hold each other accountable when they are broken.
Much of the dialogue surrounding the list has been raw, in part because it affected, directly or indirectly, so many people on this campus. As we decide where to go from here, our campus should move forward with nuance and intentionality. Let’s believe and listen to women, acknowledge when and how we’re complicit, and work hard to bring justice to this issue.
(01/17/18 11:13pm)
Each year the Queen of England opens Parliament with a speech from the throne outlining her government’s legislative agenda. In similar fashion, President Trump will give a State of the Union address on Jan. 30, presenting his vision for the United States. These state speeches offer a model for Middlebury to function more like a cohesive institution: a yearly “state of the college” address given by the president during J-term.
January is a reflective period at Middlebury, sandwiched in between two semesters. The president’s office has already organized several campus-wide events this month that offer space for discussion. An annual presidential address would round it off, serving as a natural step toward achieving this administration’s own goal of achieving “rhetorical openness,” outlined in a document called “Envisioning a Rhetoric That Binds Us.”
The idea is not new among academia, either: Cornell, Texas and Virginia Tech all have yearly state of the university addresses given by their presidents. Smaller schools like Oberlin and Lafayette also have them, and arguably benefit more from them because of their tight-knit nature. Middlebury would be wise to follow these schools’ lead.
The past year has been turbulent for the campus. Since Charles Murray, administrative communication has been fraught. It came to a boil in the town hall in Mead Chapel last November. This event was necessary and cathartic, but it suffered from a lack of structure. The constant passing of mics left many questions unanswered.
The town hall, as messy as it was, was a positive thing for this campus, especially because it allowed students to hear directly from President Patton on a range of heated issues. This is something that our college needs.
Middlebury needs a better structure of communication in place, one that makes the administration accountable to its students and even alumni. A public address in Mead Chapel would encourage productive conversation, both qualifying and clarifying the direction of the college.
This board recognizes its own hand in placing sometimes impossible demands on President Patton. Students have asked that she stop talking and start listening, and now we’re asking her to talk. Generally, the president talks publicly when something goes wrong. But a speech built into the structure of the year would give more regularity to the president’s appearances. It would give her a chance to speak proactively on her administrations efforts improve this campus.
Like the United Kingdom or the United States, Middlebury is an institution rich in history. It could benefit from the ceremony of the presidential office. It also needs an accessible discourse on matters of college policy, from judicial processes to dining halls — one in which as many students as possible are involved, in a public forum and not in obscure committee rooms.
Public speeches with a question-and-answer session are healthy for a civil society, especially because they require an institution’s leader to outline her vision before a wide audience in plain terms. They also gives an opportunity to question and critique proposals. As we have seen with the current White House’s press briefings, the ability to present and defend decisions before a public audience is the mark of a good administration.
Further, the address would bring together all members of the institution to envision Middlebury’s future, especially alumni, who have expressed a keen interest in the state of the college in the comments section of this newspaper.
Such a speech runs the risk of descending into grand platitudes that whitewash unpleasant aspects of Middlebury. Our hope is that the president commits to discussing uncomfortable or challenging aspects of the school. It is precisely these that most direly need to be addressed.
In structuring the speech, the president would ideally make a concerted effort to address certain specific topics, not just push the communications office’s agenda. Perhaps the SGA could suggest specific topics they would like her to address. As a new campus tradition, this speech should cover issues of importance to Middlebury, much like world leaders talk about specific policies that are relevant to their nations’ debates.
This newspaper’s reporting has its limitations. Our reporters cannot read the administration’s minds. What’s more, trustee meetings are closed to reporters. A public address would give the president and administration a venue to present their voice directly to students without going through The Campus’ opinion pages — which are nevertheless always open.
To prevent the speech from becoming one-sided, a structured question-and-answer period is essential. What the town hall attempted to do was commendable, but it needs to be structured so that questions receive answers. It also cannot work unless there is mutual trust — trust that students are willing to listen, but also trust that President Patton will speak genuinely to the issues of greatest concern.
The state of the college should be discussed truthfully and openly, without spin, each year. In turn, many members of this institution will listen and ask questions as we collectively chart a new course.
(12/07/17 11:34pm)
In our last editorial for this fall semester, we think it is important to further compound our finals stress by considering some of the dangerous repercussions of the Republican tax plan, a bill passed by the House and Senate that is expected to soon become law.
The plan, touted by many Republican lawmakers as intended to benefit the working and middle classes, will in fact target some of the most vulnerable populations. According to analysis by PBS, the changes include tax hikes for those earning less than $30,000 per year, having disastrous implications for lower income families in particular.
Although the pernicious effects of this legislation are broad, affecting the tax deductibility of school supplies and student loan payments, we have chosen to focus more narrowly on the ways in which the plan targets higher education.
We recognize that much of the conversation has been too heavily slanted away from discussing the effects that the proposal would have on especially vulnerable populations, and appreciate that even having the ability to consider graduate school represents a manifestation of some relative privilege.
At the same time, we acknowledge that enrollment or completion of a graduate program does not guarantee a change in marginalization status of someone, whether that is low-income status, race or gender. Further, for some students at Middlebury, the most immediate effects do not lie in affecting their ability to go to graduate school. The tax hikes for lower income families will be more damaging than a graduate school tax.
The Republican tax plan is, simply put, an attack on systems of higher education, affecting both private and public institutions. Among its provisions, the plan would tax tuition waivers for graduate students, increasing their tax payments by thousands in most cases, by some estimations.
It would also make college and university endowments taxable. We encourage readers to visit an article by news editor Nick Garber, “College Officials Voice Opposition to GOP Tax Bills,” which discusses the proposed endowment and student loan interest tax — with its approval meaning 12 or 13 students could not receive financial aid.
We encourage Middlebury College to make an official statement opposing the bill — especially in the midst of current efforts to support marginalized students.
The immediate effects of the plan are astounding, but its long-term implications are even more bleak. The plan would make elite institutions such as ours even more inaccessible to people of lower incomes. A person of more affluent means will always be able to go to graduate school, just in the way that wealthy institutions like Harvard will always find the resources they need for their graduate schools to thrive.
The real concern here, the people and places being most profoundly hurt by this plan, are those with fewer financial resources — the students and institutions with less private funding. Although those who support this bill may take issue with how liberal many academic institutions have become, those are not the ones which will be most profoundly affected by the plan. The plan would make elitist institutions like ours even more inaccessible to those with less financial stability.
For more vulnerable students, modifications like taxing tuition waivers can be the difference between going to graduate school and pursuing employment after graduation. These are decisions that should not have to be influenced by finances. Regardless of income, all students should have the opportunity to pursue a more advanced degree, should they so choose. Limiting the access to higher education only further inhibits social mobility and suppresses the lower and middle classes in our already oppressive economic systems.
Beyond the independent implications of the plan, there are the broader concerns for our nation’s ability to compete in global economies. Disincentivizing people from pursuing higher education will set us back globally. As Inside Higher Ed reported, more than 50 percent of those studying in STEM fields in graduate schools in the United States are from other countries; at some universities, the number is around 80 percent.
Many of those students will leave our country (especially with the encouragement of our prohibitive federal immigration system), bringing their skills and knowledge elsewhere, in place of keeping that skilled labor here.
For those of us facing already daunting decisions after graduation, the Republican tax plan only adds to those worries. The general uncertainty we already manage will be compounded by the Republican tax plan’s attack on higher education.
For many, the effects of the plan will be an inconvenience. For others, it may radically shift the options available to them for their futures. In a world that should be dedicated to expanding access to education for all, this plan works against an admirable mission under the false claim of benefitting the middle class.
(11/29/17 11:46pm)
We’re living in a powerful moment if you have been affected by gender-based violence or know someone who has — so, everybody.
Since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first exposed film director Harvey Weinstein, 35 men and counting have been accused of sexual misconduct. Emboldened by the #MeToo movement, many women have taken to social media to share their own experiences. Some claimed to be “shocked” and “surprised” by the prevalence of sexual violence. But victims are not surprised, and perpetrators are not naive.
The extensive research of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network reveals that every 98 seconds, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. That amounts to more than 570 people a day. The Bureau of Justice reports that this violence is not limited to the private sphere; every day, about 50 people are sexually assaulted or raped in their workplace. Poor, POC or LGBTQIA folks are most vulnerable to this kind of abuse.
Weekly Reveal Journalist Bernice Yeung writes, “It’s a problem that affects people in all types of work, extending beyond film, media and politics to the women who clean hotel rooms, tidy office buildings at night or pick vegetables.”
Sexual violence happens all the time — and, depending on the identity of the victim or the perpetrator, it often isn’t acknowledged by mainstream media outlets.
Sexual violence is undoubtedly part of U.S. culture; it is part of our patriarchal, political heritage. From Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, you can be an accused-sexual assaulter and become president in this country.
Yet, we’re still taught to think of rapists and gender-based abusers as “other,” as abstractions. They are nameless, faceless “bad guys.” But they have names; they have faces. To appropriate the title of a brave and important Middlebury program, “It Happens Here.”
The National Institute of Justice reports that “85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults reported by college women are perpetrated by someone known to the victim; about half occur on a date.” Queer folks are even more vulnerable. Here are some alarming statistics from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey survey and the Human Rights Campaign.
Forty-four percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women.
Twenty-six percent of gay men and 37 percent of bisexual men experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 29 percent of heterosexual men.
Among transgender racial minorities, 24 percent of transgender Native Americans, 18 percent of transgender people who identified as multiracial, 17 percent of transgender Asians, and 15 percent of black transgender respondents experienced sexual assault in K-12 education settings – much higher rates than students of other races. Transgender women respondents experienced sexual assault more often than their transgender male peers.
Bernice Yeung said it well: “At the heart of any sexual harassment accusation is the abuse of power. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had movie roles to offer. Reporter Glenn Thrush of The New York Times could help young journalists get in front of a top editor. Congressman John Conyers could open doors to a high-powered political career… [And] immigrant women from the working class... face the same kind of power imbalance as the women coming forward today, except the exploitation plays out differently. Their bosses aren’t famous but they still have real influence on the people who work for them. These supervisors can hire and fire, mete out extra hours or take them away. For women living paycheck to paycheck, that’s a significant kind of power to wield.”
We see this power dynamic play out at Middlebury between men and women, straight and queer folks, and upperclassmen and underclassmen. Inappropriate behavior, rooted in struggles of gender and power, happens all the time in our community. We see it when first-years are invited to senior sports team suites in Atwater; the senior men have all the control. We see it when the credibility of student survivors is questioned.
The onus is partially on our institutions. We commend “It Happens Here” and MiddSafe for their admirable work. Green Dot’s current form is a good start too, but we can do more to act preemptively and support women. We suggest more thorough Green Dot training for first years and sports teams.
Moreover, a more effective judicial system is in need for addressing perpetrators. We also call on the CCI to develop further resources for students on how to handle sexual harassment in the workplace. When students graduate they ought to be prepared for employers who try to use their power to take advantage of their employees.
Ultimately, this matter comes down to individuals and it is their responsibility to make a difference. Sexual and gender-based violence is inappropriate — period. To those who seek to trivialize the threat of sexual and gender-based violence: shame on you. Reread the statistics. If you haven’t experienced sexual or gender-based violence, listen to the people, especially women, who have. Their stories are the ones that matter most.
Perpetrators are beginning to be held accountable in a way they weren’t before and that is noteworthy progress. But even if someone hasn’t been indicted in the narrow legal sense — especially via the myopic system on college campuses — that doesn’t mean the perpetrator’s actions weren’t egregious.
There are many reasons why students choose not to report, from revictimization by an exhausting judicial process to concrete threats from perpetrators, whose status and power protects them.
As The New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes, “For most women, the perpetrator is not a Hollywood executive, or a sitting senator or an esteemed journalist. For most, there will be no press conferences if they come forward. There will be no celebrity attorney to sit at their sides and stroke their hands. There will be no morning news shows to praise their courage. For most, the decision to speak up will still feel fraught and without sufficient benefit to outweigh the possibility of negative repercussions.”
If you have behaved in a way that has facilitated sexual or gender-based violence, directly or indirectly, you need to change. Bystanders need to be held accountable too because they are complicit when they remain silent. We all need to be intentional about fighting gender-based violence.
Next time, be the difference between a good night and nightmare. Check your friends and check yourself. Risk losing social capital in order to prevent someone from trauma, and contemplate why holding back is considered “cool.” Junior and senior men, think about your power in spaces and your social capital on a Saturday night. Athletes, leave aggression and force on the field because that has no place in consent culture.
As Blow puts it, “We have to focus on the fact that jokes that objectify women are not funny. And we have to focus on the fact that society itself has incubated and nourished a dangerous idea that almost unbridled male aggression is not only a component of male sexuality, it is the most prized part of it. We say to boys, be aggressive. We say to our girls, be cautious. Boys will be boys and girls will be victims… [People] are not responsible for men’s bad behavior. The idea that horny men can’t control themselves is a lie!”
As one of our editors so aptly put it: Believe it or not, you are accountable for your actions — for the pain you do or do not cause. So act consensually, defend consent culture and, most importantly, be a decent human being.
(11/16/17 12:52am)
Last Thursday, Nov. 9, hundreds of members of the Middlebury community gathered in Mead Chapel for a town hall meeting. The event was originally planned by Women of Color and the Black Student Union with support from SGA and was subsequently co-opted by the administration, who claimed it had been already planned. While it was presented as a “community conversation,” it was more of a Q&A for students who wanted answers from the administration.
The unstructured nature of the forum allowed for administrators to dodge questions posed by students. Instead of one answer for one question, the microphone was passed around among students. Every few questions, an administrator would answer selectively. This was in part from the stream of questions and the inability to answer due to legal reasons. Either way, there was common theme of answering the least inflammatory part of questions posed. (Please look to the News section of this paper for a selected transcription of the event.)
The town hall meeting was an example of students’ qualms with administration coming to fruition — the primary issue in question being defensiveness. While the event was intended to be a conversation, flyers handed out listed the accomplishments of the administration. In an event framed to have a primary goal of listening, we find it specious to bring a planned response and hand out a rap sheet at the door. If there was in fact transparency, there would be no need to set up a line of defense before the conversation began.
Administrators’ primary response to stories shared and questions asked were to express how hurt they were, rather than asking why students felt that way or how they reached conclusions. This response stopped the conversation, making it about administrators’ feelings, rather than the issue that presumably brought us all there.
This town hall meeting clearly demonstrated the need for more transparency on the part of administrators. One of the most common responses from administration was, “we’re working on it, but we can’t share.” This frustrates us as students, deterring us from working to move forward because we don’t know how much progress is being made.
The need for transparency is not new; students have been asking for it long before the Charles Murray fiasco. We understand there are some questions that cannot be answered due to legal reasons. At the same time, leaving us in the dark forces students to make uninformed demands or actions that could be more complete if there was a better understanding of situations. Students should not have to visit deep corners of the Middlebury website or come to town halls to ascertain how the school is improving.
The administration also needs to match the vulnerability of the students who share their stories. At the meeting, speakers noted that this issue goes beyond what happened to Addis Fouche-Channer. Many students have been vulnerable in public and private arenas, without much resolve from the administration. Administrators say they appreciate the vulnerability of students who routinely share their stories, but fail to give them the same courtesy.
These “community conversations” then become spaces where students retelling stories of hardship and silence are met with sighs and shaking heads. This is not to say administrators need to match students’ stories with their own, but preplanned answers to complex questions are certainly not the answer.
While the town hall brought light to issues students have been talking about for years, it did not leave its attendees with a concrete understanding of where to go. If anything, it was cathartic and allowed students to give an uncensored and unobstructed message to the administration. But the work is not done there, especially since the administration is notorious for listening to students share their thoughts and stories without doing anything to follow it, other than make a committee.
Other than a need for increased vulnerability and transparency on the part of administration, we have suggestions for moving forward.
Administrators should not look to students to do their jobs. Students have done the work to provide frustrations, reasons and ideas to the administration on multiple occasions. The task is now to listen. If students are not presenting reasonable ideas, tell them. If there is information that would make students’ ideas better, tell them.
Marginalized groups are putting down effort and showing why they’re uncomfortable, often with no return. Further, all members of the community should be informed of the feelings and sentiments that students at the town hall shared. We cannot move forward if some of us are ignorant of the problems a significant amount of our community face.
Whether we encourage cultural sensitivity training beyond the first year or invite students to bias training for faculty and staff, we need to all come to this conversation. We all need to continue to come because the work is not done. Instead of asking why people are sharing “negative” stories, ask why the stories exist. Ask what you can do to decrease the amount of stories or care for those who have been affected by oppression.
Everyone can see the administration is trying. We cannot call on the administration to fix racism. We can call on them to make concrete steps to combat institutional racism here, now, at Middlebury College. This is a difficult ask but not an unrealistic one, considering this is the work for which administrators are paid.
Students are paying and going into debt to be here. It is not the job of marginalized, or really any, students to fix the problems they did not cause. We’ve seen plenty of disingenuous promises and productive discourse; now let’s make some concrete plans.