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(03/14/19 9:59am)
Every weekday shortly after noon, students fill the Redfield Proctor dining room and sit down at one of more than a dozen different Language Tables for a served meal with professors and TAs. At each table, everyone including the student waiter that serves it, speaks only the designated language. The idea is straightforward — to provide students learning the foreign language a space to practice.
With more than 60 years of history, the student-run facility is now looking to extend its reach. On Mar. 4, students and faculty member of the computer science department sat down at the pilot Tech Table.
“We would like to extend this platform to non-language majors and would like to provide spaces for what Language Tables value and love, which are languages but also passion toward their learning subjects, the celebration of diverse cultures and inclusive platform for community engagements,” reads the Language Table’s official instagram account on the day.
Subin Cho ’19 and Stephen Chen ’19.5, Language Table managers for the academic year, shared that the idea of a Tech Table came partially from the fact that their technology manager, a computer science major, had not attended a Language Table yet.
The managers invited six students and one faculty member to the very first English-speaking academic table.
“Unlike the normal language tables, the focus of the table was not an improvement of a language (we didn’t speak in a computer language if you’re wondering),” one of the attendants Takao Shimizu ’20 said, adding that the conversation topics ranged from internship experiences and academic decisions.
“I’d love to see non-language language tables to continue because they would facilitate communications and build communities within departments,” Shimizu said. He also noted that because the Tech Table was open to non-majors and minors, undeclared first-years and sophomores could use the opportunity to explore the department and connect with each other.
Being from Germany, Professor of Computer Science Daniel Scharstein used to go to the German Table sometimes, and said that the Tech Table was successful.
“I think it’s a good idea,” he said. “And if they do one table like that for different departments — it doesn’t have to be tech, I don’t think there was anything special about it being a tech table — but if they have other things in addition to the languages, it’s a nice form that you don’t usually have.”
One of the main realizations that the managers had was that there is a lack of space for students to talk to professors in a non-academic setting. While the Language Tables have been providing students that for decades, Chen said that the the language-learning community represents a small fraction of the academic community, and the students who come to the Language Tables only comprise about 10 percent of the student body.
“So how do we expand that?” Chen said. “How do we open up the space where people can do that?”
Both Chen and Cho started working as Language Table waiters in the fall of 2016. Cho sees the Language Table as a particularly global and international space not only because of the diversity of languages represented, but also because of the way student attendees and student waiters bring encouragement to each other.
“What we deliver is not only the food, but also the spirit and the sense of language community,” Cho said, explaining that the same sense of community applied to the Tech Table, even though they are speaking English.
At the same time, Chen brought up that there has been some concerns over English-speaking tables at a space that’s otherwise solely dedicated to foreign language learning. Similarly, Scharstein said that English-speaking tables should probably be a small component of the initiative.
There are 15 different languages at the Language Tables, some of which are offered only seasonally, including Korean, Cantonese, Swahili, Vietnamese and ASL. While the food is prepared by Proctor Dining Hall, the entire process from recruiting student waiters to arranging daily attendance is completely organized by students.
“I’m just completely amazed that the whole thing is student-run,” Scharstein said.
The Vietnamese Table was a new addition to the Language Tables this spring term. Following the founding of Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) this year, Nathan Lam Nguyen ’19 reached out to the Language Table managers about having a table for the Vietnamese community on campus. Now every Friday, Nguyen serves as the Vietnamese waiter for the table.
“You don’t really need 20 students to set up a table,” Cho said. “As long as there are some regular attendants or there are some demand of setting up a table, you can ask us and come to us; be like ‘open up a table.’”
“There’s enough Vietnamese students on campus for us to be able to probably have a table going,” Nguyen said, explaining that he knows personally at least nine new Vietnamese first-years.
Consisting of 55 students serving tables of different languages, the work environment is a unique one in that student workers get to use a foreign language.
“It’s a very interesting space just because everyone here speaks at least two languages, and more likely than not they probably speak three, maybe four,” Chen said. “Meeting so many people who will go abroad, or have gone abroad or are from abroad really creates this interesting community within the workplace.”
The next pilot table in planning is the Japanese Heritage Table, which will take place on Mar. 18. According to the managers, new tables in the future could be either academic and cultural oriented. “The focal point of the pilot tables is to give the space to those people that are unrepresented,” Cho said.
(01/24/19 10:59am)
The Department of Economics is recruiting for three faculty positions, and its coordinator Amy Holbrook has barely been able to leave her office since the start of J-term due to the amount of work she has. Holbrook is helping to bring in nine candidates in three weeks and has to organize all their travel logistics and schedules on campus, a process that she described as “fast and furious.”
“I haven’t left my office for the past two weeks, even to get lunch,” Holbrook said. “My faculty have been bringing me food and drinks.”
Scrolling down her packed email inbox, Holbrook explained that recruiting new faculty marks the busiest time of her year and is probably one of the most important parts of her job. She has been working as academic coordinator for the department since 1997, and her job responsibilities range from working on course catalogues to helping students declare their majors.
While there are more than 100 senior Economics majors graduating every year, the academic departments and programs vary greatly in size — and so do the job responsibilities of each coordinator.
“I don’t think that you could just say, ‘This is your job description, now only do those things,’ because that’s not really what this job is,” said Michaela Davico, coordinator for the Dance department and History of Art and Architecture. “You always have to be a little bit flexible to do what comes your way.”
The flexibility is part of what drew Megan Curran, coordinator for the architectural studies and studio art programs, to the job in the first place in 2015. She said that the flexible hours have been beneficial for her family and work life.
“I have a very good relationship with my faculty, where I can have conversations with them about what they are allowed to ask of me and what they are not,” Curran said, adding that a lack of such communication for other coordinators, who have been at times asked to perform jobs outside their responsibilities, such as physical tasks, and that there are some coordinators who might not feel comfortable doing the same.
“I TEACH THEM HOW TO DO THEIR JOBS”
Holbrook said that her faculty members are extremely supportive. “I consider them family at this point,” she said. “But I don’t do their jobs for them, and I want that made very clear. I teach them how to do their jobs so I can do mine.”
This past fall has been especially intense for Curran. Besides the faculty recruitment and the normal academic workflow of the entire year that makes fall the busiest, she said that the ongoing workforce planning process became another source of stress.
Throughout the past semester, the group of more than 20 academic coordinators have been having multiple meetings with Dean of Curriculum Susan Gurland.
“[Gurland] has been providing us with information that she’s been given, and she’s been very open and honest with the conversations that we’ve been having regarding the workforce planning,” Curran said, explaining that the meetings initially “had this very intense environment” because a lot was unknown.
The academic coordinators were notified of the workforce planning situation last July, and expect steps will be taken in March or April. Judy Olinick, coordinator for the Japanese, German and Russian departments, said that it has been a difficult wait.
“It’s very hard to tell what’s going to happen,” Olinick said. “It’s really disturbing to people, to the staff, to have to go through this whole year and go through Christmas and New Year and not be sure they are going to have their jobs in July.”
According to Olinick, it is a consensus among coordinators that the structure of their jobs should essentially stay unchanged, with each department and program being identified with one specific coordinator.
“The departments are unique in how they function,” Holbrook said. “And you really need to have a coordinator for each individual department, because they know specific details that are important to the efficiency of running that department.”
“OH HONEY, I CAN’T”
Davico, who started working for Dance and History of Art and Architecture in 2014, said it has taken her almost all of the past four years to master the learning curve of the position, because there are responsibilities that only need to be carried out once or twice each year. She has also had student workers who help with social media and other tasks.
Interaction between academic coordinators and students varies, depending on factors like the size of the department or program. As the coordinator for the largest department on campus, Holbrook hires student office associates, who usually stay on the job throughout their college careers. Political Science major Grace Vedock ’20 has been working for Holbrook since her first year, helping with data entry, filing and event planning.
Vedock has developed a close relationship with Holbrook, much like many students in and out of the department have.
“It’s really common for students walking by Warner, and just come by Amy’s office and sit down. The candy jar really draws people in,” Vedock said. “It makes sense with Economics majors, but then there’s just a bunch of Amy-fans that just know her for some reason or another.”
Holbrook used to organize Thanksgiving dinners for major students who stay on campus during the break, which gradually increased in size and ended up needing college van rentals. Students would gather in her house to enjoy a big dinner, music and games.
“I think it’s because I’m pretty much an open book — I’m honest about myself and my own life, and I think students feel comfortable around that,” Holbrook said. “I sort of humanize things, so then they open up and they share things with me. I think in the day-to-day Middlebury experience, they’re not seeing a lot of that.”
Last semester, Holbrook took an introductory French course, where she also made many friends. One of the many first-years and sophomores in the class was planning to declare a major in Economics, and asked Holbrook if she could be his advisor.
“It was so sweet. I’m like, ‘Oh honey, I can’t, but let’s walk and I’ll tell you why,’” Holbrook recalled. “After talking with him, I recommended a faculty member who he would feel comfortable with as his advisor.”
The whiteboard calendar on one of Holbrook’s office walls is decorated with magnets, photos, postcards and artifacts brought back from all over the world by students and faculty, who continue to be Holbrook’s favorite part about her job.
“I don’t think that people at Middlebury, staff especially, get recognized for how integral they are in the running of Middlebury College,” she said. “Everyone is intertwined here. Everyone is connected.”
For full staff issue coverage, click here.
(11/08/18 10:57am)
Inside Kirk Alumni Center, a colorful panel on the wall includes two photos of club activities and two paragraphs outlining the evolution of social landscapes at Middlebury College, all on the background of a photo showing a group of students dissecting pig feet.
The neatly designed collage-style panel is titled “Living Together: Social Life.” At first sight, pig dissection may seem to many, including President Laurie L. Patton, more like a classroom activity.
“We heard that this is the Pre-Med Society, whose idea of fun gatherings outside the classroom is dissecting pigs,” Patton said at the exhibit opening on Oct. 26 to an amused audience. “Go, Midd.”
The panel is one of more than a dozen featured in the new exhibition “Continuity of Change: Living, Learning, and Standing Together,” an exhibit that looks at the history of the college from the student perspective. The exhibit was curated by a group of six interns of the 2018 MuseumWorks, an intensive summer internship program supervised by Jason Vrooman ’03, curator of education and academic programs of the College Museum of Art.
“[The exhibit] is Middlebury’s story told through the hearts and minds of its students, and it looks to a future where diversity and inclusivity is Middlebury,” said college archivist Danielle Rougeau, who co-supervised the project.
Throughout the eight weeks, the interns met every Monday with Rougeau to go over huge amounts of archival materials of the college’s history, from scrapbooks and photographs to student publications and official reports, attempting to understand the past, present and future of Middlebury. The team wanted to formulate a narrative that, according to intern Jessie Kuzmicki ’19, “was true and also aspirational.”
“I think we all are in agreement that Middlebury is a pretty awesome place, and I think we always strive to be positive,” Kuzmicki said at the opening. “We always try to do the right thing.”
Student activism constitutes an important element of the exhibit, with several panels dedicated to various points in time in the college’s history of student protests. One shows student protestors outside Mead Memorial Chapel after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Another explains the organized “Die-In” in Ross Dining Hall in December 2014 after Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed by police earlier that year.
The challenge to represent Middlebury’s 218 years of history in one small exhibition was always present during the curatorial process. Elizabeth Warfel ’19 said that they were “constantly bombarded with new ideas,” trying to figure out what direction the exhibit should take and what to include in it. Warfel also appreciated being able to work with not only Art History majors, but also with English and History major Kuzmicki and Theater major Sam Martin ’19.
Unlike other interns who worked on other projects at local museums or libraries, Martin worked on the exhibit full time and helped design the panels in Photoshop.
“I do a lot of work in theater and design for the stage,” Martin said. “It was really exciting to bring about what I’ve learned about visual storytelling and aesthetics of this exhibition.”
He explained that the design of the panel in a relatively free collage-style is intentionally challenging the previous exhibit on view at Kirk Center, which consisted of mostly historical black-and-white photos.
“It’s really meant to look like something students made with paint, glue and tape and just put up [by] ourselves,” said Martin. “I hope it’s empowering to the students to take control of our narrative of Middlebury and what we want it to be.”
Part of what made the exhibit possible was, according to Rougeau, the interns’ dedication to understanding Middlebury’s evolution throughout the years and to place their own experience in that context. Exploring the diverse panels, there is no doubt that this sense of continuity shines through. Elements one might find familiar include dance performances in recent years and clippings from The Campus.
At the same time, viewers are guaranteed to find something new and unknown to them in the exhibition. On the panel titled “The Women’s College,” various images and scans of documents illustrate the prevalence of gender inequality both in the past and present, the students’ struggle against that, as well as a little known attempt to build separate campuses for women and men before the administration gave up the idea in 1950.
Above a photo of The Feminist Resource Center at the Chellis House and another of student protests marching outside Ross, three headshots of women are accompanied by notes, written or printed in the 1930s, outlining their “offenses” and the punishments they received. All three had their rights for “nights out” taken away for a couple days because of misconducts like “entertaining in a classroom at the Chateau with the lights out and the door closed” or “smoking on campus.”
“It’s a wonderful view into how women are treated differently than men, the rules that dominated their lives and did not pertain to men,” Rougeau said, explaining that these particular materials came out of what she called “miscellaneous historic topics” consisting of important stories that do not necessarily fit into the archive’s record groups.
The exhibit initially stemmed out of conversations between the MuseumWorks program, the Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury and the president’s office to redesign the Kirk Center, and bringing the college’s archives to life in the long run is a crucial part of that.
Rougeau is excited that the archive materials are becoming part of the curriculum, as there is generally an increasing awareness of the importance of going to the primary sources in the country. Yet the exhibit marks the first time where “archives is the impetus.”
Having the exhibit at Kirk Center, Rougeau said, does bring limitation to its availability, as it is an alumni center that is only open when they host events. Meanwhile, the Special Collections room in Davis Family Library is always open to interested students.
“We are open five days a week, [and] anybody is welcome to come here,” she said. “We are hoping that through curricular exposure that there will be a genuine curiosity among the students themselves to come and do their own research.”
(10/11/18 10:00am)
“A little irresponsible” is how Film and Media Culture Professor Ioana Uricaru describes her decision to move to the U.S. in 2001 to study film and television production at the University of Southern California. She did not have any friends or family in the U.S., and naively she thought the university would provide housing for her. Moreover, she did not have the money to pay for the expensive program.
Luckily, she found a room to rent online while she was still in Romania, her home country. She became friends with the landlady Tracey, who picked her up at the airport three days before school started, and stayed with her for a couple of years.
During her first year in Los Angeles, Uricaru sometimes found herself in a far from ideal situation. At some point, Tracey told her that she had to make lemonade, because “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
That is where the name of Uricaru’s debut feature film comes from. “Lemonade” centers on Mara, a 30 year-old Romanian immigrant and single mother working on a temporary visa in the U.S. who marries an American man. When she applies for a green card, things start to become difficult, and she is forced to confront various obstacles.
“I wanted to make a film about a Romanian woman who immigrates to America, because that’s what I know,” Uricaru said. “That’s what I lived through.”
When she heard the overly-optimistic American expression that seems to suggest any trouble can be turned into something positive, she was puzzled and found it “really stupid and almost offensive.”
Later, she started to realize that the idea behind the saying is one deeply rooted in American culture — the belief that one can always find a way around hardships as long as one makes the effort. Yet that may not be totally aligned with reality, as the challenges faced by Mara in the film show.
Uricaru’s own story as a filmmaker and an immigrant perhaps can be seen as one of making lemonade out of lemons. Her father is a writer, her mother teaches Romanian, and Uricaru grew up in Cluj, a city in Transylvania, in a house full of books and a love of literature and fiction. At the same time, she grew up under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Control over media is just one of the many repressive aspects of the totalitarian regime, and going to the cinema to watch movies became one of the very few things that Uricaru enjoyed and needed in order “to escape the bleakness of everyday life.”
The reality of the dictatorship also influenced Uricaru’s choice in what to study in university, and she considered the range of options to be very narrow.
“A lot of possibilities were just out of the question, because many of the humanities were not just ideologically influenced, but [also] ideologically controlled,” she said. “You couldn’t do literature, or history, or philosophy — anything like that — and have a good feeling about it.”
The sciences were what remained. For young Uricaru, going to a large city after university to work was also important. A degree in science and a potentially high-level research job in laboratories seemed to be the way to achieve success in Communist Romania, where the government would assign graduates their jobs.
Uricaru graduated from University of Bucharest in the Romanian capital with a Masters of Science in Biochemistry. The degree, however, did not land her a job in a lab. When she was still a student at the university, violent demonstrations against the totalitarian regime led to the overthrow of the government and the execution of Ceaușescu, ending the 42 years of Communist rule of Romania. What followed was a painful transition to capitalism and democracy.
“Although I was a student in biochemistry, I felt that this is the last chance that I have to maybe do something else,” she said. “So I started thinking about it, and I realized that I still wanted to do film.”
The only film school in Romania, National University of Theatre and Film, was harder to get in than one might imagine. The school would only accept about seven students each year for the directing track, and there was a rumor that only those with private ties could get in.
Despite not knowing anything about film production, Uricaru believed it was the last chance that she had to pursue her passion. She took the admissions test twice, first when she was still in her fourth year of the biochemistry program, then when she had finished her science degree.
She compared the test to the kind of reality television show in which people try to survive on an island. It was probably a little less dramatic, but there were multiple rounds of stressful competition over the course of one week that eliminated the number of applicants from 120 to seven.
“I thought … if I don’t get in the second time, then forget it, I’m just going to become a scientist,” she said. “But I did get in the second time.”
The offer was not something she could turn away, and she started her journey toward becoming a filmmaker. Later, she continued her studies at USC and paid for the tuition herself through — unexpectedly but perhaps not surprisingly — a teaching assistantship in the university’s biology department.
“So in the end, it was good that I did the degree in biology. It was useful,” she said, laughing.
It was also useful in the sense that filmmaking is as much a process of artistic creation as analytic, scientific organization. Uricaru possessed skills and experiences for both, and the duality of their combination resonates with both “Lemonade” and her identity.
“Lemonade” is a Romanian film and is mainly produced by a Romanian company, while it is also set in the U.S. and focuses on this country of immigrants, making it somewhat similar to an American indie film.
“I’m now a permanent resident, so I’m kind of an American now too. And if I ever get an American citizenship, I will keep my Romanian citizenship,” Uricaru said. “So I’m going to always be both. I like the film to also be both.”
The film depicts the struggle of balancing two identities as an immigrant in the U.S., and the events in it all came from real-life stories that Uricaru gathered through extensive interviews with young Romanian immigrants with children. They told her different stories, but all of them expressed a similar sense of “ambivalence between what they left behind and the new country.” Uricaru found that they somehow saw themselves as “the sacrificial generation,” and that they were doing everything for their children, who were either born in the U.S. or came here early on.
The immigrants she interviewed had some discoveries of their own, too. When she told them that she was looking for a little boy about eight or nine years old, who speaks Romanian to play Mara’s son character in the film, they all responded that their children could speak Romanian, which turned out to not be the case when she met the children.
“The parents lived in this kind of illusion almost, because they spoke Romanian around the house, [and] the child seemed to understand, but actually the child didn’t speak it,” Uricaru explained, adding that many parents had since told her they started to try encouraging their kids to speak the language more.
Uricaru was interested in this feeling of not fully belonging in either place and the constant self-questioning of whether the decision to emigrate was a good one. As for herself, she found it difficult to tell if that is something she still wonders about. What was more important was that she make a “very conscious effort” to spend time in Romania and do work there so that she stays in touch.
If the style of her film can be an indicator of whether or not she has stayed in touch, it seems that Uricaru has. According to media production specialist Ethan Murphy, “Lemonade” is “very much in the style of new wave Romanian [cinema].” One of the film’s producers is Cristian Mungiu, an established Romanian filmmaker whose achievements include a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.
Mungiu is among a group of new Romanian filmmakers who have been exceptionally well-received in the last 15 years.
To show me the Romanian films she considers to be masterpieces during our interview, Uricaru stood up from her office chair and reached for a few DVDs, including “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). The films have come to represent what people call “Romanian minimalism” — the idea that the individual story and detail of everyday life are emphasized, as opposed to the focus on the national and the collective under the Communist regime.
“It’s really a contagion,” she said, referring to the filmmakers who continue to produce excellent films. “So I’m very proud to be a Romanian filmmaker at this time, I think it’s great.”
In the one-hour talk with Uricaru in her office in Axinn, the fact that she is a professor dedicating a lot of of her time teaching two classes in one semester almost faded into the background.
Finne Murphy ’19 is an English major taking Uricaru’s screenwriting class, and she appreciates how hard she pushes students to make their screenplays even better. Murphy, not unlike Uricaru, grew up with a writer father.
“[My father] has a MFA in screenwriting, so my whole life he has been writing scripts. I grew up learning it, but I’ve always wanted to write fiction,” Murphy said. “But since being in this class, I kind of wish I was a Film and English double major, or that I had started this sooner.”
This is now Uricaru’s seventh year at Middlebury — producing “Lemonade” took eight. She shot the film in Canada during her year on sabbatical and completed the post-production while teaching, flying to Europe during one semester, Thanksgiving and winter breaks.
After its Canadian premiere in Montreal (where it was also shot) this week and before its Romanian premiere next week, “Lemonade” will reach Middlebury audiences as well. The film will be screened this Saturday as part of the Hirschfield International Film Series. Uricaru and Mălina Manovici, who plays the film’s protagonist, will be in attendance for discussion after each screening. The film will also be shown in Burlington on Oct. 18 at the Vermont International Film Festival.
Editor’s note: Finne Murphy is an Arts & Academics editor.
(10/04/18 9:57am)
In September 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed that the German automaker Volkswagen had installed devices in 11 million cars that cheated emissions testing, permitting their cars to emit hazardous nitrogen oxide. The reporting of Jack Ewing, Germany correspondent for the New York Times, led to Volkswagen paying a more than $20 billion settlement. Ewing’s 2017 book, “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal,” digs deeper into the corporate scandal, tracing it back to the company’s history since the Nazi era and its top-down management culture.
In a lecture on Sept. 25 organized by the college’s Environmental Studies program, Ewing discussed how Volkswagen, a corporation that prides itself in being environmentally conscious, committed massive crime and fraud.
Ewing spoke with The Campus by phone prior to the lecture about his book, lessons to be learned from the scandal and the role of journalists covering the corporate world today. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Yvette Shi (YS): When and how did you start to realize the role played by the company’s corporate culture?
Jack Ewing (JE): I had dealings with Volkswagen off and on for years, and I was already aware that it was a very kind of rigid, authoritarian type of company culture, and I knew who some of the leaders of the company were and sort of how they operated. So I think that was from the very beginning — not obvious — but I immediately had a feeling that the corporate culture certainly played a role.
And then we looked at the way the company responded to the scandal, and how close they were and how long it took them to confront it, to start investigating. And then when I started to develop sources inside the company or people that have worked at Volkswagen. At last, it just became clear pretty quickly that it was the kind of company where you couldn’t admit failure, you couldn’t say no to somebody above you and where there was not a strong moral underpinning or strong moral standard that people believe they are supposed to adhere to.
YS: Do you think that this sort of top-down culture is typical for large corporations?
JE: I think it’s certainly not uncommon. I think it exists to some degree almost in every big corporation. I think Volkswagen was the particularly extreme example, but at the same time I think it’s definitely the case that it’s something that can happen at any company. If you look at other scandals, like Enron, going back that’s been more than a decade, or Wells Fargo Bank in California, you know they were defrauding their clients on a massive scale, you always have this ingredient. The main ingredients are that you have a culture where people don’t feel they have any recourse when they are asked to do something unethical, and where you have top management setting extremely ambitious goals, and making it clear that if you fail, you are going to be fired.
So to that extent, and there’s lots of companies that operate that way, where they are constantly asking more and more employees and if you don’t deliver, your job is in danger. And that’s just an invitation for people to start to commit wrongdoing, because most people, even if they know that they can get caught in two years or five years, they’ll still try to hang on to their jobs for as long as they can.
YS: You talked about having sources inside the company. What was that process like? What were the challenges that you faced?
JE: That’s always difficult with a corporation. It’s particularly difficult with a company like Volkswagen. Volkswagen has over 300,000 employees. The first thing was to figure out the people we should concentrate on. What we did is that we found academic papers, where they have talked about their mission and technology, the engineers who have published papers in journals, and we found some papers that have names of engineers on them. Also we looked at patent registries that list the names of the people who get credit as inventors, and also helpfully their home addresses.
Then we just set about contacting those people. We did the usual thing, trying to call them a couple times, knocking on their doors — that wasn’t successful. I had the most success actually writing letters. So I would write people letters, tell them why I thought it would be in their interest to talk to me. I probably sent at least 50 [letters], and a much smaller number got back to me, but a number of people did get back to me who wanted to talk, and that was sort of the beginning where I was able to then figure out how the whole thing happened, the process with the whole illegal software being developed and then deployed over many years.
YS: What can students interested in entering the corporate world after school learn from the scandal?
JE: I think that you are going to learn a lot from the scandal. If you work in a corporation, there’s tremendous pressure to conform, people will possibly be asked to make moral compromises, and companies do not always help you to know when you are being asked to step over a line. I think that the clear message is that you have to maintain your own sense of what is right and wrong, independent of what your employer might be telling you. And if you feel that that’s being violated, you have to take action, you can’t just go along, you have to have moral courage.
I think that the people that were involved in this, a lot of them, their careers are ruined and in some cases they might go to jail. Also, a lot of them were fairly idealistic. They originally went into emissions technology because they wanted to make cleaner air, and then wound up being part of this fraud. So I think that the message is that you have to have the courage and the strength to stand up when you are being asked to do something like this.
One thing that I still find amazing is that at the very end there were a couple Volkswagen employees who went to the California regulators and said this is what’s really going on that’s wrong. But this is after they hid [the device] in cars for ten years. And the whole time, nobody went to authorities and said that there’s something really big illegal going on. Volkswagen would have been better off if they had. Everybody would have been better off. But nobody did that.
YS: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
JE: I guess the one thing that I always like to try to get across about this book is that some people think it’s a car book, and it’s not. I really tried to write it for people who don’t care about cars, don’t know about cars. My editor John Glusman, before we started working, he said: “Jack, you know, I really don’t care about cars at all.” And he doesn’t even know the difference between an automatic and a manual transmission. So he says: “You’re going to write a book that I’m gonna want to read.” So that’s really what I tried to do.
(09/27/18 10:00am)
Filmmakers Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree recalled a screening in Miami, after which a man in his seventies came up to tell them that he wished he had seen the film when he was 22 years old, and that it would have changed his life. “He went on and on,” Pingree said. “And that was really gratifying when someone says that.”
The potentially life-changing film is “The Foreigner’s Home,” directed by Brown and Pingree, a documentary that delves deep into Toni Morrison’s ideas and works through the eponymous 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. The two filmmakers’ gratification from making the film and bringing it to different places was clearly visible and transmittable during its screening last Thursday at the annual Clifford Symposium.
“The film is a call to action — to all of us, but with a special nod to the role of the artist, as a defender of our civilization and of our humanity,” Brown said.
In that sense, the film shares not only the title but also the aspirations and critical reflections of the exhibition in Paris. According to Brown, in 2006, Morrison brought in writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers from around the world “to speak to and interact with the dead artists housed in the Louvre,” centering on the conceptual construction of the foreigner and otherness.
Morrison’s son, Ford Morrison, filmed the exhibition. Years later, through mutual friend and colleague Jonathan Demme, Brown and Pingree, both faculty members at Oberlin College, were asked to look at Ford Morrison’s footage. It was firmly agreed from the start that Toni Morrison would not be in the film and that the film should be about her visions instead of her life.
The two spent three years navigating the extensive materials and bringing them to life. Pingree said that while Morrison is “riveting” in the way she talks and remains so in film, the short version consisting of only the exhibit’s footage was not satisfactory for him and Brown. Realizing that Morrison’s reappearance in the film would be indispensable, they wrote a letter to her, explaining the importance of having her on camera almost 10 years after her exhibit in Paris.
“It was at the time when Syria had exploded into war, and suddenly this massive movement of displaced people moved to the front,” Pingree said. “We saw this happening all around and thought, well, what the film really needs is for her to address now these questions 10 years later.”
Morrison agreed, and that led to the heartfelt conversations between Morrison and writer Edwidge Danticat that make up a central element of the film. We see Danticat greeting Morrison at her home and interviewing her about the 2006 exhibit, which they were both part of, as well as the pressing issues today. Throughout their dialogue, the film introduces viewers to pieces of the exhibition, including slam poets’ and rappers’ performances in front of large paintings and multiple screens installed in the gallery showing a modern dance piece.
One painting that features in the film many times is “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), an oil painting by French painter Théodore Géricault. Its large scale highlights the strong emotional effect of the moment depicted — people struggling to survive after a shipwreck — and the film shows the details of the devastated people by occasionally zooming in and out on it.
Juxtaposed with the painting is Morrison’s voice. Be it her past interview with a French radio station or her Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, her indeed captivating way of talking brings together different archival footages, ranging from groundbreaking artists’ performances from different times to more recent scenes of racial violence and inequality.
“The idea was to create the sense that Toni Morrison’s voice speaking and the import of her message is transcending time, space and media, so we are kind of soaring through the history and the world now,” Pingree said.
Brown’s animation, which both the filmmakers and audiences agreed is beautiful and moving, is another crucial element in combining Morrison’s ideas with imagery. From the very beginning, a boat packed with people in the distance moves closer to the audience against the deep navy backdrop of night sky and sea. The boat as a motif resonates with the “Medusa” painting as well as the migration crisis that has led millions of people to cross an ocean in search of a new home.
Throughout the film, the animation sequence reappears, at times in a montage with actual footages of migrants arriving by boat and getting rescued.
“That is the embodiment of the foreigner [and] ‘what is the foreigner,’” Brown said. “The foreigner is not home. The foreigner is in a vulnerable place.”
The film premiered this January at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, where the two directors began the process of planning for its distribution. Brown described some of the “hard conversations” they had to have with distributors, as not all of them were able to help fulfill the mission of the film, which is to be educational. Eventually, they signed The Video Project, which will first distribute the film to libraries, community centers and universities.
“Our primary purpose [that] was very clear and unequivocal is for it to go to schools, not just colleges like Oberlin or Middlebury, which is a pretty privileged set of people,” Pingree said. “Anyone who asks for it, we will take it to them and let them use it. … This is just the obviously correct thing to do with this film, for it to be something that people talk about.”
(09/24/18 3:16am)
In September 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed that the German automaker Volkswagen (VW) had installed devices in 11 million cars that cheated emissions testing, permitting their cars to emit hazardous nitrogen oxide. The reporting of Jack Ewing, Germany correspondent for the New York Times, led to Volkswagen paying a more than $20 billion settlement. Ewing’s 2017 book “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal” digs deeper into the corporate scandal, tracing it back to the company’s history since the Nazi era and its top-down management culture.
Ewing will discuss the topic this week in a lecture organized by the college's Environmental Studies program. His talk will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 4:30 p.m. in The Orchard, Franklin Environmental Center 103.
Last Friday, Ewing spoke with The Campus by phone about his book, lessons to be learned from the scandal and role of journalists covering the corporate world today. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Yvette Shi (YS): When and how did you start to realize the role played by the company’s corporate culture?
Jack Ewing (JE): I had dealings with Volkswagen off and on for years, and I was already aware that it was a very kind of rigid, authoritarian type of company culture, and I knew who some of the leaders of the company were and sort of how they operated. So I think that was from the very beginning — not obvious — but I immediately had a feeling that the corporate culture certainly played a role.
And then we looked at the way the company responded to the scandal, and how close they were and how long it took them to confront it, to start investigating. And then when I started to develop sources inside the company or people that have worked at Volkswagen. At last, it just became clear pretty quickly that it was the kind of company where you couldn’t admit failure, you couldn’t say no to somebody above you and where there was not a strong moral underpinning or strong moral standard that people believe they are supposed to adhere to.
YS: Do you think that this sort of top-down culture is typical for large corporations?
JE: I think it’s certainly not uncommon. I think it exists to some degree almost in every big corporation. I think Volkswagen was the particularly extreme example, but at the same time I think it’s definitely the case that it’s something that can happen at any company. If you look at other scandals, like Enron, going back that’s been more than a decade, or Wells Fargo Bank in California, you know they were defrauding their clients on a massive scale, you always have this ingredient. The main ingredients are that you have a culture where people don’t feel they have any recourse when they are asked to do something unethical, and where you have top management setting extremely ambitious goals, and making it clear that if you fail, you are going to be fired.
So to that extent, and there’s lots of companies that operate that way, where they are constantly asking more and more employees and if you don’t deliver, your job is in danger. And that’s just an invitation for people to start to commit wrongdoing, because most people, even if they know that they can get caught in two years or five years, they’ll still try to hang on to their jobs for as long as they can.
YS: How do you think this kind of culture was formed in the first place?
JE: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I can totally answer that, but it definitely came from one person. The original Beetle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche for Adolf Hitler. Many years later, his grandson, who was named Ferdinand Piëch, in the early nineties became the chief executive of Volkswagen, which at that time was at its crisis. He turned around the company, but he himself was a very authoritarian figure. Brilliant engineer, but very, very hard on people and was very out-front about the fact when people don’t deliver, he’ll fire them.
So he was the one that really created that culture beginning in the nineties, and he was the chief executive for about a decade, and then he became chairman of the supervisory board, which is technically an oversight position, where you are overseeing the operational management. But he was still very involved and still the dominant person in the company up until just a couple months before the scandal became public. So it definitely came from him. To what extent it was already there, I’m not sure I’ve totally figured that out. That’s a hard thing to pin down.
YS: You talked about having sources inside the company. What was that process like? What were the challenges that you faced?
JE: That’s always difficult with a corporation. It’s particularly difficult with a company like Volkswagen. Volkswagen has over 300,000 employees. The first thing was to figure out the people we should concentrate on. What we did is that we found academic papers, where they have talked about their mission and technology, the engineers who have published papers in journals, and we found some papers that have names of engineers on them. Also we looked at patent registries that list the names of the people who get credit as inventors, and also helpfully their home addresses.
Then we just set about contacting those people. We did the usual thing, trying to call them a couple times, knocking on their doors — that wasn’t successful. I had the most success actually writing letters. So I would write people letters, tell them why I thought it would be in their interest to talk to me. I probably sent at least 50 [letters], and a much smaller number got back to me, but a number of people did get back to me who wanted to talk, and that was sort of the beginning where I was able to then figure out how the whole thing happened, the process with the whole illegal software being developed and then deployed over many years.
I guess the other thing was the lawsuits also had a fair amount of useful information. When the lawyers started filing lawsuits, they had some access to documents that I didn’t, which they then described in the lawsuits.
YS: What do you think motivated you when you were writing the book?
JE: The short answer is just that when the story broke, it’d been only about two weeks, and then the editor of Norton Books sent me an email saying “would you be interested in doing a book.” For a journalist, the chance to write a book is always a good thing. So I said yes, and we pretty quickly worked out a deal with the help of an agent. So the short answer is: I wrote the book because they asked me to write it.
But also, it was the topic that I just found very fascinating — it has so many aspects to it and it touches so many things, environment, corporate culture, technology. It’s an interesting cast of characters, interesting legal story. So I never got bored with the subject matter, I’m not sure “enjoy” is the word because writing is always hard, but it was a satisfying story to do. I never got bored with it.
YS: What can students interested in entering the corporate world after school can learn from the scandal?
JE: I think that you are going to learn a lot from the scandal. If you work in a corporation, there’s tremendous pressure to conform, people will possibly be asked to make moral compromises, and companies do not always help you to know when you are being asked to step over a line. I think that the clear message is that you have to maintain your own sense of what is right and wrong, independent of what your employer might be telling you. And if you feel that that’s being violated, you have to take action, you can’t just go along, you have to have moral courage.
I think that the people that were involved in this, a lot of them, their careers are ruined and in some cases they might go to jail. Also, a lot of them were fairly idealistic. They originally went into emissions technology because they wanted to make cleaner air, and then wound up being part of this fraud. So I think that the message is that you have to have the courage and the strength to stand up when you are being asked to do something like this.
One thing that I still find amazing is that at the very end there were a couple Volkswagen employees who went to the California regulators and said this is what’s really going on that’s wrong. But this is after they hid [the device] in cars for ten years. And the whole time, nobody went to authorities and said that there’s something really big illegal going on. Volkswagen would have been better off if they had. Everybody would have been better off. But nobody did that.
YS: And they are also now trying to have a whistleblower program in the company.
JE: Yeah, they have to — that’s part of the settlement with the United States. The question is whether it will be effective, because they had it on but it’s been a program where you’re supposed to be able to go for complaints, but nobody trusted it. People have to believe that if they blow the whistle that they will be listened to, that there will be action taken, that they and their career will not suffer. You have to be very careful the way you set these things up, so that they really do some good. There was just this case involving Goldman Sachs where somebody went to the whistleblower, but then instead of taking action, they went to somebody on the board and the person lost their job. That’s not the kind of whistleblower program you want to have if you are really sincere about preventing wrongdoing.
YS: What challenges do you think journalists today who are trying to cover the corporate world face?
JE: Corporations are rich, so they can hire a lot of people whose job is basically to keep you from finding things out. So that’s a constant challenge, and we are pretty much at permanent war with corporate PR industry. And people are afraid to talk to reporters. It’s hard to get beyond the PR department when you are trying to find out what’s going on, and that’s always one of the biggest challenges. At Volkswagen, you can do it but it takes a lot of work.
YS: What would you say is the role that a journalist should have there?
Traditionally I think that journalists were very focused on government and what government was doing right or wrong, but these days corporations have such influence on our lives, maybe even more influence than government — if you look at Facebook, Google — just how much they know about us and how much we depend on them. It’s really, really important to hold those companies accountable that takes a lot of resources, so I think that’s just an incredibly important thing for journalists at the moment.
YS: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
I guess the one thing that I always like to try to get across about this book is that some people think it’s a car book, and it’s not. I really tried to write it for people who don’t care about cars, don’t know about cars. My editor John Glusman, before we started working, he said: “Jack, you know, I really don’t care about cars at all.” And he doesn’t even know the difference between an automatic and a manual transmission. So he says: “You’re going to write a book that I’m gonna want to read.” So that’s really what I tried to do.
I sometimes hear from people, “I don’t really want to read a car book,” and what I always try to get across to people is that it’s not a car book, it’s about people and people’s weaknesses, ethics and bigger issues than just emissions.
(05/04/17 1:32am)
In China, a country with the world’s second largest economy, women create 41 percent of the GDP. In 1990, Chinese women’s annual salary was about 80 percent of their male counterparts. Six years ago, the number became 60 percent. Simple statistics like this, regardless of the complex reasons behind them, blatantly show the unfair treatment received by women in China.
“So we are in an age of conflicts and resistance,” said Lu Pin, a leading Chinese feminist activist who gave a talk titled “Feminism in China: Women’s Bodies on the Frontline” on Thursday, April 27.
The talk was delivered by Lu in mandarin Chinese and simultaneously interpreted by Jingyi Wu ’17, one of the organizers of the event. Wu started the audience off by recalling how she “stumbled upon, by some fate, the very first of young Chinese feminist conferences” as “a young and naïve high school student,” and met Lu.
Having worked for the women’s rights movement in China for more than 20 years, Lu is the founder of “Feminist Voices,” which is “the most influential feminist media in China.” Last year, she co-founded a new organization based in the U.S. to support feminist movement back home.
Social media platforms have been Lu and her colleagues’ main battlefield for years. In 2012, their project themed “Nude Photos against Domestic Violence” came out on the internet, and featured photos of women with different levels of nudity and symbols of violence or suppression on them. Through these provocative photos, they wanted to gather support for their ongoing plan to advocate for “the legislation of the very first anti-domestic violence law” in China.
In reality, although their efforts resulted in successful legislation, Lu said that the nude photos had a very limited effect. The few photos that caught attention were taken down by the original website, and most photos simply did not attract many. “So we were quite disappointed. Why aren’t people interested in nude photos?” Lu said.
“The deeper reason is that although these photos are nude, they are not sexy. The women in them are not sexy. The type of bodies that they depict are not subject to male gaze. They are not to be fantasized [about], and they are not feminine enough.” She argued that because these depictions of “stubborn, calm and angry” women “cannot really be consumed by men,” they failed to be disseminated.
From the incident, Lu learned that when women in China’s patriarchal society try to give their own definitions of their bodies, and to challenge “the sexiness as the only rule,” the society refuses to listen to them. She emphasized the necessity of body resistance, given that women in China are suffering from oppression in the form of “bodily hardships.” “The bodies are these suppressed women’s last and sometimes only resort to resistance,” she said.
China does not seem to lack grassroots feminist initiatives, and many are creative in their ways. In 2013, Lu supported a group of Chinese female university students and their play titled “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” to advocate for women’s sexual independence. Unfortunately, in mainstream online media platforms, photos of them holding signs about “What My Vagina Says” received mostly criticism.
Linking the two similar events, Lu concluded: “For the women who cannot be used, the public wants to ignore them. And for the women who refuse to be used and directly challenge men’s sexual power, the public gives them harsh criticism.”
These incidents also shed light on the social stigmatization Chinese women are facing today, which simply expects them to carry out familial duties. In fact, Lü pointed out that China’s current chairman Xi Jinping explicitly expressed that at a news conference in 2012.
Feminists in China were astounded. For Lu, this shows something more than the state’s warning of its own feminists. “It has a deeper connotation, which is that the state, through requiring women to stabilize the family, can stabilize the whole nation,” she said.
Apparently, the Chinese government’s efforts to push back feminism have only increased in recent years. In 2015, five of Lu’s colleagues were arrested and detained for a month for organizing a protest on public transportations to call attention to sexual harassment on these very areas. According to Lu, for the state they became “troublemakers,” and their actions were “threats to stabilization and the manager of this stabilization, the state.”
Actions have become harder for Lu and her fellow activists. Nevertheless, the large number of “ordinary Chinese feminists” did not give up. “We are in an unprecedented age,” Lu said. “From 2012, I’ve witnessed how fast the Chinese feminist community is growing.”
Today, many among them are women who are highly educated and live in bigger cities. Their anger has even led to the creation of the term “straight men cancer (*=(k❊ڈ),” which has its own Wikipedia page now, as a criticism of male chauvinists and sexists in China.
Still, there are existing obstacles for the many feminist activists in China. For Lu, they tend to lack knowledge about the living conditions of the lower class people, the pervasive role played by the state in gender inequality and the ability to “turn their anger into action.”
Importantly, the pressure does not only come from within. Lu argued that most people here in the U.S. are probably unaware of the impact of Trump’s election on women rights’ movements in China.
“Trump’s election is seen by a lot of chauvinist men to be signifying the defeat of women and feminism,” she said. “On the Chinese internet, the attack against feminism has upgraded to a new level after November of 2016.”
After her media platform “Feminist Voices” was censored and silenced for 30 days last year, and seeing the support from around the world she received during that time, Lu co-founded and registered a new organization called “Chinese Feminist Collectives” in New York City.
“For us, the contact with our friends back in China is essential,” she said at the post-event dinner at Chellis House. “If you are an overseas organization and lack the contact with domestic communities, the things you say lose their value.”
Women’s protests throughout China have led Lu to realize that “the rise of China is happening at the cost of extreme hardships of women.” In response to what the next step for feminists in China is, Lu said that the most important thing is to survive and “to live longer than our opponents.” She also believes that it is the time for “guerrilla wars,” and to “keep ‘sabotaging’” whenever they get the chance to intervene.
Her organization is currently planning to host feminist training sessions for high school students in Beijing. “In the face of the very harsh political environment, what we are doing is to continuously expand our community temporally and spatially,” she said.
(03/17/17 12:18am)
As a college well-known for its international vision, Middlebury College does a fairly good job of bringing different aspects of diverse cultures to its members. But there is always more to be showcased, and the students never cease to surprise the community.
The Chinese Society, along with the Chinese Department, purchased a “guzheng” (٪j筝), also known as a Chinese zither, last May. On Monday, March 6, the first-ever guzheng recital took place. An audience filled the entire Chateau Grand Salon to listen to the repertoire of student performers and had a chance to observe the Chinese plucked string instrument which has over 2,500 years of history.
With a resonant cavity made from wood, a “guzheng” has 16 or more strings and movable bridges. To pluck the strings, players often wear fingerpicks on one or both hands. Having emerged during the Warring States period (475-211 BCE), the instrument also became the model for some other Asian zithers. The fascinating ancient instrument has obviously not become obsolete in any way – it is one of the most popular Chinese instruments today.
The first scheduled performer of the song “Liuyang River,” Emily Cipirani ’19.5, was unfortunately not able to attend the showcase. According to Jingchen Jiang ’18, one of the other players and organizers, Cipirani was the one who started the whole idea of bringing guzheng music to campus, as she owns one guzheng herself.
“Emily learned to play it from a Chinese teacher in Ohio, and is very passionate about it,” Jiang said. “We thought that many people might like it.”
Lyra Ding ’19, who started playing the “guzheng” at the age of six, carried out the following two pieces to great reception. The first one called “Han Gong Qiu Yue” is a very traditional song with an ancient melody and simplified techniques.
“I played it without the fingerpick because in that way I think it’s more similar to another instrument called guqin, which I also play,” she said.
Ding’s second piece, “Qin Sang Qu,” is a familiar one for her, and the song tells about a young girl parting from her loved ones. The nostalgia was, according to Ding, somewhat in accordance with the reality of being abroad and away from home.
The last piece, “Eternal Sorrow of Lin’an,” was performed by Jiang and Gloria Breck ’18. The unique composition is a concerto of “guzheng” and piano, and the flawless collaboration between pianist Breck and Jiang, who played the “guzheng,” made it the highlight of the showcase.
The piece was perhaps the most powerful one, telling a story about a national hero that was falsely accused by his country and executed. Lasting for more than 13 minutes, the performance shifted between absorbing solos of the guzheng and piano, and the even more captivating ensemble of the two culturally and fundamentally different musical instruments.
“The piece is probably one of the biggest guzheng performing pieces, and I wanted to challenge myself with the difficulty,” Jiang said.
This was not the first time that the two good friends collaborated on a musical piece. Jiang talked about their collaboration for the International Student Organization (ISO) show last November, for which they performed an excerpt of “Butterfly Lovers,” a very popular and more light-hearted piece.
“We felt that for a formal recital, we should have something more serious,” Jiang said. “We needed a piece that would truly convey and express the instrument, and one with more cultural foundation.”
The success of the recital has prompted Jiang to think about what types of guzheng pieces could be performed in the future, as the piece “Eternal Sorrow” was “a bit too heavy.”
“We weren’t sure about to what extent a very Chinese and folk piece like this one will be approachable for foreign audience members,” Jiang said.
The fact that many of the listeners were deeply moved by the music was encouraging.
“So we felt that maybe music really is something universal,” Jiang said. “People can all sense the emotions embedded in it.”
The team put a lot of effort into writing the recital program, hoping that the audience would gain sufficient historical and cultural context for understanding the music.
Jiang believes that these sorts of events should be promoted on campus.
“We have organizations like the Chinese society and ASIA [Asian Students in Action], but people seem to be more interested in talking about politics and social issues,” Jiang said. “I think there should be more things focused on the cultural aspects.”
Now that the college owns a “guzheng” and many people are interested in it, future activities devoted to the instrument are guaranteed.
“The Music Department professors are very excited about this,” Ding said. “They kept asking us if we could do a demo or even a class for them, so that they can understand this instrument.”
Jiang also hopes that students will join, likely through a student-hosted J-term workshop next year.
(02/24/17 1:15am)
Imagine a museum exhibition that not only amazes, inspires and entertains you along every step, but also challenges you with questions and ideas posed by every meticulously selected work of art. The latest exhibit at our very own museum, American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity, which opened on Feb. 17, guarantees viewers a fulfilling experience of such with more than 90 pieces that broaden the definition of American portraiture.
Richard Saunders, director of the College Museum of Art, is the curator of American Faces and the author of a recently published book with the same title. In an interview on Sunday, which was suitably turned into a tour of the entire exhibit, Saunders explained his long-term fascination with American portraits and identity. He has been interested in portraits since he was in college, and wrote his dissertation in graduate school on a portrait artist. Unable to find a good book about portraiture to assign to students in his classes, Saunders put years of his work into his own book.
According to Saunders, the exhibit is a “distilled version of the book.”
“The idea is that the Americans have been interested in creating images of themselves for hundreds of years, and so I was interested in why,” he said. “So I thought, well, can I break that down into groups? Can I create, as I’ve described this as a rudimentary taxonomy, a system to look at all this?”
To answer these questions, the exhibit is divided into seven sections, based around the same seven chapters in the book that bring out different themes and stories. The one hour of my first visit to the opening felt like barely enough to absorb the wide variety of the pieces selected; from oil-on-canvas paintings and daguerreotype to caricature and videos, the exhibit could be somewhat overwhelming, and requires close attention and active thinking from the viewer.
“That’s why the [label] texts are so long,” Saunders said in response to this observation. “I felt that it was important to do that, because otherwise people wouldn’t understand necessarily why something was here. I hope people get it. It’s like anything; you try and throw it out there, and see if people are interested.”
The first section of the exhibit, titled “The Rich,” starts us off with more traditional oil-on-canvas paintings, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, which were commissioned by wealthy people. People’s desire to showcase social status, wealth and fashion is apparent throughout the colonial period and into the first decades of the Republic.
“Many of these people are being flattered through the portraits,” Saunders said. “The idea was to make them look better. It’s like the ultimate Donald Trump experience.”
He pointed out that Trump once said he saw a 35-year-old when looking in the mirror, while the president was also dissatisfied with a painting of his 35-year-old self.
“I’d like one of [my students] to work on images of Donald Trump, because he has such an ego and a focus on his own [image],” Saunders said.
The portraits hanging on the wall from two centuries ago seem not so cut off from the present; in fact, they are so immediately related to our media world today, whether personal or political.
In the next section, “Portraits for Everyone,” two pieces on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum bring the audience to a new era of portraiture and identity. Saunders emphasized the importance of Warhol’s portrait of Ethel Scull, an art collector, which is one panel of a huge commissioned portrait consisting of 35 more of such pieces.
“He wasn’t interested in doing paintings like that,” Saunders said, pointing at the oil paintings from the former section. “So this is really important, in terms of telling how commissioned portraits by wealthy people changed in 1963 when he did this.”
The borrowing of this piece in part led to the installation of an actual photo booth in the exhibition, placed among other works of art.
“The photograph, on which this [Ether Scull painting] is based, was taken in a photo booth exactly like that,” Saunders said, highlighting the importance of the machine in impacting mainstream American painting.
As an interactive element of the exhibit, the photo booth allows visitors to take four black-and-white snapshots for free (despite the vintage words painted outside that indicate a 25-cent fee).
“Fame” brings together works of different media that look at famous people. “Images of celebrities have been gradually replacing portraits of heroes,” reads the section note. Across the wall printed with a large image of LeBron James hangs Constantino Brumidi’s “The Apotheosis of Washington” (1859), which is a preliminary work of the Capitol dome in Washington D.C.’s interior painting, depicting George Washington surrounded by holy figures in the clouds. Saunders commented that the Capitol dome is probably the most “hallow shrine” in this country, in which “Washington has become a god.”
“He’s moved on from being a real person,” he said. “He’s the embodiment of ideas and American beliefs about being noble, being moral and being patriotic.”
Walking towards the fourth section called “Propaganda,” Saunders explained that no portraits are accidental, and there is always a reason why a portrait is made. A number of the works included are political, including a Warhol painting in 1972 commissioned by the Democrats to create a negative portrayal of Richard M. Nixon, a more recent political caricature “Who Does He Think He Is” (2008) by Pat Oliphant depicting Barack Obama and a small TV looping the first televised presidential debate between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon.
“This is about the obvious use of portraits for different agendas, for selling you an idea, or a product, or a political belief,” Saunders said. “It’s all about control, about image.”
The fifth section, “Self and Audience,” was, according to Saunders, the part he felt most challenged by in the curating process. Again, he attempted to showcase the long history of artists making self-portraits with a wide variety of works, along with ideas of the intended audiences for the portraits. Included in the section is C. Zimmerman’s panoramic photograph, “Women of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“[This photograph is about] an allegiance of a group that most people would find awful,” he said. “But these people certainly cared about being identified with that group.”
He pointed out that most of the people in these group portraits seem to be happy and proud to be part of the group.
“It’s about issues of identity. We all want to figure out where we fit into something, and connect to things that we care about and believe in.”
The section also includes more contemporary works, such as “Genetic Self-Portrait: Hair,” which is a hair’s image under a microscope, and a “Name Self-Portrait (with Beethoven),” on which the artist Gene Beery identifies with Beethoven through mere words and no image.
“Ritual, Power, and Memory” combines the ideas of monuments and memorials.
“This whole section really is about how we remember people, and how we use their lives to tell other narratives or establish beliefs that we feel are important,” Saunders said.
One of the most intriguing works displayed is a collection of postmortem portraits from 1850-75, which are small images of deceased people. Saunders is fascinated by how Americans have a hard time talking about death, though taking these images was a very popular thing to do back then.
“Most of these people were probably never recorded in painting, particularly the little babies who died, and infant mortality was enormously high,” he said. “So this was a way to honor them and to remember them.”
The other side of the section is devoted to public monuments and the breaking down of them in cases of people rejecting the power, both acknowledging the abundance of life-size bronze statues of celebrities in the U.S. and the ways in which they resonate with the public.
The exhibit ends in the center, where the seventh section titled “Gallery” offers the audience a resounding conclusion. “Portrait of Stephen Colbert” is likely to catch the audience’s attention immediately, with its unorthodox composition of portraits within a portrait. Saunders argues that the piece is “a satire of formal portraiture.”
“It’s funny in one regard, very funny,” he said. “But also I think it’s symbolic too, about the seriousness with which people take images.”
Lastly, Saunders discussed a painted portrait of John M. McCardell, Jr., President of the College from 1991 to 2004. The painting was commissioned by the College, and normally hangs in the Board Room in Old Chapel, along with portraits of all other former presidents.
“The idea is that Middlebury [College] dates back to 1800, and the board of trustees has a fiduciary responsibility to care for this institution and make sure it’s preserved and succeeds and thrives,” Saunders said. “By surrounding [the place] by all the people that kept it going, it sends a message, and it kind of underscores the decisions that are being made.”
It is Saunders’ hope that viewers can understand the importance and value of these carefully analyzed portraitures and the whole reason behind American people’s fascination with them. He attributes this particular reason to the founding of the U.S. as a country of immigrants where, for a lot of the people, their heritages are traced to other places. For Saunders, the idea that connects portraits with hierarchy in Great Britain, where some of the first groups were coming from, is mixed with the Americans’ values on individual success.
“It’s all based on identity, and how we view collective identity and individual identity,” Saunders said. “We talk about selfies as being different, and I don’t think selfies are different at all. I think they are just part of a continuum of lots of different things in world we’ve already been doing. It’s just the latest phenomena.”
(01/20/17 1:41am)
With the start of J-term, the Middlebury College Museum of Art has brought a brand new exhibition to campus, titled “Untouched by Time: The Athenian Acropolis from Pericles to Parr.” On Jan. 13, Professor of History of Art and Architecture Pieter Broucke, who also serves as the Director of the Arts and the curator of this exhibition, gave a virtual tour of the intriguing collection at the Dance Theater.
What makes the exhibition unique, according to Broucke, is that every art work included comes from the holdings of Middlebury itself — including those from the museum, libraries and local private collections.
“It’s a very specialized topic, and yet it’s all done with material from here,” Broucke said. “And it’s not just that we have all the material, there is actually some very good-quality material.”
Besides the content itself, the time period covered by the works of art — three centuries — shows yet again the thought put into curating the exhibition. The exhibition is divided into six sections in chronological order, each focusing on a different theme. According to the exhibition note, the wide-ranging art works “bear testimony to the enduring fascination with the Athenian Acropolis that persists to this day.”
The first part, called “Early Travelers,” documents the growing recognition of Ancient Greece being the “true fountainhead” of Western civilization through publications, drawings and paintings by early antiquarians, including volumes of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, the very first study of the Greek remains that was published in 1762.
The second section, “Classical Antiquities in Early Photography,” highlights the role of newly-invented photography in perceiving the Ancient Acropolis, featuring a number of important photographs, including the very first photo ever taken at Didyma by French photographer Joseph-Philibert de Prangey. Another notable photographer, William Stillman, took a series of unusual photos of the Acropolis.
“He [Stillman] believed that it is important that…you have to stand right in front of them, as a way of getting an objective view of the monument,” Broucke explained.
The third section, “Greetings from Athens,” focuses on the rise of tourism in Greece. The invention of the snapshot camera enabled tourists to take their own photos, one of which Broucke acquired himself from “an old store along Route 7.” He dated the photo to sometime between 1894 and 1902 because of the condition of the building, and happily pointed out that the box of the Kodak Camera is in fact right in the frame.
The fourth part, “Pure Creation of the Mind,” is in fact a survey of the Modernist architects and artists on the Acropolis and includes a stunning photograph taken by Edward Steichen of Isadora Duncan, known as the mother of modern dance, who poses in front of the Parthenon portico. Also included is artist Le Corbusier’s publication, Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture), which unconventionally compares photos ancient Greek buildings to modern cars.
The fifth section, “The Acropolis Restoration Project,” consists mainly of Socratis Mavrommatis’ photographs that record the “heroic undertaking” of the revolutionary and huge restoration project from 1975 to 2002. The project took shape largely because of a United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report saying that the Acropolis was in bad shape as a result of pollution, a great amount of foot traffic from tourists and other factors.
Finally, “The Acropolis, Globalization, and Mass Tourism” shows how “the Acropolis continues to inspire.” It includes a copy of the front cover of The Economist of April 2010, which was ironically titled, “Acropolis Now,” speaking to the Greek financial crisis. There is also British photographer Martin Parr’s almost entertaining photo of two tour groups in front of the Acropolis in 1991.
“Here, the Parthenon is … providing the excuse or backdrop,” Broucke said. “And if you look carefully, there is no one person paying attention to that majestic building or the understanding behind it.”
He added that, while for many tourists visiting the Acropolis may be “checking off the bucket list,” seeing the remains was at least for him an incredibly moving experience.
The exhibition intends to highlight the idea that the Acropolis has moved beyond representing Ancient Athens.
“It has become the iconic monument associated with Greece as a modern nation state. On a loftier level, it marks the birthplace of Western civilization and serves as the global symbol of democracy,” reads one museum label.
Another “first” of the exhibition is that there will be an online version of the entire display, which Broucke considers to be very important for archiving. This is also only feasible because the College now owns all the works of art.
(11/04/16 12:31am)
On Thursday, Oct. 20, the Chilean television show Bala Loca (Stray Bullet), created by Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture David Miranda Hardy premiered in Dana Auditorium. More than 60 students, faculty and community members gathered for the series’ pilot, which the host Professor Jason Mittell called its “U.S. premier.”
The series centers on a 50-year-old journalist who is a former investigative reporter under Chilean dictatorship. The 10-episode series explores issues in contemporary Chilean society, particularly the relationship between money and politics as well as the distrust of businesses and institutions. The show debuted in June on CHV, a Turner-owned Chilean network, and attracted both local and international audiences.
In the discussion following the screening, Hardy explained certain elements in the series and how they came to be. The decision to have a main character in a wheelchair, namely journalist Mauro Murillo, was the one thing that Hardy refused to negotiate. In a follow-up interview with Hardy, the intriguing process of making Bala Loca was further elaborated.
Yvette Shi (YS): How did you decide to make a TV show in Chile?
David Hardy (DH): I just came here a couple years ago, and that’s where I have my identity still. That’s where most of my creative ideas still are happening. That’s where I have my network, so I know how to go around producing. I hope in the mid-term to long-term, I will start producing stuff here. I would love to do something in Middlebury actually, I’m working on something so we can produce something super local.
YS: Do you see your experiences here at Middlebury influencing your decisions when making the show?
DH: Not really. That show is something I started while I was there, and my mind is thoroughly thinking of the audience there. But, one of my concerns or curiosities last night was to watch a group of American people, to see how it was received. And in the comments I’m receiving, and also because the show was seen by many other Latin American people from different countries before, I think it does have an international appeal. I follow closely with politics here too, and I think there are a lot of crossovers. It’s talking about issues like health insurance. Probably all Western countries are having that discussion. And then as you move into the show, you have the relationship between money and politics. It’s absolutely at the essence of the current political campaign here. So there are things that are very specific, and there are things that are idiosyncratic.
I wanted to make a show that has a strong local flavor and identity. You can say it’s absolutely Chilean, and that’s one of the reasons that it’s a success in Chile. People are really happy to see themselves reflected on the screen. And it can be appealing to other audiences. There is kind of a global audience for series; basically in the world of cable they are really on demand. Of course Chile has its own niche there, and they were very happy to receive the series.
YS: How do you see the Chilean dictatorship play into the show?
DH: It’s so recent in Chile, it’s really hard not to talk about it. It’s impregnated everything in Chilean society. We played around it, it’s not the main theme at all in the show, but we do play around it. We do acknowledge how essential is the power structure in Chile today.
The one thing that might be different is that we are not talking about dictatorship in a traditional Leftist way, which is a place of victim of human right. We are talking, hopefully in both ways. We talk about human rights, but we also talk about the economic and systemic influences in current Chilean society.
I think there are issues in the show that are at the very edge worldwide. I haven’t seen many series treating disabilities the way we do. And it’s fascinating, because it is very front and center. Nobody describes a character as the guy in a wheelchair. I think we managed to put a very charismatic, compelling character in a wheelchair, without being the center of the narrative. And I think there’s not a lot of that. I’ve been watching a lot, you go from PD-centering, rehabilitation, medicalization of the problem, asexual troubled characters … But he goes in and out of cars, you see stairs in his house; he’s not problematic.
YS: What do you do to keep the series smart but at the same time entertaining? Is there a conflict?
DH: There are all these horror stories about television executives pushing changes in your content; we didn’t have much of that. That could be a challenge, when somebody is demanding changes in the narrative that are meant just to satisfy the audience, or increase the ratings.
I want people to be engaged. “Entertainment” is a dirty word sometimes, because people rate it as if it’s entertaining, then it’s shallow. And I don’t see it as incompatible at all. I think being entertained is to be engaged, and to have emotions with the characters, and to be challenged to make reflections on current political issues. And of course we didn’t want to give a lecture to anybody, we wouldn’t be didactical, telling people how to feel or how to think.
YS: How did you familiarize with the process of investigative journalism?
DH: Reading a lot. In Chile we have the more traditional journalism, that is politically biased to the right. Recently there has been no print press opposing these, but there’s a lot of movement online. And we have a Center for Investigative Journalism, which is a digital news media outlet, that goes on really long investigative projects. Then they release a really long article. We had extensive interviews with them, both to understand the mechanics of their work, how they go around to research and investigate, and also in terms of what they thought is going to be the hottest topics.
Those are really amazing journalists in Chile, coming back from the dictatorship, doing undercover work. We didn’t want to model our character on one of them, they are too nice. I want a character that is more flawed, more of an under-hero, while these guys are real heroes.
(10/14/16 12:27am)
On Friday, Oct. 7, the 39th presentation of the Paul Ward ’25 Memorial Prize acknowledged student members of the Class of 2019 who have produced outstanding essays for their first-year writing classes. Over half of the 50 nominated students and their families gathered in the Twilight Auditorium in the afternoon for the hour-long celebration hosted by Mary Ellen Bertolini, Director of the Writing Center.
The Paul W. Ward ’25 Memorial Prize in Writing was established by Paul Ward’s widow, Dorothy Cate Ward ’28 in 1978. For 38 years, the competition has honored excellent writings by students in their first year at Middlebury College across all academic divisions. As a journalist and diplomatic reporter, Paul Ward valued “precise and exact usage of words, exact meanings, phrases expressed lucidly and gracefully,” as put by Mrs. Ward.
Students’ essays are nominated by faculty annually and evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel of judges.
“We are impressed this year, that among the nominees and winners are students for whom English is just one of the many languages they speak,” Bertolini said in her welcome speech. “And we are impressed at the range of interest that your writing represents.”
Among the nominees’ work were personal narratives, critical arguments, creative works and research papers from various departments.
The honorable mention awards went to Gemma Laurence ’19.5 for “The Morality of Happiness: A Comparison of Aristotelian and Kantian Ethics,” Sarah Rittgers ’19 for “Nationalism and the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Leo Stevenson ’19.5 for “Natural Environments and Human Cognition” and Kevin Zhang ’19.5 for “Natural Selection for E. coli Resistant to Triclosan and its Effect on Developing Cross Resistance to Therapeutic Antibiotics.”
A mere glimpse of the titles of their work gives a sense of how diverse the topics are. Nominating faculty members presented the certificates, and spoke of the students’ work, highlighting how across different areas of academic study, the awarded essays showed the students’ excellent writing skills of formulating effective and lucid communication.
During the presentations of the two runner-up awards and the first-place award, the audience had the chance to listen to the student recipients read excerpts from their winning essays. Each recipients of the runner-up prize received $250 .
Abbie Hinchman ’19 was awarded the runner-up prize for her paper “The Geography of Occupation: Examining the Use of Location in Out of It,” an essay for her first-year seminar on post-colonial literature.
Sarah Yang ’19.5 won the other runner-up prize for her essay “Space Control in the Soviet Union.” The paper fulfilled the task of applying a Marxist concept to a concrete historical example, assigned by Assistant Professor of Spanish Irina Feldman in her seminar Introduction to Marxism. “I barely corrected it,” said Feldman afterwards, commenting on the Yang’s use of precise and elegant language.
The first-place prize, along with a $500 award, was presented to Caroline Snell ’19, for her essay “Mastery at Any Cost: The Dominance and Damning of Standard Oil”, which she wrote for her first-year seminar Power and Petroleum in Asia taught by Assistant Professor of History Maggie Clinton. Notably, the winning essay was Snell’s very first paper for that class, which showed her talents in writing and her ability to follow guidelines even before coming to college.
According to Professor Clinton, the paper topic was not easy, as it asked students to analyze how the rise of kerosene changed the 19th century, drawing from three challenging books.
“Caroline more than rose to the occasion,” Clinton said, adding that the paper “meticulously captures the nuances of historical change.”
Professor Clinton was optimistic that Snell’s talents will bring her more success.
“If she could write beautifully about kerosene, she could write beautifully about anything,” she said.
Each year, the nominees for the Ward Prize are invited by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research to train as peer writing tutors.
“We hope you talented writers of the Class of 2019 will share your gifts with incoming classes,” Bertolini said.
Indeed, the students nominated did gain valuable insights through producing these outstanding essays. For Zhang, recipient of honorable mention prize, taking the time to revise was essential.
“Even though it takes time, it is not until I start editing my work when my ideas and arguments truly become a lot more clear and concise,” Zhang said.
As a couple nominating professors mentioned how the prize recipients were active and considerate contributors to class discussion, talking about ideas seems to be equally important. Shan Zeng ’19, one of the nominees, said that speaking to professors and students about her essay was especially helpful.
“When you are forced to present an idea to someone else, you have to clarify it so that other people understand,” Zeng said. “It’s a very effective way to organize the complicated information.”
On the Friday just before this year’s Fall Family Weekend, many of the award nominees’ families were there to celebrate “some of the best 18- and 19-year-old writers in the country,” as Bertolini put it.
She especially expressed gratitude to the family members, stating, “They were there on the spot to recognize and encourage your very first words from the time you were toddlers, posting your accomplishments on Facebook and refrigerator doors.”
On behalf of the faculty, Bertolini also emphasized the College’s vision of writing in a liberal arts education.
“It is our commitment to encourage you to use writing as part of your own life-long learning process, and thus to make a difference in the world,” she said.
(09/30/16 12:23am)
As committed, busy college students, it may be difficult to recall the last time we spent a complete two hours with other people in complete silence. Yet on Saturday, Sept. 24, participants of “Open Space: An Improvisational Laboratory,” held in the Dance Theatre, did exactly that through a practice of dance improvisation.
As the second session of the weekly event, it attracted six participants, including Dance majors, non-Dance majors and two faculty members. Though it was a relatively small group, the far-reaching energy generated by the dancers’ diverse movements filled the entire room, and kept me —someone who has never been a dancer before— observing whole-heartedly for the entire two hours.
Open Space was created by Gabriel Forestieri, a visiting artist-in-residence in Dance at the College and a choreographer who has practiced improvisation for 30 years.
“Open Space is a place to try out ideas, inhabit your body, engage with others physically and release agendas,” the program description reads.
Lida Winfield, a visiting lecturer in Dance who just joined the College this semester and is teaching an improvisation class right now, elaborated on the somewhat abstract idea before session started.
“My understanding from what he said is that it’s so important, so lovely to have a space for dancers to come and be able to improvise, to explore ideas and to work together without someone facilitating,” she said. “We get to grow and learn so much from each other.”
The first hour of the session was designed to be in complete silence, and the second hour is open for musicians to join and play at their wish. For the first half, the brush of skin and clothes against the floor were the only sounds in the high-ceilinged, spacious Dance Theatre, along with the occasional finger-tapping on the dance floor.
Initially, only two dancers were present, who both started by lying on the floor, stretching and feeling their bodies. Their movements differentiated from the very start, as they simply followed their impulses and there was no deliberate facilitation in any form.
The absence of music, an element that one would probably consider crucial in dancing, gave way to the natural, unique rhythm created purely by their movements.
The pace of the dancers’ movements shifted constantly, sometimes more rapid and sometimes completely still. As the first hour was rounding up, one dancer approached the grand piano at the corner of the room, opened it up slowly, and started to play separated notes. The music composed of simple notes added layers to the dancing almost immediately.
Though the other dancer did not alter her movement much, it seemed to fit with the melody seamlessly. Along with the gradually more complex piano sound, the atmosphere in the room became a bit solemn and yet peaceful.
The pianist, Mandy Kimm ’17, is a double major in Dance and Environmental Studies. As a dancer and an artist, she considered the exercise of improvisation a really important part of her practice.
“It’s kind of nice having the open space to see what material is in my body, what things want to be expressed and exploring that in a non-class setting, non-formal choreographic setting,” Kimm said.
It may have been the echoing music that attracted three more students and one faculty member to join the group successively. The energy generated in the room grew at a steady pace, and it became increasingly harder for an observer like me to keep up with all the unique movements of the dancers.
Their actions were not limited to the dance floor. Some utilized the thick, black curtains around the room and danced around them, occasionally dancing behind them and exposing only parts of the body. Some moved in front of one of the windows, from which the early fall sunlight found its way in the room, and the image became an almost silhouette photo in motion. Surprisingly, their distinct dance moves conveyed to me a sense of harmony rather than that of chaos or confusion.
The piano music also became more versatile. At some point, Kimm opened up the piano lid and plucked at the strings inside it. She also incorporated humming and speaking out poem-like sentences to incorporate with the piano. Some other dancers responded by gentle, melodic whistling and humming. All of these might have seemed rather random, but there is no doubt that every sound and movement made by the participants were naturally becoming integrated parts of the scene.
The interactions between dancers gradually became more important and obvious, as the session reached its final half hour. The piano stopped, and one dancer started to play music pieces and songs on her phone. For some time, two participants did almost identical moves side by side, imitating and following each other.
Another two engaged physically through complicated dance moves that one might see more often in a structured dance piece, such as holding onto and letting go of each other repeatedly. Emotions in the room grew stronger. More dancers had satisfied, relaxed smiles on their faces.
The practice reached a climax with the ongoing music pieces played from the phone. The drumbeats enhanced the rhythm of movement, while other symphonic instruments added complexity to it. Participants and viewers alike were fully engaged and concentrated even after the last moment. The session ended with people greeting each othr and discussing the practice in calm, passionate tones. One could tell that the whole experience was quite uncommon.
Winfield acknowledged that for the curriculum, there have been “many guests, teachers or choreographers that lead space for improvisation.” For Open Space, however, there is no facilitator.
“People could come and go, to move in the space if they wanted to,” Winfield said.
The soundtrack that ended the practice session happened to be a popular old song called “What the World Needs Now,” which to me concluded the two hours pertinently.
The group hopes more members of the community will join the space on the coming Saturdays from 1-3 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall.
“We are hopeful that it will eventually draw people from the larger community, people that aren’t exclusively dance majors, or musicians,” Winfield said.