College students get a bad rap. Among any population there will be a few misbehaved deviants scattered among many upstanding individuals; but at Middlebury, it seems that some faculty and administrators overestimate the prevalence of these malcontents. My friend Charlie and I recently walked through ...
Last Tuesday was not a good day for any American outside of the top one percent of wage earners. Democrats lost 65 seats in the House, bestowing the GOP with their biggest majority in, well, over half a century and now cling to power in the Senate by a narrow margin. The next two years will likely be ...
Midterm elections do not inspire quite as much media buzz and public interest as its quadrennial counterpart, the presidential election. And in some regards, they should not — there is not any one race on the ballot which everyone in the nation votes on, nor are we determining anything as important ...
At 12:30 a.m. this past Saturday, a friend and I decided to hit up the Bunker, host of the annual VACA-sponsored Halloween party, featuring DJs from New York and Montreal. (VACA stands for “Vitality of the Artistic Community Association” in case you were wondering.) As we neared FIC, we saw streams ...
It is rare that we think of Middlebury, both town and college, as a mighty, unified force. It is more common that we equate the area with its New England quaintness, seemingly slowed pace of life and picturesque pastoral beauty. But the opening of the Cross Street Bridge this past Saturday was a show ...
Middlebury’s OUT day marks one of the first times that our campus has collectively engaged the idea that honesty about our identities can truly foster an empathetic, socially responsible and dynamic community. However, despite its relative merit, I can’t help but think that this movement undermines ...
Being a climate activist, I tend to engage in some pretty intense and discouraging discourse. Still, the most terrifying conversation I’ve ever had was with a representative of the International Red Cross, at the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen last December. We were discussing climate refugees ...
To The Campus, I would like to extend a “wonderful job done” to the students who volunteered their time to the Spooktacular event held on the Middlebury Green. Those students were so good with kids! I attended the festival with my two year old and although he wasn’t much into the games, I did ...
Three weeks ago, as the rest of the editorial board was working tirelessly on our third annual Green Issue, I was taking a holiday from The Campus — but not from the theme of sustainability. I was in Denver, Colo., attending the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability ...
As you read this column you know who has won and who has lost in the midterm elections. You know who will control the House and the Senate for the next two years, who will be Vermont’s governor, and whether, for the first time since the Civil War, the House and the Senate will be controlled by two ...
Over the past week, the communications office has been rolling out its new battle strategy against dishware thieves. You might have seen the posters with the oh-so-creative spaghetti font telling us that “[we] can dish it out, but [we] can’t take it.” Or the strange film noir-esque YouTube video. ...
Dear Campus, I want to compliment Melissa Hirsch on her 9/30/10 Op-Ed “Truth in Biases.” Her piece was an entertaining read and I think she makes important points. Specifically, I agree that biases are almost everywhere. There are biases in the recent decisions of the Texas Board of Education and ...
Some days here at Middlebury just seem too perfect. The autumn air is crisp, but not too cool, professors cancel class and homework assignments and maybe you even sneak a glimpse of your Proctor crush giving you the once-over from across the salad bar. Yet every golden sunset at the end of every sublime ...
One of the best things about this week was the opening of the movie The Social Network. I have not seen this movie, but I am assured of its brilliance because it was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the many speeches of President Jed Bartlett, rated fifth best president by a survey of prominent political ...
The recent column entitled “CEOs, hip-hop dancers and biofuel farmers” presents a compelling argument for why the environmental movement needs to be more inclusive so that it can fulfill its vision of reshaping society in an effort to save the planet. Let’s see if we can make this dream a reality. First, ...
Great leaders are all judged by history. Centuries of human history are often boiled down to a list of those who have defied expectation: Pericles, Augustus, Queen Elizabeth, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, to name just a few. But these are not ...
For those of you blissfully unaware of the drop in temperature, the hike in workload or our past editorial alerting you to both of these trends — we have officially hit the month mark. While, for many of us, this will continue to be a shock to the system for the next couple of weeks, the wheels of ...
In 1999, a Los Angeles court issued subpoenas to 17 U.S firms — including Wal-Mart, Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, and Sears — seeking more than one billion dollars in damages over garments supposedly manufactured in sweatshops in the Mariana Islands. In 2005, the state of Illinois passed legislation ...
As you may have already heard, a Rutgers freshman, Tyler Clementi, leapt to his death off of the George Washington Bridge on September 22th. He was 18 years old and bullied for being gay. Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei are being charged with invasion of privacy after streaming video footage of Tyler having ...