I will never forget the face of my Moroccan teacher when I entered his class and said to him, ‘Ya‘tik al-‘afiya.’ This expression is a key for everyone who visits the Levant, the Arab Gulf, and Egypt — we use it in all contexts for literally everything.
With the end of Middlebury’s indoor mask mandate came a return to pervasive individualism — in most places if you want to wear a mask, you do, and if you don’t, you don’t. The college administration is no longer the primary regulator of Covid-19 guidelines. Beyond required masking in classrooms ...
Tuition increases are not new or unexpected. However, we ask that this price tag be accompanied by comprehensive, accessible information regarding exactly how this money will be used. If Middlebury expects students to pay more, it makes sense that we as students can expect to know where our money is ...
After more than six months for me at Middlebury, I miss many things in Jordan. When I say Jordan, I mean the Arab countries in general, which share many customs and habits. I decided to turn this longing for home into a door through which I might open the opportunity to pass on a part of my culture ...
Middlebury's (and America’s) rapid and genuine humanitarian response to Putin’s aggression is admirable — and incomparable, in relation to other crises outside of Europe. It’s worth thinking about.
Middlebury College has existed on unceded Abenaki lands for the past 222 years. Following recent conversations about decolonizing curricula and the renaming of the Middlebury Chapel, there arises the question of land repatriation. Upon recognizing the moral imperative of repatriation, the question becomes ...
I’m excited to extend the platform of The Campus as a physical and digital space for other historically marginalized members of the Middlebury community to share their experiences.
Two weeks ago, in our second staff issue, we editorialized on the apparent disconnect between staff and students, calling upon the latter to use their status as patrons of this institution to rally on behalf of those making barely livable wages. On Thursday, our community woke up to multiple instances ...
Dear Class of 2021.5, Middlebury has taught me a lot. After attending this elite liberal arts academic institution for eight semesters over four and a half years, I sure hope I’m smarter than when I started, and that you are all, too.
For almost two years, we’ve lived in this gray area of cultivating a community without physically being together. As a result, many of us have forgotten about a core value of community: commitment.
When we left our little apartment—located in a beautiful corner of Polytechnic University in Kabul—to the airport, my little sister wrote, “As I write, I miss our beautiful home. I miss the tableau on the wall, the decorated candles, the clock, and all those Eid days and Yalda nights that will ...
You might think Orientalism was buried long ago, but these neo-Orientalist perspectives are not unique to Middlebury. Organizations of power still systemically infect all aspects of Arabic language instruction in higher education.
In the past two years, we’ve gone through a period of both collective, mass-scale loss but also individual experiences of grief. Yes, we’re “all in this together” — but we’ve also all encountered vastly different versions of the pandemic, from the initial quarantine to the return to school ...
In January 2019, we published our first staff issue. It detailed the impact of workforce planning — a concerted administrative effort to reduce employee compensation costs by 10% — on the staff of the college. Three years (and one global pandemic) later, we again find ourselves inamidst a critical ...
I’m one of the lucky ones who have some support. My immediate boss is awesome, as is hers. Still, every time I take time off I wonder: who has to suffer for it? Who’s going to have to do my work on top of their own while I’m away?
Professor Lana Povitz has had a transformative impact on our lives since she joined our community in the fall of 2018. Her courses focus on the histories and legacies of liberation struggles in the United States, including Black and Jewish radical traditions, and movements for sexual freedom and gender ...
Once it became clear that the two-week quarantine was going to extend just a bit longer than originally imagined, Circulation staff at Davis and Armstrong Libraries realized that they needed to come up with a plan to keep offering library services to patrons.
It’s far past time to recognize Middlebury’s staff for who they are — the people who make it possible for us to be here in the first place. The recent results of the staff council survey display a staggering level of dissatisfaction among Middlebury employees, relating to rampant understaffing, ...
The class of 2021.5 graduation marked the first Feb graduation where the original Febs were in the minority but it may not be the last. Ultimately, many of us find ourselves graduating with a “.5” at the end of our class year despite our initial plans. It’s high time we abandon the stereotype ...
As a board, we have a somewhat informal tradition of kicking off the semester by welcoming the newest students to campus — whether through offering advice during a Covid-19 semester, for example, or making recommendations for bridging the Feb-reg divide. This year, however, we recognize that first-year ...