On November 8, 2016, perhaps you did not sleep from disbelief, joy or rage. In Havana, the nomenklatura of the communist party also lost sleep; a new situation emerged that broke the plans of a diplomatic approach prepared secretly and meticulously. The new tenant of the White House was a piece on the ...
There has been a lot of talk since Trump was elected about leveraging one’s privilege to do good. That is exactly what the Moving Money Campaign is about. It’s all too common to hear liberal college students complain about how powerless they feel; but the truth is that we are not powerless. The ...
Editor’s note: This column is excerpted from remarks President Laurie L. Patton gave to the Middlebury College faculty in early April. It also appeared in a slightly different form in the spring issue of Middlebury Magazine. The events of March 2 and the ensuing debate about the value of public discourse ...
I support the goals of the dining hall meat-reduction proposal with enthusiasm. The methods, however, are all wrong.
Dear Dr. Patton: We write to protest the Middlebury administration’s punitive response to students involved in the events surrounding the Charles Murray lecture on March 2, 2017. Middlebury students have reported being placed on probation and having disciplinary letters added to their files for protesting ...
I would’ve liked to know more about staff members’ personal interests, hobbies and opinions about the College. Questions that were more critical of the way students treat staff would’ve been more valuable (and interesting) to read, than simply a list of “memorable interactions.” Instead of ...
Racial and economic oppressions recently have been thrown at each other in Trump era politics as if one contradicts the other. In part, the white poor have started claiming oppression as their own, claiming that policies like affirmative action or individual prejudices amount to “reverse racism” ...
Last week we published an op-ed by Esme Valette ’16 illuminating “predatory pack behavior” on campus. She pointed to a “Hunters and Hunted Party” thrown by a group of senior boys in the spring of 2014 as an example of the perpetuation of a social culture on our campus that fosters predatory ...
The remarkable series of events that followed the announcement of Charles Murray’s visit to campus contains more than a few lessons for both the community and the individuals. The debate of free speech and Murray’s legitimacy in Middlebury’s liberal academic setting will, and should, continue. ...
The context in which we do our work in higher education has changed dramatically in recent decades and these changes have an impact on our specific experience at Middlebury. Institutions such as Georgetown, Brown, Harvard, Princeton and others have publicly shared how they historically and systematically ...
A couple of weeks prior to Charles Murray’s much-discussed visit to Middlebury, I was asked to write a piece on student activism for a spread that the Campus had intended to put together on the topic. In the wake of Charles Murray’s visit, this plan — like many of our plans for the semester — ...
Many see America’s rapprochement with Cuba as a new status quo, but others prefer to wait before reaching a verdict. On politics and chess.
What did I just do? Last week in the Middlebury Campus newspaper I published an apology for the “closed decisionmaking process” by which I offered a departmental co-sponsorship to the Charles Murray event earlier this year. I’ve since been called lots of names online, mostly centering on my ...
To Our Readers and Contributors, We at The Campus are pleased to announce the creation and launch of a brand new website. We are thrilled to have a renewed online presence and believe that it will enhance our weekly coverage and provide our readership with a platform that is easier to read and navigate. ...
In the wake of the highly controversial protests against Charles Murray — which raised questions about the nature of free speech, political expression and power imbalances at Middlebury — many students are facing College discipline for their participation in the protests. This situation has caused ...
Donald Trump has proclaimed April as “National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month,” affirming his commitment to reducing and ultimately ending sexual violence in our Nation. Kind of ironic coming from the man who’s been accused of sexually assaulting more than fifteen women and caught ...
March 2, the day of the Charles Murray talk, was never going to be easy for Middlebury. Free speech and civil disobedience, two of our nation’s most challenging and sacred traditions, seemed to collide. In this war of virtues, everybody lost; the mob silenced Charles Murray, the media dragged Middlebury’s ...
In the weeks since the Charles Murray event, many of our peers have been called in “to talk” with administrators about their actions. Many have left those talks with punishments. Others of us, myself included, are wondering if we’ll get the email or if our faces were not caught on camera. As uncertainty ...
In “A Letter to the Well-Intentioned Liberal Professor” (April 12), Travis Sanderson states that Middlebury faculty whose “support of ‘free speech’ ... does not include protection of shut-downs and other methods of expression” are “on the wrong side of history.” Comparing us to the white ...
As I discussed in last week’s column, racial oppression and economic oppression are intimately linked. This week, I want to look a little more closely at the mechanisms of racial and economic oppression to understand their overlap and their divergences. Can white people be oppressed, and if so, how? ...