[The following regards conversations on campus surrounding divestment, activism and diversity, which all directly relate to corporatization. It links newspaper reporting, silencing of oppressed voices and investing in unethical companies, while advocating for free and just existence on earth, an aim ...
Religious vocations used to be a big deal at this school. At the beginning of the 1800s, the majority of Middlebury graduates became ministers, who were required to read the Greeks and probably had to wash their own dinner dishes. I don’t blame us for forgetting these origins — we were a little ...
A good friend of mine told me about a conversation she had considering the dialogue present on campus, how people are always speaking about an issue, stringing eloquent sentences together and producing infallible logic that is birthed, lives and dies in the span of 15 minutes in the Proctor booths. ...
I made the switch to Vibram FiveFingers and minimalist running footwear after pulling a hamstring last spring, and since making the change, I’ve had the longest stretch of injury-free running I’ve ever had. It was a relatively mild hamstring pull — something not terribly uncommon in runners — ...
I left the U.S. this Thanksgiving break. France granted me access into their country sans glitch. I glided through their customs saying my bonjours, mercis and je suis americaines in all the right places, and so what if they lost my suitcase. Fast forward through some crepe consumption, oui-oui-ing ...
I am a Canamerican — one of the truest. Oh, and in the somewhat likely event that portmanteaus are not your bag, kind reader, allow me to elaborate: I am a dual citizen of Canada and America, and can’t for the life of me discern which country deserves my undivided national pride. Indeed, I’ve ...
As an enthusiastic blog-following liberal feminist, I welcome new theories that challenge traditional assumptions about men and women’s sexual “natures.” I’m naturally drawn to critiques of the stereotypical view that women seek meaningful relationships while men look only for sexual pleasure. ...
On Thursday, Nov. 15, Olav Ljosne, senior manager of international operations at Royal Dutch Shell, came to campus to speak on a variety of topics, including the future of energy demand and conflict surrounding oil. Both students and members of the faculty filled the Robert A. Jones ’59 (RAJ) Conference ...
A recent op-ed (“Divestment Creates Positive, Systemic Change”) argued that divestment is a valuable tool in the fight against global warming. While I wholeheartedly share in the author’s concern about climate change, I am not convinced that Middlebury College’s divestment from fossil fuel companies ...
This past week we kicked off the holiday season with Thanksgiving, which despite its most questionable history, has always been for me less about its origins and more an excuse to bring the family together to eat, drink and be merry. The holiday season itself, unfortunately, can be a divisive topic. ...
One of the College’s greatest strengths lies in its professors. The Princeton Review recently ranked the College seventh in the “professors get high marks” category, a fact that is likely unsurprising to many students here. What is surprising, however, is that a primary criticism that came from ...
After last Tuesday’s election, the media immediately began its post-presidential election process of savaging the losing campaign for reasons explaining their defeat. While it is true that Romney’s campaign could have made many small, yet beneficial changes to improve its positioning against President ...
For many students of the liberal arts elite, undergraduate existence is an era of unchecked decadence. You can eat a packet of peanut M&M’s and a cigarette for lunch and get nothing worse than a few judge-y looks from the girl headed towards the gym in Lululemon. You can saturate your bloodstream ...
Perhaps one of the most exciting results of last week’s election — for women, at least — is that the United States now has the highest number of women in Congress than ever before. Unfortunately, that only means 20 women in the Senate out of 100 seats, and 78 out of 435 seats in the House (although ...
In the past few days, I have read headline after headline detailing the damaging effects of Hurricane Sandy on the New York metropolitan area. Millions are still without power and dozens have been killed; countless homes and businesses have been destroyed. In scanning through the headlines, however, ...
I came into Peter Beinart’s lecture last Thursday night feeling very nervous. Mr. Beinart, a modern Orthodox Jew and author of The Crisis of Zionism, has received ample criticism from both the left and right on his view of the Middle East peace process, and is a controversial figure in the Jewish ...
The potential for an Israeli-Iranian conflict has been boiling for some time, notably escalating in recent days. A military factory in Sudan (one of Iran’s allies) was “mysteriously” bombed this month, and Israel was immediately blamed. Israel, in turn, suspiciously made no comment — this would ...
The past three months of travel on the Watson Foundation’s ticket has been the most phenomenally humbling, addictive, complicated, joyful experience of my life. I pause my travels to write you now only to do my part to ensure that you appreciate what is at stake here, which is nothing less than truth. From ...
I met my two best friends at a three week summer program about four years ago. Twenty-one days is all it took to develop close connections with them. I’ve seen my best friends fewer than 21 days since that summer. One of them lives in Virginia, the other in Taiwan. We have to communicate across state ...
Divestment is a tool that is best used as part of a broader movement towards a real-world goal. My goal is to keep the global temperature from rising two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature, an increment that was about the only thing global leaders could agree upon at the Copenhagen ...