From the Aurora Theater shooting to the horrifying Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, the widely publicized mass shootings of 2012 provoke an important social question on whether or not the Second Amendment right to bear arms should be readdressed. In the wake of these tragedies, politicians and ...
We do not have a unique mental illness problem in this country; other countries also have people who suffer from mental illness. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who supports the right to carry a gun at the cost of any other right. He seems to think that ...
The first thing I did when I got a text message asking if I had seen what was going on in Newtown was check online news sources. After reading a few headlines and skimming a few articles, sparse in detail and high in speculation, I went downstairs to my family room. I sat down next to my mother, who ...
This academic year, there has arguably been no bigger issue on the minds of Middlebury students than divestment. The topic polarizes us at times. Some argue that as an institution with a pledged commitment to environmental and social justice, Middlebury should put its money where its mouth is. Divesting ...
About one year ago, the College launched a new site — ‘go/portal’ — in order to aggregate information about events and activities on campus. The initiative aimed to provide a single, comprehensive resource for students, many of who were tired of their inboxes being inundated daily with all-student ...
The recent movie Zero Dark Thirty showed extremely clear visuals of Pakistan and I felt awkward sitting in a theatre in Boston watching my own country on screen. It has been two years since I have been to Pakistan. There is a longing to go back; it is as if the smell of rain, pakoras and chai beckon ...
In an article published on the front page of the Dec. 6, 2012 edition of the Campus (Panel Discusses Racial Diversity), my position on affirmative action was described this way: “Dry, an opponent of affirmative action, suggested that affirmative action does not have a place in college admissions and ...
Being a Feb has, for better or for worse, defined much of my time at Middlebury thus far. I am now preparing to work as one of the leaders for Feb orientation after the end of winter term. I look forward to meeting the new class and re-experiencing some of the orientation activities alongside them, ...
Superstorm Sandy may be a bit of an afterthought now that both J-Term and winter in Vermont are well under way, but remnants of the catastrophic storm are still very much visible back home in New Jersey. Thankfully, my home and neighborhood managed to remain reasonably unscathed in the wake of the storm ...
I could not focus as I clicked through the questions. While I was supposed to select answers, it did not seem there could possibly be any. Twenty beautiful elementary school students were brutally massacred on the day I sat for my examination to be certified to teach elementary school. When I awoke ...
I believe in a strong correlation between rules and the game of sweet or sour. If you have ever played the game — and with a mom who rolled around the carpool circles in a station wagon, I have played my fair share of sweet or sour — you know that in theory it’s very simple: wave equals sweet, ...
After having been long overlooked as an unavoidable part of playing contact sports, concussions have only recently started to get the attention they deserve. The rise in media coverage is partly a result of recent controversies in sports leagues such as the N.H.L. and the N.F.L, in which athletes have ...
Dear my fellow students: I encourage you to lay down your passions, lay down the issues you care about and learn to take no for an answer. I have seen all this “so-called activism” around campus, and yet it is clear that the administration is unwilling to change — accept it. The administration ...
The first op-ed I ever wrote for the Campus was titled “Keep Affolter.” Her anti-racist protest at last week’s affirmative action panel, however, “pushed [me] overboard.” I am “done beating around the bush.” It was a “destructive demonstration of [a professor] hijacking what could ...
Traveling in Australia and New Zealand, you quickly realize that people here are incredibly interested, informed and invested in the outcome of the American presidential election. The result matters to them on several levels. Mostly, of course, it’s symbolic; there was little daylight between the ...
Self-immolation may have become a somewhat grisly global phenomenon through the Arab spring, notably during the struggles in Tunisia, but recently it has tragically returned to where it has the most traditional associations: Tibet. Four Buddhists have set themselves alight in recent weeks in protest ...
[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 — ...