Humans have a natural attraction to disaster. Often traffic gets bad after a car accident not because the accident didn’t get moved to the side quickly enough, but because we can’t look away. We often stare at dead animals in the road not because we want to, but because there’s a certain fascination ...
I am a proud Republican. But last week, I filled out my absentee ballot and voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate. When I first announced that I planned to vote for a third-party candidate, many of my friends were a little angry. “This may be the most important election of ...
President of the United States Barack Obama’s first term has not been the uninterrupted tale of disappointment and broken promises that the media, his opponents and even pessimistic liberals might have you believe. Obama promised to reform health care and subsequently passed a bill that will allow ...
Most people in the world who look at Middlebury College see a bastion of decency, fairness and social justice. Most people see Middlebury’s continued commitment to carbon neutrality amidst difficult economic conditions as evidence of an exceptional dedication to the future of our planet. Most people ...
With so much focus on the economy in this election cycle, much of the electorate has been paying little attention to foreign policy. However, with our College’s reputation as an internationally diverse institution, its strong international studies, foreign language programs and global activism on ...
This summer, I went a little Bible-crazy. It’s fine, you guys. I’m fine. I had no conversion experiences, no brush-with-death leaps of faith, no immaculate conceptions. I was neither saved nor born-again. The last time I went to church was once this summer, and I spent most of the time like ...
Things I will not be talking about in this column: the War on Women, the GOP (and how much it hates women,) Roe v. Wade and the threat of overturning it, etc. We already know how much the Republican Party hates women, so I’m not going to talk about it right before the election — I’m over it. Vote ...
We are happy to announce the return of the Cameron Cup at Middlebury! In years past, the Cameron Cup was awarded at the end of each academic year to the Commons which had won the most number of points through a series of inter-commons challenges and competitions. This year, we have formed the Cameron ...
Treasurer Candidate Wendy Wilton is reasonable, reliable and respectful. She has worked with the State Auditor’s Office over the past few years to improve municipal transparency and financial management and to foster prevention of embezzlement legislation. Wilton is the VT Municipal Treasurer of the ...
Change at an institutional level can be frustratingly slow. Recent actions taken by a small group of Middlebury students prove that when such change takes too long, more drastic measures may effectively pique awareness of an issue. In an email sent on Oct 12 to a majority of students, staff and faculty, ...
It is because I believe in Middlebury College’s ability to educate passionate and critical thinkers that I am extremely disconcerted by the fraudulent press release sent out by a group of students on Friday, Oct 12. First and foremost, it worries me that Middlebury students who are champions of social ...
Lately professors all over the country and here at Middlebury have been trying to answer the question, “Why liberal arts?” Although the answer is complex, it’s also quite simple. A good liberal arts education produces critically engaged citizens. In other words, people who can get information, ...
My passion lies in the heartbeat of the Earth. With its warming hands and nurturing care, the Earth provides me with everything I need. There is nothing more that I wish for than to protect the place that gives me life. When I heard about Middlebury, I thought I found the perfect school for me. Now ...
Since roughly January, unless you’ve been trapped at the bottom of the sea in a mid-ocean ridge somewhere, spent no less than all of your time out in the backcountry or have failed to leave Bicentennial Hall (entirely possible), you’ve hopefully figured out that the number by which we refer to this ...
“I think attorneys are so busy. You know, they’re always taught to argue everything, and always weigh everything and weigh both sides and they’re always, you know, they’re always devil’s advocating this and bifurcating this and bifurcating that. You know all that stuff. But, I think it is ...
There has been quite a bit of talk about divestment at Middlebury College in the past few weeks. For many students, this is their first exposure to the reality of our college’s endowment, which is invested with very limited, if any, screening for environmental and social criteria. Others have heard ...
On Friday, Oct. 12, Middlebury College welcomed His Holiness the Dalai Lama to campus. An announcement was made that in honor of the visit from the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the College had chosen to demonstrate ethical leadership in divesting its endowment from war and environmental destruction. In ...
In the aftermath of the Dalai Lama’s visit, students received an email claiming that Middlebury College was divesting from war in order to “align its money with its mission.” While we later discovered that this email was a fake press release sent by concerned students, their call for transparency ...
After gazing in awe at the double rainbow that appeared after the freak thunderstorm last Saturday, I realized that most of us share a certain romance with Middlebury. Disappointment with days of rain can be outsmarted by a perfect fall day; dissatisfaction with housing, the endowment or dining hall ...
Of the many animals in the presidential debates, the elephant in the room — Europe — has yet to really come up. Foreign policy arguments have centered on the Middle East and the economic disputes have mainly been on a national scale. So whatever happened to the eurozone crisis? It has not disappeared; ...