Opinion

Spring Break - Dylan Levy

Panther Blood: An exercise in bi-winning

The past few weeks, there have been several op-eds printed in the Campus protesting the stifling nature of Middlebury’s rigorous academic demands. Although I agreed with many of the arguments presented in the op-eds, as a lifelong nerd with no hope of salvation and a puppet of the administration, ...

Yankee Doodle Dandy?

A few days before the Japanese earthquake (and ensuing nuclear power and human crisis), the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in this country approved Vermont Yankee’s request for a new 20-year license. Despite the local plant’s questionable history (radioactive hydrogen was found leaking into ...

Building a healthy academic community

Last week the economics department sponsored a lecture on “Early Non-Marital Childrearing and the Culture of Despair,” by Phillip Levine, an economist from Wellesley.  Levine posited deeply problematic and racist conceptions that devalued a “culture” from which he retained much distance.  ...

Thank you, thank you! - Donna Donahue

On behalf of the Better Middlebury Partnership I want to thank the wonderful Middlebury College volunteers who helped us with the Chili Festival and to thank all the great students who showed up to sample the more than 70 types of chili provided by more than 50 vendors. It was a great day made greater ...

A very premature crush list - Maya Goldberg-Safir

Sometimes I get fed up with this place. There may be better reasons to dislike Middlebury, but so often I come back to the same restless discomfort: I am always surrounded here. I am always watching. I am always being watched. Maybe you can relate — you know those days when the perky girl on your ...

Editorial

Whether you hear of it through e-mails from your RA or by looking down your decimated hall, the problem of dorm damage is a reality. With several weeks still remaining in the academic year, the College’s monetary tally for dorm damage exceeds $53,000 — more than the cost of one student’s yearly ...

MiddCon and LAL

Dearest Blueberry, You don’t know a lot about me, and I don’t know a lot about you, but we are in love. Here is the story of how I met you. Doing homework is one of the loneliest parts of my day. I came to this realization this past weekend, when I spent every waking hour of my actual birthday ...

How I Fixed the Federal Deficit

A heavy knock on the door startled me as I sat at my desk the other night, wallowing through a lengthy problem set. “Come in,” I yelled, and then returned to my work. When I noticed my visitors I nearly fell out of my seat. President Barack Obama stood in my doorway, flanked by House Speaker John ...

Cartoon - Dylan Levy

To a basketball player - Wenbo Zhang

At the beginning of your journey, it might have been the glamour of the NBA that lured you into the game, or that exhilarating sound of a basketball swishing through the net. But not long after, what started off as a spurt of enthusiasm grew into a long-lasting passion. When other kids were at home ...

A letter on creativity

In a recent lecture on the connection between mind and body, Andrea Olsen said that after three days of drinking water at a conference in Korea she was 60 percent composed of that country. My encounters with the Proctor water tap have provided less inspiration. That’s not to say this place is lacking ...

Editorial

There are many wonderful things we can, and often do, say about Middlebury students. Our academic knowledge is vast and expanding everyday; our athletes are disciplined and talented, and our teams nearly always competitive; and on the weekends, we know how to cut loose and have a good time. But there ...

Passive Revolution

Interesting course offerings, Spring 2011

An ideal liberal arts education provides a broad-based academic curriculum with the purpose of cultivating individuals who think critically, communicate well and realize potential. Such an institution, like Middlebury, must offer a diversity of subjects in a limited number of classes, which both interest ...

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Snow Storm

I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was … snow. II Middtwitt: this snowday has only reinforced how badly I WANT MATTHEW BIETTE TO BE MY DAD #socuteinanapron III E-mail from Professor Billings canceling class: Hi everyone, I’m snow-bound this morning, and so is Prof. Monod. Have ...

Institutionalized Protest

From Iran to Egypt, from Yemen to Libya, from Morocco to China and from Senegal to the United States citizens have spilled into the streets, surrounded government buildings  and choked public squares, holding signs and shouting — hoping that their combined presence and united voices will change their ...

Shadow-Boxing for the Climate

Lately, I’ve been taking a class on social movements; civil rights, farm workers unions, peaceful uprisings in the Middle East — you name it. And while I have learned that there is no way to explain these powerful events as a whole — each is unprecedented in its own way — some key components ...

A welcome change - Jack Hoffman

The town meeting last week marked the second year in a row that Vermont’s education spending has declined. And it happened without the angst we all felt last year. Only three districts rejected their budgets — that’s the fewest in at least 20 years. And based on the anecdotal evidence, many budgets ...

“Hello” policy - Logan Brown

Although I have a very large bone to pick with issues involving the Middlebury community and our inability to integrate different social scenes on this campus (I hope to address them in future articles), I want to start with a very simple proposition. It may seem a wild idea at first but I think it ...