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Teaching the American Negro Spiritual

February 1, 2013 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

CO70-5-07-clemmons-011Twilight Artist in Residence François Clemmons teaches a January term class called the History of the American Negro Spiritual and Its Influence on Western Civilization. He has found that teaching this subject to young people with little connection to the lives of America’s slaves takes special understanding and some creative techniques. Clemmons describes the class and some of the resources he uses, below.

Watch Clemmons  perform “I’ve been in the storm so long.”

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Writing about American Negro spirituals is my passion. I’ve been singing these glorious songs since my earliest conception in my mother’s womb. This legacy was passed down to me by my mother, my grandmother, Minnie Green, and my great-grandmother, Laura Mae Sanders. I sang these songs at home and in church when other children were singing “Mary Had Little Lamb” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and other typical nursery rhymes.

African-American-Spirituals

The index provides a systematic listing of Negro spirituals

In putting together the collection of The Index to African American Spirituals, Kathleen Abromeit and I wanted to make available to all young singers, professionals, and teachers information as to what was available and, in some cases, where one can still purchase these arrangements. We focused on solo arrangements, but just as much is becoming available for all levels of choral groups. Much of it unfortunately is out of print. But we do know libraries, private and public, where copies can be had with a little research. Schomberg Public Library in New York City, Oberlin College, Fisk University, Spellman University, Morehouse University, Jackson State University, Morgan State University, Harvard, Howard, and Yale Universities, just to name a few.

I use this publication and several others that I am familiar with in my January term class at Middlebury College on Slavery and the American Negro Spirituals. Some excellent resources are The Book of American Negro Spirituals arr. by the Johnson Brothers, The Music of Black Americans by Irene Southern, Songs for Today, Arr. Clemmons, Songs of Zion—United Methodist Church, and Wade in the Water by Arthur Jones. In addition, there are several notable publishers who are making an effort to republish collections made famous by tenor Roland Hayes; bass, Paul Robeson; and alto, Marian Anderson. Arrangers such as Hall Johnson, H. T. Burleigh, John W. Work, Nathaniel Dett, Eva Jessye, Roland Hayes, Jester Hairston, the Johnson Brothers, Florence Price, and Margaret Bonds are featured.

These publications are augmented in my class by recordings, DVDs and CDs by classical singers, pop artists, jazz musicians, vocalists, and instrumentalists, as well as live performances by me, along with members of the community and faculty. With the help of local artists, I have been able to form the core of a chorus to sing these songs and occasionally to perform a solo here and there. However, the hardest part of passing on the legacy of these songs has been developing a fuller understanding of the secrets to unlocking the unique impact of this repertoire. Spirituals appear quite simple and naïve in print. Most of the “authentic” arrangements I’ve seen can be sung by amateurs as well as young beginning singers. The simple texts and pervasive repetition are highly deceptive. Rare is the student who brings his life experiences to this work, which demands it.

So in order to really teach this work, I must discuss with the class and in small seminar groups the life of slaves and their unique struggle in their 17th- and 18th-century world. Some of the students come prepared for the intellectual stimulation and comparisons, but on the whole, most have almost no true perception into the humanity, or lack thereof, of this humiliating experience. In all fairness, much in our society produces this condition in students and encourages them to see only the ultimate outcome or the topical aspects of this repulsive situation: American Slavery.

The path toward teaching the inner life of these songs is lined with patience, encouragement, and understanding. Our society has wrapped many unpleasant experiences in pageantry and superficial holiday recognition. It often takes much determination and creativity to read the signs of the reality of peoples who have been slaves in this environment. Most of the students have no idea that many if not all of the songs have a double meaning: one applicable to the Bible and its spiritual strengths and another that plans for insurrection and flights to freedom.

The slaves were overtly taught, by the official churches and parsons and priests who visited the plantations, a submissive theology based loosely on several biblical texts referring to “slaves, obey your master” (Ephesians 6 chapter 5-9 verses; Colossians 3 chapter 22 verse; and 1Peter 2 chapter 18 verse) and “render under to Caesar those things which are Caesar’s and unto God those things which are God’s” (Mark 12 chapter 17 verse, and Matthew 22 chapter 20-22 verses).

Many of the students today do not know the inner voices, relationships, and intricate weavings of the theology of the Bible and don’t really relate to its profound world impact along with its acknowledged philosophy, poetry, and inspiration. I begin with Old Testament legends such as David, Saul, Solomon, Ruth, Daniel, Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Elisha, and Ezekiel. Then I add the life of the Christ, Paul, Mathew, Mark, Luke, Judas, John, and Mary and Joseph.

Because of the nearly unlimited variety of the biblical texts of the spirituals, we are only able to touch on the core stories and events that are important to the slaves. My next role is to wed together an understanding that for over 250 years this country was built on the free sweat of human beings with the students’ grasp of modern economic development (which may be in conflict with moral perspective) and  the principle of personal empowerment. We would not be the nation we are today if it were not for this forced, free labor; in most cases the students’ parents would not have the expected prosperity many of them take for granted, and our standing in the rest of the world would have a very different impact.

The next step requires that I build bridges to the hearts of the students. My experience has taught me that the easiest, quickest, and most permanent way to do this is to have the students share with me who they are—the special characteristics of their families, their chores and hobbies, whether or not they have pets, why they chose to come to this college, and why they chose to take this course. None of these answers in and of themselves are that terribly important. What is important is the powerful atmosphere it builds to establish community and a visible, tangible relationship with every member of the class. We begin to form a shared, academic family. One that feels and shares with each other and does not just know things intellectually.

Almost imperceptively and immediately the tone of the classroom lessons and the singing choices change. In nearly every aspect we become an organic, fully functioning ensemble with one united goal in mind, to dislodge the secrets and inner codes of the American Negro spiritual and its creators. At this point it is obvious to me that we have collectively absorbed and moved on beyond the beauty and surface appeal of this great music. The syncopated rhythms, the traditional hymn-like melodies, and the acknowledged variety of these simple biblical stories and melodies were the facts that initially drew many of the students to the repertoire, its practice, and history. Now they operate from “within” this experience on a completely different level.  This level includes all of the previously mentioned requisite aspects to understanding this experience but now also engages the much deeper sense of empathy and spirituality.

From this perspective the students and class in general begin to know themselves and the slaves as a connected people, and they value the practical experiences that they can now relate to. A joyful song is not just a joyful, ecstatic shout or a foot-stomping, clap-worthy, sometimes hypnotic self-indulgence. In like manner, a sad song is not just mournful and painful and longing for death. These songs begin to express the deeper soul longing to be free and to know the human dignity that is understood by all of humanity. The slaves who created this repertoire are no longer just over there or back there in history. Their lives and stories live today and are worthy of knowing and sharing.

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Climate Pioneer Opens Social Entrepreneurship Symposium

January 29, 2013 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere
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Billy Parish has shown that building a movement takes focused collaboration . “We never do anything world-changing by ourselves.”

Fresh from a coup in which his crowd-sourced solar energy investment company, Mosaic, Inc., sold out its shares overnight, Billy Parish gave the opening talk at Middlebury’s second annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference on January 24. An all-ages crowd at McCullough Social Space came to hear one of the founders of the youth climate movement speak about “Following Purpose”—lessons he’s learned building social movements and a business that allow changing the world to be your day job.

Parish opened by recalling two influences that changed his own life. One was a segment of Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael, in which the title character explains to his pupil how our growth-based civilization, blind to biological limits, is as destined to crash as a flying machine built without an eye to aerodynamics. The second was visiting a shrinking Indian glacier and realizing the impact on water supplies for 400 million people downstream. “I realized there was no turning back,” Parish said. “I said to myself, ‘this is my life’s work.’”

Parish has co-authored a book to help others achieve their own such realizations and fulfill them. Thursday night he took the audience through the three biggest lessons he learned in creating change, detailed in Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money and Community in a Changing World (Rodale/Penguin, 2012).

  • Follow Your Purpose. “We so rarely talk with anyone about why we feel we’re here,” Parish noted, and asked listeners to write their own purpose (or what they think it is now) on the index cards provided. Audience members then stood and spoke out loud—and then yelled—their purpose statements.
  • Build on the Best. “We never do anything world-changing by ourselves,” said Parish, and related how he enlisted leaders such as Van Jones to advise his projects and attracted several 2008 presidential campaigns to promote climate concerns.
  • Go to the Root. The crushing defeats of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference and U.S. federal climate legislation made Parish rethink his approach. Handing off his youth climate activism to successors, he took time (and the support of an Ashoka Fellowship) to examine the real barriers to achieving widespread clean energy adoption. He realized solar companies and potential customers faced capital shortages and ill-fitting financing structures. He co-founded Mosaic, his crowd-sourced solar investment platform, with the purpose of enabling “abundant clean energy for and by the people.”

Admitting that he’d had to learn the energy financing business “on the job,” Parish encouraged listeners to commit the necessary time to master their chosen areas of action. Meanwhile, at Mosaic, he said, the new solar projects the company helps to finance are creating larger numbers of people committed to renewable energy and to policies that promote it.

Click the link below to watch Parish’s talk.

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John Huddleston on “Healing Ground”

December 19, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Listen in as author and photographer John Huddleston narrates an audio slideshow of his favorite images from Healing Ground.

 

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Restoration Hardware: Inside the Studio

November 16, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Behind the scenes and inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s conservation studio.

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George Bisacca ’77 is considered one of the world’s leading conservators of “panel paintings,” paintings on wood.

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Road Taken: Echo Chamber

October 30, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Hamlet takes his coffee black. Claudius stalks the salad bar. Polonius can rarely resist dessert. One day, while serving Ophelia her soup, I watch with horror as a few drops of roasted tomato land on the table in front of her, like gobs of blood. She smiles; she doesn’t seem to mind.

At the Vermont campus of the Bread Loaf School of English, everyone—students, faculty and staff, their families, and professional actors in the summer’s annual production—sits down for a meal, three times a day, at long tables in the Inn. I, as a member of the waitstaff, serve them. Most of us are students (some are children of faculty), and only a few in our ranks have any real restaurant experience. The rest of us learn to take orders, carry trays, and pour coffee on the fly. We fake it—we act. Fortunately, we don’t work for tips.

When dinner is over, and we waiters have performed our nightly lines—“All set with that? Coffee or tea for anyone?”—the actors in Hamlet rehearse their own parts in the Burgess Meredith Little Theater. I read in the library nearby and make my nightly pilgrimage to a coffee machine in the Barn. And every night, it seems, Hamlet is roaming around outside the theater, calling, “Mother! Mother!” And Ophelia is bursting out of the double-screen doors, singing and cackling and spinning in circles, mad and loose with grief. Even when I’ve returned to the library, the players’ raucous theatrics and motley instrumentation come through the air like the mist that has already soaked the grass. I learn the pattern of their chants, their hollers and shrieks.

It occurs to me that this is always happening: Hamlet is always happening; all our stories happen over and over, forever. These actors make a temporary echo chamber, bring each scene to life again and again—but isn’t this what is going on in each of our editions, on our very own bookshelves? Crack a spine and all of the characters will come tumbling out, tangled in desperate embraces and grunting, poisonous combat. Or maybe they’re already among us, drinking tea, standing in line. Not just Hamlet and company—everyone. I like to imagine that one night I’ll brush shoulders with a muttering Stephen Dedalus, or hold the door for Clarissa Dalloway, lost in thought.

But something else happens, too: I read my very own life in the pages of a book. “Several of the waiters,” writes Marcel Proust in Within a Budding Grove, “let loose among the tables, were flying along at full speed, each carrying on his outstretched palm a dish which it seemed to be the object of this kind of race not to let fall.” Too true! “Their perpetual course among the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its dizzy but ordered circulation.” Am I dizzy on mountain air, or have these worlds converged? Laertes, dead just last night, ordering the chicken; me, rushing the order, flying across the pages of Proust; gunshots and clashing rapiers and the clamor of three hundred clean forks, all sounding somewhere in between fiction, theater and reality.

At the end of the summer, Hamlet runs for five nights. On one of them, I sit with two companions in the middle of a field, where our Adirondack chairs put down sharp moon shadows. Later, I’ll read a closing passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves with satisfied melancholy: “But now the head waiter, who has finished his own meal, appears and frowns […] They must go; must put up the shutters, must fold the tablecloths, and give one brush with a wet mop under the tables.” But tonight is for basking in moonlight and drinking wine chilled in wet grass, and listening to the sounds from the theater that come rolling across the darkness: chants, hollers, shrieks. Silence—and then applause.

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Vignette: The World by the Bay

October 30, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

In 1769, a Spanish exploring party led by Don Gaspar de Portola was sent north from San Diego to establish a fort and mission at Monterey Bay, which had been described 172 years earlier by a passing Spanish seafarer as a “fine harbor sheltered from all winds.” The first whites to see Northern California by land, and suffering greatly from starvation and disease, Portola’s men completely missed Monterey Bay, an open gulf. They overshot by at least 70 miles, but at last sighted the empty land and water that would be called San Francisco and its bay. They returned home thinking they had failed.

The admissions office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies is in a plain one-story adobe house from the historic Mexican period, home to the author John Steinbeck, his second wife, Gwyn, and their infant son, Thom, between November 1944 and April 1945. The Lara-Sota Adobe, he said, was “a house I have wanted since I was a little kid.” The little two-room house was shaded street-side by a massive cypress tree and stood on a quiet street a few hundred yards uphill from bay water. Steinbeck was writing his parable, The Pearl, and its screenplay, in a backyard garden shed in January 1945, when his novel Cannery Row, about colorful down-on-their-luck folk living downwind of Monterey’s sardine factories, was published.  The Steinbecks left the adobe for Mexico and the filming of The Pearl and never returned.

Today is the first day of classes of the fall semester, and the admissions staff is resting on laurels, having admitted one of the largest classes—418 students—in Monterey’s 57-year history. With a total student body of 700, 60 percent women, 40 percent men, from 38 countries and speaking 33 native languages, the average student has three years of professional experience before entrance. Amid its pride, on this quiet late-summer day with all the first-day bustle happening elsewhere on campus, the staff is still panged at the loss of its massive shading cypress, felled by snarling chainsaws only a few weeks before after being declared terminal and hazardous; it is said to have been planted over the bones of a child, an early resident in the Mexican period. Chipped and shredded, the cypress is piled in a small mountain in the center of the campus organic garden and has been distributed in all the gardens and beds, sweetening the already scented air.

The campus sits in a gentle, flower-scented, hillside-bungalow neighborhood, punctuated by cypress, cedars, palm trees, live oaks, Japanese maples, and knobcone pines. Gardens proliferate: alongside very old adobe or stone walls topped with terra cotta tiles, narrow stone or redbrick paths thread between buildings and duck below redwood pergolas, past tiny courtyards, bench nooks, planters and pots and gardens of phlox, coast buckwheat, primrose, buckthorn, thimbleberry, fruit-dangling grapevines, a multitude of flowers.

Near the center of campus, in the Samson Student Center Café, many nations’ flags hang from ceiling timber trusses, from the familiar Old Glory, and France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt, the Philippines, to the less familiar Bhutan, Ghana, Senegal, Thailand, Armenia. Directional signs are pinned to the wall above the cashier station and a Coca-Cola cooler: New Delhi, 7,773 mi; Petra, 6,852 mi.; Madrid, 5,838 mi.; Cairo, 7,512 mi.; London, 5,413 mi; Paris 5,621 mi.; Mexico City, 1,818 mi. In late morning of this first day, the room swells with the sound of young peoples’ banter, a babel of languages, beneath the assembly of flags.

Find a vacant seat in class with Professor Lyuba Zarsky, Public Policy and the Environment. Thirty-four IP majors crowd into a trim, well-appointed, storefront classroom on Pacific Street in McGowan Building; outside the large plate-glass window, busy traffic whizzes by. Many of the students are freshly returned from summer internships or institutes, and from an International Professional Service Semester. Lyuba Zarsky has taught at MIIS for seven years and edited the book Human Rights and the Environment: Conflicts and Norms in a Globalizing World, which will inform this course. She has previous experience—up to 25 years in sustainable development, working with Aborigines in Australia and with an NGO’s a globalization program. She will guide them through discussions of public policy and government functions and through the process of changing norms, to influence laws governing the environment and sustainability.

This being the first class meeting, Zarsky directs students to break into pairs, interview each other about their backgrounds, and then introduce their partner to the class. For 10 minutes, 34 avid, intelligent, and confident graduate students look into the eyes of their partners and digest their lives, filling the room’s air with warm talk. Justin Wright (Middlebury ’08) turns to a classmate to report of his landscaping and carpentry work in Hawaii, Arizona, and Northern California, and how living near mountain-fast Lake Tahoe, witnessing the pressures on the environment brought to bear by wealth, power, and development, led him straight to MIIS to pursue public policy. His classmate, Rainey, has been working as a translator, most recently at the London Olympics, where the beach volleyball competition commanded much attention.

Faculty Authors’ Section—10 shelves—William Tell Coleman Library, a bright and modern, two-story facility. Pull titles at random: Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto; Bringing Women In: Women’s Issues in International Development Programs; Terrorism and Homeland Security: Thinking Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime; Strategically about Policy; The Interpreter’s Companion; Leadership in English Language Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Skills for Changing Times; The Human Genome Project and Minority Communities: Ethical, Political, and Social Dilemmas; Translators’ Strategies and Creativity; American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific. Adjacent are five shelves dedicated to the life and career of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the brilliant, abrasive maverick who served in the Army in China, Burma, and India before and during World War II. Nearby is a lifelike bust of the general, with his prominent ears and thin Yankee nose. Stilwell’s two daughters, who settled near the family home in Carmel, were long associated with the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Nancy Stilwell Easterbrook, born in China and a longtime trustee of MIIS, and her sister, artist Alison Stilwell Cameron, are themselves memorialized outside the Coleman Library in a flower garden with thankful plaques from the many Chinese scholarship students they supported at Monterey.

At the Holland Center, a photo exhibition overlooks tables for ping-pong and foosball. The pictures are the work of Peter Grothe—former adjunct professor and emeritus director of International Student Programs, who died in June 2012, at the age of 81. All are close-up portraits of mostly young people, an international panoply of children from a lifetime of world travels; the faces brighten a dim and temporarily empty gathering spot.

In early 1960, as adviser to Minnesota Democratic senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Peter Grothe drafted the language of a foreign-aid bill and proposed an entity he called “The Peace Corps.” Later that season, Humphrey gave the idea to the Presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy. Young Grothe wrote Kennedy’s proposing speech and later served in the first “class” of Peace Corps volunteers, assigned to Ethiopia. At Monterey for 31 years, Grothe taught cross-cultural communications and American politics, and recruited in more than 40 countries, greatly increasing international student enrollment. In the student lounge, beneath Grothe’s colorful assemblage of international amity, the pool cues rest on the tables like crossed and put-away swords, and the rows of foosball combatants are, at least for the moment, at rest.

Up behind the Holland Center, grounds super Kirk Eckhardt (who, with his build, could be a younger stand-in for the actor Nick Nolte) is tending a row of tall, stupendous flowering vines that most people would not notice unless they left the traveled way and peeked at an obscure wall, when he is startled by the sight of a wounded deer hiding in the foliage. It seems to have been injured by a car. He calls the wildlife rescue truck for the Monterey County SPCA. It glides discretely up a driveway, and the veterinarian eyeballs the deer before mixing a sedative so the deer can be rescued. Graduate students sit studying and checking e-mail in a nearby courtyard, blissfully unmindful of the little drama unfolding just a few yards away.

The McGowan Building contains the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program, the East Asia Nonproliferation Program, and the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program. Framed decorative posters spied on the second floor: Middle East maps, informational posters on botulism toxin and the dangers of ingesting alpha emitters, and two vintage U.S. government wanted posters—offering a $5 million reward for Osama Bin Laden. It is eerily quiet. Not wishing to wait for the elevator, one takes the stairs to another floor.

One flight above, in a crowded little seminar room, Professor Jeff Langholz is holding the first meeting of Environmental Conflict Management, studying the role of environmental factors in conflicts and international security. Langholz’s research focuses on biodiversity conservation and sustainable development; he worked for the Environmental Protection Agency for five years on toxic waste policy, trained and practiced extensively as a mediator, and has taught a version of this course at MIIS for 13 years. Today’s simulation exercise explores a multination conflict over an imagined watercourse, the Zihum River, which forms borders of five neighboring nations. The students break into five groups, following a process Langholz has directed 5 times at The Hague, 7 times in the Middle East, and 4 times each in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and North America. The conclusion will underscore the importance of earned trust, transparency, flexibility, and most of all, enlightened self-interest. “It pays,” the professor says, “to cooperate.” There have been shouting matches, tears, and walkouts in his mediation exercises in the Real World, but at MIIS, working step-by-step toward an Ideal World, there is teamwork, reason, receptivity, and comprehension. Jeff Langholz’s article about this exercise rests on 100 case histories and will be published soon.

Screeching gulls perch atop the tiled roof of the neighboring AT&T building, echoing on the walls of the Monterey Institute. One may stand on tiptoes on the ringing second-floor balcony of the Morse Building, as a multicolored congress of national flags on their flagpoles waves in the breeze, and one can glimpse a smidgen of Monterey Bay. Toward the end of this first day of classes, four graduate students wander downtown to the water and Fisherman’s Wharf. They gaze at a heap on a wooden float moored to the whale-watching center: 25 sea lions of varying tonnage sprawl in a companionate pile. One meditatively scratches his side with a broad flipper. He grunts. Thirty yards away on a bobbing white skiff, two pelicans supervise the harbor.

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Politics in America: Just the Facts

October 30, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

With the presidential election looming, and our challenges more complex and global than ever, the state of public discourse in America is in crisis. Where there should be clear choices, anger and antipathy prevail. Partisan considerations trump common sense and cooperation. Compromise is a dirty word. Clear discussions of policy alternatives are buried beneath an avalanche of political positioning and negative ads. Information is overwhelmed by accusation.

We can do better than this.

What the public needs and should demand is serious, fact-driven discussion about real-world problems. Yet real facts are hard to come by in our political discourse. Some candidates and pundits actually disparage the facts. What’s going on? The causes and culprits are all around us.

Too many elected and aspiring leaders feed a vicious circle of assertion and accusation as they frame policy debates as black-and-white choices, simple problems with simple solutions. The media create a peculiar echo chamber; partisan shout fests too often trump the role of consistent fact provider. Interest groups pile on, heaving money, producing more attack ads, and making more claims than the public can ever hope to digest.

Believing that people want an alternative to this depressing dynamic, I started Face the Facts USA with philanthropist Ed Scott. We were determined to find a way to present fundamental facts creatively and memorably but without spin or bias. We wanted the facts to be accompanied by context and informed discussion.

Based at George Washington University, where I head the School of Media and Public Affairs, the project is powered by a tiny staff and a dedicated group of students, (It also has a bipartisan advisory group that counts Bill Delahunt ’63 and Jim Douglas ’72 among its members.) We release a fact a day in subject areas that relate to the economy, national security, education, and other issues.

The experiment is meeting with great success. Diverse media organizations from McClatchy-Tribune, Huffington Post, and Newsmax, to PBS, Journal-Register, and Voxxi are now distributing the facts. Their enthusiasm suggests these relationships are born of something more than convenience. There is a genuine hunger and appreciation for what we are doing—facing the facts every day.

I have been in journalism since my days at Middlebury. From a small radio station in Springfield, Vermont, to the Voice of America, the Associated Press and CNN, I have had the great privilege to travel the world, cover historic events, meet amazing people, and tell stories, hoping always to inform along the way. But I am deeply worried by the political and media noise machines around us. In too many places, we are polarized and paralyzed.

There is no easy fix to the depressing reality of America’s sound-bite culture and political gridlock. But the status quo is unacceptable. Facts matter. They are where we should start. And as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

It is my hope that this project, driven largely by young people who have the most to gain—or lose—can contribute to our national discourse.

Yes, we can do better. We have to.

Frank Sesno ’77 is Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. He served as CNN White House Correspondent, anchor and Washington Bureau Chief. He graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in American History and served as a trustee of the College from 1994-2004. Sign up for your fact a day at www.facethefactsusa.org.

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