Winter term has always been a favorite part of the academic year at Middlebury for students, present and past. Many alumni look back fondly on the classes they took in January and the professors who taught them. Some are even fortunate enough to make a trip back to campus during J-term—this time as teachers themselves.
Middmag talked to six alumni who were back sharing their knowledge and expertise with students this past January.
Dr. Curt Stager visited Middlebury to talk about a new, long-term view of climate change. His book, Deep Future, examines the surprising shifts—and choices—we face in a human-driven era scientists are calling “the Anthropocene”: the Age of Humans.
“We have it within ourselves to build monuments to hope and possibility.”
When Majora Carter was growing up in the Bronx, a measure of success was when someone could afford to move away. At an early age, “I started to plan my escape,” she told an audience of 400 during her Martin Luther King Jr. keynote address at Mead Chapel. Today Carter, an eco-entrepreneur and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, not only lives close to her childhood home, she is also bringing the South Bronx back to health and demonstrating how economic and environmental development can transform communities.
Kenny Williams ’12, who helped start a community garden at a South Bronx school and now works with the largest collection of community gardens in the country, delivered the introduction to Carter’s address. He noted that in 2008, Carter formed the economic consulting and planning firm the Majora Carter Group to bring her groundbreaking approach to other communities. Her successes have garnered multiple awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and Middlebury’s Vision Award, which Dean of the College Shirley Collado presented to her at the conclusion of her talk.
Carter believes that the intransigent ghetto was an “unintended consequence” of integration, as well-off black residents were able to move away, and poverty became entrenched in the neighborhoods they left behind. She showed pictures of her childhood community before and after it began to crumble. Today, people remember the evening news stories in the ’70s about the Bronx burning—when landlords torched their property for the insurance money, and people believed that “there was nothing of value there.”
Majora Carter speaking in Mead Chapel. Photo: Jessica Munyon
Carter described what happens to a poor community with no economic diversity: The financial institutions don’t locate there; instead, there are payday loan stores and pawn shops; instead of grocery stores, there are 7-11s, liquor stores, and 99-cent stores; and, she said, “There are extraordinary amounts of super, highly subsidized housing—so you get concentrated poverty.”
A vicious cycle ensues: neighborhoods deteriorate, society moves its fossil-fuel plants and trash dumps there, and children grow up in unhealthy conditions, leading to obesity, diabetes, and asthma. “We know statistically in this country that poor kids who do poorly in school statistically go to jail,” she explained. “So we were creating this pipeline directly from poverty into prison.”
Dean of the College Shirley Collado presenting Vision Award to Majora Carter. Photo: EJ Bartlett
Part of her escape-from-the-Bronx plan was to go to college and not return, and Carter said no one would have blamed her if she had never come back. “But,” she said, “I could not not look.” She wanted to fix things.
One day, her dog pulled her through trash-strewn brush to the banks of the Bronx River. She’d had no idea there was a river so close to her home. With a $10,000 grant, she began the process of reclaiming the riverside. Later, with additional funding, she spearheaded the creation of the Hunts Point Riverside Park, and later a greenway along the waterfront.
The Majora Carter model for community renewal takes a community asset (a building, a piece of land, a riverside) and uses it to seed economic diversity—to create opportunities for job training, meaningful employment, and economic development. People stay in these communities as their income rises because it contains a mixture of housing and the goods and services they need. She looks for projects that foster the economic development of the future, in the areas of manufacturing, food, and technology. She described projects where community members crafted furniture, conducted research, and created new products.
In the wetland restoration project, Carter hired local residents to do the work. They were trained in ecological restoration. They learned how to clean up contaminated land and to “see value in themselves.” “Showing them they could create their own economic prosperity in a legitimate way was a really powerful tool,” she said.
These individuals were “generationally impoverished,” she explained, “cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. They had significant barriers to employment.” This was their first opportunity to learn skills that many take for granted, such as knowing how to be a team player or to anticipate the boss’s expectations.
One of her recent projects involves a large commercial building that has been closed and shuttered. The building, just minutes from the subway, is on the gateway to the neighborhood. It is highly visible and depressing and “reminds people of the way the South Bronx used be, a place you don’t want to be anywhere near.”
So, Carter, now in negotiation for the long-term lease of this building, hired kids from the neighborhood to “design beautiful, public art to go on the length of it.” In many cases this was their first job, and the images of the kids, paint smattered and smiling, speaks volumes. “They got to design and implement the project—that the only reason it was there was to bring light and happiness to people who saw it,” she said.
Carter ended her talk with these words:
“For Dr. King to be at the end of his life, fighting for racial, environmental, and economic equality—if he could do that and pay the ultimate price for it, then the rest of it should be easy for us. I feel that we spend so much time collecting tributes and putting them out there and feeling bad about them—and all of these things about our collective failures, while we have it within ourselves to build monuments to hope and possibility. That is your job.”
And the audience rose to its feet and gave her a long, standing ovation.
Watch her talk here:
Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.
The discussion was lively and informative Tuesday night as panelists debated whether environmental and social concerns should influence the College’s endowment policy at the first of a planned series of open discussions on the topic. Several panel members asserted that divestment would come with a significant cost but Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury, had another angle. Read the story and watch the video.
As part of our ongoing coverage of how Middlebury is engaging scholarship in the digital age, we take a look at scholarly publishing and some of the questions academia faces with evaluating digital scholarship.
The field of digital scholarship is quickly emerging as one of academia’s great frontiers, with plenty of exciting, and occasionally disconcerting, questions. On Tuesday, Middlebury’s Digital Scholarship Working Group hosted a roundtable discussion tackling specific issues around the topic of “Transforming Scholarly Publishing: New Forms of Peer Review, Open Access, and Building Academic Communities.”
Speaking to a mixed audience of faculty and staff at the Axinn Center, the panel featured two Middlebury faculty members, professors Jason Mittell and Alison Byerly — both of whom have rising profiles in the digital humanities — and national experts Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication for the Modern Language Association, and previously a professor of English and media studies for Pomona College, and Katherine Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Tri-Co Digital Humanities Center.
Fitzpatrick, whose earlier research focused on the relationship between traditional forms of publishing and communication and newer media forms, began thinking about scholarly publishing as one of those “modes” in which things are moving from print to digital. She particularly thought about what this meant for peer review, and whether the traditional forms of peer review for print publishing made sense for work produced digitally. With the blessing of her publisher, she put her ideas to the test with her book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011), posting the entire manuscript to MediaCommons, an online network promoting new forms of publishing in media studies, as well as sending it to traditional reviewers through her publisher. Fitzpatrick says that the experiment generated some excellent discussion about the manuscript and provided valuable information about what works and doesn’t work in open peer review.
Rowe, a Shakespeare scholar, was also exploring what the great digital revolution meant to her field. “Like Kathleen, I’m interested in what you learn about the texts that you care about as your longstanding texts migrate across platforms,” she said. While serving on the board of the journal Shakespeare Quarterly, she was asked to guest edit a special edition themed around Shakespeare and new media. “I said, ‘It seems to me that the most important transformation new media is going to bring to the field of Shakespeare studies is in our modes of scholarly communication.” In a radical departure from tradition, she collaborated with MediaCommons to develop a new open review process for the journal, which attracted nearly 350 comments from 41 scholars in humanities fields.
A big benefit to editors, Rowe noted, is that such highly visible commentary makes it easier for an editor to see the points of stress in an argument, the points of debate, and, of course, the points of agreement among reviewers. She says the process was highly successful for both participants and editors. “The most important takeaway, I think, from a big picture perspective of this experiment is that it gave us a process that was assessable in its own right; archivable as a process, and therefore replicable. This is not a kind of product that humanist scholars generally produce. Now we have a lot of data about what the strengths and weaknesses of this process are.”
Mittell spoke from real-time experience. He is currently in the midst of an open review — placing a pre-print draft online and soliciting comments from both expert and lay readers — of the manuscript for his new book, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. Mittell chose to serialize the release of his manuscript online by chapter rather than as a whole. He says that one of the things scholars have learned is that comments on a full manuscript can be robust at the beginning and middle of a book, but then taper off. Release by chapter, along with plenty of outreach through online outlets and social media, has helped produce a more even distribution of comments throughout his text.
The nature of open review comments can be helpful in ways the traditional model rarely affords, says Mittell. “Generally, the conversation has been quite good. It tends to be very granular, focused on the individual paragraph. Of course, that’s the kind of commentary you don’t get when you submit a full book manuscript. You very rarely see ‘In paragraph 17 in chapter 3 your argument loses track.’ That kind of granularity has been very helpful in my own revision process.”
Byerly, who served as provost at Middlebury for several years, offered a different angle on digital scholarship. She is particularly interested in the process of how to evaluate the quality of digital work in the context of promotion and tenure, and has presented on the topic at the MLA annual conference. “It’s interesting because I don’t have anything like the level of expertise of my colleagues here, but it shows that there’s a real desire to find people who can bridge the gap between the work being done by practitioners and the institutional structures that they inevitably have to get slotted into.”
Byerly sees potential for the faculty evaluation process to emulate the emerging open review process in publishing. She says a lot of valuable feedback is lost in the traditional process because much of the detailed discussion in a closed review committee never makes it to the faculty member who could benefit most from hearing it. “I really see an analogy between the publishing industry and the way in which a lot of evaluation that the whole academy is founded on really needs to shift in ways that publishing is starting to take account of.”
The challenges of evaluating this type of scholarship, says Byerly, often come down to format — how the work is presented. “But also questions of what we actually look for in scholarship, in something that you call scholarship, and what constitutes a scholarly argument? Does it have to be a text-based argument, or does a database and a set of information presented visually constitute a kind of intellectual product, and argument in itself?” The frequently collaborative nature of digital work makes it especially challenging, says Byerly. If you’re reviewing someone who has worked on a digital archive with four other colleagues, for example, it can be difficult to assess that individual’s specific intellectual contribution.
One of the biggest challenges, says Byerly, is simply finding people with the right expertise to evaluate digital content. “You realize it’s a kind of shell game, where everyone is looking for some source of authority. The committees look to publishers, the publishers look to readers, readers look to other colleagues for somebody to say, ‘Is this worth looking at?’ So the idea of putting it in a space where there can be a mutual process of validation, where a variety of voices can enter into some kind of dialogue that produces some kind of judgment about whether a work is worth spending more time on seems to me a very productive way to move forward in a context where traditional sources of authority are very hard to find.”
Whether scholars find themselves on the producing end or as evaluators, it is “absolutely where the fields are headed,” said Byerly, “where most disciplines are ultimately going to end up in some way. What I think most of us, who, as scholars trained in different ways, probably have to figure out is where we ourselves fit in, either as colleagues who are in a position to be participating in these trends, or as department chairs who are sitting in judgment some day on junior colleagues who are doing work that presents itself in a way that’s different from what you’re traditionally accustomed to.”
Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.
This time of year is stressful enough for most people. Add in a week of exams and things can feel downright crushing.
Taking this into account, the Parton Center for Health and Wellness has been proactive in offering students, staff, and faculty a range of stress-reducing activities during exam week.
Last spring Middmag checked out one of their scheduled sessions with Therapy Dogs—hard not to see the positive results of that experience! The dogs are back this semester, on Wednesday from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in Coltrane Lounge, and the center has added a week of meditation sessions as well, wonderfully tucked away in the Mitchell Greene Lounge in McCullough.
Middmag stopped by a few sessions at the start of the week to see how things were going. Four times a day the sessions are guided—at 9 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.—and the rest of the day the room is peacefully quiet.
Rows of mats and cushions line the floor, and the daylight—even on a gloomy day—streams brightly through the windows and overhead skylight.
Several people have volunteered to guide sessions, and on this particular visit Chris Shaw, a visiting lecturer in English and American lit, sat quietly at the head of the room. Experienced in meditation—he’s been practicing for about ten years—this was actually his first time leading a group (you wouldn’t have known it.). As the stragglers settled in on their cushions, took a deep breath, and closed their eyes, Shaw gently offered cues about breathing, focusing on positive thoughts, and generally being mindful of your body.
Neat piles of handouts on the welcome table enlighten the amateur to the practice of beginner meditation. First and foremost, respect the “noble silence” of the space. Resist the temptation to talk out loud or even bust a move into your best Sun Salutation or Downward Dog. This is most definitely a place of quiet, in both mind and body. And also give yourself a break—recognize that it may feel a little weird at first, but that the benefits are apparent over time, especially for students who are facing new life experiences and sensory overload at a rapid clip. The key word, though, is “time,” as another guideline notes: the benefits of mindfulness meditation accrue over time. That’s why they call it “practice.”
For twenty minutes the small group sat quietly, with only a few prompts from Shaw. Then a resonant and singular tone of a meditation bowl brought the session to a close. As the group slowly stood to shrug into scarves and down jackets, another string of students ambled in to take their places.
Drop-in and Guided Mindfulness Meditation
December 10-15
Mitchell Greene Lounge at McCullough
Drop-in: 6 a.m. – 11 p.m.
Guided: 9 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 8 p.m.
Sponsored by Parton Center for Health and Wellness
