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Politics in America: Legal Eagle

October 30, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Attorney Megan Sowards ’98 is on leave from her job as an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm Patton Boggs to serve as the deputy general counsel to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Amid a grueling campaign schedule, she was gracious to answer a few questions we had about her job and how she got there.

Middlebury Magazine You are a working as the deputy general counsel to a presidential campaign at a time when lawyers and politicians (and journalists!) aren’t held in the highest public esteem. What attracts you to this particular job? And what would you say to those who have less than a positive image of politicians and lawyers?

Meghan Sowards It’s unfortunate that this perception exists, because my career in public service provides me with a front row seat to the sacrifices that men and women on both sides of the aisle make in order to stand for election and to serve in public office. I see the long hours, the missed family events, the attention to detail, the passion for fact-finding, the day-to-day hard work that comes with being an exemplary public servant–things the general public doesn’t get to see. I’m fortunate to work for men and women who became involved because they believe that their efforts will strengthen our country and improve the lives of all the people they serve. I feel strongly that this presidential election will be the most consequential of my lifetime. It’s tremendously satisfying to work for someone who I believe has the skills and know how to lead country in the right direction.

MM You’ve written speeches for the State Department and served as a speechwriter and press secretary, respectively, for a pair of United States senators (Susan Collins from Maine and Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island). How has this experience informed what you are doing now?

MS Obviously those jobs helped me hone my writing skills, which I use every day as a lawyer.  Having worked on both Senate and State Department staffs, I know what those positions entail. So, that background helps me provide more practical legal advice to my co-workers on the campaign. I’ve stood in their shoes. I have a greater appreciation for the realities and demands of their jobs. Campaign staffers may not always love visiting the lawyer’s office, but I hope my background makes me a more approachable counselor.

MM Is there anything about this job that has surprised you?

MS I’m continually amazed by just how much work goes into running for president and how such a small team of people is able to get it done. Even basic things—like making sure that the candidate’s name appears on the primary ballot in every state—require a great deal of preparation and effort. During the primary, I spent a lot of time researching each state’s unique ballot access requirements and making sure that our campaign had met those requirements in all 50 states and D.C. These can range from filling out a basic form to submitting a petition signed by thousands of registered voters in a strictly prescribed format.  Our office oversaw the process from start to finish—including taking volunteers into the field to gather signatures. Even on a presidential campaign, everyone rolls up their sleeves to get the job done, no matter how big or small. You have to earn it.

MM What does a successful day look like to you?

MS A successful day is a day when no one outside the campaign knows that I exist.  When the lawyers have done their job, we’ve anticipated the pitfalls and steered the campaign in a direction that avoids them.

MM You’re on leave from a position at one of the most prestigious D.C. law firms—Patton Boggs—to work as legal counsel on a presidential campaign. Think back to 1997-98 and your senior year at Middlebury. In your wildest dreams, did you envision doing what you’re doing today?

 MS Not at all. I don’t come from a political family or even from a family of lawyers, so it wasn’t until I started working on the school newspaper at Middlebury that I gained any exposure to politics. Then a Middlebury alum offered me a summer internship on Capitol Hill, and I realized that politics is in my blood. Even then, though, I never imagined that I would have the privilege of working on a presidential campaign. It’s a thrill.

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Politics in America: Myth or Reality

October 30, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

In the media’s telling, a presidential election is in almost daily flux. Voters’ sentiments shift, often dramatically, in response to each new event: a change in candidate tactics, an evocative ad, a dramatic speech, a strong debate performance, and, not least, a highly publicized candidate “gaffe.” Entire news cycles are devoted to parsing the electoral implications of candidates’ rhetorical miscues: “you didn’t build that,” a claim that 47 percent of people “are dependent on government,” or even seemingly trivial mistakes such as a misremembered marathon time.

In our view, this media narrative—if not wrong—is very misleading. As our students and those watching our Professor Pundits videos have heard us say, we believe that voters are not so easily swayed, and that presidential elections turn on much more substantial matters. The history of past campaigns, the data on public opinion and voting behavior, and our understanding of how political activists and groups behave suggest to us that the voters’ political sentiments are both more stable and more rational than media accounts indicate. To illustrate our claim, we focus here on four key themes that we believe will shape this election in ways that the conventional wisdom may not appreciate.

It’s the Economy, Stupid
Much election coverage focuses on hot-button “social” issues—abortion, welfare reform, and gay marriage—that pundits believe divide voters along partisan lines based on gender, race, or other demographic characteristics. The media also spends considerable time discussing candidate qualities, such as likeability, as measured, for example, by which candidate voters would prefer to have a beer with. In contrast, we tend to discount these factors as major electoral influences.  Instead, when voters are asked to identify the issue that most concerns them, polls repeatedly show that the economy—particularly jobs, governmental spending, and the federal budget deficit—is by far the most important priority. Health care usually comes in a distant second, followed by immigration. Cultural or “moral values” issues, on the other hand, barely register on the list of voters’ concerns. This is why we believe this election will turn largely on how voters assess the state of the economy and to what degree they hold President Obama culpable for its middling performance during his first term.

Similarly, we do not find much historical evidence that candidates’ personalities are strongly correlated with election outcomes. Just because a voter might prefer to have a beer with one candidate does not mean she’s likely to vote for him. It is true that whether a candidate is viewed favorably or not does have some bearing on the race, but favorability ratings say as much about voters’ assessment of contextual factors, such as the state of the economy, as they do about attitudes toward the candidate. That’s why the most accurate election-forecast models are based largely on economic variables and not on other issues. To be sure, in a tight race, one can cite almost any issue as determinative. But in prioritizing electoral influences, we start with the economy.

Drowning in Campaign Cash
A new entity, the Super PAC, emerged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts in connection with electoral races, so long as they do not coordinate their spending with the campaigns themselves. This is significant because it has rearranged how campaign money is spent, but it probably has not dramatically increased the likelihood that election victories can be “bought,” as many critics have claimed. First, the total percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on politics in the U.S. has remained stable over the last century despite numerous changes in campaign finance rules; this is unlikely to change any time soon. Second, evidence from past campaigns suggests that while lack of money can lose elections, a surplus of money is no guarantee of winning. Witness 2012’s most generous Super PAC donor, Sheldon Adelson, who was unable to “buy” the Republican nomination for his preferred candidate, Newt Gingrich.

Although large donors like Adelson have received most of the attention this year, we continue to see an increase in small-donor contributions of $10, $25, or $50. This year, the Federal Election Commission made it even easier to donate small amounts by approving technology that allows giving via text message. Reformers laud small contributions as more democratic than large ones, but small donors are also unrepresentative of the electorate at large. They are more likely to be white, male, and possess a higher income, and—importantly—they are also more likely to hold views on policy issues that are far from the mainstream. Those who collect most of their money from small contributors are candidates such as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders—none of them is a moderate.

A Hopelessly Polarized Electorate
If there is one overriding media characterization of this election, it is that we are a deeply and increasingly polarized nation, an image indelibly captured in the ubiquitous red-state, blue-state electoral maps. That division, pundits tell us, is based on fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on a host of issues, from gun control to prayer in schools.  We believe this image is overdrawn. The mistake pundits make is to confuse a choice between two polarized candidates with a polarized electorate. It is true that candidates go to great lengths to differentiate themselves across a host of issues, and that these differences are based on very real and contrasting ideologies. However, as political scientist Morris Fiorina puts it, voters, while closely divided, are not deeply divided. Although they must choose between two very partisan candidates, most voters are moderates.

As we noted above, the moral values that attract so much media attention actually rank very low in voters’ priorities. Moreover, there is not much evidence indicating that red-state and blue-state voters differ significantly in their views on most of these “hot button” social issues. Aside from party identification, income remains the most consistent predictor of the presidential vote, with lower-income voters more likely to vote Democratic. Church attendance has become a better predictor of votes in recent years, but that may reflect the fact that presidential candidates are talking more about religious issues than it registers a change in voter opinions.

Health Care
We’ve been hearing all season long about Republican vows to repeal the Obama administration’s health-care law, and about Democratic vows to defend it. This campaign bluster obscures the fact that the main battles over the health-care law over the next few years will focus on the states. At the national level, Republicans are unlikely to have the votes to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but numerous Republican governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, Rick Scott of Florida, and Nikki Haley of South Carolina have promised to resist at least some provisions of the law. Indeed, over the summer the Supreme Court handed the states a powerful tool by ruling that states are free to reject the Act’s Medicaid expansion provisions.

It is no accident that the states are playing a key role in a controversial U.S. policy area. Congress and the White House often find that it is easier to get a bill passed if major conflicts are deflected onto the states. In the case of health care, Congress decided to let states set up insurance exchanges, for example, rather than fighting a battle over a single national model. One of the reasons that the U.S. federal system remains vital is that politicians in Washington repeatedly pass the buck to other levels of government. Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote that there is hardly a political question in the United States that does not eventually become a judicial question. We would add that there is seldom a national policy debate that does not touch on a local policy debate.

Conclusion
We hope that most readers will find the picture we paint more reassuring than the media’s portrayal of an electorate whose vote can be bought by misleading ads, flowery rhetoric, and pleasing candidate personalities. To be sure, voters have neither the time, nor the inclination, to dig deeply into the weeds of policy platforms or candidate biographies.  But they can tell a lot by observing shorthand cues, starting with the presidential candidates’ party allegiances, that allow voters to infer the relative candidate positions on those issues, particularly economic ones, that really matter to them.   And the evidence indicates that voters choose accordingly, in ways that are consistent with both their own preferences but also with what they view as the best interest of the nation. That voters do so is, we believe, a sign that elections continue to provide an effective mechanism for choosing our president and for insuring that he—someday she—remains responsive to the collective will of the American people.

Matt Dickinson and Bert Johnson teach in the political science department.  Matt and Bert cohost the middmag.com video series Professor Pundits. 

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Where is Literary Criticism Headed?

October 25, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

In some people’s opinion Dwight Garner ’88 just might have the dream job in American journalism today. Garner gets to read books and write reviews for a living. He gets to choose the books he wants to critique from the 25 or so that arrive at his door every day. And he gets to publish those reviews twice a week in, of all places, the New York Times.

Dwight Garner lives in New Jersey, near the Delaware River.

Garner returned to Middlebury on October 23 to present the annual Robert W. van de Velde Jr. ’75 Memorial Lecture on “The Future of Book Criticism” to an audience of about 100 students and college community members, and the 47-year-old book critic could hardly contain his joy at being back.

“You come to college I think to have your life changed, and mine really changed here at Middlebury,” he told everyone in Dana Auditorium. “It was a big deal for me to come here as a student.”

Garner was delighted that three of the faculty members who had the greatest impact on his view of literature are still teaching at Middlebury, and all three were in attendance for his talk: Stephen Donadio (the Fulton professor of humanities), Brett Millier (the Cook professor of American literature), and Jay Parini (the Axinn professor of English and creative writing).

Donadio, Garner said, “gave lectures that made me want to weep in my chair, such was the passion and intellect that he brought to talking about books.” Millier “has a great ear for good writing, and knows how to teach it to kids and how to put that sound in your ear.” And of Parini “who then as now is the hardest working man in show business,” Garner revealed that the professor’s tongue-in-cheek advice about writing biography – “Write the damn thing first and research it later,” i.e., get a draft down on paper – still resonates with him today.

After graduation Garner was a clerk in a book store, the driver of a sprout truck, and the arts editor for an alternative newspaper – all before landing a position in 1995 as the first book editor for Salon.com. In 1998 he joined the New York Times Book Review, and since 2008 he has been writing his literary criticism for the daily paper.

“The future of book criticism is like talking about where reading is going in this country. And there’s no doubt about where it’s going – it’s going online. We are all going to watch a movie in 15 years and see people reading newspapers and magazines on the train and laugh because it will be like seeing those huge cell phones in movies we watch now from the 1980s.

“Seventy percent of me loves the idea of this technology,” Garner said. “I am a fan. I agree with the novelist Tim Parks who wrote in the New York Review of Books website that platforms like the Kindle ‘offer a more austere, direct engagement with words.’ He reminded us that no tyrant can ever burn an e-book. [Brooks’s article] made me stop and think, and I got serious for a while about trying to read across different platforms.”

Garner said he is “bullish” about technology, especially about the iPhone because “it obliterates that great fear that we have of being trapped somewhere, like at the DMV or on a train, with nothing whatsoever to read.”

One downside of e-books for Garner “is that on New York City subways one of the great things used to always be seeing what people were reading. But now all you see are slates – people holding this blank thing – which is also a tremendous loss for publishers because, as you know, books are sold by word of mouth in this country. And the biggest word of mouth is seeing some groovy person with a groovy book, and that is almost entirely gone now.”

He also lamented how “the tactile sense” of books, magazines, and newspapers is lost with reading done using the latest technology. You can’t put an old love letter in a Kindle, Garner said, and you can’t use an old ticket stub as a bookmark in one either.

Being able to take notes in a book is very important to the book critic too. “I almost can’t read without a pen or pencil in hand, and I have no faith whatsoever that five, 10, or 15 years down the road that we’ll be able to access the notes we took in e-books today. It will be like trying to find an e-mail that you wrote on a computer that you had eight years ago,” he added. “And I am the kind of person who needs his notes.”

Without trying to seem like he was piling on the criticism of digital reading – “declinists bore me,” he said – Garner pointed out that he regrets what technology has done to independent book stores and to book-review sections in newspapers and magazines in America, and how it seems like “an entire editor class has vanished in this country.”

“Having an editor as a young writer of any kind, and especially as a critic learning to hone your arguments – I can’t stress how important that is. I feel lucky to have had so many great editors in my career.”

Nevertheless, Garner is sanguine about the future for cultural criticism in America. “Things look good for the new generation of critics” and he mentioned a few by name: Anthony Lane, James Wood, Manohla Dargis, Frank Rich, and Dana Stevens.

So if you’re looking for Dwight Garner’s book reviews in the Times, check the paper (or look online) every Wednesday and Friday. “This schedule seemed to be crushing and grueling the first year I did the job. I was terrified,” Garner confessed. “But I quickly came to realize that I can read most books in about eight hours, and it takes me five or six to write a review.”

And what happens to the rest of the books he receives? Garners dutifully spends 15 minutes with each one “trying to find a spark or a reason to care” because his greatest fear is that a important book might slip by unnoticed.

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Old Chapel: Advisory Shift

August 3, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

On the morning of May 26, the day before Middlebury’s 212th commencement, President Ronald D. Liebowitz delivered his 2012 Baccalaureate address to graduates, parents, and other assembled guests in a crowded Mead Chapel. As one who has not shied away from provocative or controversial topics when speaking to the senior class on the eve of graduation, President Liebowitz did not disappoint. He began: “Baccalaureate addresses usually involve presidents offering students some wisdom about how to succeed in life following graduation. My advice today is perhaps a bit unorthodox, because it boils down to this: Be wary of the advice you get from your elders, and find ways to gain their trust and provide advice to them.”

Middlebury Magazine recently spoke to President Liebowitz about this address and the thoughts behind it.

How did you settle on this provocative topic as the focus of your address?
It was a long time in coming, actually. For several years, I’ve been thinking about this generation of students and how different they are from other generations. Hearing what’s on their mind, what they are thinking about, how they work, how they get information, the environment they live in . . . just getting a feel for the magnitude of change that they are operating in as compared to previous generations.

It’s one thing to say that things have changed—they are always changing—but it’s another thing to consider the magnitude of the change and what has gone into the change that makes it different. As I noted in the speech, “The volume of information alone that is available to today’s youth, and the speed at which it is attained and shared, has altered quite dramatically what is possible for one to do, where it might be done, with whom, and at speeds that were simply inconceivable even 15 years ago.” All of these things came together.

You spoke of a problem of perspective and a problem of perception when attempting to bridge this generation gap. What did you mean?
This generation has been shaped by a vastly different set of circumstances than those that have shaped previous generations. That hit me over the head during a board meeting this spring when we were meeting with students to talk about a big concern: student stress.

To the adults, the solution was simple: reduce all of the things that students are doing and that means taking all of the stuff outside of their assigned work, take that out of the equation, and they will be fine. And the students at first didn’t quite understand us. And then finally one basically said, “No, that’s just a temporary solution. This is the world we inhabit, and it includes all of these other things.”

Yes, student stress is a very valid concern, but our solution was not their solution. Eliminating these options would not make the situation better; if anything it would make it worse. Students noted that all of these opportunities outside of the traditional classroom contribute to how they learn.

The world they inhabit is not the world we inhabited a generation ago as students. We don’t like the fact that students are completely wired, connected all of the time. To them, that’s not odd, it’s not something they can turn on and turn off. To today’s generation, this is the way they operate, it’s the way they get information, it’s the way they determine where they will go to lunch, it’s the way they communicate with their friends. All of these things are normal. “This is not the problem you think it is,” they told us. So, there are different problems we have to try and solve, and we will work with the students, learn from the students, how to best achieve this.

And the danger in not doing so . . .?
I referred to it as being like the movie Groundhog Day. These issues (student stress, student self-segregation, binge drinking) keep coming up, problems that need resolution, and we as an institution have tried diligently to deal with them, but the results have all been the same: an affirmation of the problems, but no agreement on how to address them.

Four or five years ago we established a task force on social life because we had heard how unsatisfying the social life was for our students. And one of the things we did was appoint a student-only committee, thinking that if we got the adults out of the equation, students would create their own solutions and their own recommendations. And they did! But we reacted to those recommendations in a way that was part of the problem. That is, we rejected some of these ideas because we did not understand how their life experiences were so different from our own. We framed the problem, but we didn’t comprehend the students’ responses. Now, we did some positive things, but there were other issues that we thought were kind of odd, so we didn’t deal with those. And those, in essence, are what we’re dealing with five years later. But I think that’s beginning to change. I mention in the speech two specific instances—the student stress meeting and a meeting involving the Socially Responsible Investment Club —where today’s students are effectively educating us and engaging us in a way that will allow us to make progress on a couple of important issues.

About midway through the speech, you make a hard pivot from a local perspective to a global one.
Right. This is not an issue of a group of students behaving one way—plugged in, redefining how one learns— because they live in relative isolation in Middlebury, Vermont. It’s a generational perspective, and that’s why I brought it from a very local campus example to the much larger picture.

You see it in debates within the academy in which there is a resistance to challenge convention, to reformulate assumptions. That’s why I wanted to call attention to the young scholar at Harvard, Professor Eric Nelson. In his book, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, and in his scholarship, Nelson forces us to re-examine long-held views about political values and what they mean. And in doing so, he really turned things upside down in the academy, where scholarly achievement and scholarly respect are hard to come by, where seniority is so valued. Yet through his own way of hard work and expertise, he has challenged conventions of centuries, really, on this topic of political thought. And he was able to do so by demonstrating how generational issues can be bridged: with a younger generation effectively educating the older generation in a way that is both respected and legitimate, through hard work, gaining trust, and the introduction of new lines of thought.

That should be a template of how this younger generation can do the same.

That’s an empowering idea.
It is, but there’s another part to it. An important part of this speech that I think is crucial is the notion of not turning one’s back on the older generation, either. There’s vulnerability in the younger generation of falling prey to self-righteousness, of identifying all the wrongs committed by their elders and then doing one’s own thing. Just as we need to turn to learn from them, it is incumbent upon them to communicate with us, to stay in touch, and to be being agents of change in the right way. I wrote in the first paragraph, “Be wary about the advice you get from elders.” It doesn’t mean ignore elders. It means this generation needs to learn their elders’ blindspots; it needs to learn how to enlighten the older generations by virtue of what they, this current generation, see that the older generations do not know how to see. It is not enough for this current generation of students to see a productive new path to innovative solutions. It is their special challenge to learn how to bring the rest of us along.


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Water Matters

August 1, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

As I write this in early summer, Tropical Storm Debby is in the process of dropping as much as 25 inches of rain on Florida; last week Duluth, Minnesota, broke its old rainfall record by 25 percent, and the resulting flood swept the seal from the zoo down the main street.

Meanwhile, the most destructive fires in Colorado history are raging, as record temperatures drive humidity down almost to zero. This cycle of record drought and flood has whipsawed the planet for the last few years, making all of us think about water in ways both new and scary. We’ve built our civilization around water these last ten thousand years—our cities along the sea and rivers, our farms in places that could count on reasonable rain. But all those assumptions are now being tested, being broken.

Global warming is the prime mover here. We’ve raised the temperature of the planet about a degree, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, we’ve made the atmosphere about 4 percent wetter in the last 40 years—an astonishing change in a basic physical parameter, and a change that loads the dice for both drought and flood. Those dice loaded, one place after another is throwing snake-eyes: Pakistan in 2010, with flooding so bad 20 million were forced from their homes; Texas in 2011, with drought so bad half a billion trees may have died.

Or, of course, sweet Vermont, this time last year, when Hurricane Irene dumped more water than this state had ever seen—when its gentle rivers swelled to the point that covered bridges washed downstream and roads crumbled into the torrents.

But the kind of change we’ve kicked off has other results as well: the oceans are not only rising steadily as ice melts, they’re also turning steadily more acidic. Reefs—which feed hundreds of millions of people and shelter fantastic quantities of the planet’s DNA—are dying quickly. River systems are drying up in places like the Middle East where water has always been a political sore point.

As Alex Prud’homme ’84 chillingly details in his book The Ripple Effect, this means that we’ve lost the luxury of ignoring water, of taking it for granted. Every one of us faces the prospect of not only too much or too little, but also too dirty. And that means that some of the best minds of our time must be deployed to try and figure out how to keep us wet enough and dry enough and with access to clean water.

It’s a critical task, one that students and scholars around the world are taking up with gusto. (Look no further than the Middlebury environmental studies class that helped build state legislative policy to address arsenic contamination in Vermont well water.) But all of us need to pay attention. And maybe not just to the trouble and the trauma.

Maybe to the glory, too. One problem with taking water for granted is that we’ve spent too little time appreciating its power, its beauty, its meaning. We’re water-based creatures on a planet that’s mostly covered with water. Knowing that—knowing it deep down, and celebrating it—is going to be key to our survival.


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Vignette: Inside the Halls of Science

August 1, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

Summer Solstice, 2012: Unpopulated corridors in Bi Hall reveal hundreds of unoccupied cubbies, homework bins, and backpack hooks. Empty bulletin boards dotted with vacant pushpins and thumbtacks take on a certain semblance of constellations in the sky, especially on the longest day of the year.Not long after, in the Tormondsen Great Hall, a reception for the 30 or 40 student research assistants and faculty rings the air with lively voices. On serving tables are 24 boxes of pizza, 4 salad containers, and 5 urns of water and iced tea.

Students enter the building from the outside’s 90-degree furnace to the refreshing, cooled air of the building.  In minutes, food consumed and liquids downed, everyone bustles off to begin work. As he stacks 18 empty pizza boxes on a recycling cart, Dean of Curriculum and Director of Natural Sciences Bob Cluss, of the chemistry and biochemistry department, looks remarkably cheerful.

“We did pretty good with our estimate,” he remarks to colleagues. The statement takes on a greater resonance, this being the Middlebury temple of science.

Past the open lab door of MBH 355, Christopher (biology student, madras Bermuda shorts, auburn T-shirt, black vinyl gloves) uses a syringe to transfer stripped streptococcus cells into medium, inside tiny glass tubes. The Van Morrison tune “Brown Eyed Girl” murmurs nearby, only slightly more audible than the humming fridge stocked with bottles, flasks, petri dishes, buffer solutions, and boxes of Ambion RNA and Novex Protein. Christopher carefully pours the contents of the vials into small electrophoretic tanks. He will apply electrical current and note how the streptococcus DNA migrates.

Down the geography department hall, past “The Sandbox,” the departmental reading room and its proud sign, “MAPS R US,” past the GIS lab with its framed portrait of the late Professor Bob Churchill (1946–2004) who was instrumental in making the lab among the first in an American college or university, student-research posters line the corridor. One reads: “Landscape of Experience: The Oswiecim-Wodzislaw Slaski Evacuation March, Seminar on Historical Geography, Prof. Anne Knowles, Stephanie Ellis and Chester Harvey, May 2008” This “narrative map” demonstrates the method of illustrating the “landscape of experience—the physical and human landscape as perceived by those living within it—of concentration camp evacuation marchers near the end of the Holocaust.”

A line is inscribed across a 1945 map of the terrain west of Auschwitz, the line progressing in rainbow colors from green to yellow to orange to red to dark purple, green signifying “least suffering” and purple “greatest suffering.” Professor Anne Knowles, a principal investigator in the five-year, five-study, multi-institutional project on Holocaust Geographies, scurries by the depiction; she carries a well-buttered muffin from toaster to research room. She joins her research assistant in front of two adjacent computer screens, where, sitting beneath an ancient world map, they stare at an inventory database of the Nazi camps, displayed in tiny columns, banal facts and figures transmogrifying into life and death.

Walk tentatively into the fifth-floor Goodsel Lab, where Connor Fitzsimmons ’12, Alex Clement ’12, and physics professor Anne Goodsell construct “an apparatus for laser-cooling rubidium atoms, radically reducing their temperature to within one degree of absolute zero.” To achieve this, they bombard a cloud of atoms with photons of the correct frequency to excite the atoms, employing a diode laser, isolator, rubidium vapor cell, beam chopper, and an acoustooptic modulator, all supervised by a Fabry-PeÅLrot interferometer. Rubidium, a soft, highly reactive and non-radioactive alkali metal, is notoriously unstable, especially when introduced to water, when it reacts by releasing hydrogen gas that often immediately ignites and burns with a vivid violet color. This cause and effect is not explored in the cooling experiments in MBH 511.

Topical subjects and the political philosophy of the Aquarium Room and Cephalopod Research Lab, MBH 367, are unequivocal: “OCTOPI WALL STREET,” reads one handbill taped on the door. “We are the 97%,” reads another. “Invertebrates are 97% of animal diversity.”

In most of the corridors of Bi Hall, display cases contain the representative enthusiasms of 200 years of the sciences, back all the way to the European scientific excursions of natural philosophy and mathematics professor Frederick Hall.

There is a surveyor’s level, cartographic drafting tools, a stereograph, and the personal microscopes of Professor Ezra Brainerd (Class of 1864; president, 1886–1908) from his home study in the large brick house at 39 Seminary Street.

There are multicolored models of crystalline structures, labeled “cubic,” “cubic body-centered,” “orthorhombic face-centered,” “monoclinic,” “hexagonal,” and “rhombohedral.”

There are samples of many elements—antimony, arsenic, boron, calcium, cobalt, fluorine, lithium, vanadium—but not visible samples of argon, chlorine, francium, krypton, palladium, or radium.

There is an electromagnetic telegraph; a Bunsen-Kirchhoff spectroscope; a Bohnenberger’s machine; a set of Klinger orbital models; a leather-cased haemacytometer; clear, graceful Wheaton flasks; and documentary sets about evolution on VCR tapes, whose utility may already be mysterious to the inheritors of the science center.

There are, in the heady procession of technology, vintage computer disc drives and removable diskettes of varying size.

There are nesting Chinese dolls and Vermont mineral samples—fuchsite from Clarendon; garnet, asbestos, and serpentine from prolific Eden Mills; jasper from Colchester; malachite from West Rutland; actinolite from Dover; kyanite from West Fairlee; and iron pyrite (also known as fool’s gold) from Montpelier.

Observations (while sitting on an end-of-the corridor windowsill, north side of building) of student research assistants’ migratory patterns: Despite the building’s relative emptiness due to the time of year, it hums and breathes. There are echoes of whistlers in adjoining halls; the odd trudging steps in a stairwell; a door opens, another closes; a young man in jeans and eye protection, carrying a jug of liquid, steps out in the hall and disappears through another doorway; an assistant wearing an orange shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals that flap on the linoleum floor balances two tubs full of lab samples down the corridor and also vanishes; five minutes pass while no activity is observed; a young woman in a white smock glides down the hall while checking signals on her iPhone, and grimaces.

Placards taped to the door of MBH 268: “Research Area Quiet Please: Behavior Testing May Be In Progress.” And a quote from Young Frankenstein: “After 5:00 pm, Slip Brains Through Slot.”

The College admissions guide has walked backward across campus to stand and lean confidently against a third-story railing overlooking the Great Hall. She is dressed in Midd colors—navy blue top, white shorts—and burbles enthusiasm for visiting high school students and attentive parents. “Writing is stressed in all aspects of the sciences,” the admissions guide is saying.

“It helps students solidify what they know and learn.” A sandy-haired high school boy bends out over the balcony to look above, and his sandy-haired father reflexively puts a hand on his arm.

“A good friend of mine” the guide is exclaiming, “down the hall, is castrating a rat right now!” Several parents blink.

Facing the sunny south side in the sixth-floor greenhouse, an Araucaria heterophylla, or Norfolk Island pine, may experience brushing the glass ceiling in another month or two. The swelling root ball has shattered its eight-gallon clay pot, which has been mended with duct tape.

An adjacent succulent, Stapelia gigantea from South Africa deserts, makes a visitor feel at home because it has not yet flowered—the blossoms mimic the smell of rotting flesh (it is called a Carrion plant), which attract pollinating insects.

Centimeters away, water trickles through a small mossy rock garden of Sphenophyta Equiestaceae, horsetails from the Carboniferous period.

A poster at student-faculty research lab MBH 237, from the National Institute of Health’s Animal Research Advisory Committee, features the famous depiction of Uncle Sam in an Army recruitment poster, painted in 1917 by the commercial artist James Montgomery Flagg.

“ I WANT YOU…TO BE PROPERLY TRAINED,” it now admonishes.

In the year 1917, 58 Middlebury students enlisted in the armed forces to fight in the First World War. One of that group, Eugene P. Hubbard ’17 a science and literature student of Chatham, New Jersey, was killed in action the following spring.

On the sixth-floor west-side lounge, colossal windows look out over trees and fields. An observer’s eyesight swoops out past the organic garden, over Cornwall hills with their symmetrical rows of Malus domestica trees and their swelling fruit, past the 440-million-yearold Taconic orogeny upthrust of Snake Mountain (elev. 1,287 ft.), leaping the 4.5 miles beyond its western cliffs to the invisible north-draining freshwater lake, all 125 miles of it, and beyond, the upper tips of the billion-year-old metamorphic upthrust named by aboriginal Mohawks for the “tree-eating” Algonquian tribe of what became known as the Adirondacks.

There is enough wind passing over these mountains and the intervening terrain to stir the crowns of the tree grove near Bi Hall, but it is insufficient to turn the nearby windmill with any authority. Solar collectors swivel to the west in midafternoon, drinking light filtered through wispy cirrus clouds. A tractor tows a bailing and wrapping machine to produce round bales of alfalfa, clover, and birdsfoot trefoil, the white-wrapped shapes dotting the green fields almost like constellations in the sky.

Outside the western door of McCardell Bicentennial Hall, a brown leaf-footed bug with its bright orange-tipped antennae, dragging a gimpy right rear leg, follows the edge of a stone tile and over an opportunistic seedling in a crack, and then pauses to scratch its abdomen.

It requires exactly four and half minutes to cover the length of the tile. Thereafter, it continues its journey westward.


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Almost Famous

August 1, 2012 by
Categories: Midd Blogosphere

For Susan Orlean, there was a day before The Orchid Thief. Julia Alvarez? She once edited a newsletter called Special Reports: Ecology. And James Franco . . . well, let’s just say that not all that long ago, McDonald’s eaters in L.A. were handed bags of Big Macs by a college dropout and future Academy Award nominee. (And let this be a lesson to the kids out there: this successful actor never forgot his scholastic ambitions and is now a PhD candidate at Yale.)

These are just a smattering of the fascinating items revealed in the Days of Yore, a critically and popularly acclaimed website founded and staffed by Middlebury graduates who want to know what life was like for artists before they had “money, fame, or road maps to success.”

Astri von Arbin Ahlander ’07, Lucas Kavner ’06, and Evan Dumouchel ’06 take us behind the scenes and beneath the hood of the Days of Yore.

Walk me through the site’s founding. Was there one eureka moment? Or did this evolve over a series of conversations?

LUCAS I think it came out of being confused and living in New York City after college and looking up interviews with artists I admired and finding that they often skipped this huge chunk of their lives that I was really interested in—the chunk where they weren’t sure how to play the game quite yet. Most interviews I was reading would say, like: “I was just waiting tables, totally broke, and then all of a sudden I was starring in Die Hard!” And I wanted to know details about the struggle period. So I was walking with Astri one day, and I brought up the idea for an interview site, and she really liked it, too.

ASTRI To be entirely frank, that walk took place on a dark street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when Lucas and I were on our way to or from a neighborhood party—one of those hazy post-college get-togethers where an impossible amount of NESCAC grads squeeze together in an impossibly small apartment. When Lucas told me about the website idea, I turned to him and said, “So, just do it.” He mumbled something about, how would we get people to agree to be interviewed? I kept up my pushy routine and said, “No excuses. Just ask.” The next day, there was an e-mail in my inbox from Lucas, who wondered, since I was so cocky, if I was interested in starting a site like that with him. I said I was. Definitely. Lucas and I brainstormed a few interesting people, and we just asked them. They all said yes. That was the beginning of the wave of positivity that we have been riding ever since. We just ask. And people just say yes. Not all of the time, but an overwhelmingly large part of the time.

I think that is a testament to the fact that the DoY idea is a good one—one that people want to support—but it also shows that, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, successful people are often fundamentally kind and willing to help young artists. At first, Lucas and I opted for a simple Tumblr platform. But after a few months, we realized we were going to need to up the ante a little on the technical side. So, I reached out to Evan, who was a friend of ours from Middlebury. Evan is a talented computer maverick, and I thought maybe he would be willing to help us a little. He did more than help a little; he came on board.

EVAN The subject line of the e-mail was, in classically flattering Astri style, “As luck would have it; or the day we remembered there was a computer genius in our midst.” I wasn’t one, but I guess I had kept up enough of the act in college to have convinced somebody I was. I figured this whole project they had started was about figuring it out, so I did, and just kept figuring. It started with retooling their old site, but before I knew it, I couldn’t walk away from the project. I woke up, many cups of coffee later, having pored through all this content, built a completely new website, and had it ready to go if they said the word.

So, how to do you go about selecting people to be interviewed?

ASTRI In the beginning, the selection was often determined by whom we had some sort of personal connection to. Could we find their e-mail? Did we know someone who knew them?

LUCAS Yeah, for a while we didn’t have to connect any publicists or agents or anything like that, it was just us looking at the people we could get connected with.

ASTRI I did a lot of research, read all their books, and wrote them long, personal e-mails detailing why I was a genuine fan of their work or why I thought their story would suit the site specifically. I still write personal e-mails and do as much research as possible, but now the whole process has gotten easier because we have this incredible archive to refer to. It’s easier to ask an artist for an interview when you can say that you’ve interviewed Marina Abramovic. Or to approach some legendary writer when you can refer to your recent conversation with E. L. Doctorow. That doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult.

LUCAS I’ve definitely been turned down a bunch, especially by actors and directors early on. They seemed more skeptical of the press than writers. Also Jonathan Franzen, who still will not let me interview him, however hard I try.

Who was your first interview?

ASTRI The very first person I interviewed, and the first interview to be published on the site, was the writer Gary Shteyngart. He is a phenomenal writer; I’ve always loved his work. He was also my teacher at Columbia where I was getting my MFA in writing. Gary is one of those incredibly generous and accessible people. He didn’t hesitate, even though the site didn’t actually exist yet.

LUCAS Mine was Kristen Schaal, a comedian and performer I’d done some improv with in New York, and she was starting to get big at the time. Now she’s everywhere: she’s a Daily Show correspondent, she just had a big part on 30 Rock, and she’s in a bunch of movies.

EVAN My first interview was with Patrick Fischler, a friend of mine and also an actor. I think it was important to have a softball interview as my first, and I was still completely nervous. Once the interview got going, as they often do, it took on a life of its own, and I didn’t look at my list of questions once.

Most difficult?

ASTRI Do you mean most difficult to do or to get? I have to say that I’ve never had a bad interview experience. One that I thought was going to go terribly at first, though, was when I interviewed James Franco. He came 20 minutes late to the Starbucks where we were meeting, and he started out by basically telling me he didn’t want to be there. His assistant had said I would get 15 minutes, and his attitude made me fear I’d hardly get that. We ended up talking for an hour. And he warmed up. In the end, the interview was just great. As for the most difficult one to get, Marina Abramovic was pretty tough. I spent nearly a year trying first to track and then pin her down. In the end, I flew to New York from Stockholm to see her (terrified that she would cancel at the last minute!), and it was worth everything. The most difficult one to get, though, I’m still trying to get. It’s been nearly two years. I haven’t given up. I’m close. And I’m really, really stubborn.

LUCAS I’ve only had lovely interview experiences with the people we’ve featured. Honestly, nobody’s been very difficult at all. As far as difficult to get, I’ll go back to the Franzen Problem. I’ve e-mailed that guy so many times over the years that now he almost seems used to it. He’ll just write, “Hi Lucas. I’m sorry. Please keep trying.” Though he was nice enough to include me on his mass e-mail when he changed his e-mail address. So maybe he enjoys my persistence.

ASTRI That’s hilarious. Never stop trying.

Of all the people you’ve interviewed, who has the craziest Days of Yore story?

ASTRI Oh, so many. The photographer Thomas Roma stands out. His story is just so crazy, and his completely uncompromising attitude is both unnerving and inspiring. He was kicked out of high school for starting a fight. Then he got a job at 16 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Then he was hit by a truck and sustained a serious brain injury. While recovering, he had to sit very still in his bed. All he could do was look out the window. His brother gave him a camera, and he started taking photos out the window. That changed everything. When he recovered, he quit a very successful career on Wall Street, embraced near total poverty, and unflinchingly pursued his dream of being an art photographer.

EVAN Thomas Roma was one that floored me, absolutely. His seems like so many different lives. A recent interview that Lucas did with actor and musician Jake La Botz seemed the most like what I’d imagine a movie version of the Days of Yore would entail. Jake’s story just read the way I’d expect a tortured, searching artist’s story to unravel—complete with drug dens, Bret Easton Ellis-styled Los Angeles, and long roads to redemption.

Ok, if you can interview anyone you want for the Days of Yore, who would it be?

EVAN I’d love to interview Martin Scorsese. That would blow my mind. I always want to know about a director’s journey from the first films that resonate so much (like Mean Streets with Scorsese) and how that journey winds, meanders, relates to their lives as they go on. That’s a goal of mine, to get more director interviews.

ASTRI Such a dream interview! Scorsese, definitely. I’d also love to interview Wes Anderson. I adore his style, the films he has made, the way he works. And Meryl Streep—what a woman. Also, Toni Morrison. And Tomas Tranströmer, but I’m afraid I’m too late for that.

Last question, but it’s a two-parter. It’s 20 years in the future, and you’re being interviewed for the Days of Yore (yes, it still exists in some form). First, what do you tell readers about your “days of yore,” your first steps starting out on the road to success? And, two, what does success look like 20 years from now? How will you define success?

ASTRI Wow, that’s a big question.

LUCAS That is very large, yes.

ASTRI When I interview artists, I often ask what they would tell their younger selves that they think it would have benefitted them to know. In 20 years, I think I would tell my younger self to stop doubting herself so much. I am constantly wracked by self-doubt! But, like pretty much all of the DoY interviews show, this 20-something in-between time is somehow meant to be full of doubt. Am I doing the right thing? Making the right choices? Where will all these small, incomprehensible steps lead me? Like Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots going forward, only looking back.

I interviewed a wonderful writer yesterday who said that, yes, the goal was always to publish books. But in the end, success for her is not actually that her work exists in print or that she has won a bunch of awards, but that she is able to take the image she has in her head and render it on the page.

EVAN Oh God, that seems like such an easy answer—it isn’t. But the first thought that came into my head was do more. Think less. Just do more. Our 20s can be a time of navel-gazing introspection. I would love to reach back in time, tilt my head upwards, move my legs forward, and just do. I would absolutely worry less about making the right choices and just commit to making choices, period.

LUCAS For so many of the people I’ve interviewed, their 20s represent this big, long blur of a decade, where all the events got lumped together, and they were throwing lots of things out there, seeing what stuck. That’s been the most helpful advice—realizing that every artist was deeply confused about something. Every artist wondered how they were going to pay bills early on, even once they started becoming well known. I’ve been lucky these past few years (or screwed, depending on how you look at it) in that I’ve been able to make a living doing lots of different things that I like doing, without thinking of those things in respect to a long-term, ultimate goal. I guess I’m still trying to figure out what “success” means to me. The one thing I do know is that it means owning seven white tigers.

EVAN As far as my definition of success goes, if I’m still acting, it will be when I’m getting the calls asking me to play a part instead of the other way around. In general, to be able to do whatever I love at an expert level will be enough. A sense of mastery in whatever it is I’ve chosen to do at that time will be successful in my book. To put a finer point on it, when I “know” instead of “think I know,” then I’ll define that as a success.

ASTRI But don’t you think the over 100 DoY interviews so far show that even the most successful artists never stop feeling like they don’t quite know? Which I guess, in a way, is comforting in and of itself.

EVAN You’re totally right. I’ll settle for knowing one thing, and seven white tigers.

LUCAS Nobody Ever Really Knows What They’re Doing: The Days of Yore Story.

ASTRI Publishers, come get it.


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