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 fossil fuel divestment issue continues to heat up. This week we heard different views from a student panel, and the Socially Responsible Investment Club released a new video featuring interviews about divestment with several Middlebury faculty members.

• Middlebury lost a friend near and dear to our hearts last week. Read about the remarkable life of 106-year-old philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis.

• Major League Baseball may be in full swing, but Middlebury senior Ryan Moores is thinking NFL. The 6-6, 315-lb. Panther offensive lineman was invited to the Atlanta Falcons rookie camp this weekend, where he’ll vie for a coveted spot on the preseason roster.

• If you missed the Middlebury TEDx talks this year, you missed some incredible speakers — like Natalie Randolph, the first female varsity football coach in Washington, D.C., or Derek Amato, who had a major concussion, then suddenly discovered a virtuosic ability to play piano. The good news is that all those Middlebury TEDx talks are viewable online!

• Harvard professor of government Eric Nelson will give this year’s Fulton Lecture, “The Lord Alone Shall be King of America: Hebraism and the Republican Turn of 1776,” on Thursday, May 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Dana Auditorium. It’s free and all are welcome.

• The theatre program opens its spring production of Howard Barker’s The Castle, on Thursday, May 2. Set in the 13th century, the historic drama also reflects contemporary themes.

• Looks like it will be a beautiful weekend to watch some lacrosse, and the Midd men’s team will host the NESCAC championships starting Saturday, May 4, at noon.

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 

• Assistant Professor of Biology Catherine Combelles has received the Perkins Award for Excellence in Teaching. Combelles, who specializes in reproductive biology, will be honored at a ceremony and reception open to the College community on Thursday, April 4, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 104 of McCardell Bicentennial Hall.
• Last week Middlebury announced it had offered admission to 1,750 students, who will make up the class of 2017, out of an applicant pool of 9,112 — a 19% acceptance rate. The new admits come from 44 states and 73 countries.
• Forbes online raised Middlebury up as an example of how colleges can promote the idea of a “bridge year” between high school and college to help students avoid burnout and further prepare for their academic road ahead.
• The Solar Decathlon ’13 team kicks off their spring construction season this Thursday, April 4, at 4:30 with a ceremonial celebration at their building site in the Ridgeline parking lot, just west of campus on Route 125. All are welcome.
• Davis Projects for Peace recipient Jihad Hajjouji ’14 started an “entrepreneurship boot camp” in Morocco. On Friday, April 5, at 12:30 p.m., she’ll give a public talk about her project at the Axinn Center, Room 219.
• Middlebury College Affiliate Artist Mary Rowell will perform music for violin, viola, and electronics in a free concert on Friday, April 5, at the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Rowell has earned international acclaim as a performer and proponent of new music.
• Cellist Sophie Shao, a perennial favorite in the Middlebury College Performing Arts Series, returns with her piano quartet on Saturday, April 6, at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts.
• Finally, if you’re planning to attend the New Play Festival, “Undressing Cinderella,” next week, you’ll get some interesting insight at a Behind the Scenes lunch and discussion on Monday, April 9, at 12:30.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/04/03/things-that-happened-things-to-do-week-of-april-1/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/06/drawing-on-the-wall/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/06/drawing-on-the-wall/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:53:05 +0000 Stephen Diehl http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=11448 The American artist Sol LeWitt was widely known in the 1960s for the temporary wall drawings he devised for others to produce per his instructions as part of a growing Minimalism movement.

In what might be the epitome of hands-on learning, a group of art history students installed LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #394 last week as part of their class, “Minimalism: Art, Objects, and Experience,” with professor Eddie Vazquez.

The drawing came to Middlebury’s Museum of Art with a detailed set of instructions, including specifications for materials used and orientation of lines. Museum designer Ken Pohlman and preparator Chris Murray created the pencil grid guidelines, and each student could choose from a limited selection of lines to draw. The whole process took about 50 hours to complete, and the finished product will be on view in the Overbrook Gallery through April 21.

More on Bianca’s second film later, but we thought this would be a fitting post for Valentine’s Day.

Of course, it’s not that simple. At least not if you’re weighing the countless factors philanthropists must consider, which is what a group of 25 Middlebury students did during a new J-term course titled “Philanthropy: Ethics and Practice.”

The money was real — $100,000 from the Texas-based Once Upon A Time Foundation, which has made similar grants to several colleges and universities to support the study of philanthropic giving. The class’s charge was to research nonprofit organizations that interested them, and allocate the funds by the end of the course.

Sarah Stroup, assistant professor of political science, guides a class discussion.

A faculty team of political scientist Sarah Stroup and philosophy professor Steven Viner served as facilitators, crafting the course to blend the mechanics of philanthropic giving with the ethical decision-making tools necessary for such important choices.

For the first two weeks, students delved into the intricacies of nonprofits and philanthropy. They split into five groups and compiled lists of possible organizations to support, then spent a week immersed in research on their prospective grantees, including phone conversations, meetings, and tours. They narrowed the field significantly with each group considering one to three potential organizations.

Sitting with Stroup and Viner, one student group described how they’d honed their list down to one local social services group — the Addison County Parent Child Center. They liked supporting an organization in the local college community and were impressed with the center’s results in reducing teen pregnancy.  But will it persuade their classmates?

Students listened to detailed briefing papers from their classmates on each of the charities considered for grants.

“I feel like in order for them to keep providing help and education on a case-by-case basis, we need to address the issues of staffing,” said Luke Martinez ‘14. Martinez noted that most of the center’s funding comes mostly from Medicaid and the state, but those sources seem continually at risk as the country digs out of recession.

“That won’t be sexy to present in front of the class, but it’s the fact of the matter,” added fellow group member Emmy Masur ‘13.

Week four marked a transition to the hard work of narrowing the list even further in preparation to make awards. To help create a baseline of shared information about the charities, each student group presented a briefing paper that included background, structures and strategies, financial information, oversight and monitoring, evidence of impact, and reasons why to support them.

They narrowed the field to four finalists: Gardens for Health International, which fights malnutrition; Grassroot Soccer, which works to reduce HIV infection through education; and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which reduces parasitic worm infections in Africa, and the local Addison County Parent Child Center.

The class took numerous hand votes to narrow down the finalists, but struggled to reach consensus.

But along with a smaller field comes stronger advocacy from the student groups. When students had a chance to ask each other for additional information, there were sometimes testy exchanges as students slipped into the role of advocates. They all knew what was on the line for their charity and wanted to make a compelling case.

“I think we expected this,” said Stroup, “that as the decision moment came closer, students were not thinking about these questions in abstract terms. They were thinking about them in the particular context of the charities that they felt passionately drawn to.”

On the last day of class, the moment of truth arrives, when the class must decide — together — how they’ll parcel out the money. Everyone knows how much research and emotion the other teams have invested, but they really want their group to come out ahead.

Stroup and Viner, now in full facilitator mode, guide the students into a decision process that’s fair and logical. Viner has suggested a kind of “Robert’s Rules” system to keep the class on track. Trying to narrow the decision further, the class takes a series of votes: how many charities to fund, which are your preferred charities, if we vote for only three, what would they be, and so on.

Ian Stewart ’14 (center) broke through the stalemate by suggesting a paper vote.

Three solid hours of deliberation yields a stalemate, and a new group dynamic. Quite simply, it is difficult to sit in a circle of friends and peers, and tell them you don’t want to support their cause. Ian Stewart ‘14 proposes a solution that breaks the log jam: Each member of the class write on a piece of paper how much money they would allocate to each of the four groups and then tally the class average for each. It’s an imperfect solution — some groups get more, some less — but it nicely illustrates the need for compromise and progress. Gardens for Health and SCI end up with $35,000 each, while Grassroot Soccer and the Parent Child Center end up with $15,000 each.

With a decision finally made, the mood turned from tension to joy, exuberance, and relief. And despite all the wrangling that came before, the class seems satisfied that the will of the group was reflected in their decision.

Viner applauded the students’ efforts, especially their perseverance when it might have been easier to split the money evenly and call it a day. “That’s a sort of life lesson about us learning how to do good with our money,” he said. “These are difficult decisions, but there’s also an undercurrent of another sort of problem that arose, which is coordinating with others to come to a decision about how our projects will clash with, and come into tension with, other people’s projects even when they’re both good projects.”

“Our class introduced students to both ‘what is’ in the American nonprofit sector as well as to perhaps ‘what should be’ in terms of our responsibilities to others,” said Stroup, “and we hope that the conversations that we began over J-term continue as students grow as citizens and leaders.”

To read more about the Feb celebration weekend, click 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.

• Two rising stars in the world of social entrepreneurship headlined the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship’s second annual symposium last week. MiddMag was there to catch the talks by Billy Parish and Majora Carter.

• Seven Days took note of an artistic milestone at Middlebury this week, featuring a story about the Dance Company of Middlebury’s 30th anniversary celebration, and its upcoming performance tour.

• Middlebury’s Jay Parini, enjoying an increasingly rare cold snap, penned a thoughtful reflection for CNN.com about returning from balmy Key West to a frigid Vermont.

• J-Term ’13 is winding down, which can only mean one thing: It’s Feb celebration time! The annual cap & gown ski-down is coming Saturday, along with lots of other festivities.

• Audio artists from the J-Term course Sound & Story will play their works at a special gathering on Wednesday, January 30, starting at 8 p.m. Billed as a must for storytelling fans, these radio documentaries will feature “rich stories of reclusive local craftsman, portraits of bike makers, ferrymen, zombies AND humans, and campus mysteries solved.” Who could resist?

• Middlebury men’s hockey hits the ice with special meaning this weekend, donning camouflage jerseys to raise money and awareness for the Wounded Warriors Project, which serves severely injured members of the U.S. armed forces. The jerseys will be auctioned off through silent auction during the games.

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.

• With the startling resignation of General David Petraeus and ensuing scandal, national security is back in the spotlight. Last week Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs hosted a talk by Philip Murphy, assistant professor of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute, on mapping the evolution of a major terrorist network in Indonesia. A video of Murphy’s talk is available online.

• Is it possible that, despite the limitless new ways technology helps us connect with one another, we’re feeling lonelier than ever? In her blog post this week, Dean of the College Shirley Collado explores this and several other issues related to our over-dependence on technology versus face-to-face conversation.

• Last weekend was filled with highlights and heartbreak for Panther sports. In NCAA tournament action, field hockey ended their 17-0 season with an overtime loss to DePauw and women’s soccer also had an abrupt end to their season with a 1-0 loss to Misericordia. In happier news, both cross country teams are headed to NCAA championships and the football team ended their strong season at 7-1 with a 35-13 win over Tufts.

• The Woodin Colloquium series welcomes John Seager, president of Population Connection for a talk on the population, the environment, and social equity on Thursday, Nov. 15 at 12:30 in the Orchard Room of Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest.

• November in Middlebury can be a dark, cold month. What better antidote than Shakespeare at Wright Theatre? The College’s department of theatre and dance presents “As You Like It,” opening Thursday, November 15 at 8 p.m. Director Cheryl Faraone set this show in the World War I era, with period music (directed by Carol Christensen) playing an important role.

• And it’s a big weekend for music at Middlebury, featuring concerts by Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence François Clemmons, the Sound Investment Jazz Ensemble, the Middlebury College Orchestra, and the Middlebury College Community Chorus. Details for all of these and more are online.

Previous Professor Pundit commentaries

Matt and Bert will host an election-night gathering at the Grille in McCullough Student Center. Please join them if you’re in town, or follow their live-blogging and tweets. On Twitter, Matt is @Mattdickinson44 and Bert is @bnjohns.

Previous Professor Pundit commentaries

Previous Professor Pundit commentaries

Previous Professor Pundits commentaries

The annual occasion, which falls near the start of each academic year, is named for Nicholas R. Clifford, who taught history at the College from 1966 to 1993 and is a champion of critical inquiry. This year’s symposium was hosted by the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts in honor of its 20th anniversary.

Middmag caught the kick-off energy of the evening’s keynote speaker, Julie Burstein, and opening wire-walking event with the following video Dispatch:

More Clifford Symposium coverage:

• The Planter Box in the Sky
• Close Encounters

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.

• How do you explain carbon neutrality to a new crop of first-year students? Cue the carbon-shredding sharks, of course. Check out the Sustainability Office’s creative take on the college’s carbon neutrality goal in this new video at middmag.com

• In the aftermath of the Libyan embassy attacks, Middlebury Diplomat in Residence Jeffrey Lunstead described in a CNN opinion piece the eerie similarities between the tragedy in Libya and a 1979 attack on the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, which he survived.

• The presses are rolling again for The Middlebury Campus, which published its inaugural edition for the academic year this week.

• On Friday, Sept. 21, the Rohatyn Center offers “From Deng to Dollars: The Political Economy of China’s Rise.” This is the first annual symposium of the International Politics and Economics Program. Opening remarks by President Ron Liebowitz start at 12:15. Here’s a full schedule.

• Another hot topic, immigration, is the focus of a student-organized symposium titled “myAMERICA” that kicks off Wednesday evening, Sept. 19, and runs through Friday.

• It’s a big weekend for home sports. Football opens at home on Saturday against Bowdoin, and several other teams, including cross country, field hockey, men’s soccer play at home this weekend. Visit Athletics for the full schedule.

Previous Professor Pundits commentaries

This summer, with the international flair of the London Olympics on our minds, MiddMag decided to see just what these language students were up to. From ardent competition on the fields and strategic moves at the table to athletic artistry in the dance studios, here’s a brief sampling of what we saw.

Previous Professor Pundits commentaries.