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.

• If you missed the Narrative Journalism Showcase on Tuesday, you still have a chance to listen to the amazing stories in the “How Did You Get Here?” series on middmag.com. Check out the trailer to get a taste of what’s in store!

• Not only is Sue Halpern the director of the Narrative Journalism Fellowships, she is also the author of A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher.
  She talked to the folks at the Dish about what surprised her most as she visited nursing homes with her therapy dog, Pransky.

• The Solar Decathlon team is hard at work on its entry for the competition next fall, Insite. Recently the Burlington Free Press highlighted the students as they worked to deconstruct a historic barn so they can repurpose the wood to use as siding for their house. Check their website to stay up to date on their progress!
• The school year is winding down, but some athletic teams are still going strong. Both men’s and women’s tennis won their respective NCAA Regionals and are headed to the NCAA Quarterfinals. The women’s lacrosse team is making its 16th trip to the NCAA Final Four this weekend, and the women’s golf team is competing in the NCAA Championship in Destin, Fla.

• Senior Andrew Ackerman has been working hard on this thesis project and as part of his research, he’s been training in extreme mixed martial arts. Recently he took part in an amateur fight night in Plattsburgh, N.Y., in his first competitive fight ever. And he won!

• Finals begin on Wednesday, so it’s quiet on campus and things to do other than studying are scarce. Downtown, at 51 Main, good music is available as usual with a Blues Jam Wednesday night and Mint Julep on Friday night, performing an ecletic mix of swing and Latin rhythms.

• Artist and photographer Edward Burtynsky is receiving an honorary Doctor of Arts from the College at Commencement on May 26. His exhibit, Nature Transformed, will be on display at the Museum of Art until June 9. If you haven’t seen it yet, you still have a few weeks to check it out!

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.

• Midd alum Andrew Forsthoefel ’11 walked from Philadelphia to California, and his story was featured on NPR’s This American Life.
• Laurie Essig shared her latest take on beauty-product advertising in her blog “Love, Inc.” at PsychologyToday.com, and it ain’t pretty…
• Harvard professor and tour de force political theorist Eric Nelson made an incredibly complex historical concept both graspable and engaging for a packed house during last Thursday’s Fulton Lecture in Dana. You can read about it and see the entire hour-plus talk here.
• President Liebowitz sent a message to the College community this week reaffirming the College’s support for the construction of the natural gas pipeline project that will come through Addison County.
• On Wednesday at 5 p.m., the women’s lacrosse team will host Castleton in a first-round NCAA game for its 19th tournament appearance in 20 years. Tickets are $3 for adults, $2 for students.
• Make time on Friday at 8 p.m. to catch Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence Francois Clemmons for his final solo concert before he retires this month. The beloved tenor will take center stage at the Concert Hall in the Mahaney Center for the Arts, and it’s free!
• Tuesday, May 14, is Arbor Day, and campus horticulturist Tim Parsons and student volunteers have plenty of activities planned–live music, tree tours, tree planting, food, a kids’ race–spelled out at go/arborday. Can’t make it? Enjoy our ligneous, leafy friends by virtually touring the trees here on campus.
• Stop by Axinn 229 on Tuesday from 5–7 p.m. and check out this year’s “How Did You Get Here?” audio slideshows from the Narrative Journalism Fellows.

Professor Olinick did not disappoint. His multimedia presentation included pictures of Turing as a child in a sailor suit, a song about Turing, and a scene from Breaking the Code, a play about Turing by Hugh Whitemore.

“At the age of 23” said Olinick,  “Turing made the modern world possible.” And yet, until recently, he could have been “easily described as the most important person you’ve never heard of.”

Turing was born in London in 1912. He attended Sherborne School, where he was at the bottom of his class according to Olinick, preferring to study math on his own. He attended King’s College at Cambridge University as an undergraduate and received his PhD from Princeton. And during this time, he was laying the groundwork for computer science and artificial intelligence.

“He published relatively few papers in his lifetime,” Olinick said,  “but almost all of them are considered landmarks in their field.” At a very young age, he conceived of his Turing Machine, which could do possibly any mathematical computation. It used an infinitely long tape divided into squares that would be left blank or encoded with a one or a zero as the machine worked on a problem. Turing demonstrated that “anything computable could be computed by such a machine.” He also developed the Turing Test, which measured machine intelligence, including the ability to learn.

Olinick’s presentation included two artifacts from the WWII era—Enigma machines. These machines, which look like typewriters with an extra keyboard, were used to encipher messages. Tom Perera, an expert on “everything enigma” brought them for audience members to try out at the conclusion of the talk.

The Enigma machines used a series of rotors that could be interchanged and rearranged and were connected to a “plug board.” They could be configured in so many combinations that, for all practical purposes, they were nearly limitless.  When a letter was typed, it cycled through the rotors and emerged as a different letter altogether. To give the audience a sense of how complex deciphering the code was, Olinick tried to explain in terms people could grasp.

“Suppose you had a high-speed computer that could process 100 million configurations per second,” he said. “Imagine that we had a computer this fast that started running the day the universe was created and was running continuously ever since, examining different configurations of this machine, trying to find all of them—and among all of them, finding the correct ones. This machine, which has been running since the dawn of creation, would be 1/800,000 of the way through.” Yet, Turing broke the code.

But for all of his success, “Turing’s life took on the dimensions of a Shakespearian tragedy,” Olinick said. He was an openly gay man during a paranoid, unaccepting time. When he was young, his closest, dearest friend, probably his lover, died tragically just as they were about to go to Cambridge together. In 1952, he reported a burglary, and during the investigation the police discovered that Turing had a homosexual relationship, which he admitted. He was arrested, lost his security clearance, convicted, and subjected to chemical castration (estrogen injections).

Olinick said that the estrogen had a terrible effect on Turing, feminizing him and destroying his sexuality. He died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning. According to Olinick, it’s widely believed to have been suicide, but Turing did not leave a note and had been making future plans; he’d even just purchased new socks. Some speculate that his death could have been a political assassination. And his mother believed it was an accident, because he worked with cyanide.

As appreciation for Turing’s contributions and tribulations has grown in recent years, a “plethora of novels and short stories, five dramatic plays, three operas, a musical now on the London stage, and a monopoly set” have been devoted to Turing. The play Lovesong of the Electric Bear by Snoo Wilson, directed by Cheryl Faraone, debuted at Middlebury College in 2010. It was later performed by the Potomac Theater Project.

In the wake of public demands for restitution for Alan Turing, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology in 2009. Printed on a handout at the lecture, it read in part, “Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. . . . This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue.”

As things kicked off on Thursday evening at the Mahaney Center for the Arts, students, faculty, and staff enjoyed musical presentations, dance and theater performances, and a keynote address with actor and activist Cassidy Freeman ’05 (listen below).

On Friday, the Great Hall and adjacent classrooms of Bicentennial Hall were packed with the day’s full schedule of poster sessions and oral presentations, capped off with an evening reception and more music and theater performances.

Below is a slideshow that briefly captures the excitement of the event, followed by an audio clip of Freeman’s keynote address in its entirety.

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The 2013 Student Symposium kicked off the weekend in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall with welcoming performances by a cappella groups the Mountain Ayres and the Mamajamas (pictured above).

Hear what actress and activist Cassidy Freeman ’05 had to say about Middlebury, creativity, and writing your personal mission statement:

Professor Stephen Whitfield

The first is the force of anti-Semitism that endured until the late 1960s, and the second is the rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s—a movement that continues today, Whitfield said, as Americans of the 21st century embrace diversity as a source of national pride and strength.

American society has changed over the past 70 years, and the Jewish people’s place in that society has evolved along with it. Making references to American literature (Richard Wright), theatre (Arthur Miller), film (Otto Preminger), music (Louis Armstrong), sports (Jackie Robinson), and journalism (Look magazine), the guest speaker took the audience on a scholar’s tour of the Jewish-American experience over the past seven decades.

Whitfield was at Middlebury College on April 14 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Quint Lectureship during the day-long symposium on “The Jews in America: Past and Future.”

The Max Richter Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis—a chair he has held since 1985—Stephen Whitfield is the author of eight books, the writer of 60 articles, and the recipient of Fulbright teaching professorships in Israel and Belgium. And while Whitfield’s C.V. says his “curricular and research interests are primarily in the intersection of politics and ideas in the 20 century,” it is clear from his scholarship and his talk at Middlebury that his expertise also extends into civil rights, foreign languages, modern American and European history, philosophy, and of course Judaism.

Whitfield was one of four speakers invited to give presentations at the conference. The others were: Riv-Ellen Prell, professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, speaking about “Women, Men, and Families: The Axes of Jewish Cultural Change”; Ted Sasson, professor of international studies at Middlebury and visiting research professor in sociology at Brandeis, on “American Jews’ Changing Relationship to Israel”; and Michael G. Holtzman, rabbi of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, on “The ‘Joining’ Paradigm and the Future of Communal Life.”

Historian Stephen Whitfield (l.) greets Adam Jones ’13 (r.) and faculty member Larry Yarbrough at the symposium.

Professor Whitfield, in the Sunday afternoon lecture delivered in McCardell Bicentennial Hall, equated the anti-Semitism of the post-war era with the racism that was prevalent in America at the time, and yet he said there was always a sense that intolerance was at odds with American values.

Bigotry in America was “seamless” in the years immediately after the Second World War, Whitfield said. “Prejudice was seen to spring from a single psychic source or distortion, even if the targets might be multiple. Who the minorities were was fluid because the hostility toward them was sometimes generic.” This tendency demonstrated historian John Higham’s theory of the “unitary character of prejudice,” the guest speaker said.

Something extraordinary was going on in the 1950s and 1960s that made the nation more democratic, something Whitfield called “a tectonic shift in the definition of the American identity.”

“An awareness of the heterogeneity of the pot increasingly gathered momentum. The American way of life that was so frequently invoked in the 1950s, increasingly needed to be expressed in the plural. The republic was increasingly appreciated as a collection of groups.

“The pot had not melted,” Whitfield noted. “It meant that all sorts of changes would be taking place, and it also meant that the place of Jews in American society could rise to extraordinary influence and conspicuousness.”

By the 1980s, the differences between peoples ceased to be a cause of divisiveness in the United States. Diversity became a source of national pride for minorities, and thus did multiculturalism provide the framework for Jews to strengthen their place in society.

Whitfield, who mentioned earlier that his family’s name was originally Weissfeld, or “white field,” concluded with remarks about the “conundrum of Jewish identity” in America today where “prejudice has been replaced by popularity, hostility has given way to hospitality.” In this context Whitfield related a remark by Elvis Presley who apparently had taken to wearing the Star of David around his neck. Elvis explained his choice of jewelry saying: “I wouldn’t want to be kept out of heaven on a technicality.”

So where Jews in America had once been subject to widespread anti-Semitism, today they live in a pluralistic society in which they are appreciated for cultivating their heritage in ways that could not have been anticipated in the 1940s or 1950s.

The Quint Lectureship was established at Middlebury in 1987 by the late Hannah A. Quint and her son Eliot Levinson, a member of the Class of 1964. Its purpose has long been to provoke thought at the College and within the community on issues of Jewish history, religion, and culture.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg delivered the first Quint lecture in 1988 on the topic “Israel and Palestine: A Battle of Two Rights.” Since it was founded, the lectureship has always been delivered by a different speaker, with one exception: Rabbi Hertzberg, a prominent scholar and activist, was invited back in 1997 to mark the 10th anniversary. His subject: “The Future of the Zionist Movement.”

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.

• Last Thursday the 2013 Solar Decathlon team invited the campus to walk through its solar house under construction next to the recycling center. It was a spirited event with students cheering, a band playing, and the president speaking, so in case you missed it watch this short video produced by Stephen Diehl. What happens next? Once “InSite” house is completed it will be disassembled, transported to Irvine, Calif., and reassembled again for next fall’s international competition held by the U.S. Department of Energy.

• Middlebury graduates have supported their alma mater again! In March, when a generous donor offered $20,000 if 2,000 alumni would make a gift during the month, the grads rose to the challenge and made donations. Our hats are off to the alumni, the donor, and the hard-working College Advancement staff for reaching their Spark A Match! goal.

• The College has earned news coverage over the past few days: on Bloomberg.com for Middlebury’s position on divestment in fossil-fuel companies; in USA Today for Assistant Professor Joyce Mao’s course “Mad Men and Mad Women”; in the Boston Globe for winning an EPA award for reducing the College’s food waste; and in the Washington Post for Associate Professor Jason Mittell’s view on DVR’ing TV premieres.

• The Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in a Global Context continues through Friday with discussions, lectures, and a film – all on the subject of “Body Parts.” 
  

• “Jews in America: Past and Future” will be the topic of a one-day symposium on Sunday, April 14, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Hannah A. Quint Lectureship in Jewish Studies. Speakers from Brandeis University, the University of Minnesota, the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, and Middlebury College will discuss American Jewry from four different perspectives.

• The “Real Food Week” keynote speaker, author Philip Ackerman-Leist of Green Mountain College, will discuss higher education’s role in creating just, humane, and sustainable food systems on Thursday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Jones House Conference Room. Then, next Monday, April 15, there will be two talks about food: at 12:15 p.m. in Warner Hemicycle about creativity and food in the “elBulli” ecosystem, and at 7:30 p.m. in the Jones House Conference Room on the Arab influence on Mediterranean gastronomy.
• Global Vision, Global Reach: The Middlebury-Monterey Lecture Series will continue on Monday, April 15, at 12:30 p.m. in Franklin Environmental Center, Room 103, with John Balcom, a professor at MIIS in the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation, and Language Education. His topic: “Serving Two Masters: Reflections on Literary Translation.”

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/2013/03/27/hope-and-climate-change/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/27/hope-and-climate-change/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:19:02 +0000 Maria Theresa Stadtmueller http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=11660  

Klyza gave a nuanced view of Obama’s first term and what might come next.

The question mark was key. In a recent talk entitled, “Change We Can Believe In?” Christopher McGrory Klyza, the Stafford Professor in Public Policy and professor of political science and environmental studies, parsed President Obama’s environmental record for progress, setbacks, and possible future action. Not surprising for the co-author of an award-winning book about recent U.S. environmental policy, Klyza went beyond a mere scorecard to suggest the subtleties of achieving any gains in the current political climate.

Klyza began by giving the full Orchard at Franklin Environmental Center some political context: Obama’s actions (or lack of them) must be weighed against his having taken office while the U.S. was fighting two wars and suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Add to that a Congress that has been gridlocked—and worse—since 1990. Klyza quoted California Congressman Henry Waxman’s 2012 comment: “I have never experienced as much hostility toward the environment than exists in Congress today.” In fact, Klyza noted, recent studies show political party polarization has reached levels not seen since Reconstruction. “There’s virtually no environmental middle,” he said, referring to a graph of congressional environmental voting that showed red bars crowding the anti-environment extreme and blue bars crowding the pro-environment edge. Meanwhile, although most Americans support environmental protection, that support is too shallow to pressure politicians. “There’s support, but not salience,” he said.

Still, the Congress and Obama managed to pass two significant laws in the first term. The Omnibus Public Land Management Act consolidated 159 bills and produced the greatest expansion of the wilderness system in 15 years. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus act), invested $80 billion in energy efficiency, public transit, and renewables. What Congress and Obama didn’t pass was a comprehensive climate bill; in both the House and Senate climate and cap-and-trade bills died, Klyza said, due to overcomplexity and failed tactics. After Republicans took the House in the 2010 midterm election, Obama and the Democrats fell back into defending the “green state” from attack. (The “green state,” Klyza explained, is “the set of laws, rules, institutions, and expectations regarding conservation, pollution control, and resource management”—such as the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Forest Service, and the Antiquities Act.) That defense was successful, he said, quelling 39 anti-environmental riders attached to the House’s 2012 Interior-EPA appropriations bill designed to weaken greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation and vehicle fuel efficiency and to promote oil and gas leases in wilderness areas.

Klyza then considered some of Obama’s executive actions. His appointments of Lisa Jackson (EPA administrator), former EPA chief Carol Browner (energy czar), Van Jones (green jobs czar), and Steven Chu (energy secretary) were environmentally credible. When the EPA roused from its Bush-era slumber to respond affirmatively to the Supreme Court’s charge (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) that the agency determine if greenhouse gases are a “danger to public health and welfare,” the gates opened to stronger regulation of motor vehicle and power plant emissions.

For example, Klyza explained, California has the right under the Clean Air Act to seek a waiver from the EPA allowing it to require stricter motor vehicle emissions standards than those nationally set. The Bush administration denied the waiver; Obama granted it. A state and federal collaboration helped establish national greenhouse gas standards for cars and light trucks that translate into stepped limits of 35.5 mpg by 2016 and 54.5 mpg by 2025. Higher mpg standards for heavier vehicles were also established.

Klyza also noted that a 2011 rule requiring 90 percent cuts in mercury emissions from fossil-fueled power plants by 2016 resulted in utilities closing many older coal-fired plants (mercury pollution’s greatest source) rather than incur retrofitting costs. The EPA also tightened standards for other air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but in a major disappointment, Obama wouldn’t support ground-level ozone reduction.

Despite a gridlocked Congress, environmental progress continues through what Klyza called “green drift.” “Green state” laws often include provisions that require review and action based on the best available science, he said, giving the example of the health consequences of particulates. New data show that lower levels than anticipated can damage human health, which requires the EPA to adopt stricter air quality standards—unless Congress intervenes. Since gridlock renders that unlikely, stricter standards accrue. In this scenario, GHG could, through green drift, decline to levels close to what the defeated Waxman-Market climate bill would have achieved through 2020, but not beyond. Unfortunately, he noted, “green drift will not lead to the fundamental changes in the U.S. economy and society that are necessary to make far deeper cuts in GHG emissions.”

Reviewing several other advances, Klyza concluded that in light of first-term pressures, “Obama’s executive politics are making a difference.” But lack of real presidential action on climate change and land conservation left many feeling “the environment never seemed on the top of his to-do list.”

And the second term? Klyza found Obama’s actions hard to predict. Changes to the National Environmental Policy Act could put “some sand in the gears of polluters,” Klyza said, by allowing some lawsuits over greenhouse gas outputs; a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers responded with, “It’s got us very freaked out.” It remains to be seen what Obama will do about the Keystone XL pipeline and other planned fossil fuel infrastructure, or leasing of federal lands for coal extraction, although Klyza considers it essential that issues such as Keystone and fossil fuel divestment have made it to the front page and popular awareness.

“So how do we influence the president to keep global temperature rise below two degrees Centigrade?” a student asked during the lively question and answer period. Klyza responded, “Ceaseless pressure, ceaselessly applied.”

Hang Du

With support from a faculty research grant, Du went to the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in Hangzhou, China, while on her sabbatical in 2008.  Twenty-nine students on the Middlebury program gave her permission to study their every move, and so she went to classes with them, observed them in academic and non-academic settings, and interviewed them in Chinese before, during, and after the semester.

For three months she ate meals with the students, analyzed their questionnaire responses, spoke to their teachers, administered language proficiency tests, and even read their journals (with permission, of course)—all in an effort to understand how American students handle their immersion in her native country.

Hang Du transcribed all of her conversations, observations, and analysis into more than 2,400 pages of hand-written notes, and recently published an article on her quantitative findings in the Modern Language Journal, with a second article due out later this year.

On March 20 she presented her qualitative findings in a Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture at Middlebury entitled “Study Abroad in China: Language, Identity, and Self-presentation,” to a gathering of about 60 students, faculty members, and community members. And as she shared stories about her observations in Hangzhou, about a dozen students smiled and nodded their heads indicating that a sizeable share of the audience had studied in China on the Middlebury program and had “lived” similar experiences.

For example, she told a story about a Middlebury student who took a 10-hour train trip to Beijing. As soon as the other passengers noticed her high level of proficiency in the Mandarin language, she was besieged by questions because her language skills exceeded people’s expectations. Added Du, “The Chinese people can be very blunt.”

She told about a student with Korean parents, who identified with the international students at Middlebury, but felt she was part of the majority in China. Or about the student-musician who was invited by strangers to perform at their wedding, and did so willingly. Or about the student who found he was “less eager” to defend American policies after living and studying in China.

Du, a veteran language teacher who first came to Middlebury in 2001 as a member of the summer Chinese School faculty, was particularly interested in the students’ awareness of dialects and accents. She played an audio clip for the audience in which one of the students in the program impersonated a Hangzhou resident’s less-than-perfect pronunciation of Mandarin.

Her qualitative findings fell into three categories: language proficiency, identity and self-presentation, and interaction with native speakers. “Soon after I analyzed the data,” she said, “these three themes jumped up and called out my name.”

Du was inspired to conduct her study when, in 2006, she found extensive research on study abroad in other countries such as Russia and France, but “there was nothing about American students studying abroad in China.” Her interest was compounded by the fact that more than 50 study-abroad programs had been established in China since the 1980s, and the realization that China ranks fifth on the list of the most-popular destinations for U.S. students studying abroad.

And yet, Chinese-language teachers in the U.S. did not have access to valid research findings about American students in China, she said. “Year after year we send students over there and then they come back, but we didn’t really know what [their experiences were,] so that’s why I wanted to study it.”

From her research, Du has concluded that Middlebury students felt “respected and valued” in China because of their language proficiency, and their positive images of themselves has motivated them to keep learning and practicing the language. Students told her that they could “fend for themselves” in the marketplace or with taxi drivers because of their language skills. They felt validated because they could make their opinions or feelings known in conversation with others in Chinese.

She also noticed a shift in students’ perspectives about non-speakers of Chinese, as demonstrated by the student who thought Westerners in Tiananmen Square who could not converse in Chinese were “shameless,” and by the student who observed that Europeans sitting at an adjacent table in a restaurant were actually “disappointed” to hear him speaking Mandarin.

Some students in study-abroad programs are ascribed “half-wit status” by native speakers because of their lack of language skills, Du explained, but for Middlebury students in China the opposite was true. “Our students were appreciated and honored by the Chinese people for their language skills.”

Mapping Vergennes was just one step students took to suggest safer walking and biking routes.

What keeps residents driving around town instead of biking or walking to school, work, and errands? What could change those habits? Four environmental studies (ES) seniors spent a semester looking for answers by getting to know the people, traffic lights, and crosswalks of the City of Vergennes, VT. On a recent Tuesday evening they presented their findings—3 main causes and 18 recommendations for change—at a joint meeting of the Vergennes city council, planning commission, and recreation committee. A reaction from Shannon Haggett, chair of the planning commission, was typical of the response: “I was blown away by the quality of the work.”

Since the late 1980s, ES seniors have developed community-related projects for their capstone senior seminar, focusing on diverse topics such as land management, climate, energy, and water issues. Last fall’s “Cultivating Community Through Sustainable Transportation” resulted in a 52-page report, a highly professional presentation to Vergennes officials, and hopes that the research could be adapted to other Vermont communities.

The students who chose this project among several transportation-oriented options (18 seniors participated in fall semester’s ES 401) brought a cross-section of ES foci to the task: Aaron Kelly’s is policy; Jessica Lee’s is creative arts and dance; Angela Todd focuses on chemistry, and Carlton “Carly” Westling on biology. Their first concern was “Where do we start?”

Fortunately, the semester’s faculty advisor, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Environmental Studies Molly Costanza-Robinson, is an experienced guide in these seminars. “The transportation focus is newer to me, but I’ve been interested as a citizen for a long time,” she says. She also brought ideas from a recent research project in which she and faculty members from six other institutions visited European cities with model sustainable transportation networks. “I learned more about what’s possible and how it was achieved,” she says.

Working with the students and Costanza-Robinson was Diane Munroe, the College’s veteran coordinator for community-based environmental studies. Munroe’s many local and state-wide partners have come to welcome the collaboration—and results—a team of ES401 seniors typically achieve.

The seminar kicked off with a primer on transportation—intensive reading and discussion on such issues as equity, access to jobs, climate change, and a new federal transportation funding bill. That process, at least, was familiar student territory. As they moved toward fieldwork, familiarity gave way to many moving parts. The students set up selection criteria (resident density, number of nearby employers, etc.) that pointed to Vergennes as a workable site. Munroe’s contacts there and with the Addison County Regional Planning Commission were eager to participate. The students met with local officials and conducted detailed walking and mapping trips in Vergennes to measure its crosswalks and assess sightlines. There were days of surveys about residents’ transportation habits and their perceived barriers to biking or walking. They talked with mothers who struggled to push strollers along broken sidewalks and with shoppers too wary of traffic to walk to the nearby supermarket.

The students had some of their own apprehensions: “How do we organize all this?” and “How will we be graded?” Costanza-Robinson advised, “Don’t worry about the grades. Worry about the process. And don’t be afraid to flail around a bit. That’s where the learning is happening.” After many drafts, lots of feedback from their community partners and their advisers, and a particularly rigorous three-hour session with a white board, they started to clarify the issues. As Aaron Kelly notes, “We came in with an untarnished perspective, so we could offer creative solutions. The persistence paid off.”

So what drives Vergennes residents to drive? Three main themes emerged: safety, connectivity, and perceptions and habits. For example, the truck Route 22A turns into Main Street in Vergennes, and residents worry about not being seen, not having time to cross safely, and about being passed too closely on bikes; the city’s infrastructure doesn’t always let someone walk from here to there;  and people perceive walking or biking as too time-consuming or unpleasant in extreme weather.

Matching these results with data from transportation studies and from local research by the county planning commission, the students crafted 18 recommendations ranging from simple (signage and enhanced stoplights) to more complex and costly (a connecting biking/walking trail on a former railbed). “We designed the recommendations to stand on their own,” noted Westling, “so the city could choose which they could afford without weakening the others.” All of their recommendations held multiple benefits—to residents’ physical health, a sense of community, or the local economy. “They knew they couldn’t sell this only on a ‘save-the-planet’ basis,” says Costanza-Robinson. “They had to show the many benefits of sustainable transportation.”

At the Vergennes meeting, the planners and council members raised fine points about town boundaries and state regulations. The students answered questions about streets and paths as if they’d grown up there. “It was so gratifying that they let us present our ideas,” said Jessica Lee afterward. The City Council’s budget vote this June will determine which changes to adopt and what might need outside funding (the report includes suggestions). The students’ success won’t be measured only in future crosswalks and bike lanes, however. As Westling said, “I remember the moment during this project when I realized, ‘this isn’t just what I’m learning in my class; it’s also how I should live my life.’”

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/22/street-smarts/feed/ 10 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/20/eight-minutes-3000/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/20/eight-minutes-3000/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:39:06 +0000 Blair Kloman http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=11562 Eight minutes. $3,000.

That’s pretty much what it boiled down to last week when MiddChallenge gave 17 student groups a very brief opportunity to explain why their business, outreach, or arts venture deserved one of its six cash awards.

MiddChallenge, part of the College’s Project on Creativity and Innovation (PCI), is a student-driven annual event that encourages other students to pitch ideas for projects or businesses that can solve problems or enhance society in some way.

Basically you apply, prepare an eight-minute presentation (often with the help of a mentor), make your pitch to a panel of professionals who volunteer their time as judges, and find out whether you’ve won—all over the course of one week.

The winners then spend the summer implementing their projects, and the only follow-up requirement is that each of them must submit a written reflection of the process.

It’s a highly efficient and fast-paced way to get start-up funding for an idea—and then put that idea to the test. And, as Liz Robinson, director of the Project on Innovation in the Liberal Arts, points out, “It’s really less about the ultimate success of a particular project and more about the process—the people who mentor these students and the things they learn along the way.”

And they learn a lot. PCI makes available to all the students a stream of valuable resources—from professional mentors who help with presentations and business plans to opportunities for additional funding from other PCI programs such as MiddStart, PCI’s microphilanthropy network.

The student committee—energetically made up of Joanie Thompson ’14, AJ Guff ’13.5, Kate Robinson ’16, Logan Randolph ’14, Will Potter ’14.5, Hannah Bristol ’14.5, and Olivia Tabah ’16—received 37 applications and, practically overnight, narrowed it down to the 17 who were invited to make presentation pitches in one of the three categories: Business; Education, Outreach, and Policy; and Arts.

“It’s a huge time commitment,” said Liz Robinson, “but they take it very seriously.”

The students invite the judges from the professional community, create the criteria for judging, and organize and introduce the student presenters. The 11 judges included young entrepreneurs Chris Eaton ’99, Eliza Eaton ’05, and Corinne Prevot ’13, as well as former Vermont governor Jim Douglas ’72, widely experienced businessman Charlie MacCormack ’63, and the director of the Vermont Women’s Fund Catherine Kalkstein, among others.

The whole event, which took place over two days in Axinn, held an air of professionalism and pragmatism. These were not pie-in-the-sky ideas, but well-thought-out ventures that would in some concrete way add to our society and address an immediate need. Students presented detailed implementation plans and proposed budgets. Several of the groups included first-years and sophomores who were as articulate and poised as their senior peers in presenting and discussing their goals.

This year’s winners include the development of a new method for managing the invasive Eurasian milfoil in waters across Vermont using a patented process called MiddFoil®; Uncle B’s Firenuts, a spicy snack food that a student started last year in a Middlebury Entrepreneurs class and wants to expand this summer; two food-related projects: Share the Surplus, which will deliver untouched and leftover dining hall food to local communities, and Middlebury Foods, which will provide low-cost and highly nutritious grocery items to people who don’t have access to grocery stores; a creative mixed-genre film about the Los Angeles music collective WEDIDIT; and a multimedia narrative featuring stories from people who have experienced bullying in New England schools. For a complete list of the winners, as well as the groups of students involved, see below.

MiddChallenge 2013 Winners:
Business:
Uncle B’s Firenuts
Ben Stasiuk ’14

Uncle B’s Firenuts is a spicy nut snack, based on a recipe developed by Stasiuk’s Uncle Bill, that blends the intense heat of homegrown heirloom hot peppers with the flavors of bourbon and wood smoke. Stasiuk started a business selling Firenuts through the Middlebury Entrepreneurs course last January and hopes to expand the family business over the summer.

Integrated Milfoil Management
Austin Ritter ’13, Greg Dier ’13, with Samuel Carlson ’10, Professor of Biology Sallie Sheldon, Meghan Short

Waterbodies across North America are threatened by Eurasian milfoil, an invasive plant that inhibits recreation, lowers property values, and decreases native species diversity in its surroundings. In the 1990s, Professor Sheldon discovered a native insect that selectively feeds on the milfoil plant. She developed the MiddFoil®  process to efficiently grow and distribute this insect. After a decade of research has shown the MiddFoil® process to be a safe and effective method for providing lasting milfoil control, Integrated Milfoil Management intends to bring the MiddFoil® technology to waterbodies in Vermont.

Education, Outreach & Policy:
Share the Surplus
Cailey Cron ’14, Molly Shane ’14

Addison County is home to nearly 4,000 food-insecure people while Middlebury College dining system produces 300 tons of food waste a year, a portion of which is untouched and servable. In collaboration with Dining Services, Share the Surplus will collect excess prepared food from the dining halls and make it available to local people in need.

Middlebury Foods
Nathan Weil ’15, Harry Zieve Cohen ’15, Chris Kennedy ’15, Jack Cookson ’15, Oliver Mayers ’15, Elias Gilman ’15, Eduardo Danino-Beck ’15

Through Middlebury Foods, Vermonters will be able to purchase supermarket-quality food at fast-food prices. High-quality meats and vegetables will be bundled in food boxes and sold at local delivery sites including churches and community organizations. Each box provides a week’s worth of affordable and nutritious food for approximately $1.50 per meal by eliminating overhead costs and piggy-backing on the established purchasing power and infrastructure of Middlebury College.

Arts:
WEDIDIT
Moss Turpan ’14, Dylan Redford ’14

The project is a mixed documentary/fiction film about WEDIDIT, a collective of electronic musicians based in Los Angeles and one of the few in which members collaborate on work but release music individually. The film will explore the unique collaborative creative process and will employ documentary language to investigate the creative process of the artists and fictional language to represent the emotional experience of the music.

War at Home(room)
Aidesha-Kiya Vega-Hutchens ’14, Jun Chen ’14

The War at Home(room) project will compile oral histories of bullying in New England school systems. The coordinators will travel throughout the region documenting how these experiences follow people over the course of their lives and then produce multimedia narrative that illustrates the struggles endured by those bullied as well as those who eventually rise above their experiences.

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.

• Chief Diversity Officer Shirley M. Collado and Sheyenne Brown ’09 talked with NPR’s “Tell Me More” host Michel Martin on March 7 about campus diversity—both creating and maintaining it.
• The NCAA Skiing Championships came to Middlebury and things couldn’t have gone more smoothly for the 148 athletes representing 21 teams. Middlebury posted the best team score in the men’s slalom for the second straight year and Nordic skier Ben Lustgarten ’14 turned in his second All-America performance, helping the Panthers complete a 10th-place finish on their home snow.
• TEDx returned to Middlebury over the weekend for a second year of inspiring ideas and discussion. The theme was “The Road Not Taken” with more than a dozen speakers taking the stage to share their interpretation.
• Starting March 14th, the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs brings us “The Politics of Freshwater: Access and Identity in a Changing Environment,” a three-day, interdisciplinary conference featuring scholars from both national and international institutions, in addition to our own from Middlebury, the C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
• On Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in Dana, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose show has been at the museum since February, will discuss his work and the current exhibition, which focuses on abandoned quarries throughout Vermont and “nature transformed through industry.”
• First-year saxophonist Zitong (Bruce) Jia, winner of the 2013 Beucher Concerto Competition, will be the featured soloist in Friday’s Middlebury College Orchestra concert at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall. Jia rose above a strong field of musicians to earn his distinction, and the evening should be impressive.
• Don’t miss the premiere of “The Opulence of Integrity” March 15 and 16 at 8 p.m. in Mahaney Center for the Arts Dance Theatre. This performance, inspired by the life and legend of Muhammad Ali and incorporating elements of boxing with martial arts and an original score, is the fine work of dance faculty member Christal Brown and her company INSPIRIT.
• Several upcoming film screenings around campus offer something for everyone—MCAB’s “Free Friday Film” featuring Les Miserables at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. in Dana Auditorium; the Hirschfield International Film Series featuring Little Birds on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., also in Dana; and the Education Studies Film Series featuring Bag It, about the effects of plastic on our world, on Wednesday, March 20, at 7 p.m. in Dana.

The exquisite paintings on wooden panels are attributed to the “Master of the St. Ursula Legend,” an unnamed artist working in Bruges between 1475 and 1500. The panels are the outside wings of a triptych – a popular format for religious art – and the whereabouts of the third or center panel is also unknown.

And yet Monod, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury, has determined almost to a certainty the identities of most of the major figures depicted on the panels. He has also determined when the works were painted, and has informed opinions about who the Master of St. Ursula was, why the paintings were commissioned, and what might constitute the subject of the missing middle panel.

“I have been in love with these two panels ever since we acquired them and they have fascinated me since I first set eyes upon them,” said Professor Monod, who acknowledged that he is not an art historian by training. Rather, he is an expert in 17th- and 18th-century European history, particularly the history of the British Isles, and he was motivated to delve deeply into the origins and symbolism of the panels because “they are very, very rare and very, very fascinating.”

Monod sees a direct British connection in the right-hand panel of the Middlebury triptych, particularly in the “protecting saint” shown carrying a scepter, wearing an open crown, and dressed in a gown bearing the coat of arms of England. Monod concludes that the figure in the painting is King Henry VI, although Henry VI was never canonized. The painter depicted the king to appear much as British royalty did on the coinage of the day: “a generic portrait of a king…with long flowing hair and a youngish look.”

Monod is certain that the man shown kneeling before the king commissioned the making of the triptych, the outside panels of which measure just over 20 inches in height and eight inches in width. “It is quite clear that he wanted something small and quite possibly portable, but he also wanted it packed with saints…for every possibility and every occasion.”

So who commissioned the work? “The man in the right-hand panel is well dressed, but not well dressed enough to be a nobleman, nor is he carrying a nobleman’s sword,” which leads Monod to believe that the patron of the triptych was “a wealthy merchant, an alderman of a town, or someone high-ranking within a city,” presumably in England.

Paul Monod says the “d” in his surname is silent and the accent goes on the first syllable

The author of five books and an assiduous researcher, Paul Monod examined the iconography associated with the eight saints in the left wing of the triptych and used those “clues” to determine who they are and how they might hold meaning to the patron.

According to Monod, the saints in the background of the left panel are: St. Anthony Abbot, shown with fire coming from his feet; St. Barbara, who is about to be decapitated; St. Sebastian, who is naked and shot with arrows; and St. Giles, who is carrying a crosier in front of a hermit’s cell. The saints shown as bishops in the foreground of the left panel are: St. Nicholas, who has at his feet two little boys in a barrel; St. Omer, with a thick pair of eyeglasses; St. Eligius, who is holding a goldsmith’s hammer; and St. Blaise, with a wool-combers carding tool.

Each of the eight saints must have held significance to the patron who paid for the creation of the triptych, Monod explained. For example, it was believed that St. Barbara guarded against thunder and lightning, St. Blaise protected those in the wool trade, and St. Anthony was appealed to for infectious diseases.

Before Paul Monod concluded his research, the identities of St. Giles and St. Omer in the triptych were not known, and the identity of King Henry VI had never been confirmed.

The Middlebury historian and others have deduced that the triptych was painted in the studio of Pieter Cassinbroodt, a free master of the Bruges Guild of St. Luke. Based on his research, Monod believes that the Middlebury panels were most likely painted in 1495 by one or more of Cassinbroodt’s apprentices. (Cassinbroodt was known to take on as many as seven apprentices.)

The final piece of the puzzle is the center panel: where did it go, what did it depict, and why did it get separated from its wings? We may never know the answers to those questions, Monod remarked, but it’s likely that the missing center panel showed a powerful religious image such as the body of Christ being brought down from the cross.

The one certainty, though, is why the triptych was commissioned. It was intended to be  “a declaration of a kind of political loyalty and it’s meant to show that the patron has accepted the political transition and change of power” from King Henry VI to Henry VII.

He concluded: “This is a very rare piece that has a big, important story to tell, if not by me then by others in the years to come. These two panels – these two tiny, little panels – will reveal more and more about the history of the times, about the person who commissioned them, and about these charming little saints who are posed so mysteriously against this fascinating landscape.”

Middlebury College acquired the two painted panels in 2011 through the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund. The Museum of Art is open to the public without charge Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. 

Montana State? In Middlebury?

It’s not every day you hear skiers from the western schools announced over the loudspeaker at Middlebury’s Snow Bowl. But today is not every day.

Wednesday morning marked the start of the 2013 NCAA Championship for both alpine and Nordic skiing, hosted this year by Middlebury.

“It’s been a long time in the works,” said an appropriately bundled Director of Athletics Erin Quinn, who stood among a crowd of other fans at the finish line, watching the first of the women’s giant slalom runs. “We’ve been prepping for this for more than a year, and it’s just a great feeling to have the day finally be here—and the weather cooperating!”

Indeed, an overcast day with slight flurries and temps in the 20s made for the perfect race day. According to one finisher from New Mexico, “It was a little windy at the top, but most of us really like these conditions.” Another skier, from the University of Denver and a native of New Hampshire, was excited to be back East skiing among old friends. “This is awesome,” she gushed, fresh over the line. “Middlebury’s a great hill. And such a fun town! We’ve tried a different sandwich shop every day—so far we like Noonie’s the best.”

Waiting for their daughter Anne to race, Rocky and Betsy Rockwell from Moosehead Lake, Maine, were well prepared for the day in warm Bates hats and scarves—including the one on their dog. “This is a trip,” said Rocky. “It’s a dream for these college kids to make it to this day. It’s Anne’s first time here. She might’ve been a little nervous.”

At the foot of the chairlift, a giant flat screen TV captured each skier as she sped through the gates. Once she was visible in person on the lower half of the mountain, the cheers and clanging cowbells were deafening.

Inside the lodge, the temperature was warmer but the atmosphere just as frantic. Skiers stretched, changed uniforms, inhaled egg sandwiches, and prepped for their second runs on the GS course. Snow Bowl staff were busy answering questions and generally enjoying the excitement of the day—and days to come. “It’s wonderful to see so many faces from so far away,” said Susie Davis, director of the Snow School. Ticket master Don Swenor, with his characteristic smile, said the best part of the day was “everything happening outside on the mountain,” and added, “It ought to happen every five years instead of ten.”

Upstairs, tucked in a corner room with a clear view of the course, Doug Lewis, a former Olympian alpine skier and local Vermonter, announced each skier’s progress from start to finish with the flair and ease of a seasoned commentator. A sign hastily taped to the half-open door requested “Silence please, no cells or electronic devices.”

With only a few skiers left to go, he finally announced Anne Rockwell from Bates, whose parents waited so patiently at the finish. “And she’s looking smooth at the start…bing bang she’s through the midway gates…a little thin at the bottom…and that’s 1:05.89 at the line.”

She was 26th after that first run, 29th overall—not bad for a first outing among some of her most talented peers. Her parents were beaming.

For more details on the NCAA Championships, please use these links:

http://www.ncaa.com/content/2013-ncaa-skiing-results

http://www.middlebury.edu/athletics/about/sportsnotes/201213sn/2013sn/march13/031113/node/448304

http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/node/447735

Journalist Dimiter Kenarov ’03.5 speaks on shale gas fracking in Poland and Pennsylvania.

Journalist Dimiter Kenarov ’03.5 has covered the hunt for a Macedonian serial killer and Baghdad’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal training program (think “Hurt Locker”) but says of his current assignment, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” The young Bulgarian writer, now a resident of Istanbul, returned to Middlebury recently to talk about the complexities of “Shale Gas: From Poland to Pennsylvania” at the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest. The widely published Kenarov is partially supported in this project by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, a clue to how combative the issue of drilling for this so-called “energy game changer” has become.

The affable Kenarov began, at the audience’s request, with a brief presentation explaining what shale gas is and how drillers recover it from rock through hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Small-scale shale gas drilling has gone on for years, but new horizontal drilling technology puts gas on the leading edge of the “unconventionals,” or fuels (tar sands, ultra deepwater oil, coalbed methane, etc.) being developed now that supplies of the world’s “cheap and easy” fossil fuels are waning. One benefit of shale gas, he noted, is that it’s found worldwide and doesn’t require expensive exploratory drilling.

After Kenarov outlined some of the risks and costs, however, it was hard to understand why Poland was leading the shale gas charge in Europe and how the practice has already achieved such a foothold in the U.S. As Kenarov explained, horizontal fracking wells cover a large surface area. To force and keep open the shale fissures and release the gas within, drillers inject at high pressure from three to seven million gallons of fresh water per well, mixed with sand and toxic chemicals such as benzene and lead. Some of that water is then recovered as “flowback.” “Then what do you do with it?” Kenarov asked. Much of Pennsylvania’s flowback is sent for underground disposal to Ohio. “The water picks up 200 times the salts contained in seawater—in the Marcellus Shale [in the U.S. Northeast] it’s 3,000 times more,” he said. The water also carries as much as 1,000 times the safe drinking levels of radioactivity from its travels through the rock. Chemically tainted water from the wells can seep into underground aquifers; if pumped out and sent to standard water treatment plants, which are not equipped to decontaminate this flowback, the water seeps into rivers, water tables, and food chains.

Then there are the noise and air pollution of huge trucks needed to move water and drilling rigs; the methane released from the wells that cancels out natural gas’s comparatively modest carbon footprint; the quick decline of many of the wells, which prompts more drilling; and the pipelines extending for thousands of miles through previously scenic farmland.

In Poland, one word explains an enthusiasm countered by many other European countries’ fracking moratoriums: Russia. Poland’s longtime nemesis provides two thirds of Poland’s natural gas, and while gas comprises only 13 percent of Poland’s energy mix, many Poles want to make sure it’s “Polish gas.” The writer noted that only eight percent of Europeans overall support shale gas, but any Pole questioning gas development is branded a “national traitor” supporting Russian interests. Despite the U.S. State Department’s technical support for fracking in Poland, and the fact that the state, not farmers, owns subsurface mineral rights, “Poland doesn’t have the infrastructure,” Kenarov said. “The economy of scale doesn’t exist in one small country.” In response, Exxon has withdrawn its interests.

Scale limitation is not the problem in the U.S., where millions of square miles are mapped for fracking and half a million active wells exist. Kenarov described coming into Pennsylvania to report on fracking as “going into a mosh pit at a punk rock concert.” In northern regions of the state that lie over the Marcellus shale gas play, towns are dealing with higher crime rates, accidents caused by huge trucks, and tensions between neighbors on either side of the issue. Struggling dairy farmers who sold their mineral rights for additional income have found their supply chains collapsing as businesses shift to ride the gas wave. Vegetable farmers are either concerned about their water quality or are discovering that their customers, wary of toxicity, are buying elsewhere. (As Kenarov noted, thousands of contamination accidents caused by faulty well casings and other mishaps throughout the U.S. have been registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.)

Still, enough interests are benefiting that the shale gas drive continues (Audience members noted that Vermont is the first and only state so far to ban fracking). Kenarov commented as he showed aerial photos of vast expanses of well clusters that looked more extraterrestrial than Texan, “the scale of development is striking.”

In a panel discussion on Feb. 19 in McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Professor Barbara Hofer of the psychology department said that the method of assessing students, such as quizzes or short-answer tests vs. term papers or presentations, often drive how students go about their learning and what they’ll gain from it in the future.

“When students think what they are going to be tested on is discrete facts, then they make flash cards, right? They use rote memorization strategies. [But] if we are asking them to do higher-order tasks in our assessments, they are far more likely to use the strategies that lead to deeper understanding and knowledge,” she said.

It comes down to whether we want our students to remember disconnected bits of information or whether we want them to develop an entire web of knowledge, Hofer explained. Students don’t always see that the goal of learning is acquiring “rich, flexible, generative knowledge”; all too often they are concerned simply with the intake of information without any depth of analysis.

Cognitive psychologist Jason Arndt, an associate professor who specializes in human memory, supported Hofer’s views on knowledge acquisition.

In terms of a human being’s “working memory,” i.e., a person’s ability to think about things in the moment, people have an “exceedingly limited” capacity to hold onto data in the short term, said Arndt.  Teachers should be aware that working memory serves as a gateway to longer term retention, and if information “doesn’t get past working memory, it’s just not going to be there over the long term.” One of the techniques that Arndt uses when teaching highly complex material is limiting the number of words and ideas on each of the slides he shows his students.

He also pointed out that doing things in the classroom that demand deep, active thinking is much better for long-term retention as opposed to cursory activities that don’t demand active engagement.

“When left to our own devices,” Arndt said, “we don’t do a ton of things on our own that require a lot of effort to process it or to think about it, and that has consequences for later retention. If we do things in a relatively shallow way, that information is not likely to be there for us five minutes down the line, 10 minutes down the line, or three days down the line.”

Room for space and improvisation

The other two faculty members on the panel looked at the question of how students learn from vastly different points of view than that of their faculty colleagues from the psychology department.

Jonathan Miller-Lane, an associate professor of education studies, said that students’ curiosity should be at the center of teaching-learning process. “Before we talk about learning, we need to talk about which questions matter to students and what students are curious about,” he said.

Professors should be willing to give up their own preconceptions in honor of emphasizing the student’s place in the exchange of knowledge because, he explained, the student’s experience is more important than the teacher’s. To illustrate his point, Miller-Lane pointed to a quote from author and educator Parker Palmer: “To teach is to create a space, not to fill it.”

Said Miller-Lane, “We often assume as professors that the syllabus must pre-exist the arrival of the student and that the essential content pre-exists the arrival of the student. That’s a really interesting assumption to unpack, and this statement – to teach is to create a space – suggests that maybe there is something in the interaction between us that is at the heart of what learning means.

“Space for what then? If teaching is to create a space, where do we go but to John Dewey with this beautiful sentence: ‘Intelligently directed development of the possibilities inherent in ordinary experience.’ That’s what we are creating a space for. Where learning [is] acquiring abilities to engage that.”

Penny Campbell, senior lecturer in dance, said, “I am an improviser. That’s the bottom line in my life, [and] what I have been doing the whole time I have been here is bringing the body into the classroom, bringing the body to the center of our inquiry and our study.”

To foster improvisation, Campbell puts her dance students into situations without actually telling them what the expectations are. (She demonstrated her point by asking the audience of faculty, students, staff, and Middlebury parents to put their arms in the air and move them around. Some people moved their arms about wildly while others were more passive. Still others declined her request. But the point of the exercise soon dawned on everyone: our bodies were front and center, and none of us knew beforehand what the outcome of the exercise would be.)

“Living on the edge of chaos is something we can learn to do. We can learn the skills of operating that way. And also, we can have faith that if we are developing this amazing system of perception that the body-mind is – a continuous, active, self-organizing system in a way – if we can learn how to use that and open it and learn how to be comfortable with it, because I think we live in a culture that’s very, very suspicious of bodies.”

Every one of us has an “enormous amount of potential as a living being to perceive and pay attention to ourselves, to our environments, to the people around us, to what is going on” in life, and Campbell probes that potential in her students through improvisation.

The panel was moderated by Professor James Calvin Davis, the associate vice president of academic affairs, and was organized by his office to further the campus-wide conversation on the future of the liberal arts.

The next program in the series called Core and Change in the Liberal Arts will be held on Thursday, Feb. 28, at 4:30 p.m. in room 220 of Bicentennial Hall. Speakers from three academic disciplines and from Library and Information Services will broach the question: How can we use emerging technologies to support Middlebury’s mission “to cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community?”

The selection of photographs, on view at the Museum of Art through April 21, grew from a concept the artist began exploring in the granite quarries throughout Vermont and Canada in the early 1990s. Director of the Arts Pieter Broucke and Juliette Bianco, assistant director of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, where the exhibition originated, are co-curators and introduced the show at its opening this week.

The works are large-scale—as are, after all, the deeply cavernous subjects—but the largeness of it all can be deceiving. The artist gives little sense of perspective within the photographs, so the smallest details—the rock striations and geometric cuts, a bright green pool, a chalky white glaze—became almost otherworldly, while at the same time so clearly recognizable as our own earth. It’s a mesmerizing beauty born of industrial destruction. The exhibition also inherently serves as social commentary, but the artist himself is not documentarian; he doesn’t press his opinion but rather propose the opportunity for healthy and ongoing dialogue.

Click through a slideshow of selections below, then make a trip to the Museum to see the show in person—a must!

Danby Marble Quarry #2

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Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, born 1955), Underground Quarry, Danby, Vermont, 1995, digital chromogenic color print. Courtesy of the artist.

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.”

Middmag talked to six alumni who were back sharing their knowledge and expertise with students this past January.

“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.

• Poet Richard Blanco, who was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2000 and has been back to visit several times, was invited to read an original poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama on Monday. Three out of the six poets invited to read inaugural poems over the years have had ties to Bread Loaf: Robert Frost, Miller Williams, and Blanco.
• On Friday, January 18, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave an inspiring talk to Monterey Institute students urging them to advance disarmament and nonproliferation for a more peaceful future. Speaking to a packed audience in Irvine Auditorium, he lauded the Institute for its role in educating students on these issues. If you missed the talk, you can watch it here.
• Once again, Middlebury has made the top ten. Mother Nature Network announced its “10 of the best college environmental programs in the U.S.” recently and Middlebury’s Program in Environmental Studies came in at no. 3.
• Campus will be hopping over the next three days. The Center for Social Entrepreneurship is holding its second annual symposium with the topics of social entrepreneurship and social justice. At 7:00 p.m., Thursday, January 24, after a welcome from President Liebowitz, Billy Parish, founder and president of Mosaic, will give the opening address and have a book signing. Friday night eco-entrepreneur Majora Carter, founder of the Majora Carter Group, will give the Martin Luther King Jr. address in Mead Chapel at 7:30 p.m. after a day of workshops and activities. Saturday morning Parish, Carter, and Bill McKibben will be part of a panel discussion, “Preparing Students to Lead a Life of Meaning.” Check out the entire schedule. You’re sure to find something to attend!
• If the arts are what you’re craving this week, the Middlebury College Orchestra will be performing Thursday, January 24, at 8:00 p.m. in the Concert Hall at the Center for the Arts. On Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00 p.m., the Dance Company of Middlebury will be celebrating their 30th anniversary with a premiere of “Simply Light,” their newest collaborative creation. Being held in the Dance Theatre at the Center for the Arts, the performances will be kicking off a tour of the seven-member company to San Francisco and the Monterey Institute.
• And for some lighthearted fun, check out the talent show being held in the Great Hall at Bicentennial Hall next Wednesday, January 30, from 2:00–5:00 p.m. No, you won’t be watching students sing and dance. The performers are Lego robots and their feats are the culmination of the J-term class Lego Robot Design Studio, taught by David Kauchak. To get a preview of what you might see, click here.

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.

• Jay Parini was talking about Jesus and Robert Frost last month, though not necessarily at the same time. A New York Times article included a quote from him about Frost’s eclectic tradition for personalized Christmas cards, many now collected at Dartmouth College. And on Christmas Day, he wrote a piece for CNN.com on “Seeking the Truth About Jesus.” The prolific poet, novelist, and biographer has a new book headed our way, called Jesus: The Human Face of God.

• Congratulations to the seven faculty members awarded tenure in December: Catherine Combelles (biology), James Fitzsimmons (anthropology), Eliza Garrison (history of art and architecture), Nadia Rabesahala Horning (political science), Kareem Khalifa (philosophy), Caitlin Knowles Myers (economics), and Lynn Owens (sociology).

• There are plenty of folks who already consider Bill McKibben a great neighbor and friend—especially our planet—but it’s always good to have public affirmation. The Burlington Free Press agreed and named him the 2012 Vermonter of the Year.

• Winter sports teams are off to winning start this month so don’t miss the round of home events coming up this weekend, including men’s and women’s basketball and women’s hockey on Friday and Saturday.

• The always-entertaining and ever-talented jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut is back in town Friday at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Part of the amazing Performing Arts Series, tickets are $20 for faculty, staff, and other ID card holders, and just $6 for students.

• To kick off his four-week residency during Winter Term, Ugandan master drummer/dancer Samuel Bakkabulindi will take the lead in “Percussion and Dance Explosion” Saturday night  from 8—10 p.m. in McCullough Social Space. Bring your bongos and dancing feet, and don’t be shy!

• If you’ve got questions, she may have answers. Catch affirmative action expert Susan Sturm on Tuesday, January 15, at 7:30 p.m. in Dana, where she’ll talk about institutional change, transformative leadership, workplace equality, legal education, and inclusion and diversity in higher education. Sturm is founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School and principal investigator for a Ford Foundation grant awarded to develop the architecture of inclusion in higher education.

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

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