The surnames of all 23 members of the Class of 1890 are etched into the side of this 14-inch-long noisemaker along with this comment: “This horn was blown September 3, 1889, for the amusement of the freshmen.” But that was not the first time this particular horn was pressed into service. According to the details meticulously incised into it, the horn was also blown in October 1887 “for the amusement of the citizens of Cornwall,” and again in November 1888 at a parade honoring U.S. president Benjamin Harrison and his vice president, Levi Morton, a favorite son from Shoreham. It was sounded at a party thrown by the class orator, Burton Willard Norton, in 1889, and it was blown for President Ezra Brainerd, Class of 1864, later that same year. Was “Old Metaphysics” amused? We may never know, but if you blow into the Class of 1890’s horn today, it emits an odious sound.

The metal instrument was donated to the College Archive by the family of Lucretius Henry Ross, Class of  1890, or perhaps by “L. H. Ross χΨ” himself. Vice president of his class, Ross went on to Harvard Medical School, became a physician, served as a trustee of the College, and passed away at the age of 91. And judging from his keepsake, he obviously enjoyed a good “horning” every now and then.

Now, look at that photograph on this page, an image captured by one of Ted’s former students. Look at that impish half grin; look at how Ted smiles as much with his eyes as with his mouth. It’s not hard to imagine him looking that way when he arrived at Middlebury 35 years ago, seeing a blank canvas stretched out before him. He surely delighted in imagining what could be, just as we can express a measure of delight in recognizing what has been.

Ted has worn many titles—too many to mention here, at least in any way that gives them proper weight—and has taught an array of bright students at Middlebury and elsewhere (Iowa, Texas, NYU), yet what has remained constant is a state of what colleague and friend Stephen Donadio has described as “serene velocity,” (which is also the title of a film that Ted has long admired).

This is what set Ted apart in the classroom—and as a scholar, as a teacher, and in the world of film, where he is held in such high regard. No doubt this state of serene velocity will accompany Ted into retirement, as he turns his attention and that impish smile to further avenues of exploration that await his attention.

A recent Sunday tested that theory. An overcast afternoon found Ted in Otter Creek Bakery with one of his grandsons, 10-year-old Sutton. As the young boy quietly enjoyed a giant chocolate cookie, Ted softly greeted other customers (a neighbor, a former chair of the Middlebury Board of Trustees). How serene (!).

“What a nice way to spend the afternoon,” a friend remarked.

“We’re about to go clean the third floor of the house, then we’re going to unpack and shelve my books. After that, we’re going swimming,” Ted replied, as casually as one would ask for a pack of sugar. “Now, when are we going canoeing in the Adirondacks…?”

Guided by the museum’s curator of education, Sandi Olivo, the children study and inventory the painting’s elements: numerous casks on a sandy beach; a pennant in a breeze; a blue jacket draped on a boat’s gunwale; clouds driving over land; and out at sea, a tiny sail tacking off a distant shore. Above the seascape, a Bourguereau oil with its Olympic bosoms and bottoms elicits a sideways glance or two.

Upstairs, another Weybridge School group studies a John Sloan crayon drawing, Dreaming, 1906. This gallery affords a balcony’s overhead view of the museum’s front entryway, an Assyrian panel, and, directly below one’s feet, the admissions desk, where an attendant greets newcomers and another scans a bank of security monitors.

“First,” says the fourth-grade teacher to the assembled children, “your job is to just look at the image.” The children regard John Sloan’s crayon lines, while an outsider squints down at the security monitors, stifling the urge to wave at oneself, an Observer observing an Observer, all the while being observed by another observer there at the admissions desk. Meanwhile, the teacher Socratically asks questions; hands shoot up, and she leads the children into discerning the difference between a painting and the Sloan crayon drawing.

Below, standing near the Assyrian alabaster relief, Winged Genie Pollinating the Date Palm, is security monitor Jonathan Blake; the stone relief is from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Kalhu, in present-day northern Iraq, and monitor Blake is from the Granite State of New Hampshire and an estimable photographer of art and news events.

The chatter of fourth-graders echoes around Blake, and he recalls his favorite children’s discussion of the art at Middlebury as a class studied the Assyrian genie’s graven image. “One kid announced with great authority that ‘It’s the Easter Fairy,’ whose job was to follow the Easter Bunny around and make sure the candy eggs are okay,” Jonathan Blake remarks. “Another kid noticed the genie’s ear ornament. To him, a fifth-grader who loved to play chess, it resembled an inverted bishop’s piece—‘He’s the inventor of chess!’ the kid explained. I love the way kids think!” Before its placement in the museum, the Assyrian relief hung for a half century in a cramped Munroe Hall entryway, where occasionally students would stub out their cigarettes on it as they hurried to their history or literature classes.

Fifteen lithe audience members, faculty and students, assemble in the Dance Theatre on a late Monday afternoon, all dressed either in big sweaters and scarves or in big, sagging tee-shirts, to hear a lecture by Katie Martin, improvisatory dancer, choreographer, and teacher at Hampshire College, who studied at Bennington, where she came under the influence of the renowned, innovative choreographer Trisha Brown.

Martin shares a series of slides from Bennington—candids of some of the greatest modern dancers when they were at the southern Vermont college. One sees the socializing Martha Graham and Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey, and there is a selection from Trisha Brown’s earlier work in Water Motor. This elicits a delighted exclamation from Middlebury’s senior lecturer in dance, Penny Campbell, herself no stranger to the Bennington campus with the summer dance program she cofounded.

“Water Motor!” Campbell exclaims. “That was my first composition piece!” As is often the case in this theater, the delight is infectious and everyone laughs. Martin, with her cascade of long, dark hair, will demonstrate her own work out on the floor, but before that, her talk touches on the teachings of choreographer William Forsythe and then segues into “improvisation metaphors” drawn from the natural world’s awe-inspiring “collective individualism”—a swarm of fireflies, a legion of army ants, and (the Observer’s favorite) flocking birds, such as starlings or pigeons or the hundreds of darting, wheeling, banking Arctic snow buntings observed aloft in the Lemon Fair river valley that very bright, cold morning.

On this day (possibly on all days), every person in the theater-tech class is attired entirely in navy blue in the noisy, high-ceilinged workshop overseen by the associate technical director, Jim Dougherty.

Pulleys and cables. Ductwork. Circular saws, band saws, radial arm saws, drill presses, pipe clamps, wire spools, the high whine of a transformer. A student runs a hacksaw across a small metal bar clamped in a vise, set up on the end of a cloth-draped worktable, upon which lies, face-down, a fully articulated human skeleton.

The class is preparing scenery and props for a production of Howard Barker’s The Castle, a bawdy drama of crusaders returning home after a seven-year campaign. Other artifacts, whether from this or past dramas, appear as one takes in the vast workspace; there’s a regulation-height basketball hoop, and 15 feet above the laboring students’ heads, one can see a plywood swan, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, and a surfboard-sized Hostess Twinkie.

Next door, in the Seeler Studio Theatre, a student machine-stitches white muslin at a workstation on risers, where audience seating for The Castle is to be, while another uses a small portable steamer to smooth finished fabric hanging from a clothesline. It bobs gently as the student irons, causing sympathetic vibrations in a bright roll of razor wire—future stage scenery—looped above her head. Scores of dark stage lights hang overhead, poised to light some future drama.

Three pm on a Wednesday, in the 20th year of the Mahaney Center’s existence, the Observer is perching on a bench outside the Dance Theatre. The students, faculty, and staff striding past take on an ensemble quality: all the corridor’s a stage. A music senior bustles down a hall, making thoughtful conducting motions with one arm. Down the hall, piano ruminations trickle out of Classroom 125 and laughter from Seminar 126. On a wall, a framed poster commemorates the building’s opening celebration, held in 1992 from September 28–October 10, which featured the collaborative work of choreographers and composers, the Fred Haas Jazz Ensemble, and an alumni dance concert. It all culminated in a gala benefit for the Center for the Arts with Misha Dichter, the Emerson String Quartet, Claire Bloom, and the David Dorfman Dance Company.

At the opening, crowds in finery not often seen in Vermont strolled past the new music library, peered into but did not mark the floor of the Dance Theatre, noted the courtyard tables and chairs and the whimsical space of the café just outside the museum portals, and admired the soaring atrium heights overhead; two years ahead, in 1994, the Committee on Art in Public Places would install its first work of art way up in the very space above—Jonathan Borofsky’s acrylic and urethane installation, I dreamed I could fly at 3,876,225—the figure of an ecstatic young man, floating and transfixed.

Notes on Some Changes in Two Decades: (1) The music library has been reintegrated into the general stacks at the Davis Library, gaining instructional and assembling rooms and offices for the art history and architecture department; (2) the Borofsky flying man sculpture has been shifted from the atrium to a much smaller space above the east corridor exit; (3) the café closed, ending a lunchtime meeting tradition and gatherings: “Only in America,” mourns a drama faculty member, “do they replace a vibrant café where people meet and the ferment is guaranteed, with vending machines.” At the empty half-circle of the former serving counter sits a solitary brew-ready Keurig coffee machine, filter cups for which may be purchased in nearby offices.

In the museum study gallery, Kirsten Hoving’s environmental photography students deliver their presentations to the class, discussing works from the permanent collection; in Room 209 (MCA 209), Peter Hamlin’s digital-music students have created pieces performed entirely on tablets and phones.

Dana Yeaton conducts a playwriting workshop in MCA 209, and Eliza Garrison lectures on the evolution of Western art in MCA 125. In MCA 110, Penny Campbell and Michael Chorney, saxophonist and acoustic guitarist, lead a performance improvisation for musicians and dancers.

Later in MCA 110, Christal Brown introduces dance techniques, accompanied by multi-keyboardist Ron Rost; the Dance Theatre recently hosted the dance company INSPIRIT, with work based on the life of Muhammad Ali, under the direction of Brown in a suite of dances incorporating “elements of boxing, hip-hop, martial arts, and modern dance,” with music scored by Farai Malianga, late of Brooklyn but originally from Mutare, Zimbabwe.

In MCA 210, a multimedia arts lab, a student sounds a gong while his project is translated into digital sound on a laptop, as the door-muffled reverberations echo down a stairwell.

MCA 125 is in standing-room-only condition for a 4:30 lecture by Ilaria Brancoli Busdraghi of the Italian department, on Italian stoneworkers in Vermont in the years 1880–1915. The talk is themed to coincide with the museum’s show of photographs taken by Edward Burtynsky in the marble quarries of Proctor and granite quarries of Barre, Vermont.

Brancoli traces the development of the quarries from the 1850s, when rail transportation made industrial distribution possible, into the 1880s and beyond, when Italians migrated in droves. Arriving in Vermont with skills handed down to them for a millennia in the pre-Alpine valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy, they worked in the cutting and shaping sheds rather than in the much more dangerous pits. Still, with rock dust endemic, the average lifespan of a stonecutter was 42 years, thanks to silio-tuberculosis.

The audience views slides of the cutting sheds and extraordinarily carved marble and granite, some of which decorated the graves of the workers, and of recreational picnics, parties, Italian instrumental bands, and the vigorous unionization efforts; when viewers see side-by-side comparisons of Piedmont and Lombardy mountains and valleys with those in Proctor and Barre, there is a murmur at how alike is the terrain.

“They must have felt so at home here!” someone whispers, to which another responds, “At least until the immigration curbs, the anti-union efforts, and the Red Scare of the 1920s.”

Although the talk extends past the closing time of the museum, Brancoli announces that in honor of Edward Burtynsky receiving an honorary degree at Middlebury’s Commencement, the show has been extended through June 2013.

Let’s start by talking about the value of athletics.
Sure. I can speak both theoretically and personally. Theoretically, I do believe the cliché that a liberal arts education is about educating the whole self. Broadly speaking, athletics is part of one’s education for life. The lessons one learns, the mentoring that takes place, the leadership opportunities, the commitment one must make. All clichés, but true.

Personally, I had the experience of being a varsity athlete in college, and I learned a lot from it: the commitment, the dedication, the teamwork, the focus necessary to compete successfully. And then you learn how to cope with defeat. So there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a value. The question is how much emphasis should athletics have within the larger framework of the institution?

How has the athletics landscape changed since you arrived on campus in the early 1980s?
The biggest positive change has been the huge increase in opportunities for women. Title IX has insured that women’s athletics get equal funding, which has had a very positive impact on opportunities for women. Women’s athletics were strong when I arrived here in 1984—there were some amazing athletes and amazing teams—but the overall excellence of the program has really grown.

During this same time frame, I would say that the place of athletics at Middlebury has changed. Our conference, the New England Small College Athletic Conference, has evolved from something akin to a loose confederation of schools to a highly competitive playing conference whose members compete at the national level; national postseason play for teams did not exist until the mid-1990s. So, along with the increased level of competition for our teams has come, at least in some people’s minds, an exaggeration of the role of athletics in the overall scheme of a Middlebury education.

The NESCAC presidents have been discussing these changes, trying to find the best ways to monitor and manage this intensification. But it’s a difficult task. We are attracting great student-athletes, who are  competing at higher and higher levels and wish to continue to compete at that level in college. The competition within the conference has been ratcheted up, and the expectations of support by students and their families follow suit. So it’s no surprise that people are questioning how far this could and should go.

So what is being done within the conference?
Well, on one level, the presidents have been very effective in holding firm to NESCAC’s core operating principles designed to support intercollegiate competition in a manner consistent with our commitment to academic excellence. We’d like to call it “balance”—a balance between academics and athletics. For example, unlike in other D-III conferences, clear limits are placed on the number of games teams can play; the length of playing seasons; what coaches and athletes can do in an organized fashion out of season; how recruitment is done, when, and where; plus, other things.

But that’s not to say that I’m entirely in concert with the NESCAC approach to how we address these issues of oversight. I do believe the NESCAC is the most outstanding D-III conference in the country—academically and athletically. Yet it does worry me that the way we are trying to define the role of athletics among the 11 member institutions is limiting to each institution’s identity and autonomy. How far do we go as a conference before there is an undeniable—and what I would call unfortunate—homogenization of member schools in the conference?

I believe that each school has its own character. Each school has developed its athletic and academic culture over a long period of time; for us, it’s been over 213 years, and it reflects our location, our emphasis on the outdoors, on balance, and on the notion that education is of the whole individual. What I fear most is a conference impinging on the College’s autonomy when it comes to determining who is admitted or is discounted based on criteria that might not be as inclusive as what we like to use.

In the past, we have taken “so-called” chances on scholar-athletes whose test scores might not have been on par with the bulk of our applicants, but our admissions staff and coaches saw in such candidates personal qualities, such as leadership, initiative, perseverance, and a strong will to learn, and we have been very happy that we did so.

Yet the processes we are putting in place to address concerns of the “representativeness” of our student-athletes, which may be too arcane to describe here, are likely to exclude those types of students we, in the past, have accepted—students who have thrived on the playing fields and in the classroom and have added positively to the educational atmosphere on campus.

While what NESCAC has done has raised the level of academic standing of our accepted student-athletes (which is good, of course), we want to be sure institutions can maintain autonomy where it matters—that is, address at the local level those issues that affect a small number of institutions. If the academic and social gaps are seen to be too great on a campus, that campus, not the conference, should make adjustments to address the issue; conference solutions might be unnecessary on a number of our campuses. Collective action is effective, but, in my view, we need to be more selective in applying conference-wide solutions.

You said this system was created 10 years ago…
Right. This was largely the response to a pair of books (The Game of Life and Reclaiming the Game) coauthored by William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, when he was the president of the Mellon Foundation. Bowen raised two important points: a concern that the Ivies and selective liberal arts colleges were offering admissions slots to too many unqualified or lesser qualified student-athletes at the expense of other students, and, far more important in my view, there was developing a bifurcation of the student body at these schools, a divided culture, between athletes and non-athletes.

I’ll address this second issue first. Middlebury has always prided itself as not having a culture in which athletes self-segregated from the rest of the student body. This is largely true, based on my experiences teaching, and my close following of athletics for nearly 30 years. Ironically, and perhaps a result of the increased competitiveness within the conference and nationally, I do see a greater distance between athletes and non-athletes than in the early 1980s. It’s something for us to watch, as it relates to what goes on in the classroom and to the overall experience of our students. Some of this may be due to the intensified nature of practice, of out-of-season conditioning (which is done largely within teams), and other aspects of increased competitiveness of our programs. We need to ensure that our student-athletes continue to contribute to the overall educational mission of the institution and enrich the overall class and the classes around them while they are here.

However, I’m also concerned about how we choose to address any of the issues we believe need to be addressed. I would rather “fix” such issues locally than ask our conference for a solution, as offers of admission go beyond test scores and class ranks. When our admissions office brings in a class, they’re not looking for the students with the highest test scores or the most extracurricular activities or the most of anything. They are looking for a cohort that will have multiple strengths, that, when combined, will create the best learning environment on campus. Part of the residential liberal arts experience is learning from one another. Athletes represent a broad spectrum of strengths, and we want to be sure some of those positive characteristics are not lost.

We need some system in place to keep our academics and athletics in balance, but we need to retain our autonomy, too. It’s been 10 years since we instituted what has become an elaborate scheme for admissions for our conference, and it is time to  step back and ask ourselves: Has it served us well, has it gone too far, how might we improve things to the benefit of all our students.

I recall some discussion about whether another NCAA division was necessary to accommodate conferences with stricter guidelines.
A few years ago, I was convinced that we should be looking into a possibility of Division IV. Division III was doubling to 430 schools, and it seemed clear that we’d be at a competitive disadvantage with our shorter seasons, fewer practices, and other important values that set us aside from other conferences. But our student-athletes disagreed and were of one mind. In various discussions, student-athletes, through their captains, claimed they did not feel disadvantaged and, in fact, said “President Liebowitz: Yes, those other conferences have those advantages . . . but we still win. In addition, we have the opportunity to play more than one sport and time to do other things—to attend lectures, lead student organizations, and take advantage of exploring Vermont.”

Also, it would be hypocritical for me to sit here and say we’re at a disadvantage after we just captured our first Directors’ Cup; Williams, another NESCAC school, had won it the prior 14 years. So no, I don’t think we’re at a disadvantage.

What have we not talked about…?
Well, I think the recruitment game is a big negative in my view. The way recruiting is done is a conundrum to me. I think recruiting has become hard to understand, and, all too often, results in disappointment for student-athletes. Ironically, with more rules in place, there seems to be more suspicion and accusations of violations in recruiting than we used to see. We have very strict rules in the conference about coaches not “making admissions offers” to students—only the Admissions Office can offer admission; and we regulate rather strictly when coaches can send folders to the Admissions Office for consideration. And what we hear is that coaches around the conference somehow misinterpret some of these rules and therefore promise some prospective students that they will be admitted well before any decisions have been made. This creates problems, as you can imagine.

Yet, despite all that we have covered, and all my concerns about institutional autonomy versus a conference approach to regulating athletics, I still see our conference as the best in the country. There is something extremely valuable about being among like-minded institutions that value scholar-athletes, while ensuring that athletics fits within our academic mission.

As humans, we are hard-wired to yearn for, to respond to, stories. I have been working with a student who is interested in the field of science writing, and recently she came into my office raving about a book that seeks to explain just this assertion. In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, the writer Jonathan Gottschall describes stories as a force field that surrounds us and influences our behaviors, our movements. We as humans, Gottschall asserts, have placed stories at the very center of our existence. (In another book, On the Origin of Stories, an English professor in New Zealand asserts that storytelling is a result of human evolution and, as a consequence, is a key to our survival.)

All of this is to say that stories matter. Stories of love, of conflict, of exploration (of the land or of the human condition) have the power to change lives. It is, it has been, and it always will be.

Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of hearing Jacqui Banaszynski speak. In 1988, Jacqui won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her series AIDS in the Heartland, an unsparingly painful, yet exquisitely beautiful account of the life and death of a gay farm couple in Minnesota. (And yes, untold lives were changed after the publication of the series.) Jacqui was talking about storytelling, and at one point she addressed its permanence. “We have been writing stories since we first took up ochre to rock, and we will be writing stories when people figure out how to do it on the stars.”

In this issue, we introduce the next generation of storytellers. How and where they tell stories are evolving—by the day, even—but stories are what they give us. We couldn’t do without them.

I’ve been working as a journalist for the last 15 years, originally in documentary film and then in radio. In between, I went to graduate school with the notion that I wanted to be able to tell stories across media: print, video, or radio, depending on the story. I figured that the more ways I had to tell stories, the better my chances of making a living. I never thought technology, journalism, storytelling, and the Internet would converge to create such breakneck change.

When I started at the New York Times five years ago, I was charged with innovating on the Web. One of my first assignments was to record the sounds of toilets flushing at a children’s museum. Now we’re deep in digital storytelling, weaving text, audio, video, graphics, and photos, as we try to push the boundaries of storytelling.

At its core, digital storytelling hinges on a narrative; yet it’s often nonlinear, interactive, and invites audience participation. The last element is the most interesting to me. I recently returned from four days at the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, where I was speaking on a panel, “Sustainable Stories from Disposable Content,” about two Web series I produced over the past couple of years at the Times: One in 8 Million and Coming Out. Both of those projects built a community as the stories accumulated, and those audiences, in turn, helped to shape the projects.

On the panel, we explored how storytellers know who their community is and how to bring the community into the work. It’s important to identify who you’re telling stories to and for, which seems obvious but is essential. With the ability to collaborate and share online, a part of the storytelling process is about feedback, dialogue, and creating conversation. A sense of joint authorship exists. For this to be successful, it’s the journalist’s role to create the narrative framework so people will want to participate and will understand what contributions are meaningful.

As we push further with digital storytelling, whether it’s interactive documentaries, data visualization, gaming, or otherwise, this is a key question to answer: How can we invite participatory storytelling and keep the narrative clear, especially as we have more ways to tell stories?

Some people I met at SXSW are developing new interactive storytelling platforms; others, programs that allow newsrooms to add maps, graphics, audio, and video to an online story with ease. Programs such as these are answering to demands of journalism and the news—a fast-food version of what newsrooms like the Times spend months to execute, such as “Snow Fall,” a beautiful innovative multimedia story.

It is a bold and exciting future: one where we can explore new ways to tell stories, experiment with how to involve communities in that process, and work to connect individuals around the world through digital narratives. Now I must get back to work and figure out how it has all changed since I started typing here…

Sarah Kramer ’96 is a journalist and multimedia storyteller  at the New York Times.  Before working at the Times, Sarah was a founding member of the public radio project StoryCorps. She can be found on Twitter @sarahk11 and online at www.skramer.me

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America’s media diet is rapidly changing. Online news sites like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are ascendant, drawing millions of readers each month, while circulation at the Washington Post was down almost 9 percent in 2012. Printed magazines are still launching in record numbers, but venerable titles such as Newsweek go digital-only. ¶ Navigating this landscape in Washington, D.C., is a troupe of young, working journalists. Each has one foot in the traditional realm of their predecessors and the other foot . . . where, exactly? Recently, this cohort (featured at right) sat down with writer  Kevin Charles Redmon ’09, to discuss the modern media landscape, the technologies that shape it, and the changing role of reporters and editors.

Jaime Fuller I glanced at the channels on a small-town newspaper website the other day, and there were the usual departments, News, Politics, Opinion. And at the end it said, “Cars”—but what I read was, “Cats.” And I thought, That’s the difference between old media, which makes no money, and new media. We used to sell car ads. Now we sell cats.

Kevin Redmon Cat photos and Ryan Gosling memes seem to be the secrets to success for online news sites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. It’s a little scary. Will our kids grow up in a world without the New York Times?

Ryan Kellett Please. The news of Old Media’s death has been greatly exaggerated . . . by the media.

Brian Fung To its credit, one thing BuzzFeed does really well—which no one had done before—is think about news in terms of the “nugget,” as opposed to the “article.” The idea that you take from a traditional article a quote or an interesting statistic and make that the thing you sell. You’re not selling the article. You’re selling the thing that people will remember and spread around.

Redmon Keeping it shorter, like a quick burst of trivia?

Fung Right. In a print article, you might have five bits of interesting information. Well, BuzzFeed turns that into five different posts, which each get individual attention.

Redmon That kills me. I don’t want to write Web “nuggets.” I want to write long, thoughtful magazine stories. I realize how callow that sounds.

Kellett Keep writing those long pieces. Don’t be surprised when that reporting gets repurposed into nuggets. It’s my job to think about the person who has five minutes waiting in line at the supermarket and how they can get something out of the three months of reporting you did on your story. Some are not ever going to read 3,000 words in a single setting. But can I serve them an interactive graphic or video that tells the same story differently? You bet.

Lois Parshley One of the best pieces of advice I got, starting out, was from my editor at the Atlantic. He said, “You know, it’s great that you want to do long-form stuff. You might be able to do that for part of your job. But we don’t live in an era when anyone gets to do that full time. If you can’t be happy in a middle place—writing some daily Web assignments—then you’re not going to like journalism.” That really struck me.

Redmon Brian, I know one thing you appreciate about the Atlantic is its cult of curiosity. For instance, most Web articles are born at the morning staff meeting, when an editor says, “Why is it that NASA doesn’t take photos of government black sites?” Then someone spends a couple hours researching that question and writing a post about it.

Fung The culture there is very much one of shared discovery. Most news organizations, especially traditional ones, take the stance, “Here’s what you need to know.” With the the Atlantic, it’s very much, “I was wondering about this, and you might be wondering too, so I called up this dude, and here’s what he said, and isn’t it awesome that we were able to find out all this stuff?” I think readers really value the respect that the Atlantic gives to its audience. Another great thing about working there was that everyone had a unique role to play. Everyone had different strengths and weaknesses, a different “game to play,” and the senior editors were great at cultivating those specific talents.

Angela Evancie Did they literally talk about it that way? Your editor would come to you with a story idea and say, “Brian, this is your game”?

Fung Yeah, literally.

Evancie When I started at a small-town newspaper in New Hampshire last year, I really struggled at first. The paper came out twice a week, and I had a five-town beat that I needed to cover in every possible way: local elections, education, crime. I had a hard time producing work that I felt comfortable with. I sometimes cranked out stories in less than a half an hour. I sat down with my editor and told her how I was feeling. She said, “Eventually you learn that only a few stories can be your babies.” You have to give yourself permission to produce work you deem lower quality. That’s as true at a small paper as it is on the Web.

Fung I totally identify with that. I’m not a fast writer, and I spend a lot of time editing as I go. I’ve learned that it’s okay to be not satisfied with the final product. At some point, you’ve just got to let it go.

Fuller The first print piece I wrote for American Prospect was a very daunting thing. I sat down at my computer thinking, Oh my gosh, this is going to be in print. It needs to be the most perfect, timeless writing ever. I turned in my first draft and my editor said, “You need to rewrite this and think way less about it. Pretend that you’re writing a Web piece.” It was a nice reality check. I stopped approaching it like it was War and Peace. I’ve learned that it’s important to stick to your personal voice.

Fung Do you feel like you’ve developed a strong voice?

Fuller I’d say I’m still cooking. But I try.

Fung Voice is something I struggle with every day. I’m doing a lot of policy reporting, which, by nature, is not that exciting. So a lot of translation has to come through in the voice. But to what extent is that a conscious process, honing your style?

Redmon I sometimes pretend I’m writing a radio script—I love NPR’s pull-up-a-chair approach to storytelling.

Evancie That’s exactly what radio writing is meant to be. Editors always tell you, just close your eyes and pretend that you’re sitting across a café table from your best friend, telling them a really interesting story. That needs to come through in your writing and in your delivery.

Fuller No William Faulkner on NPR.

Evancie Right. Ernest Hemingway would be a great radio writer, because he’s all short sentences. In radio it’s “show, don’t tell.” And you get the added bonus of being able to convey emotion with your tone. So you don’t need to say “a solemn ceremony,” because you can just say the word “ceremony” solemnly. You can cut out all your descriptors.

Redmon Speaking of short sentences, let’s talk about Twitter.

Fung Becoming a reporter at National Journal has really altered the extent to which I’m tapped into the national conversation. I’m actually much less hooked on social media than before. A lot of my reporter friends say, “Oh that’s a great thing. You’re spending time contributing to society, instead of making bland cat jokes or sending animated GIFs around.” And that’s true, I suppose. But as a Web journalist, many of the stories I wrote in the past were leads that came from Twitter! I feel like I’m missing out.

Evancie There’s a healthy neo-Luddite streak running through parts of journalism, because there’s something to be said for having a beat and getting to know the people on your beat—your sources, your subjects. I don’t see that happening on the Web. Instead, I see a lot of one-off stories. You don’t ever hear the words “shoe leather” and “blogger” in the same sentence. But those Luddites are battling against a new school that says, “Twitter is absolutely important. This is not only how we’re going to develop better stories, but it’s how everyone’s going to get their news.”  To what extent can we use Twitter effectively, but not be totally broken down by it? Or distracted to a point of paralysis?

Kellett There absolutely is such a thing as a Twitter beat. I call it a social media constellation: the digital connections you have with sources, other journalists, and increasingly readers themselves. Reporters must know that the only way to grow this digital beat is by participating in it, not just listening.

Redmon I think about the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, and how Twitter “covered” that story. Journalists were publishing their articles as works-in-progress; some were rife with rumors and bad facts. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Kellett I’m of the mind that you report the news as it happens with the same high journalistic standards as before. Just be transparent about how you report the story. Readers are smarter than journalists give them credit for.

Parshley There’s some really amazing technological innovation going on, too. Foreign Policy did a couple of e-books this past year, which we dressed up with slide shows and maps. You’re able to take the power of a digital platform—audio recordings, video, multimedia, embedded cartography, infographics—and invest the time and resources you’d put into a magazine piece. I think, I hope, that that’s where long-form is headed.

Redmon I hope so, too. But market forces seem to be working in the opposite direction. You had an experience the other day that I think, sadly, has become typical for freelancers. It was after Raúl Castro announced that he wasn’t going to run for a second term as president.

Parshley Yeah, the Atlantic’s international editor wanted me to do a quick Web hit about it—I’d written about Cuba before, and I’ve been there twice. It was Sunday night, but I wrote back and said, “Sure, I’ll have you a draft by mid-morning tomorrow.” New editor, someone I hadn’t worked with, but I’m comfortable with the subject matter. She responded right away to say, “Oh, and by the way, we can’t pay you.” And I had to write back, “Oh, and by the way, I can’t work for free.”

Redmon A lot of news sites assume that most writers are so excited about having their work published that they’ll give it away for free.

Fuller Most people are unwilling to pay for quality. It breaks my heart.

Parshley So you have to find people who have other jobs that pay the rent—academics or think-tank fellows—who are willing to take the clip instead of payment. Or, you have to find naïve young writers who will do it for free.

Redmon As the model changes, I guess the challenge is to change with it, gracefully. And, you know, still pay rent.

Fung Even if I lost my job tomorrow, I would stay in journalism. Not because I’m enamored with the idea of writing, or because I dream of being the next Seymour Hersh, but because I get a kick out of explaining things to people. I want to help them understand the world better.

43:10

47:24 This technique makes moving snippets of the conversation around pretty easy.  An hour interview has to be pared down to a five- or six-minute story. And that is not easy.

(music)

02:04 My name is Sue Halpern and I’m a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the director of the Fellowships in Narrative Journalism or, as it’s popularly known, the “How Did You Get Here?” (HDYGH) project.

(music)

10:15 I was at a College dinner about six years ago, and everyone was going around the table saying where they were from. “Tel Aviv. Berea. Kabul. Amman. Spokane. Kathmandu.” As they spoke, I found myself asking the same question over and over.

12:07 It was some variant of “How did you end up at this small college in rural Vermont?”

12:59 Three months later, I was talking with Matt Jennings, the editor of Middlebury Magazine, and he was saying that the magazine wanted to do more Web-based multimedia. As he was talking, I thought, “Why don’t we train students to make short audio portraits of their classmates that answer one simple question: How did you get here?”

15:37 I proposed “How Did You Get Here?” and Matt was game.

(music)

Check out the 2013 “How Did You Get Here?” stories

48:42 I’d never done any audio before this. I am a writer and magazine journalist. But I know how to get a story and how to tell a story, and I know that this is something that can be taught.

52:05 I dislike grades. I’ve seen how grades, not learning, can become the goal, and I’ve also seen how sometimes students try to see how much they can get away with not doing. Because I knew that HDYGH was going to be a tremendous amount of work, I only wanted students who were passionate and fully committed.

39:00 Matt and I called it the Narrative Journalism Fellowship, and we put out a call for applications.

55:32 Experience was not necessary but strong writing skills were.

7:19 You get a very good sense of the range and diversity and uniqueness of the students who attend Middlebury from our pieces and from the journeys students take to get here.

11:14 I don’t have a favorite profile since I honestly believe all the stories are incredible. There’s a young woman who was smuggled out of Tibet in a box;  a competitive goat roper; someone who went to a secret school for girls in Kabul during the Taliban; I could go on. You should listen.

20:16 One of the most gratifying parts of the program, aside from the opportunity to tell these amazing stories, is to have created a cadre of very accomplished journalists and storytellers. The skills and competence they acquire in the program serve them well, whatever they do.

62:19 In May of the first year, the fellows mounted an exhibit in the Davis Family Library and provided iPods with a soundtrack of all their stories. Hundreds of people came to the opening; there were not enough iPods. Finally, with the blessing of the library staff, one of the pieces was broadcast over a set of speakers. Students who had been studying stopped what they were doing, got up from their chairs, and lined the balcony. Everywhere I looked, people were standing stock-still, just listening. And when the piece ended, they clapped and asked for more.

(music to fade)

Sue Halpern is a journalist, an author, and a Middlebury scholar in residence.

Stories have ancient roots. We’ve relied on this comforting fact. But if we look at the story’s transformation from Homer to Borges and Cortázar to Deena Larsen, Lev Manovich, and Peter Horvath we experience a monumental socio-cultural-technical shift that moves from the oral to the digital where we’re unsure what counts anymore.

We require new ways of making sense. “If we are entering a new world,” says David Weinberger in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, “then we are also becoming new people.”

New storytellers are engaged in remixing and translating, with great speed and compression, experiencing the story more as a gesture rather than a thick narrative with fully drawn characters navigating a linear plot line.  New storytellers appropriate from one another—and from the past and from other forms: painting, music, film, traditional texts, Web sites; they’re challenging boundaries and disciplines.

New storytellers are drawn to the freshness, the inventiveness that comes with “entering a new world” comprised of multiple selves—the public and the private, the digital and the physical, the psychological, emotional, and spiritual. The new storyteller is the translator of our complex—and subtle—novelty, working to obliterate distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, and our sense of space.

In 2011, half of Japan’s top ten best-selling novels were originally cell phone novels, typically love stories written in short, text message format.  Cell phone novels are the preferred medium of new age authors not out of preference, but out of necessity.

The new storyteller, like an apprentice, is always learning, morphing, adjusting to unstable conditions; this requires an extraordinary sense of audience, inviting the storyteller to sometimes incorporate the reader into the narrative—like receiving a short novel on your cell phone, a serial piece on Twitter, and a drama about how our brains work on RadioLab. All mediums count all the time, like instruments in a symphony orchestra.

In 2012, Margaret Atwood, who has written 13 novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale, went on Byliner, a web site that’s billed as a new platform for writers, and began a serial novel, Positron, where, for a few dollars, readers collaborated with her, commenting on scenes and episodes, and determining the direction of the narrative. Atwood compared her experience to improv comedy, to creating a story live before an audience.

In 1997, Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, predicted the coming of participatory television, the holodeck we, the audience, help create. I think we’ve arrived. Remember the science in Minority Report? Well, John Underkoffler is combining traditional tabular data with 3D and geospatial information manipulated through space, not via a keyboard. It’s here. Now.

We’ve changed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself once a new storyteller, asks, “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” New storytellers are responding to Emerson, carrying on his legacy.  “The sun shines to-day also…There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” he says. “Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

In 1974, the Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, a different sort of story written by three different kinds of storytellers, Vinton Cerf,  Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as shorthand for internetworking and our new storytellers were born. And here we are, moving, becoming something else by as early as tomorrow.

Hector Vila is an assistant professor of writing at Middlebury.

Bellevue is a buzzword. It denotes “nuthouse,” and “loony bin.” It is referenced in countless films and books as the solution for the mad hatter traipsing through the house uttering nonsense. It is its own punch line.

Unbeknownst to many, however, it is also the oldest public hospital in the country and the training ground for many top American physicians; yet, its infamous moniker often conceals the care and compassion that happen inside.

During the past year, I have worked in Bellevue’s child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit, conducting trauma screens, in-take interviews, and assessment scales for various psychiatric disorders. Many of the children I screened were plagued by loneliness. They had slipped through the cracks and seemed lost to the world. They ran the gamut of personas and ranged in age from five to 17.

Some refused to speak; others could not stop talking. Some came from the foster-care system; others from the Upper East Side. Some hugged me; others spit in my face.

Several months ago, I attended the initial assessment of a 10-year-old boy from the Dominican Republic. Having the fewest credentials in the room, I pulled up a chair and sat in the back.

The boy had been adopted and entered the United States at the age of five. Prior to his adoption, he suffered from severe neglect and malnourishment. His mother had admitted him to Bellevue for disorganized thought patterns, increased mood swings, and overt aggression at school. When I entered the room, he sat facing the wall, crouched like a timid animal with eyes tight shut. It was hard to imagine that such a child a few days ago had put his fist through the window.

He was asked questions and answered few. When the boy was asked to recite his birthday, he said he didn’t know. How odd, I thought. With the other patients I had met, even the most damaged, all knew their birthday. Children love to tell you their birthday. They tell you their age down to the very last detail—eight and three-fourths, ten and a half, nine and a quarter. I had never met a child who could not recall his own birthday.

After the assessment, I was invited to meet with the physicians and discuss the diagnosis. I sat in the corner as each resident and medical-school student presented. Their diagnoses were elaborate, layered, and sophisticated beyond the little medical knowledge I had gained. The birthday episode was not mentioned. The attending physician nodded her head and said little. To my surprise, she asked me what I thought.

“I find it very odd that the boy doesn’t know his birthday,” I said.

The attending offered a small, knowing smile.

“Yes,” she replied, “it is quite unsettling.”

It was later discovered that the boy was mentally retarded. In accordance with the group’s original assessment, there were signs of comorbidity with bipolar-1 and generalized anxiety. However, the true culprit was more obvious: the boy didn’t know his birthday because his brain could not comprehend the concept.

I am at the bottom of a long ladder that points toward medicine. Sometimes I’m not even sure if I’ve made it onto the first step. However, I have discovered that my intuition—my ability to sense when something is awry—is perhaps on the right track. Sometimes the solution to the problem is simpler than we perceive. Often, the solution is in our capacity to listen.

Jessica Halper ’11 lives in New York City, where she is finishing her postbaccalaureate for medical school. She currently works as a research assistant on trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder studies at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Let’s back up a moment. I was in Schmitt’s Warner Hall office, chatting with him and the aforementioned Aden, full name being Aden Forrow ’13, an exceedingly quiet, very pleasant young man from the Boston area. In a recent talk, Schmitt had referred to Aden as likely “the most mathematically gifted student I have ever taught.” For the past year or so, the two have been investigating a problem within the area of mathematics known as combinatorics. Schmitt explained that in combinatorics “we are given a finite set of objects and a set of rules placed upon the objects, and our two most basic questions are 1) does there exist an arrangement of the objects that satisfies the rules, and 2) if so, how many?” A Sudoku puzzle is a trivial combinatorial problem, Schmitt said. “But what is more interesting,” he added “is discerning the minimum number of clues that can be given while still providing for a valid puzzle.” The conjecture is 17, and recently an Irish mathematician designed a procedure to prove that no 16-clue puzzle could exist. Tricky thing is, it would take a standard desktop computer 300,000 years to complete the computation.

So Schmitt and Aden are trying to solve the problem using a tool known as the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz . . . and that’s pretty much all I will say about this tool. I asked Schmitt to explain it to me, and another silence arose. Aden quietly chuckled. Then, as polite as he could be, Schmitt attempted to tell me about the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz. Let’s just say that we subsequently both agreed that C. N. is not meant to be understood by a general audience. And, frankly, it’s beside the point.

The point, really, of our discussion was not how Aden and Schmitt were attempting to solve this problem, nor was it about whether they would actually solve it at all. (“One never knows how long it will take to solve a math problem, if you can solve it in the first place,” Schmitt would later say.) No, the reason we were talking that afternoon was because it was so unlikely to be having this discussion in the first place.

Before he met Aden, Schmitt had never found the need to provide a student in an enrolled course with his or her own set of problems, problems that were not a part of the course syllabus. But just one or two days into Aden’s participation in Math 247, Graph Theory, Schmitt knew he had to do something different. “He wasn’t challenged by the class. He picked up on subtleties, special cases that I’ve never seen an undergraduate recognize. There have been times when I’ve noticed disparities between talented students and the whole of a class, but this generally happens in introductory courses. Aden was on an entirely different level.”

So Schmitt decided he would seek out a problem for which he and Aden could apply the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz technique. (Using Sudoku came to him at breakfast one morning while he was having his granola.) “And we have been having an ongoing mathematical conversation that each of us has wanted to have. These conversations have been entirely outside of any syllabus; Aden receives no course credit.”

I asked Aden if this matched his recollection.

He thought for about five seconds and then said, “More or less.”

“Aden is very understated,” Schmitt added.

Aden smiled. “One of the things I like about Middlebury is the amount of attention professors give to their teaching and to their students,” he said. Schmitt mentioned that I could very easily be writing a story about Aden’s collaboration with Noah Graham, in the physics department, “but then you would have missed out on capturing my good looks.”

At this, Aden let out a loud, sustained laugh. It was startling, given how quiet he had been. It was a laugh one shares with a peer.

Aden Forrow ’13 will enroll in the mathematics graduate program at MIT next year. If he has an idea for the Sudoku project, he knows who he will call first.   
    

“

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.

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

• Middlebury admissions continue to thrive with a record number of applicants this year. And a record number of admitted students visited campus during Middlebury’s Preview Days last week, enjoying everything from the Spring Student Symposium to a Quidditch demonstration.

• As any NESCAC athletic director can tell you, Middlebury has always had a strong athletics program. Recently the Burlington Free Press pointed out why that is: it has a stellar athletics department with a dedicated and talented staff.

• In keeping with the “stellar” theme, Middlebury’s alums fit right in. Time magazine recently released its 2013 list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” In the “Pioneers” section is Middlebury’s own Don Yeomans ’64, asteroid hunter. Read about why you can sleep easy at night, thanks to Don.

• It’s back! The third annual Bach Festival will be held this weekend, April 26–28, featuring guest conductor Martin Pearlman of Boston Baroque. The festival kicks off Friday night with the College choir and chamber orchestra at 8:00 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall. Activities continue all day Saturday, culminating with the Festival Concert in Mead Chapel at 8:00 p.m. Sunday morning area churches will be adding Bach music to their services. Everything is open to the public and it’s all free, except for the Saturday night concert. Come celebrate the music of Johann Sebastian Bach!

• If jazz is more your thing, the 4:30 Combo will be playing at 51 Main on Thursday night from 8–10:00 p.m. Swing to the music of members of Middlebury’s jazz community!

• Other activities abound over the next few days. On Thursday at 12:30 p.m. the Woodin ES Colloquium Series continues with the lecture “The Sufficiency Principle: A Key to the Sustainable Future,” given by Katherine Follert Ebner ’87. Friday afternoon is the start of the annual Relay for Life, the all-night fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society. And on Saturday both the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams begin the NESCAC tournaments with a home-field advantage.

• And for a unique experience in music, come hear a concert featuring a repertoire of varied East African instruments, vocal selections, and dance. The performance takes place Tuesday, April 30, from 8–10 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Concert Hall.

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.

• Jay Parini weighed in at CNN.com on whether paper-grading software could replace the human, professorial version. The D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing drew on his 40 years of teaching (and paper grading) to limn the difference.

• With a Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in the wings, Professor of Political Science Erik Bleich wrote in Atlantic.com that “A collective, nationwide effort by private institutions can transform the debate about affirmative action.”
• Cold stone seats and leaden skies fit the occasion. On Tuesday, April 16, Middlebury joined 300 venues worldwide marking the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” with public readings.  The lunchtime audience sat in the wind at Gifford Amphitheatre as theatre professor Dana Yeaton first read the letter from the eight white Birmingham ministers who scolded that the freedom march was “unwise and untimely.” A tag team of 26 student and faculty readers then delivered the fruits of King’s mighty pen. Read the letter here.
• The Spring Student Symposium kicks off Thursday evening with a keynote address by actor and alumna Cassidy Freeman ’05 and performances of all kinds. Friday is filled with visual art and architecture exhibits, oral presentations, and poster sessions. The range and sophistication of student work is mind-blowing. Plus it’s all very fun. The full schedule is here.
• Boston Globe jazz critic Bob Blumenthal calls him “a jazz treasure.” Now a Middlebury resident, sax and trumpet master Miles Donahue will bring his quintet to the Town Hall Theater Friday evening. Everyone gets a free CD, too.
• Earth Day is Tuesday, but since many Earthlings gotta work, the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op will host a party on Saturday from 12-3 pm at the store on Washington Street. Live music, a seed and seedling exchange, stuff for kids. Not to mention our planet’s signature contribution to the Milky Way—food.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/04/18/things-that-happened-things-to-do-week-of-april-15/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/04/11/academe-science-on-the-brain/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/04/11/academe-science-on-the-brain/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:57:14 +0000 Blair Kloman http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=11759 Academe is Middmag’s occasional check-in on what students and faculty are talking about.

Last week President Obama announced an ambitious plan called The Brain Initiative—a $100-million project to study brain function. The goal is for scientists working in the field of brain research to further their understanding and continue to develop resources that will lead to breakthroughs in treating conditions such as Alzheimer’s, autism, and stroke.

That announcement got the attention of some neuroscience faculty and student researchers here on campus. Middmag caught up with Professor Tom Root and Stephen Lammers ’13, Ben Wagner ’13, and Deirdre Sackett ’13 during a break from their studies. Here’s what they had to say about Obama’s plan—and what it might mean for the future.

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.”