By some accounts, Hugh Marlow ’57 has appeared at more than 70 Middlebury alumni events around the country each year. Extrapolated over nearly 30 years, it means that Hugh has attended more than 2,100 gatherings, where he no doubt greeted each and every alum with a handshake, a wide smile, and a story or two. Let’s say the average gathering included 100 people. That would mean Hugh has shaken 210,000 hands and told (at least) 210,000 stories.

That sounds conservative to us.

I’d be willing to venture that the figure is twice that, though, really, numbers alone do not capture Hugh Marlow’s value to—and impact on—Middlebury College. Not even close.

During a tenure in alumni relations that spans three decades, Hugh has been the College’s roving ambassador, its on-campus greeter, its cheerleader, and, yes, its official critic. You see, no one loves the College and its people the way Hugh does— unconditionally, but not uncritically; completely, but not without a measure of candor that has earned him the affectionate moniker of Middlebury Unplugged. He tells it like it is, always with the College’s best interests at heart, and always with a soft spot for those who have been fortunate enough to attend the College on a Hill.

When I first moved to Vermont nearly seven years ago, Hugh was one of the first people I met. He welcomed me to Middlebury—it was as warm and as genuine a welcome as I’ve ever received—before adding with a wink and quick grin, “Even someone from Virginia can grow to love this place.” I laughed—and was more than a little bit surprised that he had bothered to learn who I was and where I was coming from; but I shouldn’t have been. That was just Hugh being Hugh.

Since then, Hugh and his lovely wife, Barbara, have become good friends to my wife, Katie, our little boy, John, and me. When we bought a house just up the street from the Marlows, Hugh and Barbara were the first to arrive on our doorstep with a bottle of champagne and a note that read “Welcome to the south end of South Street. We’re so glad you’re at Middlebury”; it still hangs on our refrigerator to this day. We’ve enjoyed meals at their house, and they at ours, where Hugh has taken a shine to the Southern-style eggnog I make each December. A few years ago, Barbara bought Hugh a bright yellow scooter for Christmas (he’s pictured riding it, at left), and she stashed it in our garage so it’d be a surprise on Christmas morning. And then just the other day, Hugh and Barbara stopped by—he wanted to drop off a copy of a letter Gordie Perine ’49 had written to him after he had accepted the job of director of alumni relations in 1980. The “copy” was the actual letter, typewritten on thin, onionskin paper. Terrified of damaging it, I treated it like it was the Constitution, made a copy the next day, and promptly returned it him. In the letter, Gordie wrote, “There is no doubt in my mind that you will do a tremendous job for Middlebury and the Alumni Office and that you will make many, many friends along the way.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

•    Youngman Field at 4 a.m., dress code ranging from coats and ties to flannel pajamas

•    The pre-dawn diligence of a legion of facilities professionals

•    The pre-dawn student serenade of the president at 3 South Street and subsequent breakfast at Steve’s Park Diner

•    The president picking up the tab at Steve’s

•    A two-hour period that can start out cold and rainy and can conclude warm and sunny

•    Phil Cyr’s behind-the-scenes stage management

•    The colorful array of flags, representing the countries of the international graduates, flying from the top of Voter Hall

•    The custom of academic regalia dating back to the 12th century

•    Hoods on faculty gowns, specifically their distinctive colors that signify the faculty member’s graduate institution

•    The student speaker. “Not that it isn’t great to get advice from cool people who have accomplished a lot in their lives,” says a recent grad, “but what was more meaningful to me was hearing what Midd meant to someone from our class . . . who knows the nuances of our lives at the College.”

•    Six hundred replicas of Gamaliel Painter’s cane and the convoluted exchange that goes into receiving said cane and diploma

•    Gamaliel Painter’s actual cane, carried in the procession by the president

•    The Alice in Wonderland-type hats donned by the faculty marshals

•    The shouts from families when their graduate walks across the stage (almost as if they weren’t sure this would actually happen)

•    Faculty or staff or trustee-parents presenting the diploma to sons or daughters

•    The wonderfully rich tenor of François Clemmons

•    Rap, rap, rap, and tap, tap, tap

•    Professors lining Storrs Walk and applauding the graduates as they exit

•    Mead Chapel’s carillon drifting over a nearly empty campus in the early afternoon

On a Friday afternoon in late spring, as the sun mops up the vestiges of a long mud season and a James Brown tune plays on the radio in the Middlebury College Bike Shop, Emma Drucker ’11 is tuning up the bicycle that’s going to carry her home to Chicago at the end of the semester. Wearing a sundress and no small amount of chain grease, Drucker mounts a gear rack over the rear wheel of her road frame. The rack is designed to hold pannier bags full of provisions for the 700-mile trip home. The size of her coed cycling party, which plans to take a Canadian route with a stop at Niagara Falls, is growing by the week: she has six tagalongs by last count. She seems unconcerned, though. “Riding a bike is like hiking,” she says. “It’s intuitive.”

The Middlebury College Bike Shop is as full of big ambitions as it is of rusting derailleurs, castoff handlebars, and paint-chipped frames. Just two years old and wholly student-run, the shop is a space that both an architect and a sociologist might term “underground.”

In its quiet way, the shop is doing its best to subvert the normalcy of a liberal arts campus. The agenda is simple: Get students out of cars or off their feet and into the saddle of a hand-built bicycle.

Four afternoons a week, one of the shop mechanics props open a nondescript door with a wooden-rim wheel mounted above it, and the Bike Shop is open for business. Down the stairs, the space opens up into a well-lit workshop, with stone walls and a bowed, creaky ceiling. Blue countertops ring the room. Sheets of plywood, painted bright yellow and bolted to the walls, are adorned with penny nails and hung with a bike mechanic’s tools: cup, crescent, pedal, spoke, crank and Allen wrenches; cable strippers; a chain tool; and an oversized rubber mallet.

The floor and shelves of the shop are something of a bike graveyard. A stack of Tupperware drawers is full of nothing but brake components and pedals; a far corner is dedicated to handlebars; and overhead, dowels hang with misshapen wheels of various sizes and widths.

Still, there is a sort of order to the chaos: The counters are free of clutter and grease. Every spanner, puller, and torsioner has a place on the wall, marked by an outline of its shape. And at the end of every evening, the cracked cement floor is as spotless as an operating room.

Before Middlebury had its own bike shop, it had the Yellow Bike Program—a failed experiment in socialism. The idea was that volunteers would maintain a fleet of communal, unlocked bikes for use around campus. Need a bike? Take a bike.

Wayne Darling, Public Safety liaison for student programming, explained: “Around 2002, a group of students rebuilt [bikes] to make them as simple as possible and painted them bright yellow. These were hideously ugly bikes.”

But, even covered in bright yellow paint, the bikes had a tendency to disappear. “We ended up finding them in some pretty unusual places,” Darling said—on the far corners of campus, tossed into bushes, or in the middle of the quad with all their spokes stomped in. Trying to keep the Yellow Bikes rolling, or even in one piece, was a Sisyphean task.

When Hubert d’Autremont ’07 inherited the remnants of the program, it included about seven partially intact bicycles, not one of which could be ridden. His solution was a kind of libertarian approach to a “tragedy of the commons.” Instead of supplying campus with ownerless bikes and waiting for them to get wrecked, d’Autremont designed a workshop for students to build and repair used bikes—at little or no cost.

Using a community-bike collective in his native Tucson as a model, a “really empowering nonprofit with a huge presence,” d’Autremont set about dismantling and rebuilding the College’s bike program. He first went to Public Safety. “I knew there was a stash of bikes in the barn,” he said. “It’s just one of those rumors around school. You know they’re there.”

Then he approached Facilities Services in search of a space, because at this point, “our shop was still in the basement of the Japanese house, which was pretty horrendous. They showed me the basement of Adirondack House and said, ‘Will this work?’

I said, ‘This is absolutely perfect.’”

Finally, he approached College administration. “I went to President Liebowitz, and I said, ‘Look, here’s the deal, don’t use the Yellow Bike Program to bolster the College’s environmental image if you’re not going to support it. Either support it, and then we have a great program, or just kill it, because no one wants to deal with it.’ And he said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”

Equipped with a barn full of discarded bikes, a new workshop, and a grant from the Environmental Council, d’Autremont enlisted the aid of the College’s Vitality of the Artistic Community Association to help christen the new space.

“They had years’ worth of extra paint and said, ‘Wow, this would be a really awesome spot to do an art show. Before we get any tools or stands, let’s paint the shop and let people know it’s here by having an art show.’”

Before it was a repair shop, then, the Bike Shop was a gathering place, a guerrilla-style art house, and focal point of creative energy. It was a space designed to transcend its own definition.

Though the two have never met, Chris DiOrio ’12 could be Hubert d’Autremont’s protégé. DiOrio, one of the shop’s two chief mechanics, has shoulder-length hair that falls across his eyes as he sands away coats of old paint from his Schwinn road frame. When the shop is full—and
it almost always is—he’s responsible for running from stand to stand, lending expertise, advice, or just a third hand. The day after his last exam, he’ll ride solo from New Jersey to New Orleans. He guesses it will take at least a month.

“The understanding you get from building bikes is very different from the understanding you get from fixing bikes,” he says. “When you take apart a bike completely—or take a bike that has nothing on it and figure out what needs to go on there—you learn a lot. Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong in building my bike did. But it was great because it meant I learned a lot.”

DiOrio describes his political persuasion as “anarcho-bicycalism,” which emphasizes bioregional agriculture, self-sufficiency, and an end to the car culture. “The bike-collective aspect of teaching people is part of a greater vision I have for the world,” he says, without any trappings of naïveté.
That Chicago-bound Emma Drucker is spending her Friday afternoon wielding a set of hex wrenches says something about how maddeningly irrepressible bike repair can become. The shop seems to run on that basic impulse: Even when the repairs aren’t pressing, taking apart a machine, modifying it, and putting it back together satisfies a deep-seated urge to tinker.

It’s precisely this sort of intelligence and pleasure that d’Autremont wanted to create a center for in founding the shop. “It’s one of those things where, once you get their hands dirty, people really can fall in love with it. They’re only going to become more interested.”

The day after the Baltimore Sun eliminated one-third of its news staff, Vivian Schiller, M.A. Russian ’85, president and CEO of National Public Radio, sat cross-legged in a purple suede chair in her office, lamenting the decline of print journalism.

The newspaper industry meltdown comes at a time of heady growth in listenership for NPR, the nonprofit corporation that has developed one of the nation’s strongest newsgathering operations both at home and overseas.

“We have taken market share, but it’s hard to be gleeful about that,” she said. “With what’s happening to the rest of journalism, it’s not like, oh good, we can take over. It’s more like, oh my God, we have a responsibility to step up and fill in the gaps. That’s the way it feels. We have financial issues, too, but unlike the rest of the news media, our audience is skyrocketing. Our long-term health and viability are very strong.”

Schiller, 47, arrived at NPR on the sixth leg of her journalistic career that has touched down in print, television, digital media, and now, radio. She was first published in print, writing a column on teen life for the Daily Times in suburban Mamaroneck, New York, while a high school senior. She worked in cable television at Turner Broadcasting and CNN, launched the award-winning Discovery Times Channel, and then headed up the industry-leading, digital portal at nytimes.com

At NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., she heads up the nonprofit corporation that produces and distributes news, talk, and entertainment programming to 880 noncommercial public radio stations around the country. The programming runs the gamut—from its award-winning news programs such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition to the radio game show, Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! . . . Today, more than 27 million people listen to public radio each week—up from just 2 million in the early 1980s. Morning Edition’s average daily audience, about 7.6 million, is now 60 percent larger than the audience for ABC television’s Good Morning America and about one-third larger than NBC’s Today show, according to the Washington Post.

“Audio is an incredibly nimble form of media,” Schiller told NPR’s Tom Ashbrook on his show, On Point. “Of all the legacy media—print, radio, and television—audio has the most staying power. There are so many ways to experience audio while doing other things—live broadcasts, live streaming, or downloads to your iPod.”

Even with a growing listenership—up 7 percent in 2008— NPR has suffered during the economic downturn. Just before Schiller’s arrival, NPR eliminated 64 jobs—about 7 percent of the workforce—and cut two shows produced in Los Angeles. To stave off further layoffs, NPR employees, including Schiller, will take a five-day furlough by the end of September, to make up for a decline in revenue from NPR investments and corporate sponsorships. NPR’s annual budget of $155 million comes from member stations, about 40 percent; corporate sponsorships, about 40 percent; and the rest from individual gifts, investment income, and foundations. Less than one percent comes from the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

“These rollbacks will help us get through the next 18 months,” said Schiller. “We are all suffering in the down economy. But we have protected, and absolutely will protect, our core news operation. We have full-time reporters in India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a full-time reporter in Mexico City. This costs a lot of money, but we have to do it.”

Simon Thomas-Train ’09 should be dead.

He should have died on March 7, 2005. That’s what doctors say. That’s what he says. That’s what the surgeon who saved his life will tell you. He should have died because the Volkswagen Jetta he was riding in, on a snowy, ice-slicked mountainous road in Norway, hit the concrete base of a lamp post at more than 60 miles an hour, blowing out its windows, mushrooming its airbags, crumpling its frame. He should have died because the seatbelt that he was wearing in the Jetta’s backseat, the seat located behind the front passenger seat, kept Simon in the car, but tore apart his insides. That tough strap of woven nylon that cocooned him within the confines of twisted metal lacerated his large intestine, nearly slicing it in half and causing massive internal bleeding.

That’s how Simon Thomas-Train came to be lying by the side of a twisting mountain road in rural Norway. Lying by the side of the road at the edge of a grocery store parking lot, the smoking, twisted ruin of a Volkswagen Jetta lying nearby. Lying by the side of the road. Waiting to die.

Mayor Goodrum still has the first car he ever bought, or at least he did until he wrecked it into an overpass pillar on his way to Atlanta. He hadn’t gotten far—not more than two hours from here—when he blew a tire and lost control of his 1958 Impala. That car was a thing of beauty—big, boxy, and green, with a glittery shine in the paint and a white leather interior. The mayor rarely drove that car; he had others through the years but always kept his baby safe and sound in the garage. He used to drive it to church every Sunday to keep the engine in good shape. He still had the original tires on when he wrecked her, which of course was the problem. Lord knows what he was thinking when he decided to drive that beautiful old boat all the way to Atlanta on rubber more than 40 years old.

The most amazing thing is that he walked away from the crash without so much as a bruise. He ran that big car right off the road and punched her into the pillar of an overpass. He had his cell phone in the car with him, and it still worked. First, he called 911, then dialed information and asked for Al’s. When he couldn’t get anyone at the garage, he called me at home. He’s the mayor, after all, and I guess he’s pretty much used to getting what he wants.

So that’s how I found myself in my coveralls on the Sabbath, driving two hours each way to pick up a 1958 Impala and see what I could do. Turns out it was a beautiful day for a drive. The fall lasts a long time around here, and there was this sunshine warming all the leaves as they were falling; making them feel there had been some mistake; that they’d given up too early and turned their colors and dropped when there was still a day or two left of golden light. The fall always makes me hopeful in a sad kind of way. I rode down there in the tow truck listening to some Atlanta preacher trying to save my soul before it was too late. Seems to me most preaching is like the fall—hopeful in a sad kind of way.

When I got down there near the wreck, the traffic was backed up, even on a Sunday morning. I had to switch on my yellow flashers and run up the left shoulder to the crash. You wouldn’t believe how many people in that line of cars flipped me the bird—on the Sabbath no less—thinking I was just using my lights to get ahead of them in line. You could barely see the car from the road, but all those folks were rubbernecking anyway, slowing everybody up because there just might be something awful to see.

It was lucky for me—and for the mayor—that the car landed on her wheels. All I had to do was winch her out of the ditch onto the flatbed of my truck. I could tell by the way she fishtailed out of the mud that something was seriously wrong with the front axle. I couldn’t be sure, but my guess was she was pretty much a DOA.

You never know who you’re going to meet when you get called to a wreck. People you’ve known in ordinary ways for years get turned into wide-eyed strangers by the popping sound of steel and glass. The mayor was pissed off and late to his speaking engagement in Atlanta. He didn’t say a thing about the accident but was more than clear he wanted me to get that car on the truck and us back on the road ASAP. He always spoke like he was in a movie or something. Looking at him, it was easy to see he was a bit of a wreck himself: hands shaking, eyes sunk into his head. His loafers had mud in the tassels, but he’d straightened out his tie. Seemed like he’d drunk about 10 cups of coffee, too. The first thing he said after, “Morning, Al,” was, “you got to get me to the airport.”

“Where you flying off to, Mayor?”

“Not flying, Al, but I need a rental car ASAP. Got to get to that podium in Atlanta. I’ll miss the salad course for sure, but I just might get a bite of the salmon if you step on it.”

“So, Mayor, where’s this airport then?”

“How the hell should I know, Al? You’re the damn tow-truck operator. You’re supposed to know where everything is!”

“You’ve got me a long way from home, you know.”

“Shit, Al,” was all he could say, and we sat there in the cab side by side for a moment or two. Quiet like. People usually need some time to realize what they’ve done, and so I give it to them once I’ve got their car hooked to the truck. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they shout at me—as if I had anything to do with it. Sometimes they just stare out the window. Those are the good wrecks, of course, when the driver and other occupants of the car aren’t strapped to a board in the back of an ambulance—or worse. I can tell a lot about a person from how they react when they’ve just crashed their car. What they worry about tells me a lot about what matters to them. Who do they call first when we get back to the garage? Who picks ’em up? Is it hugs and kisses and thank-God-you’re-all-right or shouting and how’d-you-wreck-the-goddamn-car? Some worry about the money. Some are wracked by guilt. Some smile and laugh like they just got away with something. One guy even asked me to stop at an ABC store so he could buy some champagne to celebrate. “Always did hate that car,” he said.

The mayor wasn’t thinking about much other than his speech and how he could get to Atlanta. He deliberately did not look behind him at his wrecked Impala lying there just over his left shoulder. He’s a man who is used to prioritizing his thoughts and not letting on what he’s really thinking. I suppose you’ve got to be that way if you’re a mayor—or a card player. He’d have time later to think about that car, but now he had to get to the podium at the Southern States Mayor’s Association so he could deliver the keynote address, tell them all a thing or two. My diagnosis? The mayor was in serious denial.

He took out his cell phone and, just before the battery ran out, got directions to a Hertz rent-a-car joint at this small airport nearby. I wasn’t sure they’d be open, and I had visions of driving the mayor all the way to Atlanta, which I knew he’d not be shy about asking of me. So we pulled into the airport-arrivals lane, yellow lights flashing as required by North Carolina state law whenever you’ve got a car in tow, his banged-up Impala up there, on display for all the world to see. The mayor didn’t once look back as he jumped out of the truck, muddy loafers and all, and ran inside to the Hertz counter.

I saw the whole thing through the window. You should have seen the look on the face of the kid behind the desk. He looked right past the mayor at that crumpled Impala, my truck, and the flashing lights. His eyes bugged out just a little. He excused himself and walked all the way down to the end of the counter, where he spoke to someone on this red phone for about five minutes. Had to be his supervisor. Can I rent a car to a guy who just got out of a tow truck with his own wrecked car on it? The answer must have been yes because he was all smiles when he came back to where the mayor was standing—not so patiently, I might add. A few minutes later, key in hand, the mayor waved to me through the window, then hurried down the escalator toward the lot full of shiny new cars.

I waited till I saw him pull out of the lot in a big Cadillac convertible, and then I went off to find the highway, still shaking my head. Some folks manage to maintain a handle on their authority even when they’ve just about messed everything up.

Those words don’t come naturally; Hugh is not the retiring type, not in the literal sense, anyway. But yes, last June, Mr. Middlebury—that’s a name he will not self-apply; “Gordie Perine ’49 will always be Mr. Middlebury,” he’ll insist—officially retired as the executive secretary of Middlebury’s Alumni Association.

And while we fully expect to see him just as much, if not more, in his “retirement,” we thought now would be as good a time as any to ask Hugh to reflect on his tenure at the College on the Hill.

As a freshman, I lived in Starr dorm, first floor, the corner closest to Starr Library. There were those who said that was the closest I got to the library.

My first class was 8 a.m., the basement of Carr Hall. It was “Idiot English” with Mr. Littlefield. That was the start of College for me.

We had ROTC classes; we were issued a uniform. And we marched Wednesday afternoons in front of McCullough, on the field there. It was mandatory for the first two years, and I enjoyed it very much. For those who wanted two more years, you applied, and if they wanted you, they said sure. So I did it for the next two years, as well.

Compared to the teams today, the level of hockey and lacrosse we played was like kindergarten. But we had fun. It was special.

At the end of the hockey season my junior year, Bob Telfer ’57, my roommate, said, “You have to come out for lacrosse.” I told him that I had never held a stick, and he said, “We don’t have enough players; you’re in shape from playing hockey; Duke [Nelson ’32] is coaching, and you love Duke, and you like to hit people. Come out.” I went out, and I’m sure I dropped more balls than I caught or threw. And I played for two years.

With [geography professor] Roland Illick, you had to think, you had to look at things [differently], make decisions. You couldn’t cram the night before and memorize the length of the river, the population, and the rainfall.

I describe Middlebury as a family. Is it a perfect family? Absolutely not. But there is no perfect family.

Our students are fun, very good company, and smart, so smart. Great additions to any group.

Gordie Perine ’49—he cared, he loved, he took care of you. And he was a calming influence. When people got excited about a situation, Gordie would gently say, “It’s okay.” He was a mentor. He was very special.

When somebody says, “Duke Nelson,” the grins start.

We’re blessed with landscape here.

Middlebury is a wonderful place to live, work, and raise a family.

[Son] Chris Marlow graduated in ’94 at the age of 31 because he had been in the Marines for eight years. And one of his best friends was Glyn Trevillion ’93, who had been a London bobby for six years. I was in a deans’ meeting [when I first heard of Glyn]. Freddy [Neuberger ’50] came in and said, “I’ve just taken care of dorm damage in Battell. We’ve just admitted a London bobby.”

Over a period of time, [daughter Laura Marlow Latka ’01] accepted that it was okay for us to be around, and she brought kids home. Now many of her best friends are our best friends.

We were in a bar in the Embarcadero on a beautiful San Francisco evening. And I suggested to the group that we go outside, and I’d update them on what was happening at Middlebury. We were out there for about a half hour, and after the Middlebury group broke up, someone came up and said, “Excuse me, you all are so tied in. Are you members of a cult?”

For every story that I remember, I’ve probably forgotten 15.

The movie ends, and Peter [Kohn] gets up on the stage, and somebody yells, “Pete, what time is it?” And Peter says, “It’s time for me to thank everyone who made this possible.” And the tears came down.

Winter is part of why you live in New England.

When you’re skating on Lake Champlain, and you hear the ice crack—that’s an attention getter.

The summer is a reward for making it through the year.

To take the Bethel Mountain Road out of Rochester going east in the morning, and you hit the crest before you go down the hill. And looking east across that landscape—the rolling hills, the fog in the hollows, the sun—I’ll put that view up against anything, anywhere.

Picking up a copy of New England Review is at once a titillating and an intimidating experience. Its high-gloss front cover depicts a recent work of visual art—oil paints on silver paper emulating waves, a zoomed-in photo of enoki mushrooms, or moody acrylics—while the shiny onyx back cover lists such authors as Franz Kafka and Aldous Huxley among the names you might not recognize. There are poems translated from French. Fiction stories invoking Joni Mitchell. A new play titled December Gold.

If you are a lover of words, you will find your heart beating with anticipation as you thumb through the 200-odd pages, uncluttered by photos, graphic-design elements, or advertisements. But if you are even the slightest bit savvy about how the publishing world works, your mind can’t help but do the math. With no ads, and a cover price only slightly more than your latest Harper’s Magazine, you wonder what, or who, is supporting such a publication.

For more than 20 years, the answer has been Middlebury College, which has fully sponsored New England Review, or NER, since 1987. But in an effort to cut costs in the current financial crisis, the College has given NER editor Stephen Donadio and his staff two-and-a-half years to figure out how to support the journal and get in the black.

The announcement, made in May by Middlebury President Ronald D. Liebowitz in a campus-wide e-mail, has sparked an impassioned national debate about the literary journal’s future.

New England Review was cofounded in 1978 by poet and novelist Sydney Lea and Jay Parini, back when Parini taught at Dartmouth College. In 1982, the journal moved to Middlebury, and the publication became New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, thanks to its new affiliation with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A few years later, Middlebury College began fully sponsoring the magazine, and in 1990 its title became New England Review, with the subtitle “Middlebury Series,” indicating the independent journal’s support. Since late 1994, its editor has been Donadio, the John Hamilton Fulton Professor of Humanities at the College and director of the Program in Literary Studies.

Hailed by some literary editors as one of the most selective and most respected of the 600 or so active journals in the country, NER has its office tucked away in the Kirk Alumni Center overlooking the golf course on the far southwestern edge of campus. There, managing editor Carolyn Kuebler ’90 weeds through most of the 4,500 manuscripts the NER receives or solicits each year, publishing around 2 percent of submissions. Among the 3,500 names of authors (living and deceased) in Kuebler’s database are Robert Penn Warren, Ha Jin, Julia Alvarez ’71, Seamus Heaney, Norman Mailer, Grace Paley, and Charles Baxter. And although NER is no longer officially affiliated with Bread Loaf, conference attendees often submit their work to NER, and writers published in NER often decide to go to the conference. “There’s a good deal of commerce back and forth,” says Donadio. “And New England Review keeps Middlebury’s name in circulation in the literary community in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.”

In 2008, the Boston Globe wrote that NER is “one of the journals most often mentioned by writers and readers—including editors of other journals, as among the nation’s best.” Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships, American Academy of Arts and Letters awards, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowships, Pushcart Prizes, Mary McCarthy Prizes and publication in the Best American Short Stories have all been conferred upon NER writers.

But when the economy began to crumble last year and Middlebury had to find more ways to eradicate a $20 million deficit, a quarterly literary journal with a circulation of around 1,500, was seen by many as a relative, rather than absolute, funding priority.

Last fall, in addition to instituting money-saving measures, including a hiring freeze, Middlebury created the Budget Oversight Committee (BOC), consisting of faculty, staff, administrators, and students, who were tasked with meeting twice a week to discuss and recommend cuts to President Liebowitz.

On May 12, 2009, Liebowitz circulated a memo to the College with the latest round of budget recommendations. Most of them—including a 50 percent cut to expenditures at 3 South Street (the president’s College-owned residence), a 10 percent budget reduction at the museum, and an elimination of all nonessential travel for athletic teams—received an ACCEPTED stamp from the president.

Then there was line item 6: “The BOC recommends that effective June 30, 2009, the College will end its relationship with the New England Review (NER) and wind down operations. The winding down of operations will allow for the redeployment of staff and the fulfillment of existing contracts.” Liebowitz’s response? “AMENDED as follows: The New England Review will have until December 21, 2011, to eliminate its current operating deficit. If it cannot, the College will end its relationship with the Review.”

The reaction in literary circles and beyond was swift. A May 14 piece in the online journal Inside Higher Ed immediately elicited rat-a-tat-tat comments about the “core mission” of a liberal arts college, the cost of operating literary magazines, and the efficacy of undergraduate tuition dollars subsidizing them. Liebowitz reports receiving between 50 and 75 e-mails and letters—many of which were copied to the NER staff.

“I understand these are challenging times for the College,” wrote Ellen Bryant Voigt, a former Vermont poet laureate and longtime Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference faculty member. “Surely, though, the percentage of your budget represented by NER is very small, and the savings achieved by ending your sponsorship would be negligible.”

Rebecca Makkai Freeman, a 2004 graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English whose story “The Briefcase” was published by NER and is featured in Best American Short Stories 2009, took it one step further after writing that she was “heartbroken” to learn of Middlebury’s broken commitment to literature. “I get the sense that Robert Frost would be a particularly nasty ghost to be haunted by, and I’m pretty sure he’d be on our side in this one,” wrote Freeman. “If I were you, I wouldn’t risk it.”

Tim Spears is Middlebury’s acting provost and a professor of American studies, who teaches courses on Hemingway and American literary migrations. He’s also a member of the Budget Oversight Committee, which recommended that the College end its relationship with the New England Review. He extols the strengths of the journal, but he says that in light of the economic conditions affecting the College, the administration has to make budgetary decisions based on what best serves Middlebury’s students. And it was clear to the committee, he says, that for all its strengths, the Review has a very limited impact on under-graduates.

“There’s an ongoing discussion of what is essential, what is critical to the mission of Middlebury College,” he says. “One could argue that the New England Review is an important part of the general literary culture here; it’s part of a larger picture. But how important is it compared to something else?”

Jason Mittell, an associate professor of American studies at Middlebury and the chair of the film and media culture department, echoes this sentiment; he was one of the first to respond to the Inside Higher Ed piece, defending the BOC recommendation. During an early June phone interview, Mittell says that while he recognizes the literary value of the journal, it has a tenuous tie to the College’s “core academic mission of educating undergraduates.” He explains: “Anything that impacts classrooms and the student experience should be a priority,” he says of budget cutbacks. “The New England Review has a very narrow impact.”

NER publishes on a quarterly basis, producing about 1,500 books each run. (The subscription base is about half that; of the 700 subscribers, 300 or so are institutional subscribers, and 400 are “regular” subscribers.) Around campus, it’s available at the library, the Admissions Office, the President’s Office, the College Bookstore, and a few other places. But Donadio and Kuebler maintain that its effects on the College are far-reaching. In addition to publishing Middlebury alums such as Stanford Jones lecturer J.M. Tyree ’95 (who occasionally reads for NER) and novelist and screenwriter Justin Haythe ’96, the journal has published the work of several Middlebury faculty members. NER also has two interns per semester, and Kuebler has taught a winter term course on publishing.

Ted Genoways, the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and a frequent Writers’ Conference guest, argues that journals like NER and VQR support the certification of faculty—if tenure review boards expect faculty to publish, the academy needs to support publishing, he says. “As soon as everyone collectively decides that they’re going to opt out, which is what is happening right now, the whole system will collapse,” says Genoways, adding that he’s baffled why Middlebury would ever consider chipping away at an academic cornerstone that has long distinguished the school from every other small liberal arts college in the Northeast.

When questioned about the NER’s role in career advancement, however, Spears has countered that journals like the NER do not play a significant role in tenure cases. “The journal is not peer reviewed—the gold standard in scholarly publishing—which limits the value that tenure committees place on the articles published there,” he responded to a commenter on Ron Liebowitz’s blog, Ron on Middlebury. “Of the 25-30 Middlebury associated faculty who have written for the NER,” Spears wrote, “few, if any, were untenured at the time they published in the journal, and few view the magazine as a vehicle for advancing their tenure cases.”

On the same blog, Spears addresses Middlebury’s commitment to literary studies: “Let’s be specific about Middlebury’s support of literary studies, or more specifically creative writing, since that is what is at issue here. We have a thriving creative writing program in our English and American literatures department, to which we have added a Robert Frost fellow (in poetry) this year (hiring, when other colleges chose not to). For six weeks during the summer, we operate the Bread Loaf [School of] English program up on the mountain in Ripton and at campuses in other parts of the world. Then later in the summer, we hold the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a program completely dedicated to creative writing. We have no plans to cut back on these programs, all of which foster literary culture on both local and national levels. This is a significant institutional commitment, and to suggest that we have pulled back on our support of literary culture, or the transmission of knowledge related to literature, is to ignore the larger picture.”

Between $250,000 and $275,000 is what Middlebury’s Vice President for Administration and Treasurer Patrick Norton says it takes to support New England Review every year. And while the budget item may not seem like much to some, it represents lots to others, says Liebowitz. “How much is socioeconomic diversity worth?” he asks, equating the yearly subsidy for NER with scholarship funds. “Or supporting faculty in their teaching, research, and mentoring of our students? Those are questions to think about.”

In his blog post, “Budget Cuts and the New England Review,” Liebowitz espoused the literary value of the journal and acknowledged the perilous climate for literary magazines without institutional support, but with today’s economic realities, he said that he finds “asking families who are paying $50,000 a year in comprehensive fees to, in effect, subsidize a literary magazine that serves a very small slice of the general population and is known only to a handful of Middlebury students, a very hard sell. . . . I must consider how our institution will weather the current financial challenges and, first and foremost, preserve what is most central to our students’ education.”

A student who works in the mail center was the first to respond to the post and went so far as to say that few students aside from mailroom employees knew that the NER existed. She was countered by a spring graduate and former NER intern, who spoke effusively about the value of her experience and said that others, like those who took Kuebler’s winter term class, felt the same way. Nearly a dozen students contacted by this magazine said they didn’t know what the NER was; one, a self-described fan, said he thought it would be a tragedy if the journal folded, but he understood the College’s position, in light of the budget crunch.

And Liebowitz says that not one of the letters he has received has come from someone who currently teaches, works, or studies at Middlebury; neither have the dissenting posts on his blog. So it’s not surprising that the dissenters’ focus has not been on what the College would lose if the New England Review was eliminated. Rather, they are looking more broadly, levying a charge that Middlebury is betraying an obligation to the literary community.

Spears disagrees with these critics. “In times like this, when universities and colleges are being forced to examine their own business models, it’s not enough to assert the cultural values of entities like NER and assume that they should get the same institutional support they’ve received in the past,” he writes. “During the last eight months, those assumptions have been turned upside down, and the NER, with help from the Middlebury administration, must now look for creative ways to fund the journal’s operation.”

He adds in a later interview: “The NER has never been asked or pushed to put itself on more solid economic footing. Not to sound Pollyanna-ish, but I think [the 2011 deadline] gives the Review a really good opportunity to go and find out what the potential is to gain additional revenues.”

Selling ads to be placed in NER’s pages is a possibility, though the advertising climate for literary journals isn’t so bright at the moment. Norton talks about boosting NER’s marketing—bookstore signings, reunion copies, etc.—to increase subscription numbers. Liebowitz talks about the possibility of a digital journal.

However, going purely online and eliminating all the printing (about $16,000 a year, according to Kuebler) and shipping costs (about $10,000 a year) would still leave the journal in the red. Even asking writers, who are paid $10 a page plus two copies of the issue, to contribute for free would leave a large gap. Cutting costs, alone, won’t be enough. Still, other literary journals have had success seeking outside funding. The Kenyon Review raised around $2 million, has established an endowment, and is supported in part by the National Foundation for the Arts.

Kuebler says that until now, the NER had never sought underwriting support, and she’s eager to reach out to foundations and potential benefactors. Perhaps that is why she sounds optimistic, even during such anxious times. She says that she knew of the NER when she was in high school; she saw it as part of the “Bread Loaf scene, the professional writers’ scene,” which helped attract her to Middlebury. She visits the writers’ conference every summer and says that the outpouring of support for NER from those writers is inspiring. She’s hoping that readers across the Middlebury alumni community and beyond will be similarly supportive.

For if the Review is to survive, that support—in dollars as much as in words—is more important than ever.

To support the New England Review, please contact Carolyn Kuebler at nereview@middlebury.edu

Overhead rail lines shadow wide avenues of bargain shops and fast-food restaurants, and vast housing projects give way to streets of 19th-century row houses, churches, and defunct brick breweries. One of these large Bushwick, Brooklyn, edifices, just across from a row of pastel stucco houses, is the new home to Remains Lighting, a business run by husband-and-wife team Alexandra (Alix) MacGowan Calligeros ’90 and David Calligeros. While the streets are clogged with buses and taxis, the four-story space that houses Remains is open, spacious, and flooded with natural light.

Remains Lighting has showrooms in London, Chicago, Manhattan, Greenwich, and Los Angeles, and its antiques and original designs appear regularly in glossy spreads in Elle Decor, House Beautiful, and Architectural Digest. But as Alix says, “It’s not just the beauty of the design that matters to us, but the structural integrity of the pieces and the processes by which they’re made—the effort to manufacture locally and sustainably.”

In January, Remains, which began its life in 1996 in a Chelsea loft, consolidated its production, design, and manufacturing operations to this 25,000-square-foot factory. The new space gives the company room to begin manufacturing more of the specialized parts for its own designs, and it also allows Alix and David to realize their personal ambition–to do their work in a more environmentally conscious way.
The Brooklyn factory is now in the process of getting LEED certified. While LEED (Leader in Energy and Environmental Design) may not yet be a household term, it’s a shortcut to saying that the building has undergone a stringent process monitored by the U.S. Green Building Council and that it meets certain standards in efficiency and pollution control. “Most of what the LEED process requires,” Alix says, “are things we wanted to do anyway—the solar, the green roof, the water-efficiency control.”

It’s immediately apparent that this is a different kind of factory. In the areas where the building is not lit from tall windows, lights are mounted on sensors that detect both the need for light and the presence of activity, and all water sources are operated by foot pedal. They’ve insulated the roof and plan to install retractable awnings for further heat and light control. Remains gets all of its power from renewable sources, and, just this May, installed its own solar panels on the roof. “We expect the meters to be spinning backwards on weekends,” Alix says.

While they use scrap metals and recycled materials whenever possible, a business that works with chemical finishes has a particular challenge when it comes to water. So Remains invested in state-of-the-art filtration for rinse waters and developed a “closed-loop” system for all of its plating. This way, none of the chemicals used in meticulous finishing processes find their way back into the municipal water.

“Having the plant in a high-density neighborhood like this, a place where people actually live and work, is important to us,” Alix says. The happy consequence is that of the 40 employees who work in the Brooklyn factory, seven cycle to work year-round, and most others are close enough to either walk or take the subway.

Alix and David had been planning this expansion for about a year before they moved. The timing wasn’t great, Alix admits, referring to the collapse in the economy. It may slow down their ability to hire—they have about 25 manufacturing jobs now, but they’d like to increase that over the next few years. “Of course everything depends on the sales.” Right now things are holding steady, and they’re excited about a couple of new high-tech machines on the main floor. This is where rods, or strips of brass or nickel, are shaped into minutely detailed finials, frame lengths, and other components.

“A lot of lighting is made in China and India,” Alix says, “but we acquire most of the parts we don’t make from the East Coast, and the rest from domestic sources whenever we can.” To make a high-quality piece from metals and glass requires a lot of skill, skills that are disappearing in the U.S. and that Alix and David hope to help keep alive. A list of some of the artisanal and industrial services they require includes glassbenders, metal spinners, brazers, glass blowers, shade-makers, wire-formers, and chain-makers—not your standard curriculum at tech schools these days.

Motivated by his respect for the craft and informed by years of work in antique restoration, David starting designing original pieces for Remains in 1998. His “permanent collection” now consists of hundreds of different wall lights, pendants, sconces, and lanterns. The company also does custom work anchored in David’s knowledge of antiques and on adaptations of the company’s own designs. Most of the pieces are characterized by simple elegance, but there are also some flamboyant show stoppers—such as the gilded chandelier hanging in the 59th Street showroom, four feet tall and decorated with caryatids and hermai.

Los Angeles designer Madeline Stuart says, “I can’t think of another company anywhere in the country that offers so many unique and beautiful fixtures. They’re absolutely exquisite.”

David, who founded the company and is in charge of acquisitions and design, has a deep knowledge of all things lighting. Of Alix, he says, “She has turned our business from a one-man antique shop into a thoroughly organized international organization. She’s able to see patterns in seeming chaos, to then create systems of management and communicate her distilled, organized vision to our staff.”

A history major with a concentration in studio art, Alix learned early on how to make complex connections and handle a lot of data while developing an appreciation for tactile beauty. At Middlebury, her senior thesis focused on civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and she had a memorable summer job working on a vegetable farm in Starksboro. But it is printmaking teacher David Bumbeck who continues to inspire her. “He was an expert in all techniques,” she says. “He didn’t adhere to a rigid style or method or philosophy in his teaching. He adapted to his students, was very generous in that way.”

The influence of this teaching style can be seen now in the way Alix works with employees. “We really value people’s different contributions to the business, and we want their input. And while the business grows, people’s jobs evolve to better suit their talents. There’s a lot of room for collaboration.”

It’s sometimes hard to hear on the factory floor, but the atmosphere is cordial and focused. There are designers, mainly mechanical engineers working on computers, and finishers concentrating on the polishing wheels and chemical rinses. The shipping department—one man at a desk—is right near the front door, where a massive, gleaming, 18-arm chandelier, “a custom piece,” Alix notes, awaits a photo shoot before being shipped to its final destination.

The price tag for these items? Yes, it’s pretty steep. As Madeline Stuart says, “The quality of the fabrication makes them almost like pieces of jewelry.” But what makes them valuable is something added to their decorative flair, it’s the values embodied in their production.

Vinh Thanh is a small village in the coastal lowlands of central Vietnam. It sits beside the lazy Con River, in Binh Dinh Province—not a place you’d expect something life-altering to have happened to an American. Not once, but twice.

The first time I went there was May 16, 1966, as a young infantry platoon leader. I flew in, sluicing above the ground, looking down from a drab green helicopter at the people below. This is the way Americans seem to prefer traveling. Fast, heavily weaponed, power-drunk, godlike —all the better to avoid the natives. The weather sucked. Low clouds glowered at us. “Turn back,” the clouds seemed to say. We were, as you may have guessed, about to be sucked into the whirlwind of our destinies, collective and individual. It would be bad news.

Reaching a ridge just above Vinh Thanh, we set down and left the choppers. I disliked this part. We had arrived at what infantrymen call the “Line of Departure,” one of the almost literary phrases tacticians have come up with. It means, “Ahead lies Indian country. It’s a good day to die.”

We hiked up the ridge looking for “Indian Charlie,” and then we died. We got taken under more fire than I’d seen in five months. Many died soon, within 60 seconds of the ambush, others later, well into the 20 hours that we lay surrounded on that damn hill. But how the nearly 30 who met death that day actually died wouldn’t matter to them anymore. To those of us left behind, however, the how and why of it turned out to matter a great deal. To me, it has mattered more and more ever since.

And so it was that 42 years later, on November 18, 2008, I took the road back to Vinh Thanh. This time I traveled slowly, seated in a cramped SUV, looking up at lush hills that rose from the Con River, looking out at the people passing by at eye level. This is now the way I prefer traveling—though it’s taken me a while to get used to it. Deliberate, unarmed, sober, childlike—the sort of traveler natives like to take in. The only similarities to my first trip were the weather and the fact that I was again accompanied by a small band of brothers.

This time the brothers all chattered along in Vietnamese. I couldn’t understand a word, but I understood how they felt. Once they were busy trying to kill men like me, while I was busy trying to kill men like them. We all got good at it.

When we reached the base of the ridge at Vinh Thanh (I couldn’t say “Line of Departure” in Vietnamese, but there must be a phrase for it), we got out and walked uphill, approaching the old landing zone. End of the road. We stopped, quieted down, and took in the surroundings. I picked a spot in a farmer’s field and dug a small hole in the wet earth. I buried a little 1st Cavalry Division pin, yellow and black. I spoke to the souls of the men I had left there—and to the souls of the men we killed that day. I thanked them all for being patient, waiting for me to come back.

I tried a little prayer, but words choked up in my throat. I felt a good emptiness. I cried. One of my comrades, Nguyen, whom I’d nicknamed “Many-Wounds-Guy,” said the place was now “sacred.” My daughter-like interpreter, Trang, touched my shoulder and said, “Michael, you be alright.”

Then we all walked back down the hill toward the village and had lunch.