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:

In noting what tremendous opportunities this new facility will provide, President Liebowitz underlined the importance of both the sciences and experiential learning, while others, including Lake Champlain Maritime Museum director Art Cohn and CEO of Terry Precision Cycling Liz Robert ’78, offered enthusiastic remarks on the benefits for the local community. And former student Debbie Hutchinson Gove ’74 shared memories and reminiscences from other classmates who couldn’t be there. Middmag was on hand to capture it all.

Listen to Julia Alvarez ’71 read from her latest book A Wedding in Haiti.

“How Did You Get Here?” An annual series produced by the Middlebury Fellows in Narrative Journalism

Lorena Espinoza ’11.5, Caracas, Venezuela

Produced by Aidesha-Kiya Vega-Hutchens ’13
Photography by Melissa Shapiro ’13

Now that 99 percent of Middlebury students have their own cell phones, the hard-wired sets in dorm rooms are a thing of the past.

But one thing that hasn’t changed over the decades is the recorded voice on the other end of the line when you call the main number at Middlebury College: (802) 443-5000.

“Welcome to Middlebury College,” a woman’s voice affirms. “For admissions, press one…” It’s a familiar voice, a friendly voice, one that faculty and staff have heard hundreds of times when they call in for their messages. For others, like prospective students and their parents, it’s a greeting they may be hearing for the first time. But regardless of how many times you have heard it, the voice is always pleasant and reassuring, kind of like speaking with your best friend’s mom.

So who is it? A vocal coach? A local radio announcer? No, it’s Peggy Fischel, the manager of telecommunications services, who is known on campus as the go-to person for telephone operations, but rarely gets recognized as the telephone voice of Middlebury College.

Here’s how it all happened: “When the College purchased its first automated attendant in 1986, a fellow from the development office recorded the original greeting. But when we got direct-inward dialing around 1996, we needed someone to record the new message. It was probably eight or nine o’clock at night when we finally cut over to the new system, so I said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and I recorded the greeting.”

Peggy Fischel, the telephone voice of Middlebury College

And Fischel has been recording the official telephone greeting ever since – not only for the main College number but also for the computer help desk, the Bread Loaf School of English, admissions, and a host of other departments and services.

“About 10 years ago, [executive vice president] Bob Huth asked me to add some new things to the menu in the 443-5000 greeting, so I said, ‘Bob, do you want me to get a professional to record it?’ and he said, ‘No, no, you’re doing fine. But I have just one piece of advice for you, and that’s to try smiling first.’

“So that’s what I do,” Fischel says. “Before I record every new message, I smile. It’s not that I am laughing or trying to sound jolly, I just smile before I dial, and smiling raises the level of the greeting a little. People should try it before they leave a message because it really works.”

Sometimes Peggy Fischel will look in a mirror too, just to make sure she’s really smiling in her Davis Library office before she records a new message.

Telephone services, which oversees campus phones, printers, and copiers, plus the voicemail, 9-1-1, and emergency notification systems on campus, was also responsible for rounding up the over 2,000 analog telephones from student rooms when the College decided to remove the equipment in the fall of 2009. Originally telephone services tried to recoup some of the revenue it had lost to mobile phones by selling the used equipment, but the market for used landlines proved to be so soft that the College ended up recycling most of the phones instead.

Today, any Middlebury student who wants a hard-wired telephone in a dorm room has to pay a $50 fee for installation. (Students on financial aid can apply to have the fee waived.) And Fischel says it’s a rare occurrence in today’s world of cell phones, Skype, e-mail, text messaging, and all the other forms of electronic communication.

“There are only about 25 students who have our phones in their rooms,” she says, “and the majority of them are international students who need the phones to speak with their families back home.”

But the person who records the greetings heard hundreds of times a day is not discouraged by the shift from landlines to cell phones.

“We have new people calling the College every day, and the first thing they hear is my voice. I always feel good about that because we all know how important is it to make a good first impression. And it’s my job to do it!”

Listen in while Peggy Fischel prepares for a recording.

In the 50 years since they last skated together, no other duo has managed to challenge this claim.

In sports, the adage goes, numbers don’t lie. That’s why there are two record books for men’s ice hockey at Middlebury, not just one. The first runs from 1923 to 1964. The second one marks achievements from 1965 to the present; it’s titled “modern-day” records. Now, 1965 is not an arbitrary date. That was the year when intercollegiate men’s ice hockey was split into divisions. (Previously, all schools, regardless of size, competed in one division.) Dividing the record book in such a way has had another consequence: it has rescued some of the greatest individual performances of recent years from relative obscurity.

Take the 35 goals scored by Kevin Cooper ’04 in 2003-04, for instance. That’s a modern-day Middlebury record. Or the 48 assists tallied by Kent Hughes ’92 in his senior year—that’s another modern-day Middlebury record. Yet neither of these worthy achievements would have approached the top of the Panthers’ record book if the book had not been divided many years ago.

“There were four or five years there in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Middlebury was scoring more goals than any other hockey team in the country,” says Coach Bill Beaney, who has coached the Panthers since 1986. “And it was basically because of two guys: Mike Karin and Phil Latreille.”

Karin ’59 and Latreille ’61 played for legendary coach Walter “Duke” Nelson ’32, and they are linked not just in the College’s all-time record book, but in the NCAA archives as well. Karin, the consummate playmaker, registered the most points in a game (13), most assists in a game (10), and most assists per game in a season (3.1) in the history of college hockey, while the more-compact Latreille, with his booming slap shot and upper-body strength, still holds seven NCAA marks, including most goals in a season (80) and most goals in a career (250), two records that may never be touched.

Last summer, Phil, Mike, and their wives, Eileen Glasoe Latreille ’62 and Lynde Sudduth Karin ’62, got together for a few days in Vermont. And as Mike and Phil always do, they reminisced for hours about their coach, their teammates, and their times together.

Mike Karin came to Middlebury in 1955 via the Northwood School in Lake Placid. His father was a high school principal, and his mother was a teacher, and while growing up in Clinton, New York, he was a stick boy for the Clinton Comets in the rough-and-tumble Eastern Hockey League. Jean Phillipe Latreille grew up in Montreal, in a working-class family that spoke French, English, and a little Italian. His high school played its home games at the Montreal Forum, and he quickly became one of the most heralded scholastic hockey players in Quebec.

One winter’s day in 1957, Duke Nelson decided to drive up to Montreal to watch Latreille play. “The real reason I went to Middlebury was because of Duke Nelson,” Latreille says. “I can still see him talking to my mother in our little apartment. Duke had that look in his eye, and he told her he’d take care of me, so my mother said, ‘Middlebury, that’s where you should go to school.’”

By Latreille’s account, he had more than 70 offers to play hockey in the U.S. and Canada. A powerful skater and a strong student, he was coveted by the Ivy League, as well as some Big Ten schools, several colleges out West, and a number of schools and programs in Canada; even the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings expressed interest. (He would eventually enjoy a brief career with the New York Rangers post-Middlebury.) But because Duke Nelson hit it off with his mother, Latreille went to Middlebury and etched his name in the Panther record book.

In their first game together, the 1957 season’s opener, Latreille and Karin faced the Bowdoin College Polar Bears at Middlebury’s Memorial Field House. Karin, the first-line center, had a pair of tallies to go with four assists. Latreille debuted with two goals and three assists on an all-freshman line with Dick Morrison ’61 and Frank Coy ’61. The Middlebury Campus called the 15-0 outcome a “massacre.”

After the game, Bowdoin’s coach was steamed. As Latreille recalls, he came into the locker room afterwards and told Duke, “As long as those six freshmen are on your team, I am not playing you again.” And the coach kept his promise. Bowdoin didn’t schedule Middlebury again until 1962, when the aforementioned freshmen had graduated.

Click on the above image to launch the multimedia program

There’s nothing quite like game day at Youngman Field at Alumni Stadium.

This fall, the Communications Office has been busy capturing sounds and interviewing people who help make the locale one of college football’s  most special venues.

To launch the multimedia program, follow this link or click the image at left. It’s game time!

Most of Middlebury’s fall sports teams open their seasons this weekend, but their work really began a few weeks ago in the sweltering mid-August heat.  We roamed the playing fields one day, shortly after the students returned from their summer off, and collected these sights and sounds.

Notable young writer Tiphanie Yanique embodies the heart, soul, and spirit of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She arrived six years ago in the coveted role of waiter and returned this summer as a distinguished Fellow and rising star.

Melissa Beckwith, manager of waste management at the College, explains the ins and outs of composting

Composting can be a long and complicated process, both in terms of its labor and its science, but it’s one that Middlebury has been dedicated to since 1993, not only to save money and reduce its carbon footprint, but also to maintain and improve the natural beauty of its campus.

“Compost increases soil fertility, not in a traditional ‘fertilizer’ approach, but by increasing porosity, nutrient capacity, and water-holding characteristics,” explains Tim Parsons, the College horticulturalist. “Organic matter creates a living, breathing soil, a more natural ecosystem in an artificial construct, that of our trees, shrubs, and lawns.”

Backyard composters might think that those 10,000 pounds of food waste are just about all you’ll need to make compost. Mix in some leaves and grass clippings, turn it over a few times, wait a couple of months, and voila!—you’ve got compost. But no, not so fast. It’s not compost until all the raw organic materials have decomposed—a process that takes a year or more of careful monitoring, mixing, turning, and screening.

Middlebury’s recipe for compost is no secret: three parts wood chips, one part horse manure, and one part food waste. It’s a formula that Director of Facilities Services Norm Cushman developed years ago while attending the Cornell Waste Management Institute. And all of the raw materials in Middlebury’s compost recipe are local: the wood chips are produced on campus or sourced from central Vermont. (They are the same chips delivered to the College’s biomass plant.) The manure comes from the Morgan Horse Farm in nearby Weybridge. And the food waste originates from the dining halls and the Grille, with a smattering from the Materials Recovery Center, the Bread Loaf campus and some of the College’s residential houses.

The waste consists of pre-consumer by-products like eggshells, fruit and vegetable peelings, or chicken skins; post-consumer discards from students’ dishes; and biodegradable items like paper napkins. And why is there so much of it, often 10 tons per week or more? Because the College serves meals to about 2,500 people a day, not counting special events like Commencement, Reunion, and Fall Family Weekend.

Ricky Rheaume loads up the day's haul of food waste.

Six days a week (five in the summer) the white and blue Freightliner with its “hook-lift” box and hydraulically operated cover pulls up to the back of the dining halls to collect the food waste. Usually operated by Mike Field or Ricky Rheaume, the task of loading the food waste, hauling it to the composting facility, and depositing it at the composting site is not a job for the faint of heart. If the smell doesn’t get you, the sight of the food waste and the vermin it attracts makes it an occupation well suited for the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” with Mike Rowe, or for the book 50 Jobs Worse Than Yours by Midd alum Justin Racz ’97.

But for Field and Rheaume, both of whom have worked at the College for 20 years, it goes with the territory.

Listen while Ricky Rheaume unloads tons of food waste into a holding tank at the composting site.

The staff at dining services plays a key role in the collection of food waste, and Melissa Beckwith, manager of waste management at Middlebury, salutes their efforts to keep the waste out of trash bound for the landfill, and for ensuring that almost no contamination gets into the future compost.

After the food waste is delivered to the composting site, it is mixed with the woodchips and horse manure on an enormous cement pad that’s about 200 feet long by about 60 feet wide. The College employs a “turned windrow system” to make its compost. A John Deere loader periodically turns the mixture to achieve a core temperature of about 130 degrees F., a level at which bacteria and other helpful organisms in the mound will grow, thrive, oxidize, and cause the solid materials to decompose.

John Gosselin, waste management team leader, keeps a watchful eye and nose on the windrows. “You can tell a lot by the smell,” he says, meaning that the aerobic oxidation of organic materials produces almost no objectionable odor. So when there is an unpleasant smell, Gosselin knows it’s time to turn the pile to achieve more aeration or to consider adjusting the mixture.

Even so, the job isn’t quite done yet. It’s not “black gold” until the material is small enough to pass through a five-eighths of an inch screen and decompose for another six to eight months. The pieces that won’t fit the screen, the “tailings,” go back for another year in the windrow before seeing if they can pass the screen test again. Then, and only then, is the compost ready to enrich the soils at the College.

Last spring, Tim Parsons and the landscaping staff spread about 75 cubic yards of College-made compost on the quadrangle formed by Old Stone Row, Warner Hall, Davis Library, and the Axinn Center at Starr Library. “The purpose was to improve compaction problems underneath some of our older, more stressed trees,” Parsons said.

“Certainly the lawn greened up as well, but the organic matter will linger in the soil for years improving aeration, holding onto moisture better in droughts, and allowing soil nutrients to remain available to the trees instead of leaching down into the soil profile.”

Recently the College began spreading compost on its natural-grass athletic fields to transition those grounds to organic maintenance practices. So are there ever any concerns with the compost? “Only one,” Parsons laments. “There’s never enough of it, not by a long shot. If we had the resources to spread it, we could use four times the amount that we generate.”

Interested in finding out more about composting? Use these links below.

http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/business/recycle/compost
http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/composting.htm
http://www.composting.org/
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/

Ask any of the students arriving for Middlebury’s summer Language Schools how they’re feeling, and this is what you’ll hear—often all at once.

At the root of their conflicting emotions is the renowned and challenge-filled Language Pledge, which is required for every enrolled student. Once you take it, often within a day or two of arriving, you are honor-bound to speak only your language of study for the entire program—in class, at meals, in dorms, and even while tossing a Frisbee. The understanding is that by completely immersing yourself in a language while continuing to live your life on a daily basis helps you focus not just on the language acquisition skills but also understand the cultural perspectives and patterns of communication inherent to every language.

“No English Spoken Here” has been the commitment-driven foundation of the Language Schools for nearly 100 years. (And you know it’s serious when the phrase has its own registered trademark.) So it’s not surprising that it’s the general concern for most new—and even returning—students. Some are immediately worried about how they’ll stay in touch with family and friends back home, and others wonder what they’ll do in case of an emergency. But all are reassured by their respective program coordinators and bilinguals—those helpful intermediaries who are allowed to speak both in language and English as a liaison to the rest of the Middlebury world. It’s meant to be a serious and enforced learning tool, not a matter of life or death.

One veteran of the Chinese program explained the pledge as a key part of an amazing transformation from speaking Chinese to thinking in Chinese and finally dreaming in Chinese—almost to the point of making it difficult to switch back to English at the program’s end. A new student, listening nearby, joked somewhat nervously, “What if I lose my English? I have to go back to college in the fall.”

But while it may seem daunting and awkward at first, the overall effect of the Language Pledge has long been esteemed by educators, government officials and people from all walks of life. Students who immerse themselves in their language of study at Middlebury’s Language Schools often end the program with dramatically enhanced language skills and cultural understanding.

And to that we say:

حظا سعيدا حظا سعيدا

好运好运

bonne chance

Viel Glueck

בהצלחה בהצלחה

buona fortuna

幸運幸運

boa sorte

удача

buena suerte

Middlebury has a high waste diversion rate — 60% of waste is either recycled, reused or composted. As MiddMag’s Regan Eberhart discovered, this is not work for the faint of heart.

Enjoy some of the sights and sounds of commencement, and catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes.

“It’s all in there,” he says. “The perfect town green, the busy public library, the general store where everyone meets and even the proverbial Main Street,” he explains. “There’s also the dark evil that creeps in from the outside, of course.”

Of course. But for Hans, the picturesque New England village is what stuck with him. “My future path to Middlebury College was sealed,” he adds.

Hans is an exchange student from Free University of Berlin (FU) in Germany, sponsored by the German Fulbright Commission and a special exchange agreement between Middlebury and FU. When the opportunity arose to attend Middlebury for one year, he didn’t hesitate. “I might have gone to California or New York, but I hoped for Middlebury. I wanted to see if the image I’d carried in my head for all those years was real. And what better place to find out than rural Vermont.”

As a North American studies major at FU, Hans was a natural fit for the International Thesis Forum—only in his case, his international topic would be right here in Vermont, making him somewhat of an anomaly amidst the other students presenting theses on topics such as Egyptian land reform, Bosnian fortune-tellers, and the herbivore male in Japan.

“I knew my focus would be on small New England villages and how they function, but I needed something specific to bring it all together, a hook of sorts,” Hans said, looking back now over the year-long process. “And I found just that in the bridge.”

The bridge that caught his attention was the Crown Point Bridge, which recently spanned Lake Champlain between Vermont and New York. It was demolished on December 28, 2009, with plans for replacement by the summer of 2011.

Hans, whose local host parents live in Addison, had first visited the bridge right before it was due to be closed last fall. He got a sense of the history of the bridge, which first opened in August of 1929, and immediately understood how its closing would affect a community that so relied on the interstate span for work, travel and, almost more importantly, emotional connection.

He and his host parents attended the first of many public meetings about the bridge closing and consequently came to know quite well the people who were directly involved—from historians and state officials to business owners and community activists. Everyone had a story to tell and all had reasons for wanting to be a part of the decision process.

Hans was fascinated with the many layers of connection people had to the bridge, but he felt that to truly use this event as the centerpiece for his thesis study, he would have to forge his own connection. Having missed out on being able to cross the bridge before it was closed, he was determined to somehow experience a crossing. “One night, my host family and I had just finished dinner at the Bridge Restaurant,” he recalled. “It was after the closing so the area around the bridge itself was pretty deserted—and barricaded as well. But I decided I might take the risk,” laughed Hans, a little nervously. “So my host dad gave me cover and I climbed around the ‘danger’ signs and ran to the center point of the bridge, touched the plaque that was still there from the first opening ceremony in 1929, then ran back. That was a pretty intense moment, maybe because of the risk or the emotion, but I felt like I had finally connected with the bridge. And that was the real starting point for me.”

<listen to Hans describe his forbidden trip onto the closed bridge

Hans immersed himself in everything having to do with the bridge for the last 80 years. He arranged interviews with as many people as he could, including the owner of the iconic Bridge Restaurant, several commuters who live in New York but work in Addison County, and members of the local band Atlantic Crossing, who wrote folksongs about the bridge.

“My research drew me into contact with so many different people, shaping my perspective of Addison County and what it means to live and work here,” said Hans. “Each day it seemed I pushed beyond the image I came here with to find the working reality of history and politics in action.”

His advisor, Professor of Environmental Studies and English & American Literatures John Elder says of Hans, “He is a remarkable young man. He came to Middlebury with this vision of what small-town America looks like and really wanted to better understand how things actually work, from both an historical and cultural perspective.”

“I had contacted Professor Elder even before I came,” admitted Hans. “I heard from a Middlebury student who was studying abroad in Germany about the course he taught last year, ‘Portrait of a Vermont Town,’ that focused on the nearby town of Starksboro as a model, and I knew he’d be ideal to work with. Luckily, he agreed.”

Elder recalls that he didn’t hesitate to take Hans on, and Hans is thankful. “It’s great to have someone who is so well connected here, and who is also willing to work with this quirky German student who comes here with this idyllic image of small-town living, and not much else.”

In looking back over his experience, one of the things Hans notes fondly is all the time he actually spent off campus. “It’s really easy,” he noted, “to stay in what seems like the Middlebury ‘bubble.’ You’ve got so many incredible amenities right here at your doorstep—great faculty, dorms, dining halls and classrooms, the fitness center, the museum. It’s all right here.” But his focus on the bridge got him off campus regularly for interviews and visits to other small towns in the area. “I always loved those long drives in my Zipcar from the College.”

Hans has finished his thesis, which he aptly titled “The Bridge and Me,” and is already looking ahead to summer, when he’ll continue his work and research as an intern with the Essex County Historical Society across the lake in New York. He’ll be involved in shaping the ongoing commemoration plans. “I will continue and expand on what I did in my thesis by working more intensely on the history of the bridge and its affect on the communities who rely on it.”

After that Hans will return to Germany, as part of his Fulbright, to share his small-town experiences with his fellow North American Studies majors back at Free University. He’ll complete his bachelor’s degree and plans also to pursue a master’s in North American history and politics to deepen and build on what he’s learned this year. He’s also met a girlfriend here at Middlebury, and she will return to Germany with him to visit. “And that, I think,” he said smiling, “may be the ultimate intercultural experience.”