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:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Danby Marble Quarry #2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To read more about the Feb celebration weekend, click here.

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