In regards to being the “trustees of each others happiness”:

I would like everyone in this blog to count their blessings with what they have in Middlebury. Yes, at times you may feel alone, or stressed out and your day may not go your way. You won’t realize it now, but those everyday interactions you have with friends is what makes life at Middlebury so valuable. Appreciate that friend that barges into your room to just talk and crack a couple of jokes before you pull that all-nighter. Appreciate those 2-hour long meals at the dining hall with different friends or acquaintances. Appreciate people who stop by your carrel to just say hi (even if it is annoying at times). Why you ask? Because it won’t be there in a short amount of time.

Being away from Middlebury has taught me to appreciate those trustees of my happiness while I was there. You are all lucky. Take advantage of those 4 beautiful years–because those trustees will not always be a walk down the hall. I’m extremely jealous.

P.S. Janet I absolutely love your grandmother’s post. I admire her for being a part of this discussion. I’ve got my grandma’s name too

I would also like to echo Janet’s call for us, as a school, to work on our capacity to be there for each other. This is, though, much harder said than done. I would argue that the fact that we aren’t ‘there for each other’ is what causes tremendous pressure in the first place. Addi spoke about how these pressures and expectations can be created by us ourselves, but to a large extent these pressures also arise from within the smaller immediate communities that we are placed within or choose to live within. And the pressures that this creates: those to conform and those that exclude are tremendous. Let me expand:

We live in our little bubble, we eat in the same dining halls, we live in the same dorms, we attend class together, but we also live in and create, year after year, a culture of divisions and exclusion. We hear so much language about ‘our’ Middlebury community. It is naïve to believe that Middlebury students are one united community. I have been here for three years now and yet why is it that sometimes, if not often, I feel that I am living in ‘their’ community and not my own?

Many at our school belong to and even define themselves by groups, teams and clubs, and these groups often find themselves, consciously or unconsciously, reinforcing ideas of privilege, hyper-masculinity, gendered roles or other ideas that drive deep wedges of separation into the fabric of this ‘community’.

There can also be a certain loss of freedom of choice when one falls into groups and it becomes all the more difficult to stand up to what one may consider wrong. I saw a Middlebury sports team t-shirt a few days ago that said “Pain is temporary, Glory is forever.” This begs the question: what sort of expectations are we creating for ourselves and each other? (And oftentimes the College administration is party to this process.) Are these expectations reasonable and is this not a scenario of a few making unilateral decisions for others?

We are all privileged to be at this school, and I do think the term ‘privilege’ is thrown around too often. But it has become almost taboo to talk about topics of privilege on campus. We need to begin to acknowledge that there remains a large group on this campus who display attitudes of privilege. Why is it that so many students at our college have only white, well-to-do friends? Why is it that there is disproportionally higher campus leadership from the minority groups on campus? Our system of living, our community is broken.

One can argue that these forms of separation are natural to schools our size, that people of similar interests and actions attract each other and naturally band into groups. And yes, every person is free to live their lives how they wish to, value their own priorities and build their own groups, but not when it comes at a cost to others. Not when our actions, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we dress, the way we speak, the way we drink takes away from another’s right to make those decisions for himself or herself.

Once we entered this institution, we held a responsibility to be a part of and contribute to a system of equal opportunity to all others who take part in it.

The reason I bring this up is that I strongly believe that issues around alcohol, dorm damage, and social divisions (and the factors that cause them) on campus are integrally related and trying to deal with them individually is an incomplete venture. This loss of freedom to choose is the primary roots of these problems and this is driven, at large, by the divisions we create on campus. Also, there exists a bubble of ignorance for those who do not have a broader view of who constitutes our community. For Middlebury to become a truer ‘community’, we would need to realize that it belongs not just to you and your friends, but to all those other students you may never meet, to the custodian who cleans your dorm, to the men and women who make our food, to our professors, to the public safety officers and so many others.

I realize that I am being very critical of our school community, and there are many aspects of life at Middlebury that I love and I have met many amazing people at this school. But we can do better than where we are. I think I am a pretty optimistic person and I have faith in our ability to change and improve. This truly hinges on everyone playing a part.
My plea is for each of us to take a minute out of our busy days and reflect on what pieces of the puzzle do we each represent. Ask questions like, who are my friends? Why? Who has been there for me when I have needed them? What have I done for them? Do I act like my true self? Have I left someone feeling excluded? Do I know my custodian’s name, have I spoken to him or her? Are my peers pressuring me to do things that I would not do otherwise?

I am First Year Counselor this year and I have forty amazing guys on my hall. They are excited to be at college and have tremendous energy. All I wish is that they will have a chance to be driven by this energy and find their own destinations instead of being driven by the expectations of others. School work is hard enough, I wish that they will not need to view life outside the classroom as a struggle.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope my ramblings make sense to you.

And if you’re bitter about my comment that we should all respect each other’s opinions I wasn’t brave and listed my name as anonymous so HA!

But anyway, Janet there is much truth and beauty in your statement that “We are all trustees of eachother’s hapiness.” I really believe this statement. You are very brave for sending this out.

Also, I’m sorry that you feel isolated on this. I hope that everyone whose feels isolated by their perspective here will continue to, even to people who seem not to understand, speak out and express themselves. There are, I believe, many of us who will and want to listen and understand. And there is benefit to everyone in understanding other people’s perspectives, especially the ones that are the most different from our own (even in politics).

Middlebury is not a perfect community but no place is and I still believe, and many of you might agree with me, that we have at least have something of a good and thoughtful community here at Middlebury. And that there are many people here who will listen.

Firstly, I’d like to point out that nowhere in Janet’s article does she use the word “privilege” except in the following: “I realized that very few of my white colleagues sympathized or understood the alienation I described. I think an element of unearned privilege makes it hard for some to understand or identify with my experience.” This usage of privilege no doubt refers intellectually to the classic article by Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, which explores some of the ways in which American society, largely structured by whites, provides a host of free privileges to whites – everything from the availability of flesh-colored bandaids to the ability for a white person to wear second-hand clothes without this being attributed to their race’s poverty.

http://nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf

That being said, I’m not sure where you got the idea that Janet was accusing “privilege” of causing Middlebury’s alcohol problem. It would appear that you have your own knee-jerk reaction which is to defend privileged students no matter the nature of the discussion. However, I do sympathize when you say that there is an unjustified tendency in the community to point fingers at privilege. The idea I want to raise is that “privileged kids” are different from “attitudes of privilege”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having billionaire corporate despots for parents (I guess) and we shouldn’t immediately assume that material wealth equals material disregard on Middlebury’s campus. But I do think it is useful to think about “attitudes of privilege” and how they play into alcohol abuse and property damage.

An attitude of privilege is one in which an individual feels absolutely entitled to certain things or actions. This attitude is most problematic when the entitlement encompasses notions like “I’m entitled to smash all the light fixtures on this hall” or “I’m entitled to verbally assault Public Safety” because part of that sense of entitlement is a refusal to be accountable. Another way of understanding attitude of privilege would be to see is as a belief in one’s immunity from rules, responsibility, or punishment. Any way you slice it, I’m implying that you can be a privileged kid and not carry the attitude of privilege, just as easily as you can be a non-wealthy kid and carry the attitude of privilege.

To fight the problems that arise from attitudes of privilege would not mean targeting the rich students and forcing them to repent on their knees. Rather, the goal would be to promote ideas about mutual accountability, about taking care of one’s community, about caution and thoughtfulness, to counteract the attitude. Janet’s article is contributing to this process. She is NOT simply another warmonger, flinging accusations at the students who come from privileged backgrounds. I think that, if Janet does make “privilege” an issue in this article, it is only to raise a degree of self-awareness, relativity, and sensitivity.

Thanks.

Jacob and Karen: When I asked Janet what HER depression had to do with drinking I only meant to suggest that her leap from talking about alienation to excessive drinking by “privileged” college students made the latter appear more as a separate point to a separate issue. I agree that alcohol abuse in college can lead to more long-term issues in the future. Self-medicating with alcohol and drugs tends to replace more substantive (and substance-free) mechanisms for assessing the sources of depression or sadness in our lives.

As to dorm damage, let me state unequivocally that I abhor it. I have very little patience for it whatsoever. My issue is with reflexive connection you have assumed that relates dorm damage to privilege. I am very privileged and I hate dorm damage. I think you and I could find people at Middlebury who, apart from being at Middlebury, are less privileged in some, albeit subjective ways, who are more guilty of dorm damage than I. My previous point about walking through ghettos and seeing disrepair comparable to the aggregate damage done at Middlebury over the course of one year by drunken students attempts to arrive at this point. The knee-jerk reaction in our community is to blame the rich or privileged kids. That reaction is not always wrong, but no more (politically) or factually correct than blaming football players for any and all damage done to ADP after a given weekend.

I hope that this clarifies some of my points. I also want to insist that this forum continue to be a place of tempered discussion and positivity, rather than a place for waxing self-righteous. We are not the salt of the earth. Thank you all for your thoughtfulness. I look forward to more discussion.