Luther Tenny is Assistant Director of Facilities Services.

1. As Assistant Director of Facilities Services, you are responsible for building and maintaining the College grounds. What is your favorite area of the campus?

That’s a tough question because I was born and raised in Middlebury and have several perspectives to choose from. As an employee, Voter Quad on Commencement morning at sunrise. You’ve got the sun just starting to rise hitting the peaks of Mead Chapel and Old Chapel, and the tents are up and we’ve already got a few thousand chairs set. You can see the graduating seniors heading to Alumni Stadium and eventually hear them singing in the distance. The landscaping is perfect and, for me, it is the most rewarding day of the year.

My other favorite place is the top of the Allen trail at the Snow Bowl. I’ve skied it thousands of times in my life starting at the age of 6. It’s one of my all-time favorite ski trails because of the history I have racing there. It’s not uncommon for me to head to the Bowl and take 8-10 runs on the Allen and head home.

Honorable mentions would be the deck of Kirk during sunset and the Great Hall at McCardell Bicentennial Hall.

2. We hear you’re an avid golfer. What’s your handicap and where is your favorite place to play?

Pretty personal question for a first date! I will admit I have a golfing addiction. I would have to look up my handicap, but I think I’m around a 13. I was down to about 11, but I tore my ACL (ski racing on the Allen) and getting my knee back up to strength and getting my timing back down has not been easy. Now with a new daughter I can kiss getting to single digits goodbye. My favorite place to play would have to be Lake Presidential in Maryland. Each year we go down to visit my in-laws in Annapolis, and I play this course every day including Thanksgiving morning. I like it best because I always seem to birdie the last hole of the day. I also usually win some money off of my playing partner Pete who happens to be my partner for the Member Guest tourney at Ralph Myhre. My favorite course I’ve been to but never played is Augusta National. I’ve been very lucky to attend the Masters twice, and that is perfection on every level.

3. You and your wife Carey welcomed a new daughter into your lives a few days ago. Tell us about Millie.

She’s a little peanut and looks just like her dad. Carey read somewhere that it is a biological thing for infants to look like their fathers, so the dads will “stick around.” It’s working. She’s already got me wrapped around her tiny fingers. Amelia (Millie) Bass Tenny has been the most wonderful thing. She’s perfect in every way…but all parents say that.

4. Some of your colleagues, who wish to remain nameless, want to know: Exactly how long was your hair in your skateboard punk days?

Let’s just say I’m glad facebook wasn’t around in those days. I was a walking disaster. Puberty can be so cruel. My hair wasn’t really that long because I had a bowl cut. It was like Justin Bieber meets Eminem. My hair was longest in College when I was spending my extra time traveling to see as many Phish concerts as possible. At the longest, it was down to my shoulders. I entered the working world at an engineering firm where the owner was a graduate from Norwich, so the long hair didn’t last long.

5. You grew up in town, and now work at the College.  What single word best describes life in Middlebury as you know it, and why?

Community. I think it’s great that I can bump into my old babysitter or my friends parents or even a former teacher while grocery shopping. So many high school friends left after college but came back to settle down with a family, because it’s truly a special place to grow up. After high school all I wanted to do was get out of Middlebury, but after four years of College I missed Vermont. It gets in your blood. I returned and shortly after met a group who just graduated from Middlebury. That group turned into some of my closest friends, and that’s how I met my wife Carey who also graduated from Middlebury. Not bad for a “townie.” Both my parents settled in Middlebury because of their ties to friends who graduated from Middlebury. I guess it was only natural to go to work for Middlebury College.

Maria Stadtmueller is the Senior College Advancement Writer. She also portrays a certain red-headed dish-thief huntress.

1. As Senior College Advancement Writer, you are responsible for writing web and print materials and working on multimedia projects for Middlebury fundraising and recruiting. In the course of your work, what is your favorite Middlebury story that you have told?

I couldn’t point to just one story. But a particular type of story always gets me: students who couldn’t have come here without financial aid. (And I don’t think it’s just because I had a similar experience, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, at another NESCAC school). These students could be undergraduates, Bread Loafers, maybe Language Schools graduate students—but their potential is tightly leashed due to family circumstances the students don’t control (especially in the case of undergraduates). And then someone they don’t even know slips the knot with a scholarship, and they’re off! The best is when the student falls in love with something he or she had never met before—Northern Renaissance art, particle physics, the geology of Antarctic ice cores, Arabic poetry, Beckett plays¾and wants to explore it in depth.

2. You live in a solar-powered yurt on a 10-acre permaculture homestead and are soon launching a podcast (youturnradio.com) about creating a Nature-based cosmology. How did you develop your own environmental ethic?

I think everyone has this ethic, if deep down, since this is our home and we’ve evolved over billions of years with everything around us (except for those things made by Monsanto). For many people, though, that natural ethic lies under the waxy yellow build-up of cultural stories about human superiority, our anointed dominion, and our exemption from nature’s limits. I got heavily waxed with all that, but it didn’t stick. It helped that my parents were conservationists—my late dad grew up farming and my 85-year-old mom’s a total commando. But the primary reason it didn’t stick was that nature got to me first. I grew up on a homestead with gardens and lots of animals in a beautiful rural area of New Jersey. Most of the adults I knew were nuts, so the flag went up early that Nature made more sense.  Another flag went up in adolescence that the human/nature relationship was in deep trouble. Watching bulldozers tear up and diminish—aka “develop”—land that was as intimate a friend as any human broke my heart. It’s in a million jagged pieces by now, with this sixth great extinction that humans are causing. The more I know about this industrial growth society and the failure of the U.S. government to act as these times demand, the greater the rage that enters the mix. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, although it may manifest differently in others. Glad you asked?

3. You have worn many hats (even wigs) throughout your career. You used to run a chamber music series in San Francisco and direct chamber music grant programs in New York. Who are your favorite composers?

I love Anonymous and early music. I grew up singing Gregorian chant and it just transports me, although probably not where the nuns wanted me to go. Des Prez, Lassus, Monteverdi—love those guys. Bach! All Beethoven. Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert Lieder. Stravinsky. Mahler. Richard Strauss. Bartok. I’m out of the loop on living composers but favor John Adams, who was a pal in San Francisco, and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.  I also love Indian classical music although I’m pretty ignorant about it.

4. We also hear that you used to do a little stand-up comedy on Comedy Central, VH1, and MTV. What is your favorite joke to tell (one that can be repeated on this blog)?

I did clubs almost every night for six or seven years, but I didn’t do jokes. Most comics don’t—you do “chunks”–little stories on a topic that peak and ebb through punchlines and rhythm. I never did stuff about dating or “hey, guys, what’s with that remote?” –ugh.  And I didn’t work blue, so I could repeat it here if I remembered it (fortunately, it was before the interwebs so I can’t remind myself). I recall talking about being a vegetarian in a world of meat, the confusion of little Catholic kids being taught fantastical stories in class that they must believe and being read fantastical stories at night they’re supposed to shrug off, that kind of thing. It was a weird life, pulling in to a mining town in Pennsylvania and playing a club called “the Coal Hole” or playing to a roomful of sailors at the Improv during Fleet Week in New York. But when you get enough practice to make it work, when people are venting their beverages nasally and the room becomes this creature you can feel and shape, it’s better than anything.

5. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently un-wigged you as the woman behind Aunt Des. What do you enjoy most about playing this character?

This’ll sound like some NBA player talking post-game about being part of “a good ball club” but the really fun part of Aunt Des is the collaboration. Yeah, I knew Des and do accents and am willing to make a spectacle of myself, but I have such creative colleagues, without exception. On the Des project, Nikhil Ramburn ’10 does all the lighting, filming, and editing, and Stephen Diehl helps with the script and produces our little jaunts. I blame Diehl for the nails. Some of the ideas we come up with that we can’t use are hilarious. What I like most about Des’s character, though, is that she can call it as she sees it.

What I would love to enjoy about playing Aunt Des is hanging up the wig knowing that she’s helped convince people to bring their plates back. I mean really. Such a no-brainer.

Grace Spatafora is the Given Professor of Biology and Pre-Medical Science.

1. You tend to invite a lot of students to join you in your research. How is this symbiotic relationship mutually beneficial?

I am committed to providing as many students as I can with an opportunity to engage in research first-hand, but only if they express a genuine interest in the research process and can articulate why they choose to explore microbial pathogenesis as their research topic. This year I have 8 guys working in my laboratory, all committed to better understanding how Streptococcus mutans, an oral pathogen, reaps havoc in the oral cavity. The students benefit by committing to a senior capstone experience that could earn them graduation with distinction, a chance to communicate their research findings at a professional meeting (this year’s meeting will be held in New Orleans, LA), and the opportunity to contribute to the published literature (one of my student’s work recently made the cover of the Journal of Bacteriology). I benefit from the students’ hard work which moves the research along in a way that continues to earn major funding from the National Institutes of Health, and by being able to showcase undergraduate research at national meetings. I also get to watch these students grow as independent researchers and problem solvers, some of whom go on to pursue research careers of their own. What could be more gratifying?

2. If you were an organelle in an animal cell, which one would you be and why?

I’d be the nucleus for sure. I guess you could say that I like to control things….not in a bad way though. I don’t consider myself to be at all bossy or a control freak…but given the opportunity I do like to take charge of a situation and manage it so as to ensure the best possible outcome. Second place would go to the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, since I am rather “energetic” in the classroom where I have been known to “walk like a bacterium” and mimic Z-DNA.

3. Which living person do you most admire?

This is a tough question. I’ve given this some thought and I’d have to say it would be Christiane Amanpour, former Chief International Correspondent at CNN and current head anchorwoman at ABC News. Christiane’s work over the years as a journalist has included direct coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian War, the Siege of Sarajevo, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently Egypt’s revolution in Tahrir Square. She is seemingly fearless of reporting the news from areas of great conflict, not to mention the many exclusive interviews she’s conducted with world leaders from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. She isn’t a two-time recipient of the Peabody Award for nothing! This is not to say that she isn’t a controversial figure in the world of news casting; indeed she is. But in my view she holds strong to her convictions. She is committed to telling the truth and giving all sides of a story equal coverage. I have always thought that in another life I’d come back as a journalist, and if this were the case, then I’d want to be Christiane Amanpour.

4. Last year, the American Association of University of Women released a report about the challenges girls and women encounter in studying and working in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). This is a complex issue, but what is one thing that STEM programs could do to attract and retain women?

I think one of the most important things STEM programs could do is see to it that only the most outstanding science and math educators are hired into our elementary and secondary schools. Our teachers need to make math and science more approachable for both boys and girls. I had fabulous teachers in grade school who made learning in these disciplines fun! STEM programs also need to bring more flexibility into STEM careers so that women won’t be penalized for taking time “off” to have children.

5. You teach courses in cell biology, microbiology, molecular genetics, and microbial pathogenesis. What sparked your interest in studying structures invisible to the human eye?

Well, if you were to ask my Microbiology students they’d tell you that I became a microbiologist because you can’t hear the bacteria scream when you place them in the autoclave! But seriously, I was a young scientist in training just as the genetic engineering revolution was getting underway. At that time, bacteria were the workhorses of genetic manipulation. But then in the early ‘80’s emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases took center stage and bacteria regained their identity. I guess you could say that I was in the right place at the right time….a time when everything was about microorganisms…and not only about how they can make us sick, but how they make the world as we know it. Let’s face it, without microbes, we would not be here.