In the days following last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris—first in January on the Charlie Hebdo offices and then the horrific events of November 13 that left 130 people dead—many national media outlets turned to Middlebury political scientist Erik Bleich, asking him to contextualize these attacks committed by Islamic fanatics.
Bleich, whose scholarship focuses on race and ethnicity in the politics of Western Europe, had just spent a year abroad in Lyon, France, furthering his research so he was expertly positioned to comment. Also attracting media interest were two recent scholarly articles Bleich had published on how newspapers portray Muslims and Islam.
In one, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Bleich and his coauthors examined how British newspaper headlines from 2001 to 2012 represented Muslims. The other, which appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, assessed the tone of New York Times headlines from 1985 to 2013 concerning Muslims and Islam.
In fact, Bleich’s research upended conventional wisdom, finding that headlines about Muslims have not been predominantly negative, and that in the New York Times, headlines about Islam and Muslims actually became more positive over the period studied, even after the 9/11 attacks.
Bleich, who has made Islamophobia here and abroad one of his focuses, finds his research exciting. But he gets just as excited talking about his research methodology. On the first article, Bleich’s coauthors were Middlebury students Hannah Stonebraker ’13, Hasher Nisar ’16, and Rana Abdelhamid ’15. The second was coauthored by Nisar and Abdelhamid.
“Starting from scratch and with student input,” Bleich says, “we developed a way to download, process, code, and analyze newspaper headlines for their tone toward Muslims.” At a research university, he says, the project would have involved faculty researchers and grad students. And “undergrads would be used, if they were used at all, for the coding: ‘Please read these hundred headlines and enter into an Excel spreadsheet what you think the tone is: positive, or negative, or neutral.’”
At Middlebury, Bleich says, his students were collaborators, helping to consider what the team wanted to learn from the project over the next few years and how to learn it.
Undergraduates as collaborators has a long history at Middlebury but is, by all accounts, more common today. From geologist Jeff Munroe trekking through Utah’s Uinta Mountains to study dust deposition to Bleich and his deep dive on media representation of Muslims, faculty members often arrive at Middlebury with an active research project and continue to pursue it—usually with the help of students.
Jim Ralph ’82, a history professor and dean of faculty development and research, says the College encourages faculty members to hire student research assistants both during the academic year and over the summer. They do so mostly via the Faculty Research Assistant Fund (FRAF) for general student support and via the Undergraduate Collaborative Research Fund (UCRF) for more collaborative student work—often anticipating that a poster, an article, or a book will result.
Lisa Gates, associate dean for fellowships and research, says the summer program in particular is growing quickly. In 2015, close to 140 students were involved and most were on campus. A summer research symposium has joined the popular spring student symposium as another showcase for student work.
Febe Armanios, an associate professor of history, has used both FRAF and UCRF grants and coauthored papers with students. She now has two books in progress, and for both she’s used student research help. One book is on the history of Christian satellite television in the Middle East. The other, on halal food, which she’s writing with her husband, UVM History Professor Boğaç Ergene, came from teaching the class, Food in the Middle East: History, Culture, and Identity. She worked on it while a fellow at Harvard during the fall of 2014.
Armanios points out that Middlebury’s faculty come primarily from larger research universities. She, for instance, got her BA, MA, and PhD at Ohio State. Because graduate schools have become increasingly competitive, most of those who apply to become faculty at Middlebury have published extensively and have significant investments in their research interests and projects. “We’re now bringing in edgy, current, up-to-date scholars,” says Armanios, “who are the best and the brightest in their areas, and who are also really great teachers.”
Armanios says that when Middlebury students work with faculty and do their own research, they’re learning ways “to have a fuller and richer experience of what being at Middlebury is about. It’s not just being a passive recipient of knowledge in the classroom. They actually have a role in the production of new knowledge.”
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Zach Perzan ’14 agrees. A geology major, he worked with professors Jeff Munroe and Will Amidon on his thesis, which reported on his work in Vermont caves, the Weybridge Cave in particular. The most recent glacial advance, which ended approximately 14,500 years ago, did not disturb some deep caves. And sediments found there—some 30,000 to 100,000 years old—can provide clues about the climate in the northeast pre glaciers.
Perzan’s research work with Middlebury faculty has taken him out in the field and to conferences all over the country. Last spring, he presented at Posters on the Hill, an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., that celebrates undergraduate research. “I really haven’t heard about friends from other schools doing this level of side-by-side research,” he says. “You go to a conference and see students and professors doing a poster, and when a question gets asked, the professor responds. Here, you have to deal with anyone who wants to grill you on your work.”
The enterprise certainly seems to have value for teachers and students. “Students who are here for summer work, for example, say it was not just a paycheck or something that looks good on their resume,” says Jim Ralph, “but a really transformative educational experience.”
And that’s true regardless of whether students are heading to graduate school. “The value of research is in enhancing your critical thinking skills,” says Erik Bleich, the political scientist. “It’s really about thinking hard and systematically and meticulously about how the world works, and about how to make an argument about what’s really going on. I think that pays off no matter what their careers are.”
Bleich believes that Middlebury is better learning to appreciate the value research has to the institution as opposed to the value it has for individual faculty members and students. Research, he says, is not just something faculty members do to get tenure.
“We want to encourage our students to engage with the world,” Bleich says. “And that’s exactly what research is. It’s being engaged beyond the walls of Middlebury. So to the extent that we are engaged in research as a faculty, we are really modeling what we ask for in our students.”