Middlebury DNA is everywhere. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. We frequently see the names of fellow graduates in the highest ranks of government; on the mastheads of top academic and literary journals; and in leadership roles in the worlds of business, art, engineering, medicine, agriculture, and more. Besides, where doesn’t Middlebury have a footprint—Antarctica?
Yet in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, noticing the achievements of other Middlebury alums, faculty, students, or the school itself is a sporadic occurrence, rarely accompanied by some time to pause and contemplate that contribution.
Now is your chance. This issue’s catalog of ideas, inventions, discoveries, and creations brought into the world by Middlebury and its people is a reminder of the breadth of original thinking that radiates out from our favorite corner of the Champlain Valley.
Fair warning: This collection is by no means comprehensive. To be honest, it feels criminally incomplete. Where’s broomball? Where’s the M83 X-ray flare-up? (Look it up!) Yet in reading through this smorgasborg, you will see that the editors were not aiming to deliver a complete accounting. Their goal—and I think they’ve pulled it off—is to showcase and celebrate the variety of Middlebury influences on modern life.
A few prominent themes do stand out, though. Commitments to education and international affairs are two, and there are impressive showings from the fields of design, business, literature, and entertainment.
There is also a pervasive sense of atypical thinking that should strike you as familiar. That’s because when we said yes to a Middlebury education, we were actually saying yes to a bunch of things (winter, small class sizes, healthy food, J-term, to name a few) and no to a bunch of others (hurried specialization, coasting through course work, urban amenities).
Whether we knew it or not, we were also saying no to conventional wisdom. One of my sharpest memories about Middlebury isn’t of a specific event, but of an ethos—of learning the well-established way of thinking about a given topic so that we could then proceed to interrogate—and possibly overturn—it.
Maybe we could even come up with something better.
That isn’t to say Middlebury breeds citizens who automatically reject whatever idea they encounter. That would be just as toxic as unquestioning acceptance of conventional wisdom. But to the extent that generalizing about the minds of Midd grads is even feasible, I submit the not-so-outlandish theory that a core value shared by many of us is that the status quo generally constitutes the least compelling thing going. And it may be flat-out wrong.
This manner of thinking about the world, of instinctively striving for a fresh take, is on full display in this remarkable collection. The editors put a lot of thought into these 44 selections. I’m sure you could come up with at least 44 more.
David Wolman ’96.5 is a contributing editor at Wired and the author, most recently, of The End of Money. Follow him at @davidwolman.