A rendering of the new swing-space building. One floor will house the Computer Science Department, while the second floor will provide temporary office space for faculty and staff while their buildings are being renovated.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Middlebury has broken ground on a building that will provide a new home for its burgeoning Computer Science Department as well as temporary office space for faculty and staff who will be relocated during a series of building renovations. Naylor and Breen Builders of Brandon, Vermont, are constructing the building on a lot just east of Johnson Memorial  Building.It will be completed in June 2019.

One floor of the 24,000 square-foot building will be dedicated to computer science, containing classrooms, faculty offices, research labs, lounges, and study space. It will closely approximate the department’s current space on the sixth floor of McCardell Bicentennial Hall (MBH).

“We are currently at 100 percent occupancyin MBH,” said Tom McGinn, project manager for Middlebury. “Student enrollments in the MBH-based majors and programs have seen a large increase over the last decade with a concurrent increase in faculty to keep pace with the rise in enrollments.”

The vacated space in MBH will allow other MBH departments to expand in orderto meet the growing space pressure, McGinn said.

The other floor of the new building will house 43 faculty and staff members who currently occupy Munroe Hall, a building that will undergo a substantial renovation from June 2019 through June 2020. Munroe houses the Departments of Religion, Sociology/Anthropology, and Political Science. A major renovation of Warner Hall will follow from June 2020 through June 2021. Additional renovations planned for beyond 2021 include Johnson Memorial Building and Adirondack House.

McGinn says that Middlebury’s Academic Space Committee, a group composed of faculty, Facilities Services, and the Provost’s Office, has explored many options to accommodate growth following the opening of the last academic building—the Axinn Center—in 2008.

“The committee explored and analyzed many alternatives in an effort to create/find new academic space,” said McGinn. “A new building, acquisition of off-campus property, truly temporary spaces (i.e., modular offices/classrooms), conversion of existing on-campus buildings to academic uses, enrollment limits were all explored in great depth and considerable detail.”

Designed by McLeod Kredell Architects (MKA) of Middlebury, the building uses a pre-engineered metal building system, which keeps the cost down and provides greater flexibility both for configuring the inside and disassembling it to move or recycle in the future if the College chooses to. The new construction will cost $4.5 million.

“The design uses the steel structure to create welcoming, column-free entry porticos and open, flexible spaces at the interior,” said architect and faculty member John McLeod. “Different metal siding profiles and colors add shadows, texture, and visual interest to the exterior. And a playful mix of window sizes and configurations both animate the exterior and bring generous daylight to the interior, regardless of how the floor layouts may change over time.”

McLeod says the new building is likely to be a welcome addition on campus. “It will offer the campus community much needed flex space—whose potential uses are varied and almost endless—in the form of a progressive architectural design that resonates with its surroundings.”

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. –  Donations to Middlebury increased sharply in fiscal year 2018, rebounding to more than $40 million following a dip last year. In all, Middlebury received a total of $41.3 million in gifts during the year, which ended on June 30. That amount represents cash received for the endowment, capital, and current use through gifts and foundation grants, plus gifts-in-kind to the institution. It does not include pledges. Gifts to Middlebury have exceeded $40 million in eight of the last nine years.

“Middlebury is incredibly fortunate to have donors—alumni, parents, friends, and foundations—who are committed to the institution,” said Middlebury President Laurie Patton. “Their enthusiasm and support for Middlebury make it possible for current and future students to receive the excellent educational experience that defines our institution across all its schools and programs. Our donors inspire us and we are immensely grateful for their generosity.”

The funds that Middlebury has raised will support Middlebury College, the Middlebury Language Schools, the Middlebury C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and the Middlebury School of the Environment.

The $41.3 million in philanthropic support received during the past year was a 16-percent increase over the $35.6 million received the previous fiscal year. “We’re very pleased with this year’s results,” said Colleen Fitzpatrick, Middlebury’s vice president for advancement. “We want to thank the many members of the extended Middlebury community whose gifts will help in so many ways, from supporting faculty to providing financial aid.” 

Donations to Middlebury College specifically directed toward financial aid are a major source of funding for student support. About 45 percent of Middlebury undergraduates receive financial aid, with an average grant of $47,439.

Donations increased in several important areas. Gifts to Middlebury College grew by 27 percent, from $22.5 million in 2017 to $28.6 million in 2018. Support for the Middlebury Institute saw a jump of 17 percent from $3.4 million to more than $3.9 million. Total gifts to the Annual Fund remained strong at $21.9 million, equaling last year’s total. 

Parent giving continued to perform strongly, raising more than $7.4 million through the participation of 31 percent of parents of undergraduate students.

Nationwide, colleges and universities have experienced decreases in recent years in the percentage of alumni who give to their alma mater. While Middlebury has been affected by this trend, this year it experienced an increase as the percentage of Middlebury College alumni who made donations reached 39 percent versus 36 percent last year. That growth is due to an increase of more than 1,000 undergraduate alumni donors.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Now in its 99th summer, the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English will confer 73 master’s degrees and one honorary doctorate at 2018 Commencement exercises on its three campuses.

Commencement at the Oxford (U.K.) University campus will occur on Saturday, August 4, and graduation at the Ripton, Vt., campus will take place on Saturday, August 11. The ceremony at Bread Loaf’s Santa Fe, N.M., campus was conducted on July 26.  

The ceremonies are tailored to the traditions of each locale. In Santa Fe, the event takes place under the expansive New Mexico skies; at Oxford the graduation occurs inside Lincoln College’s 17th-century chapel; and at Bread Loaf in Ripton, where the graduate school was founded in 1920, Commencement is conducted in the Burgess Meredith Little Theater.

Seventy-three students are expected to earn their master’s degrees in English this summer: 50 Master of Arts (MA) degrees at Ripton; 16 MAs at Oxford; and five MAs and two Master of Letters (MLitt) degrees at Santa Fe. Candidates for a master’s degree from the Bread Loaf School of English typically take courses for four or five summers, and students are free to decide which of the three campuses they wish to attend in any given summer.

With Director Emily Bartels presiding, an honorary Doctor of Letters degree will be conferred at the Ripton, Vt., ceremony this year. The recipient is Douglas Wood, a senior fellow in justice, equity, and opportunity at the Aspen Institute.

Wood, who earned an MA from the School of English in 1997, began his career as a public-school teacher after graduating from Wofford College. The South Carolina native was a program officer at the Ford Foundation from 2011 to 2018 where, for a time, he led an initiative for social justice in global higher education. Prior to joining Ford, Wood was executive director and chief education officer of the Tennessee State Board of Education and a fellow at Georgetown University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

On all three Bread Loaf campuses, the graduates choose an admired faculty member to deliver an address and a member of the faculty or staff to place the master’s hoods on each graduate. Tradition also holds that the class president at each campus delivers remarks and presents the class gift to the school.

The School of English is one of Middlebury’s summer residential graduate programs offering courses in literature and the related fields of literacy and pedagogy, creative writing, and theater arts. Students, most of whom are K–12 English or language arts teachers, come from across the United States and beyond for one or more summers of intensive continuing education.

For more information about the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, consult the website or contact the administrative offices at (802) 443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – For rising seniors Julien Souffrant and Emily Stabler, summer research offers them a chance to roll up their sleeves and make a tangible contribution on a hot-button issue. Both are assisting political science professor Erik Bleich as part of his ongoing Media Portrayals of Minorities Project.

“I was really looking for something that I could say, ‘This is public. This made a difference,” said Souffrant, an international politics and economics major.

For Stabler, who chose political science for its focus on contemporary issues, participation in the project is important “because it’s current and because it matters—it really matters the way that minority groups are portrayed.”

This summer, work focuses on media portrayals of Muslims, a topic Bleich has been investigating for several years through a series of articles (many coauthored with students) and a soon-to-be-completed book. Bleich, Souffrant, and Stabler are coauthoring a paper based on a surprising finding: Newspaper coverage of Muslims trends positive when the topic is Muslim devotion. The paper will soon go to the journal Religions for consideration in a special issue on “Anti-Muslim Racism and the Media.”

This kind of close collaboration and mentoring, said Bleich, “gets students to think of themselves as people who are contributing to knowledge and finding out new things that nobody else knows with methods that are cutting-edge. It allows them to answer pressing questions that they have as citizens and individuals and then use that to speak to a broader audience.”

Professor Erik Bleich, director of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project, meets with student researchers Julien Souffrant ’19 and Emily Stabler ’19.

Bleich launched the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project in 2012, out of a desire to test opinions and assumptions against something more quantifiable.

“I had just written a piece on what is Islamophobia and how do we measure it, and was also finishing my book The Freedom to Be Racist? The thing I noticed . . .  is that there were a lot of discussions on things like hate speech and Islamophobia but not much in the way of concrete measures,” said Bleich. “So how do we see it actually in front of us as opposed to us talking about it in theory?”

One such measure, he reasoned, could be found by analyzing headlines. The results were surprising.

“We discovered fairly quickly that there really wasn’t much in the way of overt Islamophobia articulated in headlines. . . . We expected that on balance there would be many more negative headlines than positive headlines. It turned out that there were essentially an even number of negative headlines and positive headlines.”

Their takeaway at that time? “That maybe some of the case that was being made that the media was relentlessly negative was overstated.”

As Bleich has continued his investigations, techniques in the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project lab have become more sophisticated. In 2012, the lab used solely what Bleich calls “human coding”: each researcher read headlines, one at a time, and analyzed them for tone. In recent years, the lab has embraced computer-assisted methods of “lexical sentiment analysis” (analyzing texts for tone) and “collocation analysis” (searching for words found in close proximity) to parse the complete text of hundreds of thousands of articles, often stretching over decades. Bleich has partnered in this work with Maurits van der Veen, a professor of government with a background in computer science at the College of William and Mary.

For his recent work on Muslims and the media, Bleich has parsed over a million texts.

The change in methodology has led to new findings, sometimes adding to, sometimes overturning previous conclusions.

“Our early research showed that Muslims were not portrayed negatively in headlines, but rather fairly neutrally. This surprised us,” said Bleich. “Our later work surprised us when we learned just how much negativity is associated with Muslims in full text articles, which was revealed with our new computer-assisted methods.”

Just how much negativity? Bleich’s current research finds that the average article mentioning Muslims—looked at in a cross-section of American, Canadian, British, and Australian newspapers over a 20-year period—is “more negative than approximately 82 percent of all articles” in a random sample across all topics.

The average article in the “Muslims and devotion” subset, by contrast, is more positive than 52 percent of all articles in the random sample.

“One of the really cool parts of this research process is we are able to crunch so much data and able to find these really, really macro trends,” said Stabler.

Students interested in joining the lab typically enroll in what Bleich calls his winter term “boot camp” to learn the methodologies. They then apply these skills to their own research projects, which have ranged from media portrayals of Latinos to how race plays into media portrayals of mass shooters to comparisons of media portrayals of sexual misconduct in the Clinton and Trump eras.

Stabler and fellow lab member Rand Jibril ’20 were intrigued by a Washington Post opinion piece claiming that racism had led to far more media coverage for Syrian than for African refugees. They parsed over 51,000 articles over a 10-year period and found that coverage had been roughly equal.

“What’s interesting is that it shows that people make assumptions, and depending on how you’re consuming your news, you remember certain things and don't remember others,” said Stabler. “It shows that we should be careful in the assumptions we make.”

Many “boot campers” continue in the lab over one or more semesters.

“This spring we did a lot of number crunching,” said Souffrant. “It involved having the code to be able to run the program, and then looking at the raw numbers, looking at the different regressions, different valence scores of different subsets. . . . There was a lot of going through Strata [statistics software] and trying to find interesting things, seeing the things that did or didn’t match, and then looking into that.”

“You can go far down the rabbit hole,” Stabler observed.

“Human coding” still has an important place in the process. Bleich, Souffrant, and Stabler spent much of the summer reading, dissecting, and discussing a random sampling of 100 “Muslims and devotion” articles as a way to confirm or challenge what they’d found through their computer-assisted analysis.

“We expected, despite the apparent neutrality indicated in our quantitative analysis, to find a bulk of articles discussing and critiquing the cultural ‘otherness’ of Islamic faith practices, the intense religiosity of Muslims (according to scholars, perceived to be in conflict with the secularism of Western societies), disproportionate coverage of scandalous/violent events involving Muslims, and generally, just an underlying negativity that we suspected the computer may have failed to detect,” said Stabler.

Instead, their reading confirmed their earlier findings.

While Bleich’s work as a political scientist embraces a range of methodologies (including a recent series of presentations on the theme “What Is Hate Speech?”), the kind of number-driven analysis exemplified in the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project reveals deeply held core beliefs.

“Partly,” he said, “it’s about just the time we live in where everybody is just saying the first thing that comes to the tip of their brain; whether it’s true or not doesn't seem to matter anymore. For me, that’s a very dangerous world to live in. Partly I'm trying to communicate to my students to delve more deeply into the facts in order to get this better understanding of the world that we live in. And part is that you’re never at the point where you should be willing to say, ‘I now have the final answer. I can stop thinking about it for all time. I'm done.’”

By Gaen Murphree; Photos by Todd Balfour

RIPTON, Vt. — The Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the oldest writers’ conference in the country, will hold its 93rd session when it begins Wednesday, August 15, and ends Saturday, August 25. Held every summer since 1926 on Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, the conference remains one of America’s most respected literary institutions. Ten days of workshops, lectures, classes, and readings provide writers with rigorous practical and theoretical approaches to their craft. The mountain campus has attracted many renowned authors and poets such as Robert Frost, Carson McCullers, John Irving, Terry Tempest Williams, Ted Conover, and Julia Alvarez.

Conference lectures and readings take place daily and are free and open to the public.

Writer David Treuer is among the literary figures who will serve on the conference faculty. Treuer, who is Ojibwe and grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, is the author of four novels and two books of nonfiction. His latest novel, Prudence, was published in 2015, and his next work of nonfiction, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, will be published in 2019.

Other faculty include writer Tiphanie Yanique and poet Stephanie Burt. Yanique is the author of the short story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, the picture book I Am the Virgin Islands, the novel Land of Love and Drowning, and a collection of poems, Wife. Burtisthe author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Advice from the Lights, Belmont, and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them.

Writer David Treurer, a member of the conference faculty this year, is the author of four novels and two books of nonfiction.

“What makes Bread Loaf exciting is its ability to serve as a source of encouragement to writers in their more formative years,” said Jennifer Grotz, director of the conference. “The talent of the experienced writers on our faculty, the stunning setting, and the conference’s history combine to inspire budding poets and authors as they find their voices and work on their craft of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.”

This session will be the first with poet and translator Grotz in the role of director. She is the first woman to lead the cluster of conferences that also includes the Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Translators’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf in Sicily Conference.

This year, more than 285 writers, students, faculty, literary agents, and editors will gather to participate in the 93rd session of the conference. The general public is invited to attend a daily schedule of free readings and lectures that take place in the Little Theater, located on the Bread Loaf campus on Route 125.

The 2018 series of public events will begin on Wednesday, August 15, at 8:15 p.m., with a welcome by Middlebury President Laurie Patton and Grotz, who is the author of three books of poems, Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. Her most recent translation work is the novel Rochester Knockings and the poetry collection The Psalms of All My Days, both originally published in French. After Grotz’s opening remarks, poet A. Van Jordan—also a Bread Loaf faculty member—will give readings. The public events will wrap up with readings by Burt and novelist and short story writer Akhil Sharma on Friday, August 24, at 8:15 p.m.

For a complete schedule of lectures and readings, see the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Web page. Events are subject to change. Call to confirm dates and times at 802-443-5286 through August 14; 802-443-2700 after August 15.

The Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences include the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, designed for those who want to bring more depth of knowledge to their writing about the environment, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, which highlights the important role that literary translators of poetry and prose play in the United States and beyond.

Biking to Erhai Lake near Xizhou. Photo: Benjy Renton

By Benjy Renton ’21

Now in its fifth summer, the Middlebury School of the Environment has moved internationally for the first time, spending six weeks in Xizhou and Kunming, China. I am one of 19 students from 10 countries and nine colleges and universities across the U.S. participating in the program, where we are now finishing our final presentations with material we have gathered throughout the program. Directed by Curt Gervich and Liou Xie, two professors who are on the faculty at SUNY Plattsburgh, the School of the Environment uses a combination of standard classroom learning and field work to help understand China and its complex environmental issues.

Arriving in Dali, a city in northwestern Yunnan, we were immediately surprised by China’s stark rural and urban contrast. As soon as we left Dali’s new city, we caught a glimpse of the Cangshan mountain range on our left and Erhai Lake on our right. Upon arriving in Xizhou, we spent the first weekend navigating around the small village of 2,500 people that would be our home for the next three weeks.

MSoE Student Creates—and Auctions—Artwork in China to Benefit Local Nonprofit

For her major project at the Middlebury School of the Environment, Charlotte Massey ’18.5 created a series of watercolor postcards by making her own dyes and paints from natural products she found during her MSoE experiences. Massey mounted an exhibit at a restaurant in Kunming and auctioned the cards to benefit a local nonprofit supporting migrant workers. Read more at GoKunming.com.

Our time in Xizhou was spent living and learning in the Linden Centre, a restored Bai ethnic minority courtyard home that has been turned into a hotel and cultural heritage center. We began our program with setting some contexts for our exploration of the environment in China, including presentations on Chinese history and China’s administrative structure. We had the privilege of having Mike Kiernan—an emergency room doctor in Middlebury who also works with MiddCORE as a persuasive speaking and story-making instructor—lead a few of our workshops in Xizhou. One of our assignments during the course of the program is to create a “story of place,” which tells the story of our experiences in Xizhou and Kunming through a specific topic. Topics have ranged from dumplings to migration to local temples and religion. This week, we will all be presenting our work on these projects, some of which have taken the form of documentary films and others of photo essays and presentations.

Another highlight from our time in Xizhou was a visit to a wetland owned by China’s branch of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Since land ownership (the model TNC usually uses in the U.S.) is not possible in China due to the government owning all the land, the Conservancy works with local communities surrounding the wetland to protect biodiversity and hire park rangers. It was great to see how an NGO in China is working to effect change on a local level.

Xizhou is located on Erhai Lake, China’s second highest alpine lake, which is quite polluted due to sewage and other contaminants. Many of our environmental analysis classes gave us the opportunity to spend a few weeks researching government policy and measuring discharge and flow in one of the streams. The government has also banned fishing in the lake, and this allowed us to obtain qualitative data by speaking to fishermen about their experiences. 

After spending three weeks in Xizhou, we traveled to Kunming to begin the second portion of our program. Here, we had the opportunity to hear from two local NGOs about their work and challenges of enacting change in China. Policy changes in China revolve primarily around the concept of guanxi—relationships—that NGOs and other entities have with government officials. These relationships can change at any time and so the path to change is not always clear. We have discussed concepts of enacting change and the qualities necessary to be an environmental leader in China.

In Kunming, we have been able to explore concepts of urbanization and biodiversity as we saw urban green spaces and their role in protecting an ecosystem. We also looked at the intersection of religious spaces and forms of biodiversity. In addition to our course work, we have been running around the city tracking down interview subjects for our final projects and exploring our surroundings. Our home in Kunming is located around the Yunnan University area, situated close to the center of the city.

Our student group is incredibly diverse and includes people studying all forms of environmental studies and some with prior experience with China and Mandarin Chinese. I have really enjoyed returning to China, a country that has fascinated me for years. Much of our course work has been field-based, which has given me the opportunity to see how policy affects people firsthand and learn from their experiences. China is constantly changing, and witnessing change in both a small village and one of China’s fast-growing cities with a great group of classmates has been an unforgettable experience.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Caitlin Myers, an associate professor of economics at Middlebury, conducted research at the request of the New York Times’s Upshot section for its August 4, 2018, story, “The Age that Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America.” Myers, whose areas of expertise include reproductive policy, analyzed data from all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and almost all for the five years prior. The story is accompanied by several interactive maps of the U.S. that provide, by county, a first-time mother’s average age, marital status, and whether she is a college graduate.

“I stare at numbers like these every day, but there’s something about seeing them in these maps that really highlights the striking variation,” said Myers. 

According to Myers’s research, mothers in big cities and on the coasts start their families later than those in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. Among the examples included are New York, where the average age of a first-time mother is 31, and Zapata County, Texas, where it’s 21. 

The story also highlights the age gap that often coincides with the differences in a mother’s education level, another factor that contributes even more to the socioeconomic status of parents and their young children. “Research has shown,” says the article, “where children start in life strongly influences where they end up.”

“There is a lot of variation across this country in the ages at which women start families, but a whole lot of what you see in the maps is explained — in a statistical sense, at least — by differences in education and incomes,” said Myers. “The average first-time mom with a college degree is a pretty similar age regardless of where she lives.”

“One of the things that I find most striking about the data is that while there is huge gap in the ages of first-time mothers with and without college educations, that gap has recently begun to narrow,” Myers noted. “College-educated women are increasingly waiting until their thirties to become mothers, but on the other end of the age distribution, teen pregnancies are plummeting. So this may prove to be a story where a social divide is large, but diminishing.”

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – For senior Grace Levin, a key moment in her summer internship at a homeless shelter came from making vanilla cupcakes with pink frosting.

A sociology major, Levin has studied and analyzed poverty issues repeatedly in the classroom. Hailing from Los Angeles, she’s well acquainted with the face of urban homelessness. But working at the John Graham Shelter in nearby Vergennes has given her yet another lens on poverty in America.

“At the shelter, you get to know people really well. They’re not just faces in the crowd or ‘numbers’ or ‘populations,’” said Levin, “People’s stories get to hold their own.”

Levin’s job has put her at the heart of the shelter’s day-to-day life and day-to-day operations. She’s pitched in on household chores (as do all staff), gardened, read to kids while a parent cooked dinner, helped residents fill out forms and access services, processed gas vouchers, picked up donations, attended weekly meetings with local partner organizations — and just hung out and listened.

Levin used many of these “hanging out” moments to tackle the mountain of zucchini donated by local farmers, baking breads and muffins. One resident in particular was often on hand.

“So one day I asked her if she wanted to help me make the zucchini bread and a few days later she was like ‘I have this cupcake mix. Do you want to make some cupcakes?’”

Grace Levin ’18.5 is working as a privilege and poverty intern at Addison County's John Graham Shelter this summer.

As they worked together, the woman started telling Levin more of her story. In one of those conversations, said Levin, “I was asking her how her day was and she said she had been to this restaurant and picked up a job application and was trying to fill it out but she felt like she didn’t have enough to say and could I maybe help her.”

Together they tackled the job application; then together they sat at the shelter computer and pounded out a resume. The woman is now seeking vocational counseling as a next step to set goals and get training.

“At first I was sort of wondering ‘Am I being supportive here or am I just baking cupcakes? And is that really using her time and my time well?’” said Levin. “But I realized that building trust and building that relationship are really important. She was able to feel comfortable coming to me and asking for what she knew she needed.”

Levin is one of 14 Middlebury students placed locally and nationwide this summer as part of Middlebury’s Privilege & Poverty program, an “academic cluster” that brings together faculty, students, and staff interested in studying economic inequality. The program is jointly directed by Center for Community Engagement Director Tiffany Nourse Sargent ’79 and Professor of Religion James Calvin Davis. Seven students work in Addison County at such organizations as John Graham Housing and Services, HOPE (Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects), the Open Door Clinic, and WomenSafe. Seven work nationwide in cities like Atlanta and Baltimore—engaged in refugee resettlement, community development, healthy food access in low-income communities, and providing fair access to the justice system.

Nationally based interns work through the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty, of which Middlebury is a charter member. They attend opening and closing conferences that bring all SHECP interns together to learn about and discuss issues of poverty and social change.

Addison County interns gather once a week for a seminar on issues of privilege and poverty led by Davis, with Sargent on hand to also help students unpack their day-to-day experiences.

“The point is to get them thinking about what have you done in the classroom, what are you experiencing this summer, and how do they inform one another?” said Davis.

Key themes in readings and discussions include “the frustrating complexity of poverty” and “that moral question: ‘What ought we to do about it?’”

“One of the lightbulbs that goes off is that they have a deeper appreciation for just how entrenched and complicated poverty is. . . . [Another] is a deeper appreciation of the hardness of the experience of poverty,” said Davis. “I think they get a real sense of the vulnerability that comes with poverty that they cannot get just from a classroom conversation.”

“By having James and me partner together, we’re really melding the theory and the practical in real time,” said Sargent, who’s been connecting Middlebury students with community organizations for over 30 years. “And I think we hold a bigger space as a result of this. We’re extending the students’ understanding of the complexity and nuance of both public frameworks and personal experience, so they become more nuanced in what they know and what they don’t know.”

They also get to see what happens “when the rubber meets the road,” said Sargent, as organizations grapple daily with resources and tradeoffs.

Psychology major Hannah Kredich said she originally pursued a Privilege & Poverty internship to better examine the intersection of mental health and poverty issues. This summer she’s worked the front desk at HOPE, whose services include the county’s largest food shelf.

One of the strengths she’s observed is how the local community pulls together—how local service organizations collaborate and how local farmers and orchardists bring in fresh fruits and vegetables for the food shelf. But she’s been surprised to realize the extent to which employment and poverty can go hand in hand.

“I think I expected a lot more of the clients to be either unemployed or homeless, but so many of them have one or two or three part-time jobs,” Kredich said.

At the statewide minimum wage of $9.15 an hour, reports the John Graham website, a household would need to clock 90 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment; moreover, “there is not a single state in the country where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a market-rate one or two-bedroom rental.” Current data puts the overall poverty rate nationwide at 12.7 percent and Vermont’s at 11.9 percent (New Hampshire has the lowest poverty rate, at 7.3 percent; Mississippi the highest at 20.8 percent).

A May 2018 U.N. report called the United States “the most unequal society in the developed world.” According to the report, when compared to similar wealthy nations, America has the highest youth poverty rate, highest infant mortality, one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility, citizens leading “shorter and sicker lives,” and highest rate of income inequality despite “its immense wealth” and status as a global leader.

John Graham co-director Pete Kellerman praised Middlebury’s interns for the “welcomed and positive impact” they’ve had on the shelter and said: “The best advocacy for social justice requires an ability to make informed decisions, recognizing the different realities we all have, addressing those differences with intelligence and compassion . . . Our interns will carry this unique experience with them and hopefully empower their efforts to reconcile privilege and poverty.”

For Davis and Nourse, empowering students to meet these and other societal challenges is what it’s all about.

When students begin connecting their educations to their role as citizens solving social problems, “for me that’s the ballgame,” said Davis.

“It’s a humanistic approach to a social problem that gives us some of our key capacities that will be necessary if we’re going to make any progress at all on it: empathy, listening, critical thinking, intercultural competence. These are precisely the skills we need to grapple with our world’s most intractable problems.”

By Gaen Murphree; Photos by Todd Balfour

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. –The Middlebury Language Schools will conduct Commencement exercises on Friday, August 17, at 4 p.m. for 117 graduate-degree candidates in foreign languages. The ceremony will be held in Robison Hall at the Mahaney Center for the Arts on the Vermont campus.

Now in its 104th consecutive summer of operation, the Language Schools also has a West Coast campus at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., where Commencement exercises for students in the Arabic and Italian Schools was held on August 9.

At Oakland, Karen A. Stolley ’77, a professor of Spanish at Emory University and trustee of Middlebury College, delivered the Commencement address. In addition, writer and translator Oonagh Stransky, who attended the Italian School in 1986, was a special guest speaker. 

With Dean of the Language Schools Stephen B. Snyder presiding, Middlebury conferred three Doctor of Modern Languages degrees, 10 Master of Arts degrees in Italian, and eight Master of Arts degrees in Arabic at the ceremony conducted in Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College.

In Vermont on August 17, President Laurie L. Patton and Dean Snyder will confer 114 Master of Arts degrees in Chinese, French, Hebrew, German, Russian, and Spanish, and three Doctor of Modern Languages degrees. The DML, which is unique to Middlebury, combines proficiency in two foreign languages with mastery of the literature, linguistics, and culture associated with both languages.

Among the MA degrees, 47 will be awarded to students in the Spanish School, 33 in the French School, 17 in the School of Hebrew, seven in the Russian School, six in the Chinese School, and four in German.

Journalist Rachel Antonia Donadio will deliver the Commencement address at the Vermont ceremony. Formerly a resident of Middlebury, Donadio joined The Atlantic in 2017 as its Paris-based writer and European correspondent after serving 13 years on the staff of the New York Times. Proficient in French and Italian, she served as the newspaper’s European culture correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review. Donadio graduated from Yale University with a degree in humanities.

The Language Schools will confer upon Donadio an honorary Doctor of Letters degree following her address to the graduates. The journalist last appeared at Middlebury College in April 2014 when she delivered the Robert W. van de Velde Memorial Lecture.

Also at Commencement in Vermont, Middlebury will present Awards for Distinguished Study to this summer’s outstanding students in the Language Schools. The ceremony will be preceded by an outdoor carillon concert performed by George Matthew Jr., the college carillonneur, on Middlebury 48-bell instrument atop Mead Chapel. During the ceremony, students and faculty in the Language Schools will perform a number of musical selections.

When the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival (MNFF) kicks off its fourth season on Thursday, August 23, it will do so with a distinct Middlebury College flavor. The festival’s opening night film, a documentary titled Personal Statement, was produced by Beth Levison ’91 and is one of nine films written, directed, or produced by Middlebury alumni chosen to be screened over the course of the four-day event.

“We were pleased to receive so many interesting films from the Middlebury College community,” said MNFF founder and producer Lloyd Komesar. “We are delighted to share a truly impressive selection of work by its talented alumni.

The festival drew nearly 500 film submissions from around the world for consideration, Komesar added, making this season the most competitive of MNFF’s young history. Founded by the former Disney executive in 2015 to showcase up-and-coming filmmaking talent, the festival has become an end-of-summer highlight in the town of Middlebury, drawing crowds of film lovers to screenings and special events featuring not only the new filmmakers but also Hollywood veterans.

This year, the festival will formally begin with Levison’s documentary, Personal Statement, which follows three high school students at a public school in Brooklyn as they do double duty as college counselors in an attempt to lead their entire senior class to matriculate at colleges the following fall. The film arrives in Vermont with considerable acclaim, having opened the American Film Institute’s Documentary Festival in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer. The Thursday evening festivities begin at 6:30 p.m. in Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater with a conversation with Levison and the film’s director, Juliane Dressner, followed by the Vermont premiere of the documentary.

The additional College-affiliated films include the following:

A Murder in Mansfield, a documentary produced by John Morrissey ’72, which tells the story of a man who overheard his father murder his mother when he was 12 years old and is now ready to confront his father in prison—30 years after the fact. The film screens in Dana Auditorium at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, August 24.

Man Made, a documentary directed by T Cooper ’94 that follows the lives of four transgender men as they compete in the only all-trans bodybuilding competition in the world. This extraordinary film—which arrives in Vermont having won the jury award for Best Documentary Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival—will screen on Friday, August 24, in Twilight Hall at 1:30 p.m.

Rust Creek, a feature thriller written by Julie Lipson ’07 that hearkens back to the “backwoods mayhem” thriller/horror genre. The film screens in the main theater at the Marquis at 1:30 on Saturday, August 25.

Moroni for President, a documentary directed by Saila Huusko ’10 that captures Moroni Benally’s run for the president of the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American nation in the United States. Described as an “eye-opening and humorous portrait of a political race” featuring a protagonist who is young, gay, Mormon, and prepped with a degree in public policy, the doc will screen on Friday, August 24, at the Marquis Theater at 7:15.

For the Love of Mary, a documentary short directed, produced, and written by Simon Perkins ’05 and Kirk Horton ’17, which traces a 97-year-old runner's attempt to compete in a grueling 7.6-mile race to the summit of Mount Washington, the tallest mountain peak in the Northeast. The film screens in the main theater at the Marquis at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 23.

Rodney, an animation short directed by recent grad Will Lupica ’18 should be a crowd-pleaser for all ages—once they meet the protagonist, a penguin trying very hard to make it in the human world. The film screens at the Marquis Theater at 7:15 p.m. on Friday, August 24.

Lily, a narrative short directed by Danilo Herrera ’18 that introduces a couple re-thinking life plans after touring an assisted-living home. The film screens in the main theater at the Marquis at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 25.

And Meeting George, a documentary short directed by Matt Lennon ’13, which features the filmmaker’s quest to learn more about his father in the years after his sudden death in 2006. The film screens in the main theater at the Marquis at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 23.

Then the festival will conclude in much the same way it began: with a special event featuring a Middlebury graduate. On Sunday, August 26, music composed by Matt LaRocca ’02 and performed by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (VSO) will accompany a new film directed by Robin Starbuck. The arrangement is the product of a collaboration by the VSO and MNFF, in which a filmmaker who is deemed to best integrate music into his or her work is awarded with an original composition for the filmmaker’s next film; Starbuck received the award in 2017. Her collaboration with LaRocca will have its world premiere at Robison Hall in the Mahaney Center for the Arts on August 26 at 1:00 p.m.

Brazil, the director of Brown University’s MFA program in acting and directing, said, “Teachers create spaces for students to see themselves in history, in literature, in their communities. You cultivate ways for their stories to mingle with the stories they are encountering. In your work, there is possibility for extraordinary change.”

And like a skillful actor on stage, a teacher has to “decide to do it every night, in every scene. You have to step into the circle. You have to risk something. You have to make it matter.” Teachers must “decide to be fearless” and “make room for voices from underrepresented perspectives.” They also need to “risk messiness” in the classroom, “plunge their arms elbow-deep into a poem instead of shaping it into a neat ball,” and allow their students “to learn kinesthetically, to get out of those desks and move . . . to really see each other as well as the text.”

Angela Brazil, director of the Trinity Repertory Company, delivered the Commencement address on August 11.

Brazil, who was selected as the Commencement speaker by the graduating class of Master of Arts degree candidates, has been a Bread Loaf faculty member since 2012 and a member of the School’s Theatre Ensemble since 2006. Her potent “decide to do it” refrain resounded throughout her address.

The director of the School of English, Emily C. Bartels, welcomed the graduates, family members, and friends to the third Bread Loaf graduations held this summer. (The previous two ceremonies were held at Santa Fe, N.M., and Oxford, U.K., on July 26 and August 4, respectively.)

Clare Costello and Stacey Mitchell King, copresidents of the 2018 graduating class, presented the senior class gift and delivered remarks. Costello, who teaches English in Racine, Wis., said, “At Bread Loaf we are given a space to be risk takers, to stretch ourselves, to ask questions, to be vulnerable—and we are able to do so because we are never alone in doing it. A friend recently described it this way, ‘You’re never the only one saying yes to things.’

“At Bread Loaf, we participate in a ‘communion of yes.’ This communion is what makes us able to question more deeply in class, to share a poem with each other. . . .  This communion is what makes us able to drop the performance of our daily lives and become our truest selves: open, vulnerable, and together,” Costello affirmed.

President Patton (l.) conferred an honorary doctorate on Douglas Wood MA English '97. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton, Director Bartels, and Associate Director Lyndon J. Dominique conferred a master’s degree on each graduate, and a faculty member chosen by the class, Brenda Brueggmann, placed a master’s hood on the shoulders of each degree recipient.

Last, the School of English conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters degree to Douglas Wood, a senior fellow in justice, equity, and opportunity at the Aspen Institute. Wood, who earned an MA from Bread Loaf in 1997, began his career as a public-school teacher after graduating from Wofford College. The South Carolina native was a program officer at the Ford Foundation from 2011 to 2018 where, for a time, he led an initiative for social justice in global higher education. Prior to joining Ford, Wood was executive director and chief education officer of the Tennessee State Board of Education and a fellow at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

The 99th summer of the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English came to a close as the graduates and faculty members, friends and guests, walked out of Burgess Meredith Little Theater and over to the Barn for a joyous reception.  

– Photography by Todd Balfour

Octave Lepinard ’19 described the highlights of his summer internship, from working for an expert on North Korean WMDs to locating uranium mines and doing interviews with the BBC. 

This summer I was one of three Middlebury College students who was an undergraduate intern at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. This 10-week research program is led by Bill Potter, CNS’s founding director, and Masako Toki, CNS’s education project manager. The program is built to immerse roughly a dozen students in the world of nonproliferation through lectures and research projects.

A collection of lectures provided a broad overview of nonproliferation and the world of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), ranging from the details of the Iran nuclear deal to the physics of nuclear fission. Outside of the lectures, we were assigned to a CNS researcher working in a field similar to our area of interest, and we each helped our researcher with grants and projects. My supervisor was Melissa Hanham, an expert on North Korean WMDs and evaluation of new technologies’ potential, such as geospatial and satellite imagery analysis. On top of that, we had the opportunity to do independent research with the support of the top experts in that field. Independent research as well as research for a CNS expert can culminate in a publication or some sort of public display. 

My case was somewhat unusual, as I study computer science and geology at Middlebury and therefore have very little experience with political science or other international relations issues. In recent years the program directors have worked to recruit and immerse STEM majors into internships at CNS. The lectures were fascinating, and the professors made efforts to include all the students. 

I worked with Melissa and three other researchers at the Institute on multiple projects, helping them collect, process, and analyze satellite imagery. The first project was a website that crowdsourced analysis of satellite imagery to learn about potential areas of interest. Users selected a campaign that caught their attention and looked through the satellite imagery that we had selected. They could pin or label any object they found intriguing and leave a short description of what they thought it was. The goal was to harness the crowd’s random specializations to identify equipment, whose purpose we otherwise would not have known. I got to help design the user interface as well as pick and process the satellite imagery for the website. 

I worked on another project where we tried to use satellite imagery and hyperspectral imagery to locate and distinguish uranium mines from other mineral mines. Hyperspectral imagery is captured by a camera or satellite that takes hundreds of images at one time—each for a specific wavelength of light. We then can attribute certain colors to bands in order to visualize it as a colored satellite image. We did this by talking with mining experts to isolate the buildings that were unique to uranium mining and teaching ourselves how to identify them in aerial images. Hyperspectral imagery covers a broad range of color wavelengths while maintaining spectral detail. This allowed us to analyze and compare spectral signatures between different objects in the imagery. We worked to develop a general hyperspectral signature for uranium mines that would help us distinguish a  mine that may potentially be converted for this use in the future. 

My summer research culminated in writing sections for two research papers that will be published in the fall, as well as getting a couple of the images I picked and processed circulated through the news. I even did interviews with both BBC World News (see below) and BBC World Service (radio) to talk about the possible construction of two intercontinental ballistic missiles and the suspicious activity that we spotted at a facility outside of Sanumdong.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Middlebury College provided the majority of the funding for a new outreach program designed to help Arabic-speaking immigrants develop the kind of interpersonal connections that everyone needs to thrive in a new community.

The five-week summer program, which was based in New Britain, Conn., paired five American college graduates proficient in Arabic language and culture together with six newly arrived families from Middle Eastern countries such as Syria, Morocco, and Yemen.

The program called Jiran: The Arabic Community Action Summer was the brainchild of two staff members of Middlebury’s C.V. Starr School in Amman, Jordan, together with a Syrian-born multilingual educator from the New Britain (population 72,000) area. The trio of Kerstin Wilsch, Emily Goldman, and Maha Abdullah conceived of a project that would focus on meeting each family’s individual needs while expanding the five participants’ Arabic language skills and cultural competency.

Middlebury’s Ron and Jessica Liebowitz Fund for Innovation provided $29,900 for the first summer of Jiran, while Stanley Black & Decker Inc. and the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund contributed $5,000 each.

“This project struck us as a particularly creative way to take advantage of what our students had been able to do abroad and, in effect, bring that study abroad back home,” explained Jeff Cason, Middlebury professor of international studies and interim provost. “Students often wonder what to do with transformative experiences they have had abroad. Jiran was an interesting way to leverage that experience while contributing to a U.S. community in a meaningful way.”

Working in close coordination with the Islamic Association of Central Connecticut (IACC), Jiran—which means “neighbors” in Arabic—conducted workshops, lectures, site visits, and field trips intended to expand the immigrant families’ survival skills by making new connections in America. There were training sessions about how to apply for a job, how to write a résumé, how to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (or FAFSA), and how policy changes under the Trump administration can impact the legal standing of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers. There were visits to city hall, the public library, the nearby community college, the YWCA, and a community bike shop. And there were scavenger hunts, cooking demonstrations, henna classes, and lots of music and dancing.

Jiran’s five Arabic-speaking American college students–all five attended either the School in Jordan or the Middlebury Arabic School–spent the first week of the program working with the families to identify their most pressing needs; e.g., English-language skills, child care, employment, education, transportation, etc. Next, they sought ways to meet those needs through the IACC, social service agencies, educational institutions, or other resources in the greater Hartford area.

Participants seated on the steps of their program house are (clockwise from top left) Marivi Howell-Arza, Ella Nalepka, Ian James, Joy Al-Nemri, and Lorenzo Greenbaum ’18. All five attended either the School in Jordan or the Middlebury Arabic School. Standing left is Maha Abdullah and right is Emily Goldman.

Lorenzo Greenbaum, a 2018 Middlebury graduate who majored in Arabic, was paired with a Moroccan family of seven whose eldest child is still trying to obtain a visa to come to the United States. “The family’s biggest challenge is adapting to a culture that differs so significantly from their own,” he explained. “For instance, how can the mother build her own life outside of the home? How can she communicate with other Arabic speakers given the nuances of the Moroccan Arabic dialect? How can the father find a job that suits his skills? How will the son navigate the college application process?”

Greenbaum’s partner family faces numerous challenges, not the least of which is whether they will ever be reunited with their daughter still living in Morocco. The other four “participants,” as the college-level Arabic speakers were called, were matched with families confronting similar pressing needs, and the participants were encouraged to find answers that were not short-term solutions.

“All five of our participants were very intentional about setting up systems that would be sustainable after they left New Britain,” said Emily Goldman, the site coordinator for Jiran. Goldman, who grew up in central Connecticut, studied Arabic at Brown University, and worked for the School in Jordan, was sensitive to the needs of the immigrant community both through her upbringing and her close friendship with Maha Abdullah. Together with Kerstin Wilsch, who directs Middlebury’s School in Jordan, the trio understood that making long-lasting interpersonal connections would be key to the success of Jiran. And one of the ways they did so was by recruiting four “interns”—three high school students and one local college student—who were Arabic-speaking émigrés well-acquainted with the New Britain area. 

“The interns served as cultural and linguistic resources for the participants and for the families. They were the ones who had the most local knowledge. They had all gone through the public schools in New Britain, and had gone through the experience of coming to America from the Middle East as a child,” Goldman said. “The interns turned out to be one of the most important facets of our program design.”

Jiran was anything but a summer vacation for the five participants. (In addition to the Middlebury alumnus Greenbaum, the other four participants were recent graduates of Tufts, Duke, McGill, and Bard.) Middlebury’s Language Pledge was in force, and five mornings a week the participants were in class studying Jiran’s colloquial Arabic curriculum, which had been developed for the project by Wilsch, Abdullah, and the faculty at the School in Jordan. Each participant volunteered their time (and their appreciable Arabic-language skills) to a social service agency or research project. The rest of the time they were meeting with their partner families, making introductions, researching issues, formulating solutions, and planning events to promote intercultural dialogue in the community.

And while most of the formal events—like the workshop on Kurdish culture and the training session on running a small business—were held at the Islamic Association’s downtown center, the participants’ rented house located near the campus of Central Connecticut State University “became a quasi-program center and informal gathering place where the families and the interns felt welcome to drop by,” Goldman said.

Plans for next summer’s Jiran are not solidified yet, but the organizers see signs that their method is working.

“Despite some early skepticism, our program was a success well beyond what many people thought was possible,” Goldman reflected. “It resonated not only with the resettled and recently arrived Arabic-speaking population in New Britain, but with the city, too. New Britain has experienced an influx of people displaced by Hurricane Maria and we got a call from city hall to see if our Jiran model could apply to the newly arrived Puerto Rican population as well.

“People realized that what we are trying to do in terms of intercultural learning is not expensive,” continued Goldman. “We are not throwing money at the problems faced by newly arrived Arabic speakers; we are strengthening the social networks of people who arrive in this area without any social networks. Having cultural guides and making new friends can solve so many problems that thousands and thousands of dollars can’t solve.”

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – It is 8:30 in the morning in Vermont and 7:30 in the evening in Indonesia, and students at both locations are speaking Hebrew with each other today via the videoconferencing tool Zoom.

After the students introduce themselves, tell where they are from, and explain why they are studying the language, they divide up into small groups for informal face-to-face discussions with their new friends in the city of Jakarta. With laptops propped open and headphones on, the sound of multiple conversations—all in Hebrew, of course—fills the air inside a classroom at Middlebury’s Davis Family Library.

“It’s a little chaotic, yes,” says Vardit Ringvald, the director of Middlebury’s School of Hebrew, amid the din, “but it’s a structured mess. And it is exciting because the School of Hebrew is becoming more global. There are a lot of different motivations [for learning Hebrew] at play here, and all this is going on outside the state of Israel.”

Sapri Sale, the director of the Hebrew-language program at the Indonesian Conference on Religion and Peace in Jakarta, proposed the idea of a combined lesson to Tomer Grossman, a faculty member in the School of Hebrew this summer. And in a way, it’s no surprise that the two teachers connected online. Sale published the world’s first Hebrew-Indonesian dictionary and is offering one of his country’s first Hebrew language classes. And Grossman, the principal of a high school in Lod, Israel, is seeking a PhD in educational and instructional technology while teaching at the Middlebury Language Schools this summer.

Tomer Grossman (standing) and Sapri Sale (on screen, foreground) developed the shared lesson in tandem. Click on photo to enlarge.

“This is a fine example of how pedagogy can combine with technology to promote peace and friendship in another part of the world,” says Grossman. “Indonesia has the world’s largest population of Muslems, and yet there are people there who want to learn Hebrew and speak it with us.”

(The Times of Israel news website published a story about Sapri Sale’s class in March of this year. The article was titled “Muslim Man Opens First Ever Hebrew Course in Indonesia.”)

For more than an hour, the two classes separated by over 9,000 miles are having a running conversation in Hebrew that concludes in an exuberant group singalong of Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu, or “Peace will come upon us, yet.”

One of the Middlebury students, Dammara Kovnats Hall, said afterward: “I love that our class was able to speak in Hebrew—and only in Hebrew!—with students from Indonesia. It inspires me to better understand the diverse reasons why people are determined to learn Hebrew. 

“I am grateful that my time in the School of Hebrew has enabled me to understand enough to have a true conversation with these students in Jakarta, and I am excited to continue speaking with them in Hebrew and continuing a relationship with them even after the program ends,” she said.

The shared lesson concluded with the singing of a popular Hebrew folk song by students in both classes.

– With reporting by Robert Keren and photos by Todd Balfour

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — The Middlebury Language Schools conferred 114 Master of Arts degrees and three Doctor of Modern Languages degrees at the Language Schools Commencement on Friday, August 17, at the Mahaney Center for the Arts.

Middlebury’s 104th consecutive summer of intensive language instruction drew to a close as the degree candidates, dressed in cap in gown, processed into Robison Hall led by marshals Cecilia Chang and Kazumi Hatasa, the directors of the Chinese and Japanese Schools, respectively.

President Laurie L. Patton, Dean of Language Schools Stephen B. Snyder, and guest speaker Rachel Donadio addressed the degree candidates, prior to the awarding of their academic degrees.

The president saluted the soon-to-be graduates for their adherence to Middlebury’s Language Pledge during summers in the Language Schools. “You have been thinking and dreaming and planning and joking and arguing and persuading and dancing and running and signing and playing and hoping in another language—a language other than English.

“You have succeeded in achieving what you might have feared at times was impossible when you first began this journey with your new nourishing mother [i.e. alma mater] and your new Language Schools fellow travelers. With your cohort, because and through each other, you have changed… And what is at the heart of your change? I believe it is the Language Pledge and its power, the power of association.”

The 2018 graduates of the Language Schools will go out into the world and “create new communities, literally new forms of association, in helping other people remember. Your work in languages is the work of healing that the world needs most today,” Patton concluded.

Professor Snyder said Commencement is a special occasion “to honor the efforts and achievements” of the graduates. “You have made the commitment necessary to attain advanced language fluency and cultural understanding in your area of study, and beyond that you have begun creating the knowledge in your chosen field that will nourish and support the next generation of learners.

“We believe that your deep knowledge of other languages and peoples will allow you to lead in a more intelligent, open-minded, and humane fashion than would be possible without that knowledge,” the dean said. “We are deeply honored to have accompanied you on this journey and enormously proud of your achievements.”

Rachel Donadio, center, accepted an Honorary Doctor of Letters from President Laurie Patton and Trustee Russell Leng '60.

The afternoon’s third and final speaker, Rachel Donadio, grew up in Middlebury and attended the French School in her teens. Now a Paris-based writer and European correspondent for The Atlantic after serving 13 years on the editorial staff of the New York Times, Donadio dedicated her remarks to the late Huguette Knox, who taught French at Middlebury for 35 years.

That Madame Knox and her family lived in Vermont but spoke French all the time “was something exotic and enticing” to the teenage Donadio. “It seemed to give them access to worlds far beyond Middlebury.” And by the end of that summer, after many hours “in total concentration” in the language lab, and with no distractions and no Internet, Donadio too could speak French. “I went back to high school and felt different, as if I had access to something that eluded others. It was empowering and isolating, as knowledge can often be,” she said.

“Knowing many languages means the possibility of having many linguistic and even spiritual homes. It’s not the easy path and it can be quite confusing at times, but the rewards are very rich, as you language graduates and scholars know.”

Donadio lamented that U.S. enrollments in modern-language courses have been declining for years, and she catalogued reasons why it’s critical for Americans to understand other languages and cultures, including: “If the postwar order as we know it is unraveling, then learning a language, today more than ever, is an act of resistance against isolationism. If current developments are pushing the U.S. farther and farther away from meaningful links with the rest of the world,” she declared looking out at the graduates, “then it’s up to all of you to push back against that, to do your own personal diplomacy.”

Language Schools students cheered for the accomplishments of each other. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Following a musical interlude—one of five performed by Language Schools students during the ceremony—the president, dean, and directors of the Language Schools conferred Master of Arts degrees to candidates in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish. (The MAs in Arabic and Italian had been awarded previously on August 9 at the Language Schools’ West Coast campus at Mills College in Oakland.)

Middlebury also conferred Doctor of Modern Languages degrees to the three candidates who combined their graduate-level proficiency in two foreign languages with a mastery of the literature, linguistics, and culture associated with both languages.

Trustee and Professor Emeritus Russell Leng ’60 conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters to the Commencement speaker, Ms. Donadio, in recognition of her journalism here and abroad.

The ceremony concluded with a salute to Kazumi Hatasa, who is stepping down after 15 years as director of the Japanese School. Said Dean Snyder, “Kazumi expanded the scope of the Japanese curriculum by recognizing that it should reflect the diversity of today’s multicultural and technologized society.” He also made the school “a place of excitement, a nexus of intellectual vibrancy, and an environment for learning Japanese that is second to none.”

— Photography by Todd Balfour

Tuesday Tea Time, which started last year, is an unstructured, completely social gathering that takes place weekly from 4:30-5:30 pm at the Scott Center and typically draws about 15 students. Conversational topics range from musical tastes and weekend adventures to hobbies and plans for the future. The event has proven so popular that sometimes staff have to politely nudge students out the door when it’s over so they can leave for the day.

Led by Orten, Wisdom Wednesdays – also returning for a second year ­­– offer a half-hour midweek opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to share poetry, literature, music, and silence in Mead Chapel.

New meetings and groups have led to a proliferation of locations on campus beyond the Scott Center that are devoted to meditation and worship. These now include a room on the second floor of the Davis Family Library, and spaces in Munroe, Anderson Freeman Center, McCullough Student Center, and the Labyrinth at the Knoll (the College Garden).

Equally important to the support they give to student groups and initiatives, says Orten, is the expanding role that he and his colleagues play in campus dialogue on topics of race, sexuality, and other issues. Recently the Scott Center has also worked on the College’s effort to educate faculty, staff, and students about restorative practices.

“The liberal arts calls for students to be knowledgeable about the core convictions and values of others if they are going to meet today’s pressing challenges,” said Orten. “The Scott Center can contribute to this essential aspect of our students’ education.”

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – It’s a sunny August morning on the Trail Around Middlebury, the town’s 19-mile hiking path locals call “the TAM.” Stands of goldenrod dominate this open meadow not far south from the Ridgeline Woods parking lot. White oak and ash saplings planted by environmental studies students dot this stretch of the TAM’s Colin O’Neil Class of ’97 Trail. An occasional monarch flaps by on its way to the next milkweed plant. Last night it rained heavily, but this morning the ground is already dry and the sky is perfectly blue except for a few wisps of clouds.

Trail coordinator John Derick and his two-person summer maintenance crew are sizing up an 18-year-old wooden walkway that’s got some rot and wobble issues.

“It’s a pretty fantastic summer job,” said crew member Jack Herscowitz ’20.

Herscowitz, an environmental policy and music double major about to start his junior year, is this summer’s Middlebury College intern with the Middlebury Area Land Trust. Like his many predecessors, he’s responsible for both trail maintenance and GIS (geographic information systems) mapping. The internship is itself a part of a longtime partnership between the college and MALT.

Jack Herscowitz ’20 crosses a suspension bridge on the Trail Around Middlebury.

For the next hour and a half, the whine of cicadas and never-ending cricket chirps are punctuated with sharper sounds. Herscowitz takes a pry bar to the structure’s old rotten boards and rips them off, while Derick and crew member Jenn Smith chainsaw new boards out of salvaged lumber. These then get drilled and hammered on.

“This is a repair job,” Derick comments, as they work. “It might not be pretty but it’ll be rugged.”

This particular 10-foot span of planks-nailed-on-a-truss rests directly on a low spot in a meadow, where it provides just enough elevation during spring thaws or after heavy rains to keep Class of ’97 hikers out of the mud. By the time it’s reinforced, it’s so heavy it takes all three of them to turn it over and put it back in place. The repaired truss still wobbles, and Derick is not satisfied until they level it, digging dirt out in one spot and replacing it in another.

“It’s been invaluable,” said Derick, of the hours of trail work Middlebury students have contributed over the years. “Without that help there’s a lot of things that just wouldn’t get done.”

As in past summers, the trail maintenance part of Herscowitz’s job has included repairing wooden walkways, platforms, steps, and bridges of all types; cutting brush, whacking weeds, and mowing, so the trail stays passable; and stabilizing steep hillsides with stone and rock.

The GIS mapping part of Herscowitz’s internship has its own history. It is one of several mapping-related internships funded in honor of the late Bob Churchill, a geography professor who built the GIS/cartography lab and established Middlebury’s GIS program.

Back at the Bicentennial Hall GIS lab, Herscowitz, left, works on mapping software with his internship supervisor Bill Hegman, a GIS specialist and teaching fellow at Middlebury.

“The College, and especially the Geography Department, have been working with the Middlebury Area Land Trust since I've been here, so close to 20 years,” said Middlebury geography department GIS Specialist Bill Hegman, who oversees all summer GIS interns. “One of the key things MALT needs is maps—maps for all kinds of purposes, map analysis, geographic analysis.”

In the past, Middlebury students have created the various iterations of the official TAM map and they often put together baseline documentation reports for newly conserved properties. This summer MALT is focusing on kiosk upgrades, funded by a recent grant, and has Herscowitz working on new kiosk maps for individual TAM segments. He spends mornings walking trails, side trails, and boundaries with a GPS app to note any changes or additions or to verify boundaries; in the afternoon he moves to the GIS/cartography lab at Bicentennial Hall.

“Essentially what I’m doing,” explained Herscowitz, “is I have my GPS app on my phone, and I have the old map, and I just sort of walk until everything that I can possibly find has been walked. So my job is actually to hike! I think that’s pretty amazing.”

Mountain bikers, especially, said Herscowitz, are blazing their own side trails on the TAM. And, as Hegman noted, with “the Trail Around Middlebury, you would think that once it’s set, it’s set. But there are changes that happen all the time.”

Herscowitz has also walked and verified boundaries at the historic Salisbury Mills, a 70-acre site conveyed to MALT in 2004. Herscowitz’s summer work puts MALT yet another step closer to its goals of developing the site with trails and historic markers.

Herscowitz spent mornings on the Trail Around Middlebury, doing mapping and maintenance. The College and Middlebury Area Land Trust have collaborated on summer internships for years.

“A small nonprofit like MALT can’t afford the technology and specialized skills to complete the GIS mapping that the Middlebury College interns take on each year,” said MALT Executive Director Jamie Montague. “At larger land trusts these skills are in-house, but at MALT we seek partnerships outside our organization to get the job done well. MALT has been particularly excited about the two-way relationship we form with each summer’s intern. The students gain hands-on experience that provides them with autonomy and exposure to a real-life application of their academic studies. MALT gains invaluable expertise through the students and Professor Hegman.”

In addition to summer and other internships, work on the TAM links the town and the College in a number of ways. The Class of ’97 TAM segment was itself built and designed as part of an environmental studies senior seminar; another senior seminar analyzed possible routes for a Vermont extension of the North Dakota-to-New York North Country Scenic Trail, one of MALT’s ongoing projects. A social psychology class did a series of projects on how to increase TAM membership. Individual students volunteer to do trail work. And like townspeople, students and other members of the College community take to the TAM to unwind and spend time in nature.

Herscowitz recalled his first steps on the TAM as a first-year: “It was the day of the spring symposium. I had given my symposium presentation and immediately afterwards my friend and I were like ‘All right! Let’s hike the TAM.’ We discovered the [Otter Creek] Gorge and went, ‘Whoa!’—we had no idea it was that close.”

As part of his summer internship, Herscowitz worked on creating kiosk maps for individual sections of the Trail Around Middlebury.

For Herscowitz, one of the best parts of the MALT internship is that “this is just a great way to figure out what my values are in work.” In contrast with this summer’s hands-on work for a local organization, last summer Herscowitz interned with a large federal agency doing environmental research.

“Seeing the tangible effects of what you’re doing is great; working outside is amazing. I love that everything you do is impactful and really important to MALT and to the larger community,” Herscowitz said.

As with many past summer interns, Herscowitz has also been inspired by trail supervisor Derick, who’s been a driving force behind the TAM since its inception in the late 1980s, has built or contributed to building almost all 19 miles of the TAM, and has been supervising Middlebury students for what he reckons is the past 15 years—all done as a volunteer.

“John is very much the lifeblood of the TAM,” said Herscowitz. “He’s an incredible person.”

“It’s a labor of love,” said Derick. “I just love that the trail brings people together.”

This fall Derick will hand off his trail coordinator responsibilities to Herscowitz’s crewmate, Jenn Smith, but said he’ll still come back to volunteer when she wants help.

Reflecting on this summer’s work, Herscowitz said: “My biggest takeaways have been the importance of maintaining community relationships in organization building, especially at the local level. Seeing John and Jamie’s connection to and love for the community has been really rewarding.”

By Gaen Murphree; Photos by Todd Balfour

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Lassen Volcanic National Park’s Cinder Cone looks like a kid’s science project volcano gone large, a perfectly conical pile of volcanic rubble rising 750 feet high.

“Cinder Cone is amazing because it’s perfect,” said Middlebury volcanologist and assistant professor of geology Kristina Walowski. “It looks like it hasn’t been touched since it erupted in 1666. And a big part of that is just the climate in the region. It’s very arid. If the exact same cinder cone, for example, was in Costa Rica it would just be a pile of mud covered in a jungle.”

Walowski began her summer field research in the Lassen region by hiking her crew up to Cinder Cone’s double-rimmed summit to get them seeing volcanoes with new eyes.

“When you look out from Cinder Cone,” said Walowski, “every peak, every little bump in every direction is a volcano. All the topography you see is volcanoes that have erupted over the past 20,000 to 50,000 years. And you really get the sense for what a volcanic landscape is like.”

Looking out from Cinder Cone, there’s almost no vegetation as far as the eye can see—save for the Jeffrey pines poking up here and there amidst scrubby banks of manzanita. To the east the aptly named Fantastic Lava Beds spill out almost three miles in an arc between two lakes, the pathways of the once molten lava now etched in stone. Ten miles off in the distance rises Lassen Peak, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range and, like Mount St. Helens, its sister to the north, one of only two volcanoes in the contiguous United States to erupt in the 20th century. Indeed, the Cascade Volcanic Arc (which includes Lassen Peak, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, and Mount St. Helens and stretches from Lassen Peak north into British Columbia) is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and one of the most volcanically active regions in North America.

For Walowski, the view from Cinder Cone is “a great teaching moment. . . . Nothing compares to seeing geologic process or features in the field. It really helps solidify what a volcano is to students when I just take them to Cinder Cone. It changes the framework in which they think about the science they’re doing when they can stand on top of the volcano and see it.”

Dominating the view from Cinder Cone, said Walowski, are more cinder cones, a primary focus of her current research and one of four main types of volcanoes.

Elle Simmons ’21 hikes the rugged terrain in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.

When most people think “volcano” they typically picture one of the superstar stratovolcanoes, like Mount Fuji, Mount Vesuvius, or Mount St. Helens. “Cinder cones aren’t as glamorous as stratovolcanoes because they aren’t these gorgeous, huge mountains with super exciting, intense eruptions and glaciated peaks,” said geology major Elle Simmons, a rising sophomore and one of Walowski’s summer research assistants.

“Even scientists have become overly fascinated by them,” said Walowski, of stratovolcanoes. “So I found it really interesting that there were still a lot of holes in the science of cinder cones, especially in California.”

Cinder cones are created when magma is ejected explosively, rather than flowing out as lava. The ejected magma cools rapidly while traveling through the air and lands on the ground as solid matter. This particulate, also called “cinders,” “scoria,” or “tephra,” can range in size from ash particles to large boulders. Lava can flow out from cracks at the base of a cinder cone during the eruptive phase, but doesn’t make up the cone itself. Geologists describe cinder cones as “monogenetic,” meaning that they are created out of a single eruptive source or event, which can extend over months or years. Typical would be Mexico’s Paricutin. On February 20, 1943, the earth swelled up and split open in the middle of a cornfield and ash began spewing out. By 1952 when Paricutin went dormant, what was once cornfield was now a 1,391-foot-high pile of cinders.

“One of the reasons that Kristina and people who study monogenetic volcanoes are really interested in them,” observed research assistant Sam Kaelin ’19.5, a geology major, “is that they represent a purer expression of the mantle inside the earth, and that’s what she is really interested in—the basic chemistry and functionality of how the earth works.”

Sam Kaelin ’19.5 collects samples during a field research trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park.

This summer Walowski is continuing research on two smaller cinder cones just to the north of the national park’s boundaries. Her overall goal: “to understand how and where the magma was stored, evolved, and tapped prior to eruption.” Her approach combines “physical volcanology” (looking at shapes, physical features, and processes of formation, such as fluid dynamics), and “geochemistry” (analyzing the chemical makeup of the rock itself).

For example, at the site called MBX (for its moniker “Basaltic Andesite of Box Canyon” on the geological map), Walowski is interested in the temperature, pressure, and depth from which the magma exploded. One key to this information can be found by analyzing the chemical composition of the mineral clinopyroxene in tephra and lava samples. Walowski had gathered samples during earlier field trips to MBX and is at work on a research paper coauthored with recent Middlebury graduates, but wants more samples to make sure that the data is as robust and complete as possible. So this summer she and her crew gathered more samples to take back to the lab. She’s also using the samples to further decode the site’s topography and determine how the small valley at the MBX site itself was shaped.

Fieldwork has its grungy side, says Walowski: “It’s being in the sun. It’s hot. It’s strenuous. It’s a lot of hiking, hammering, digging.” But it also brings a kind of joy and builds a unique camaraderie. Walowski credits her own undergraduate fieldwork experiences—looking at volcanic landscapes in California’s Owens Valley—as a huge part of why she became a geologist, and she loves introducing a new generation of students to the rigor and joys of that experience.

Now back in the lab in Bicentennial Hall at work prepping samples, both Kaelin and Simmons feel that a huge part of the richness of being summer research assistants was simply working side by side with Walowski in the field.

“The beauty, not just of Middlebury’s Geology Department but the sciences as a whole, is that I—a 19-year-old undergraduate student—can conduct research that could actually impact a field and discover things that have not been discovered before and contribute to a deeper understanding of geological processes,” said Simmons. “I feel like that’s not something that many people get to experience, so when I was offered this research position I was beyond excited just because of the impact of it all.”

And then there’s the joy of being in nature 24/7.

“I love being outside and I love exploring. I just love it,” said Kaelin, who’s also a guide with the Middlebury Mountain Club.

Simmons said she started college thinking she hated science but took geology in her second semester and was electrified by it. Kaelin had been pursuing computer science while taking geology classes and realized after going on the 2018 J-term geology trip to Costa Rica that he had found the thing that truly excited him.

The students concurred that you know you’ve found the right thing when “you get to that point that you start talking to your friends about the things that you’re learning and they don’t care—you can tell that they don’t care—but you like it so much that you just keep talking.”

Still, the Lassen research also brought home the lesson that field research definitely has its challenges.

When Walowski and crew arrived at their base camp in late July, they opened their car doors to a smoke-filled sky. Four days earlier, sparks from a tire failure on California Route 299 had set off one of the most destructive fires in California’s history. The day before they arrived, the fire jumped the Sacramento River and forced the evacuation of parts of Redding—roughly 60 miles west of their campsite near Butte Lake.

Kaelin, who will begin his senior research project this fall, had planned to identify his own cinder cone site in the Lassen area, with the goal of studying its explosivity and creating an isopach map to show the inner and outer reaches of the exploded particulate. With Walowski’s help, he’d narrowed down the candidates before arriving at Lassen. But a first day of digging at potential sites had turned up muddled layers and tephra that crumbled like dirt in his hand—not the clear stratification and hard volcanic chunks he needed for his analysis.

As the smoke thickened and the group learned of a second fire 30 miles east and decided to decamp, Kaelin realized he had to adjust his fieldwork goals quickly. Fortunately, Walowski knew of a quarry right off a logging road where there was a good exposure of the tephra with easy access, from a cone still relatively unstudied. Kaelin gathered the samples he needed and they hurried out of town.

“I was personally super bummed right away when things didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped,” said Kaelin. “But Kristina was like, ‘This is the way that field science works. You plan and you come up with an idea and you come up with a question and you go out there and you try—and it’s not always going to be perfect.’

“Everything’s not a textbook example like Cinder Cone,” Kaelin continued. “You get out there and there’s trees and there’s soil and there’s smoke and there’s human interaction and you have to adapt to those things and you have to alter your questions and your understanding based on what you’re finding.”

By Gaen Murphree; Photos by Todd Balfour, Kristina Walowski

Slide Show

Move-in day for the Class of 2022 took place on September 3.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – At 9 a.m. sharp, the gates to Château Road opened and within moments the first group of vehicles rolled up to Battell Hall. By 9:10, they were already on their way back out the gate, making room for the stream of cars delivering first-year students on Labor Day.

With the efficiency of a pit crew, teams of orientation leaders descended on the vehicles, unloading each within minutes, and hefted the contents up the Battell stairways.

Similar scenes played out at Allen, Stewart, and Ross as members of the Class of 2022 settled into their new homes to begin the weeklong orientation known as MiddView. President Laurie Patton greeted many of the families in person as they arrived at their residence halls.

Over the coming week, students will meet with advisors, learn more about academic and campus life policies, participate in Convocation, and then leave campus for a multiday adventure related to a theme they chose earlier in the summer. Some will go on wilderness explorations, others on community engagement trips, and still others will explore Vermont.

Julia Goydan (pink shirt) of Chester, NY, and Brooke Laird (second from right) of Darien, CT, figure out the best way to use their space in Allen Hall.

Julia Goydan of Chester, N.Y., and Brooke Laird of Darien, Conn., were mulling the best way to use their unusual space on the top floor of Allen Hall. “We’ve been presented with some interesting architecture,” said Goydan, alluding to the slanted ceilings leading down to the head of her bed. A previous resident of the room had made the most of the angled roofline, Goydan’s dad observed, by adding glow-in-the-dark stars for some nighttime sparkle. “It’s going to be great,” Goydan resolved. “We’re figuring out where to put these dressers and getting some additional lighting to brighten it up and make it our own.” Both were looking forward to their orientation trips later in the week—Goydan will be canoeing on Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks while Laird goes backpacking on the Long Trail.

The Class of 2022 is a highly talented group representing 45 states, the District of Columbia, and 63 countries. The College received 9,227 applications and offered admission to 1,734 students for an 18.8 percent admission rate. Twenty-nine percent of the class is made up of U.S. students of color and 16 percent are the first in their family to attend college. About 660 first-year students are expected on campus this fall with another 104 enrolling in February.

Alyna Baharozian of Westford, MA, with her parents Dwayne and Christine in Alyna's Allen Hall room.

Just a little after 10 a.m. Alyna Baharozian of Westford, Mass., was putting the finishing touches on her room. Her parents, Dwayne and Christine, were enjoying the relative ease of Alyna’s move-in, having sent their two older kids to the University of Michigan. “This is a lot easier than Ann Arbor,” Dwayne laughed. “We drive 11 hours to get there!” Alyna, who is interested in biology and economics, is planning to play for the Panther women’s basketball team this year. But for the moment, she’s focused on learning more about the College and exploring Lake Champlain on her MiddView trip.

Down the hall, Serrin Kim of Boise, Idaho, negotiated her cello past a throng of new arrivals into her Allen Hall room. Inside, the cheerful chaos continued as her roommate, Michaela Sullivan of Newport, R.I., tried out various locations for the last few pieces of furniture.

Michaela Sullivan of Newport, Rhode Island, thinks about the best place for her shelves. Her roommate is Serrin Kim (yellow shirt) of Boise, Idaho.

“These shelving things are giving us a hard time, but I think we’ve figured it out,” said Sullivan, sliding the portable shelf into a slot between the two beds. It wasn’t ideal, but then Sullivan’s mom reminded them that if they lofted their beds, they would have full access to both sets of shelves. Problem solved.

The challenge of making everything fit just where you want it can be like a game of Tetris, joked Middlebury Custodial Supervisor Dan Celik, who was busy meeting students and answering all kinds of questions in Allen Hall. Celik and his staff make a point of being visible on move-in day. “Our custodial team works with the residence-life staff to create the bonds and relationships that are going to last through their two semesters here,” he said.

Caleigh Pope and her mother, Marie, of Rye, N.Y., were setting up shop on the top floor of Allen Hall and hoping to meet her roommate, who had stepped out before they arrived.

Caleigh Pope and her mother, Marie, of Rye, NY, work on Caleigh's room on the top floor of Allen Hall.

A spacious room with a dormer was Pope’s reward for lugging her belongings up four flights on a sticky late-summer day. Pope said she’s thinking about chemistry as a possible major and is excited to jump into her biochemistry-themed first-year seminar titled “Venomous Cures,” with Professor Glen Ernstrom.

Despite the increasing heat and humidity, roommates Eugene Bentley of Cleveland, Ohio, and Tyler Capello of Wellesley, Mass., were thinking ahead to winter and had covered the floor with carpeting between their two beds. Their ground-level room in Stewart Hall looks out on a beautiful stand of trees on the southern end of campus.

The two were pleasantly surprised to learn that they’re both hockey players and, perhaps fittingly, that both of them love the band Coldplay. Bentley is heading off on a wilderness exploration backpacking trip later in the week, while Capello works his fly-fishing skills during an orientation trip to nearby waterways.

First-year students Eugene Bentley, left, and Tyler Capello set up their room on the lower level of Stewart Hall.

Later in the afternoon, parents braved a brief, yet torrential, downpour on their way to hear President Patton and Dean of Admissions Greg Buckles give welcoming remarks at Mead Chapel. “I am delighted to have your students join this extraordinary community that holds an extraordinary set of values,” said Patton.

Students, meanwhile, rounded out their busy first day with an introduction to Middlebury’s Commons system followed by dinner and hall meetings. The annual Convocation to mark the start of the new year will take place on Thursday, September 6, at 7 p.m. in Mead Chapel. Classes begin on Tuesday, September 11.

Reporting by Stephen Diehl; Photos by Todd Balfour