clarity, not such a rarity

“what is the GADFLY?” you ask, with ingenuous and laudable curiosity. 

the GADFLY is a student-generated newspaper and blog intended as a forum for underrepresented voices in the Middlebury community. as an independent publication yet unswallowed by the political or institutional motives of the Middlebury College and its dancing bear, The Campus, we espouse a policy of absolute freedom of speech. this means that the articles presented in the GADFLY come to you 100% unedited and uncensored. since we recognize that unfiltered communication has a tendency to stir up emotional storms, we wish to iterate that all views reflected herein are solely those of their authors. freedom of expression is their right, not just under the legal sanction of Amendment 1 of United States Constitution or Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but as a condition of their being human beings endowed with the gift of communication. it is also of course your right, and if you disagree with any particular idea, you may rant about it to your friends or perhaps engage in discussion by commenting on the blog posts of our articles.

“why is the GADFLY?”

when an institution such as Middlebury College goes to great lengths to allow the financial and bureaucratic arrangements that make the publication of a college newspaper possible, it has a vested interest in the product. any college newspaper’s primary purpose is to serve as the public face of the institution, the broadcasted documentation of its activities and developments. its secondary purpose, which is an extension of the first, is to reflect the views of the student body. both of these objectives have a way of interpreting the overall character of a college – both in what is said and what is not said. because the college newspaper is read by a host of persons, many of whom, such as alumni and parents, have a direct impact on the institution’s success, the college reasonably takes steps to ensure that the public presentation matches its self-image and advances its goals, contradicting them only on certain terms (focused critiques with proposed solutions). 

so what portrait of Middlebury College does The Campus sketch out? : professionalism, pragmatism, global citizenship, diversity, environmentalism, athleticism, localism, liberalism, to name just a few qualities. Middlebury College is indeed many of these things (to varying contestable degrees), but i can conceive of several faces of the college which hardly ever see the light of readership: hostile homophobia, spatial and social boundaries between races, aggressive misogyny on weekends, flagrant littering, departmental favoritism, the mysterious disappearance of millions of dollars into an opaque budget, the exploitation of third world nations as training grounds for a class of elite professionals, and so on. (suggestion: brainstorm your own set of words for how Middlebury sees itself. then brainstorm words that describe how you see Middlebury! it'll be fun, trust me). images and opinions which don’t square with the desired public production of Middlebury College, The College on the Hill, are seen as a liability and infrequently make it past The Campus’s editors. even sadder, they usually don’t make it there at all due to the stigma which outliers place on themselves.

it is from this kind of discrepancy between the ideal and the real that radical newspapers are born. in hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation, initiatives similar to the GADFLY exist. UNC has The Boiling Point, BU has The Student Underground, Darmouth has the Darmouth Free Press, Berkeley has X, Vanderbilt has the Orbit. these newsletters have achieved success within their communities in disseminating alternative views on local and global issues across a broad range of topics. it is our hope that the GADFLY will serve similarly to inform this community of nuances in opinion and identity at Middlebury College, or at least raise eyebrows if not fists.

~ APERTURE E.V.

of the GADFLY