Middlebury Dis/identifications: Building an Anti-Institution Campus Movement

I am writing this article to bring other activists into a conversation that has already begun among students who are working toward revolution and liberation, and who see all systems of oppression and privilege as irrevocably intertwined. I am writing this article for all of the radical activists who have ever felt disempowered or silenced after requesting institutional support for their causes. I am writing this article because, as an anti-oppression activist, I believe that the institution of Middlebury is systematically co-opting, regulating, neutralizing, silencing, and marginalizing our movements. When we want to make big waves at Middlebury, it can be nearly impossible to get authority figures to support us. The reason for this is that we are struggling for survival and liberation within an institution whose goals are often fundamentally at odds with our own. I am writing this article because I’m angry, and because, as Audre Lorde once wrote, “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”

Let me start by defining what Middlebury is, exactly, because I think we students often forget. Middlebury is a corporation that disproportionately admits and hires heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, English-speaking white people with U.S. citizenship and no criminal background. It both benefits from and perpetuates oppressive ideologies of racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism, imperialism, and the gender binary. A corporation’s primary goal is to accumulate wealth. In a racist and sexist country, making profit typically requires perpetuating systems of power like white and male privilege. As a corporation, then, Middlebury would not exist today without oppressive systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. I am not arguing that Administrators intentionally perpetuate these systems. But first and foremost, Administrators are accountable to the corporation, and they want to preserve a particular image of this corporation that will lead to more profit. This means that for things like safety and access, Administrators typically will not go beyond compliance with government regulations. For example, why would they make old buildings more wheelchair accessible if the ADA doesn’t require it? The issue is not whether these are “nice people” who run our school; the issue is accountability, and the connections between Middlebury and the vast systems of power that structure all of our lives.

In the context of this corporate landscape, we cannot expect the institution to protect us from experiences of marginalization and violence in the classroom, in our dorms, and in the dining halls.

Think of the most successful activist campaigns in the past few years, and think of how they were presented to both the Administration, and to the general community: carbon neutrality, all-gender housing, and student printing budgets come to my mind. While these were all important victories that were achieved in spite of great institutional resistance, what these campaigns have in common is that they either save money for the corporation, or prevent potential lawsuits on the basis of discrimination (which also saves money). In order to be considered “successful” activists, we are often forced to perpetuate the common-sense logic of capitalism: goals like accumulating endless profit and competing with other higher-ed corporations are not questioned, and we ignore the human costs of exploited staff members and investments in unsustainable or oppressive markets.

For those who are or have been directly marginalized by capitalism, putting a dollar value on our activism can be degrading, oppressive, and marginalizing. But on a more systematic level, being forced to quantify our activism effectively silences radical or minority causes, whose goals may not save Middlebury enough money, or may not fit into this monetized system at all. The causes that lose out are the ones that overtly challenge Middlebury’s whiteness, male supremacy, and able-bodied privilege: causes with labels like “Diversity”, “Social Justice”, and “Sustainability” receive funding and institutional support because they lead to increased prestige and profits without forcing anyone to critically interrogate privilege and oppression. Ask yourself: if a top Administrator is presented with two campaigns – one that advertises experiences of racism in the classroom to incoming students of color, and one that advertises the racial diversity of our student body – whom do you think will get funding and support? Institutional support always comes with strings attached, which forces students to become accountable to the corporation, rather than to the political causes or marginalized populations we are supposed to be fighting for. Collaborating with Administrators limits our options in terms of the goals we can pursue and how we can achieve them. As someone who believes that capitalism is thoroughly enmeshed with all other systems of oppression, the goal of my activism is not to make Middlebury wealthier or more competitive, but rather to make it a more accessible environment with a more equitable power structure.

When activists work within Middlebury’s institutionalized avenues of change, we are forced to structure our organizations on a vertical-power model, like a corporation, with something mimicking a board of directors that makes decisions about how to spend money and what causes to support. This corporatized system of activism forces members of the same clubs to compete with one another for organizational power, which often silences and marginalizes those who do not win positions of authority. Corporatized activism also serves to pit entire clubs against each other in competition: environmentalists, prison abolitionists, and anti-racists compete for funding for symposia, speakers, parties, and club budgets, instead of collaborating to make the most effective, cross-cutting events and clubs possible. As a result, many radical activists who have been denied funding harbor resentment against students and organizations whose projects help Middlebury gain some “green prestige” or “diversity points”, but which don’t significantly improve the quality of our lives. The thing is, there is money at Middlebury, but most of it is spent on things like paint jobs and renovations. Our activism need not be a zero-sum game. We need to stop resenting the people whom the institution privileges, and start blaming the institution itself for pitting us against one another, for forcing us to see our causes as mutually exclusive, for spending money excessively and irresponsibly, and for using the empty promise of funding to neutralize radical critiques of power.

The lack of diversity among our organizing strategies shows that this institution not only structures and regulates our movements, but it has even limited the possibilities we can imagine for a better campus, and for a better world beyond Middlebury. I want to argue that the only way to combat the control that Middlebury has over our bodies, movements, and imaginations is through a radical dis-identification with the institution. In other words, we need to start thinking about what it would mean to work outside of these avenues that are designed to produce profit and prestige. While we should respect the efforts of institutional players like the Chief Diversity Officer and the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee, we should do so with extreme skepticism and distance, acknowledging that we are accountable to different causes.

Given that Administrators are accountable to the corporation, it is not surprising when they co-opt, exploit, and neutralize the efforts of radical student activists. Personally, I have routinely had my ideas co-opted by College employees, only to see them passed off as the gifts of a benevolent institution. I have been asked to put in long hours of unpaid labor for the goal of improving Middlebury – have completed research, staff workshops, and outreach campaigns that, frankly, are in the job descriptions of Administrators – and when my help was no longer needed or it was seen as forcing Middlebury beyond compliance, I have been told to be quiet and go home. In the classroom and in meetings with Administrators, I have been made to feel ridiculous, naïve, and immature for holding radical anti-capitalist and transfeminist views, and for making “impossible demands”. I know I am not the only one who has experienced this treatment. If this has been your experience, let’s vocalize and share our dissatisfaction, and turn it into something transformative.

We need to acknowledge that the revolution will not be funded – it will not come from the top-down, but from the ground-up. Instead of working with people who do not respect me and who want to keep me from dreaming big, I’d like to work directly with my communities to find ways of organizing outside the institution to build trust, love, accountability, and transformation in ways that aren’t defined by profit, prestige, and privilege. This is the conversation that I want us all to have.

This article was not meant to be an exhaustive critique of activism at Middlebury. But for those activists who have ever felt silenced and marginalized by the institution, I think we need to face some uncomfortable truths about our activism. First, we need to be more transparent about the fact that Middlebury would not be here without capitalism, white supremacy, and the stolen land it occupies. We need to question what it means to fight for acceptance, liberation, accessibility, and justice within such a corporation. We need to ask what it means that we, as anti-oppression activists, benefit from the social, cultural, and material capital that this oppressive institution hands to us. Second, we need to restructure our movements, and redefine political success as something more powerful and pervasive than a policy change or a Council. We need to rely less on institutional patronage as a means to our ends, and build community alternatives to colluding with authority, while being realistic about the fact that this community entirely renews itself every four years. Finally, and most importantly, we need to renegotiate the connections among our movements and the institution. In seeking out the radical possibilities for anti-institution collaboration, we need to demand – not request – that this experience we have purchased is not a damaging one. We need to turn our dissatisfaction with the institution into positive change by spreading guerilla art, staging sit-ins, storming Community Council meetings, organizing labor and academic strikes, speaking the truth to prospective students and Administrators, and shouting out our stories of how this institution has marginalized us.

What we need to do is stop trusting and identifying with Middlebury, Inc., and start being proud of our identities as wing-nuts, as rabble-rousers, and as pissed-off radicals.


(the gadfly )