Middlebury College does not equally value all of its students as it is interested in crafting and applauding those who align with its informally maintained narrow mission. In the following passages we investigate a few topics of exploration to breakdown just what our institution does value and question our dedication towards distinction and domination instead of justice.
Activism
President Liebowitz is eager to step up at any opportunity to applaud the efforts of our student activism on campus. He is quick to point out that the Environmental Council, which includes students, helped to push a skeptical board of trustees into building our biomass plant to reduce our carbon footprint. In fact, he clings to that golden message so much that it got him into Time magazine as one of “The 10 Best College Presidents.”
Liebowitz likes to tell of how enthusiastic he was when a group of students came to his office and informed him they wanted to enter the Solar Decathlon. He excitedly threw thousands from his discretionary funds behind the students. Additionally, he organized an all-star team of faculty and administrators to assist them in creating a stellar proposal. Due in large part to Liebowitz’s emphatic support of this endeavor, Middlebury has been accepted by the United States Department of Energy as the only liberal arts college in the history of the competition. Students working on the project have been able to take a reduced course load since they are receiving credit for their dedicated work to the house. While the house will be built and displayed on the National Mall next fall, the students involved were told not to worry about their classes because the Dean that has been assigned to work with them will graciously ensure they receive appropriate accommodations to receive full credit for their work despite being off campus for most all of the semester.
Students are so passionate and determined to get their voice out on the issues they feel strongly about that ten percent of our student body will be traveling to Washington DC for the student climate activist summit Powershift. The Student Government Association graciously awarded thousands of dollars in “loans” so that the organizers could make reservations for bus transportation down to the event. I use the word “loan” hesitantly because it was kind of like the subprime mortgages that were given out to non credit worthy homebuyers that ended up destroying our world by causing an economic downturn so horrible that we were forced to shut down Atwater Dining Hall. There is no way that these loans will be paid back in full, but it is okay, there will be forgiveness because the event bolsters Middlebury’s image. Dean Collado, while hesitating to meet with the Institutional Diversity Committee until six months into her return to the college, despite holding the title as Chief Diversity Officer, nevertheless put her entire support right away behind the Powershift efforts. She even hosted a retreat with Posse and the environmental group Sunday Night Group to try to darken the average skin color of the Middlebury students headed down to Washington.
What is the common theme that holds all of these pretty images together? They are green, but more importantly, they get Middlebury College absurd amounts of press and recognition. While each of these endeavors are certainly fantastic and the accolades that accommodate them are undoubtedly deserved, to claim from this that Middlebury actually supports student activism would be omitting just as big of a piece of the story as our admissions does in their blatant propaganda to attract more and more students to apply to the college so that we can reject them and increase our ranking.
Let me put this as clearly as possible: Middlebury College does not care about student activism. Well, what do I mean? Didn’t I just outline how impressive the administrations’ support of student efforts has been? To be most honest I should add a modifier to the previous statement. Middlebury College does not care about student activism unless it serves to further the image of Middlebury that the administration has imagined. The school does not care about radical action that pushes us to uncomfortable positions where we must examine our implications and complicit actions of injustice. The school does, however, care that student activism comfortably conforms to perpetuate support for what the school wants to be seen as and not how it necessarily is.
When students demanded that the college to take action to address gender affirming policies and other social justice issues on campus, the administration hesitated to embrace the efforts. The college saw a rising power of students pushing for a Gender Council and further delayed action and eventually voted it down in attempts to dissipate student momentum and further marginalize issues of gender that make this campus an incredibly unwelcoming and discriminatory place for far too many students.
However, the administration was not quick to attempt to kill this grassroots, social justice oriented, policy change agent. First they wanted to squeeze Gender Council for all they were worth before setting them out to dry. The brilliant students were asked to give presentations to administrators who did not understand the issues being raised. These workshops were incredibly time intensive to prepare and made the courses the students were enrolled in very challenging to keep up with. The administration abused the students for their incredible work and failed to give them any recognition.
Just like the biomass gasification plant, students pushed and pushed for Gender Council. Unlike the bio plant the students were never taken seriously with Gender Council. Just like the Solar Decathlon, the students involved in the Gender Council efforts put in so much time that it took away from their studies. Unlike the Solar Decathlon, the Gender Council students were told that their efforts were entirely “volunteered” and they were not to receive any course credit. Just like Powershift, Gender Council tried to be inclusive of all students on campus. Unlike Powershift, Gender Council did not have the administration bring in different student organizations from across campus and encourage them to participate.
As this evidences, Middlebury College does not care about student activism when it questions privileges and pushes for just systemic change. The administration relegates all race and gender work to a lower status of voluntary work without acknowledging that being able to access facilities is not about getting us in the headlines, but rather about a method of survival for our marginalized students. “Bad” kids do not ask tough questions. “Good” kids act as puppets for adults own agenda and massagers of the adults’ egos.
Literacy
In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argues that with the invention of the printing press came the invention of the child. A knowledge gap was created between those who had access to the “rational” world of written ideas and those who did not. Literacy was the key to adulthood and had to be earned.
Middlebury very much agrees with Postman in that they are sure to assign us way too much reading to feasibly actually complete, just so on Princeton Review rankings we can jump for joy when we are one of the top schools where “Students Study the Most.” To make it out of Middlebury you have to be “literate” and thus on the path to becoming a successful adult.
However, it is not just important that we are literate, but rather also what we are literate in. “Good” kids do not read romance novels. When one was assigned to a Sociology of Heterosexuality course, students nervously made excuses why they were purchasing a romance novel in the stores. The less courageous students just went to Amazon. It feels so wrong to buy a romance novel because that is not what “good” kids read. We have all internalized this notion that we have to maintain a front of being a “good” kids because otherwise how else would we have ever gotten into Middlebury? One student admitted in class that she was so embarrassed by the cover of her book that she was sure to purchase in the self-checkout aisle so she would not be seen.
Romance novels may be bad, but worse is to be literate in the humanities. Despite Middlebury claiming that it wants us to be well versed in a diverse array of disciplines, the liberal arts rhetoric runs no deeper than lip service. “Bad” kids go out and change the world in ways that do not get Middlebury press. “Good” kids go out and change the world in ways that do. Ultimately, “good” kids go out to become “good” adults and make a lot of money (ethically or not is irrelevant) and donate it back in the form of a building to the school so they can be forever immortalized.
Preparing us to be “good” adults is all about preparing us to dominate. We may like that you can think, but while you are at it major in Economics so you do not just end up starting to think so hard that you begin to undermine capitalistic principles that allow us to study drowning in such privilege.
The only students that are “good” enough to meet with the “holy” board of trustees are those involved in the Student Investment Committee. These students literally manage a few hundred thousand dollars of our endowment and are continually applauded by our administration for their success. The college holds them up as being the exemplary model of who and what a “good” Middlebury student is.
The Student Investment Committee knows their important role in helping “kids” grow up to be the successful adults that Middlebury wants them to be. A poster to recruit for the group reads: “Because being literate enough to read Kant does not mean you are financially literate enough to pick the right mortgage.” By reading this article and working through my ideas it has been demonstrated that you are clearly literate, but just what type of literate are you? Is it the appropriate literacy to be granted adulthood by Middlebury standards?
Protecting the PhD
“Adult status has to be earned so damn those “kids” whose intelligence positions them over me. They do not have a PhD yet and I will make that known.” Of course our professors may not convey themselves as blatant as this, but undoubtedly the thought has crossed many of their minds. This, in turn, has shaped their action towards their students. In so doing, protectionary measures are taken to ensure the value of the PhD is retained.
If the measure by which we considered one to be an adult was put into question we would have a lot of previously “adults” fighting to regain the dominant status they thought that they had worked and deserved to acquire. Of course there is no one finite measure of adulthood and we should really be using plurals to take about the concept since there are so many various conceptions.
Just like other identities, the saliency of which basis we use to position ourselves as adults or children varies on our situation. In the college setting, most certainly an important signifier of status and distinction is the terminal degree possessed by faculty. Once granted a PhD, these newly arrived adults are actively investing in ensuring chil does not substitute in for the Ph.
Students may be encouraged to think critically in the classroom, but like all behaviors there is a limit we place on this. A student’s capacity to think may be highly regarded until it reaches the point of competition with the instructor. At this point nervous energy invades and the defense of the border of distinction is on.
Many professors work to ensure that this point will never come close to being reached. They do so by having their students remind them of their doctoral status every time the students wish to address them. Such is like reminding Jane and Bobby to call Edwin’s mom Mrs. Claudett. See Mrs. Claudett is a woman who has achieved “adulthood” and the “kids” Jane and Bobby are thus of a lower status and they must address her in a way that maintains such inequality.
This fact is internalized to such a large degree that at new faculty trainings at Middlebury a topic of concern is what the students should be allowed to call the arriving scholars. When one woman professor suggested that she wanted her students to call her by her name, others jumped on her repulsively. To use your first name in the classroom destroys a distance that faculty “work hard” to “achieve.” It immediately allows the status of that person’s “adulthood” in the academy to come into question.
The college creates stern policy against students earning credit for courses taught at community colleges. Likewise, online classes receive no credit. These policies are heavily endorsed by our faculty because they want to have written into bylaws the fact that students may not receive credit from a location where they may not necessarily be taught by someone with a PhD.
When one person gets challenged there is a frantic response because we are concerned about a snowball being started that will soon upend the privileged position we know ourselves as occupying and put into question who we really are. Suddenly we are left without our signifier of distinction from the students and consequently are extremely uncomfortable by that fact.
Soon the growing ball of snow will be put on display in the construction of a snowperson. Snowpeople are vulnerable for they lack the clothing that would try to trick us into believing that they are a more significant being then they really are, just a mound of matter like us all, a mere mortal who will melt away come the wrath of a global warming.
Languages
Although we may ostentatiously wish to believe otherwise, most people do not know what the heck Middlebury College is and could not care less about it. When people ask us where it is they immediately everyone must be a skier not the valedictorians of their high school. When people have heard of Middlebury, they talk about what great language programs it has.
Why is our language program so revered and what is its honest purpose? The fact is we do not learn languages at Middlebury to celebrate cultures, rather we merely learn languages to dominate them. “Bad” kids may be involved in actions that appreciate life (drugs, punk rock, skateboarding), but we must criticize such “immature hedonistic fools.” We are “good” kids and that means we have no time to enjoy life, but rather must follow the correct disciplined path so that we may become proper adults who have the power to control and manipulate life.
Any song that may be learned in our language classes should be utilized for nothing more than a mnemonic device that then allows us to progress to our next stage in becoming dictating adults. Most of our language classes do not even try to put up a façade that claims otherwise.
On one of the first vocabulary lists for students learning in Arabic is “United Nations.” That of course is because we are explicitly teaching our “good” kids to become diplomats. The very Arabic they learn is incredibly classed and only used by high political officials. One student remarked that learning Arabic here and then expecting to be able to use it to talk to somebody on the street would be just like learning Latin in our Classics department and then expecting to fluently interact with everyone in Italy.
In Hebrew classes students are always debating Palestine and Israel. We actively teach that there is no other reason why one should desire to learn the language.
All of our languages are taught in a very elite dialect of the colonizer and never of the colonized. The locations of our schools abroad perfectly illustrates this point as well. We do not want to teach the dialect of some “powerless people” because then how will you be able to utilize the language to extract power from them?
Just as we as “good” kids speak the “proper” dialects of the languages we learn, so too is there immense pressure on students to speak “standard” American English. While we have a student body from all over the globe, it would be very hard to decipher that fact merely from how we talk. When the kid from Texas has the exact same “non-existent” accent as the kid from the Midwest, we are clearly devaluing a certain culture and placing one above another, but so too is that what Middlebury is always doing. As “good” kids we have been granted the duty to learn to dominate the world.
