With locations in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as here at home in Addison County, the program offers students a chance to work four days a week in different local food-related jobs and then take the fifth day to gather as a group and focus on a particular topic of the curriculum, such as sustainable agriculture and ecology, food systems, community and economic development, nutrition and health, food security and justice, and cultural food traditions.

FoodWorks was piloted in Louisville last summer and expanded this year to include Vermont partners. The 26 students—16 in Vermont and 10 in Kentucky—are working in local government, business and retail, publishing and marketing, nonprofits, and on area farms.

To learn more about what the students are doing on a daily basis and how they’re contributing to their communities, check out the FoodWorks website and blog.

Rehearsal in Seeler Studio Theatre

Emily Feldman ’09 brought her play “The Pilot Project,” about three people who meet on a flight from New York to Rome. Jesse Holland ’02 came from Los Angeles to direct; Tara Giordano ’02 and Joe Varca ’02 came from New York for the roles of Savannah, a sharp-tongued flight attendant with a heart of gold, and Larry, a suspicious man might also be a reluctant hero; and Kristen Connolly ’02 arrived from the set of season two of “House of Cards” to play the part of Eve, a gentle ingénue in emotional danger.

The play was performed on June 8 as a dramatic reading in Seeler Studio Theatre with about 50 people in the audience. Throughout their week together, the five professionals revised the 75-minute drama by cutting lines, changing stage directions, and examining the logic of each character’s words and actions.

On the eve of the play’s premiere, the cast sat down with Middlebury Magazine for a conversation. 

MiddMag: What’s it been like to test out a new play here?

Emily: We are doing it in one of the safest possible ways, but with people who are fiercely intelligent and able to help us decide where to go with it. For me to come back and be amongst the teachers who got me interested in writing and supported my writing, and to connect with them and show them where I am now as opposed to where I was four years ago, it’s a great benchmark. And it’s a way to launch myself into the next phase of my writing, which will be pursuing a master of fine arts [at UC-San Diego] in the fall.

Dana: It feels like the same voice grown up. [To Emily] You have always had this quirky ability to nail the thought, nail the emotion on paper, but you have all this confidence now about what’s theatrical and what pleases you and what makes a scene work in your world. It’s still “Emilyworld,” but it’s all grown up.

Tara: We have a similar language as a foundation because we all went through the theatre program here. But it’s not only that. Jesse directed my senior project and Joey’s senior project and Kristen’s, and now he’s directing all three of us. We don’t have to figure out what’s safe. We have a shared history together and I feel really comfortable going deep into the work right away.

Joe Varca ’02 as Larry, a modern-day traveling salesman

Joe: Jumping into that vocabulary is such an incredible gift for all of us. And it’s wonderful when you start working on a new play and there’s already so much depth there. There is logic and answers for all of the stuff our characters are doing. It just feels like an incredibly even and rich world that we are jumping into.

Kristen: A lot of times when you are working on a new play or you are doing a staged reading, you don’t have that much time to work on something and people are running in a million different directions, but here we can focus. We have had this whole week to work together, and then, by all of us going back to the same house at night, we keep talking about the play.

Emily: Right! When working at home, people meet for rehearsal and then go their separate ways. But by having a house for a couple of days and having the college let us to go back to college for a week [everyone laughs] lets us keep the conversation going about the work.

Jesse: Most of us live in cities right now, and it is just really, really beautiful up here. And the people in cities are generally pretty stressed out and self-centered, and the people up here are generally very giving. We have gotten so much support from everyone here. They really didn’t have to do it…

Dana: Fools! Fools!

Jesse: … and then there are trees and people here.

Kristen: And the cheese.

Jesse: Yes, the trees, the people, and the cheese.

Kristen: Let’s devote a few hours of rehearsal to that.

The cast of three: Tara, Kristen, and Joe

MiddMag: How did the idea for MiddSummer Play Lab get started?

Tara: Emily said, “Do you want to work on a play again this summer?” We had worked on one in a similar manner last summer in New York. And she said, “I’ll write it. Who do you want to be in it with you?” and I thought immediately of these two [pointing to Kristen and Joe] although we figured they’d be too busy.

Jesse: For me, it just felt like something I really wanted to do, so I came on board and committed to it happening.

Kristen: And then there’s the other part. We thought maybe there’s a way of incorporating theatre students into the process — to be rehearsing the play and working with the students. So it was like, “What would they be interested in?” [During the course of the week the students produced their own actor demo reels.]

 Tara: After the first rehearsal we had a feedback session with the students. I was taken by how much the students had to contribute and how intelligent their views were. It was one of the best feedback sessions I had ever been to.

Jesse: Yeah, I have been to some deadly feedback sessions! This was the best feedback session I have ever been to. It was a combination of Dana leading it and the brilliance of the students.

Dana: The students were all talking about the play as opposed to pretending to be talking about the play when they were talking about themselves, which is what kills feedback sessions.

Jesse: Who’s idea was it to use the [Liz Lerman Critical Response] guidelines?

Joe: It was Emily’s.

The playwright and the director

Emily: So I was thinking about, what do I have to offer people who are actors going into theatre, especially in New York? When I first got out of college, I was practiced at talking about work when the writer wasn’t there, [but not at] talking about work that’s in progress. I had to get used to phrasing my questions and opinions in a way that’s flexible and opens up possibilities for the writer rather than closes doors.

Kristen: It was really great.

Jesse: It was astonishing!

Joe: One of the exciting things about what we have been doing is that we have an on-camera class with the students during the day, and then we have the open rehearsals so the students get to see how a new play is made. They are getting both worlds: film and theatre.

Emily: It was exciting for me watching Dana lead the feedback session, especially thinking about myself as a teacher this fall. Recognizing the presence and clarity and peace of mind he brings to creating the energy in that room. He allows for those kinds of conversations.

Jesse: I have a final thought. My focus right now is on directing films and my favorite part of the process is working with actors. Unfortunately, that is not a high percentage of the film experience because the focus is on getting the shot, and so this week has reconnected me with what I love most in the world, which is working with actors.

Emily: I don’t think I knew when I was 18 why I was choosing to go to a small college in Vermont, but the ability to do this kind of thing now is probably why.

Kristen: I hadn’t been back in 10 years so I got choked up a couple of times. It’s wonderful to see the things that have changed and the things that have stayed the same, and just to be here.

Kristen Connolly ’02 as Eve

And with that, Kristen Connolly’s final remark hung over the theatre for a few extra seconds, for isn’t that what a college reunion is supposed to be all about? Seeing what has changed and what has stayed the same and immersing oneself in it for a few days.

The alumni then stood up and Jesse Holland announced that rehearsal would start in five minutes. Later this summer, “The Pilot Project” by Emily Feldman will be presented again in a special one-night-only performance, July 26 at 10:30 p.m. at the Atlantic Stage 2 Theatre in New York City, in conjunction with Middlebury’s Off-Broadway summer theatre project, PTP/NYC.  

I. K&R Man

On December 10, 2008, Felix was having an early dinner in Saltillo, capital of the Mexican state of Coahuila, about three hours south of the Texas border. Americans know Saltillo best for the traditional clay tiles it exports to high-end kitchen designers and interior decorators; but the biggest employers, General Motors and Chrysler, operate a pair of automobile assembly plants. They have made the region relatively prosperous, fostering the growth of an upper-middle class, stirring patronage in the better eating establishments, and creating a boom in another industry: hostage taking.

One of the town’s best restaurants, El Mesón Principal del Norte, specializes in spit-roasted meat. Felix had ordered the goat. An American citizen born in Cuba and based in Miami, he was a consultant whose work took him to Mexico at least 20 times a year. He was dining with three associates, speaking fluent Spanish—the sort of scene our world-friendly college likes to imagine—when one of his two cell phones rang. The call came from a friend named Pilar Valdez, head of security for the Saltillo Industrial Group. He was being held by Los Zetas, the most vicious drug cartel in a nation dominated by cartels.

While the Zetas and other Mexican gangs have grown rich from smuggling narcotics and marijuana into the United States, in the past decade or so, kidnapping has provided a growing alternative revenue stream. Almost half of all Mexicans say they have been affected by kidnapping—having been taken themselves, having had a relative or friend abducted, or having received scam calls saying a loved one is being held. Relatives of victims often receive a finger or an ear to hurry negotiations along. The kidnappers go where the money is, focusing on the nation’s business class.

Which is why Felix was in Mexico. A security expert, he had given a pair of lectures to local businessmen, telling them how to respond in the event of a kidnapping. Keep calm, he told them. Don’t offer too much money. Felix knew what he was talking about; he had been instrumental in the release of some 100 hostages, according to the Houston-based firm he worked with, ASI Global. A “response consultant” with more than two decades’ experience, Felix was at the top of a growing profession called K&R, kidnapping and ransom.

Soon after Pilar Valdez called him, the man’s son came into the restaurant and sat at another table. Felix talked to the young man, then left the restaurant briefly and returned looking shaken. After a visit to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, Felix rejoined his dinner companions. He handed over his laptop, shoulder bag, and a cell phone—the one he used to call his family. “If I’m not back soon,” he said, “call these numbers.” He left a card with the contact information for ASI and for his wife, Lourdes. Then he stood out on the curb for half an hour.

Shortly after seven o’clock, two vehicles drove up. Pilar Valdez sat in one of them, a white Jeep Cherokee. He had been badly beaten. One of the men inside the SUV came out and put his arm around Felix. They talked briefly, and Felix got into the car. An hour later, Valdez was dropped off with a few pesos for transportation. Felix has not been seen since.

There is more to Felix’s story, entailing the usual corrupt officials, American diplomats, the FBI, the toxic outward flow of drugs to the States and the reverse flow of guns; Felix’s wife; their five grown children; his music and friendship and the scholarship in his name that reflects the best of the College.

But as you shall see, Felix himself provided the moral of the story. He once wrote to friends that his work in kidnapping and ransom was to fight “barbarism.” At a time when the purpose of the liberal arts is under challenge, Felix gives us an answer: a liberal education should nurture civilized souls like Felix Batista who can cross boundaries and carry a light into a barbarous world.

The surnames of all 23 members of the Class of 1890 are etched into the side of this 14-inch-long noisemaker along with this comment: “This horn was blown September 3, 1889, for the amusement of the freshmen.” But that was not the first time this particular horn was pressed into service. According to the details meticulously incised into it, the horn was also blown in October 1887 “for the amusement of the citizens of Cornwall,” and again in November 1888 at a parade honoring U.S. president Benjamin Harrison and his vice president, Levi Morton, a favorite son from Shoreham. It was sounded at a party thrown by the class orator, Burton Willard Norton, in 1889, and it was blown for President Ezra Brainerd, Class of 1864, later that same year. Was “Old Metaphysics” amused? We may never know, but if you blow into the Class of 1890’s horn today, it emits an odious sound.

The metal instrument was donated to the College Archive by the family of Lucretius Henry Ross, Class of  1890, or perhaps by “L. H. Ross χΨ” himself. Vice president of his class, Ross went on to Harvard Medical School, became a physician, served as a trustee of the College, and passed away at the age of 91. And judging from his keepsake, he obviously enjoyed a good “horning” every now and then.

Now, look at that photograph on this page, an image captured by one of Ted’s former students. Look at that impish half grin; look at how Ted smiles as much with his eyes as with his mouth. It’s not hard to imagine him looking that way when he arrived at Middlebury 35 years ago, seeing a blank canvas stretched out before him. He surely delighted in imagining what could be, just as we can express a measure of delight in recognizing what has been.

Ted has worn many titles—too many to mention here, at least in any way that gives them proper weight—and has taught an array of bright students at Middlebury and elsewhere (Iowa, Texas, NYU), yet what has remained constant is a state of what colleague and friend Stephen Donadio has described as “serene velocity,” (which is also the title of a film that Ted has long admired).

This is what set Ted apart in the classroom—and as a scholar, as a teacher, and in the world of film, where he is held in such high regard. No doubt this state of serene velocity will accompany Ted into retirement, as he turns his attention and that impish smile to further avenues of exploration that await his attention.

A recent Sunday tested that theory. An overcast afternoon found Ted in Otter Creek Bakery with one of his grandsons, 10-year-old Sutton. As the young boy quietly enjoyed a giant chocolate cookie, Ted softly greeted other customers (a neighbor, a former chair of the Middlebury Board of Trustees). How serene (!).

“What a nice way to spend the afternoon,” a friend remarked.

“We’re about to go clean the third floor of the house, then we’re going to unpack and shelve my books. After that, we’re going swimming,” Ted replied, as casually as one would ask for a pack of sugar. “Now, when are we going canoeing in the Adirondacks…?”

Guided by the museum’s curator of education, Sandi Olivo, the children study and inventory the painting’s elements: numerous casks on a sandy beach; a pennant in a breeze; a blue jacket draped on a boat’s gunwale; clouds driving over land; and out at sea, a tiny sail tacking off a distant shore. Above the seascape, a Bourguereau oil with its Olympic bosoms and bottoms elicits a sideways glance or two.

Upstairs, another Weybridge School group studies a John Sloan crayon drawing, Dreaming, 1906. This gallery affords a balcony’s overhead view of the museum’s front entryway, an Assyrian panel, and, directly below one’s feet, the admissions desk, where an attendant greets newcomers and another scans a bank of security monitors.

“First,” says the fourth-grade teacher to the assembled children, “your job is to just look at the image.” The children regard John Sloan’s crayon lines, while an outsider squints down at the security monitors, stifling the urge to wave at oneself, an Observer observing an Observer, all the while being observed by another observer there at the admissions desk. Meanwhile, the teacher Socratically asks questions; hands shoot up, and she leads the children into discerning the difference between a painting and the Sloan crayon drawing.

Below, standing near the Assyrian alabaster relief, Winged Genie Pollinating the Date Palm, is security monitor Jonathan Blake; the stone relief is from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Kalhu, in present-day northern Iraq, and monitor Blake is from the Granite State of New Hampshire and an estimable photographer of art and news events.

The chatter of fourth-graders echoes around Blake, and he recalls his favorite children’s discussion of the art at Middlebury as a class studied the Assyrian genie’s graven image. “One kid announced with great authority that ‘It’s the Easter Fairy,’ whose job was to follow the Easter Bunny around and make sure the candy eggs are okay,” Jonathan Blake remarks. “Another kid noticed the genie’s ear ornament. To him, a fifth-grader who loved to play chess, it resembled an inverted bishop’s piece—‘He’s the inventor of chess!’ the kid explained. I love the way kids think!” Before its placement in the museum, the Assyrian relief hung for a half century in a cramped Munroe Hall entryway, where occasionally students would stub out their cigarettes on it as they hurried to their history or literature classes.

Fifteen lithe audience members, faculty and students, assemble in the Dance Theatre on a late Monday afternoon, all dressed either in big sweaters and scarves or in big, sagging tee-shirts, to hear a lecture by Katie Martin, improvisatory dancer, choreographer, and teacher at Hampshire College, who studied at Bennington, where she came under the influence of the renowned, innovative choreographer Trisha Brown.

Martin shares a series of slides from Bennington—candids of some of the greatest modern dancers when they were at the southern Vermont college. One sees the socializing Martha Graham and Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey, and there is a selection from Trisha Brown’s earlier work in Water Motor. This elicits a delighted exclamation from Middlebury’s senior lecturer in dance, Penny Campbell, herself no stranger to the Bennington campus with the summer dance program she cofounded.

“Water Motor!” Campbell exclaims. “That was my first composition piece!” As is often the case in this theater, the delight is infectious and everyone laughs. Martin, with her cascade of long, dark hair, will demonstrate her own work out on the floor, but before that, her talk touches on the teachings of choreographer William Forsythe and then segues into “improvisation metaphors” drawn from the natural world’s awe-inspiring “collective individualism”—a swarm of fireflies, a legion of army ants, and (the Observer’s favorite) flocking birds, such as starlings or pigeons or the hundreds of darting, wheeling, banking Arctic snow buntings observed aloft in the Lemon Fair river valley that very bright, cold morning.

On this day (possibly on all days), every person in the theater-tech class is attired entirely in navy blue in the noisy, high-ceilinged workshop overseen by the associate technical director, Jim Dougherty.

Pulleys and cables. Ductwork. Circular saws, band saws, radial arm saws, drill presses, pipe clamps, wire spools, the high whine of a transformer. A student runs a hacksaw across a small metal bar clamped in a vise, set up on the end of a cloth-draped worktable, upon which lies, face-down, a fully articulated human skeleton.

The class is preparing scenery and props for a production of Howard Barker’s The Castle, a bawdy drama of crusaders returning home after a seven-year campaign. Other artifacts, whether from this or past dramas, appear as one takes in the vast workspace; there’s a regulation-height basketball hoop, and 15 feet above the laboring students’ heads, one can see a plywood swan, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, and a surfboard-sized Hostess Twinkie.

Next door, in the Seeler Studio Theatre, a student machine-stitches white muslin at a workstation on risers, where audience seating for The Castle is to be, while another uses a small portable steamer to smooth finished fabric hanging from a clothesline. It bobs gently as the student irons, causing sympathetic vibrations in a bright roll of razor wire—future stage scenery—looped above her head. Scores of dark stage lights hang overhead, poised to light some future drama.

Three pm on a Wednesday, in the 20th year of the Mahaney Center’s existence, the Observer is perching on a bench outside the Dance Theatre. The students, faculty, and staff striding past take on an ensemble quality: all the corridor’s a stage. A music senior bustles down a hall, making thoughtful conducting motions with one arm. Down the hall, piano ruminations trickle out of Classroom 125 and laughter from Seminar 126. On a wall, a framed poster commemorates the building’s opening celebration, held in 1992 from September 28–October 10, which featured the collaborative work of choreographers and composers, the Fred Haas Jazz Ensemble, and an alumni dance concert. It all culminated in a gala benefit for the Center for the Arts with Misha Dichter, the Emerson String Quartet, Claire Bloom, and the David Dorfman Dance Company.

At the opening, crowds in finery not often seen in Vermont strolled past the new music library, peered into but did not mark the floor of the Dance Theatre, noted the courtyard tables and chairs and the whimsical space of the café just outside the museum portals, and admired the soaring atrium heights overhead; two years ahead, in 1994, the Committee on Art in Public Places would install its first work of art way up in the very space above—Jonathan Borofsky’s acrylic and urethane installation, I dreamed I could fly at 3,876,225—the figure of an ecstatic young man, floating and transfixed.

Notes on Some Changes in Two Decades: (1) The music library has been reintegrated into the general stacks at the Davis Library, gaining instructional and assembling rooms and offices for the art history and architecture department; (2) the Borofsky flying man sculpture has been shifted from the atrium to a much smaller space above the east corridor exit; (3) the café closed, ending a lunchtime meeting tradition and gatherings: “Only in America,” mourns a drama faculty member, “do they replace a vibrant café where people meet and the ferment is guaranteed, with vending machines.” At the empty half-circle of the former serving counter sits a solitary brew-ready Keurig coffee machine, filter cups for which may be purchased in nearby offices.

In the museum study gallery, Kirsten Hoving’s environmental photography students deliver their presentations to the class, discussing works from the permanent collection; in Room 209 (MCA 209), Peter Hamlin’s digital-music students have created pieces performed entirely on tablets and phones.

Dana Yeaton conducts a playwriting workshop in MCA 209, and Eliza Garrison lectures on the evolution of Western art in MCA 125. In MCA 110, Penny Campbell and Michael Chorney, saxophonist and acoustic guitarist, lead a performance improvisation for musicians and dancers.

Later in MCA 110, Christal Brown introduces dance techniques, accompanied by multi-keyboardist Ron Rost; the Dance Theatre recently hosted the dance company INSPIRIT, with work based on the life of Muhammad Ali, under the direction of Brown in a suite of dances incorporating “elements of boxing, hip-hop, martial arts, and modern dance,” with music scored by Farai Malianga, late of Brooklyn but originally from Mutare, Zimbabwe.

In MCA 210, a multimedia arts lab, a student sounds a gong while his project is translated into digital sound on a laptop, as the door-muffled reverberations echo down a stairwell.

MCA 125 is in standing-room-only condition for a 4:30 lecture by Ilaria Brancoli Busdraghi of the Italian department, on Italian stoneworkers in Vermont in the years 1880–1915. The talk is themed to coincide with the museum’s show of photographs taken by Edward Burtynsky in the marble quarries of Proctor and granite quarries of Barre, Vermont.

Brancoli traces the development of the quarries from the 1850s, when rail transportation made industrial distribution possible, into the 1880s and beyond, when Italians migrated in droves. Arriving in Vermont with skills handed down to them for a millennia in the pre-Alpine valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy, they worked in the cutting and shaping sheds rather than in the much more dangerous pits. Still, with rock dust endemic, the average lifespan of a stonecutter was 42 years, thanks to silio-tuberculosis.

The audience views slides of the cutting sheds and extraordinarily carved marble and granite, some of which decorated the graves of the workers, and of recreational picnics, parties, Italian instrumental bands, and the vigorous unionization efforts; when viewers see side-by-side comparisons of Piedmont and Lombardy mountains and valleys with those in Proctor and Barre, there is a murmur at how alike is the terrain.

“They must have felt so at home here!” someone whispers, to which another responds, “At least until the immigration curbs, the anti-union efforts, and the Red Scare of the 1920s.”

Although the talk extends past the closing time of the museum, Brancoli announces that in honor of Edward Burtynsky receiving an honorary degree at Middlebury’s Commencement, the show has been extended through June 2013.

Let’s start by talking about the value of athletics.
Sure. I can speak both theoretically and personally. Theoretically, I do believe the cliché that a liberal arts education is about educating the whole self. Broadly speaking, athletics is part of one’s education for life. The lessons one learns, the mentoring that takes place, the leadership opportunities, the commitment one must make. All clichés, but true.

Personally, I had the experience of being a varsity athlete in college, and I learned a lot from it: the commitment, the dedication, the teamwork, the focus necessary to compete successfully. And then you learn how to cope with defeat. So there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s a value. The question is how much emphasis should athletics have within the larger framework of the institution?

How has the athletics landscape changed since you arrived on campus in the early 1980s?
The biggest positive change has been the huge increase in opportunities for women. Title IX has insured that women’s athletics get equal funding, which has had a very positive impact on opportunities for women. Women’s athletics were strong when I arrived here in 1984—there were some amazing athletes and amazing teams—but the overall excellence of the program has really grown.

During this same time frame, I would say that the place of athletics at Middlebury has changed. Our conference, the New England Small College Athletic Conference, has evolved from something akin to a loose confederation of schools to a highly competitive playing conference whose members compete at the national level; national postseason play for teams did not exist until the mid-1990s. So, along with the increased level of competition for our teams has come, at least in some people’s minds, an exaggeration of the role of athletics in the overall scheme of a Middlebury education.

The NESCAC presidents have been discussing these changes, trying to find the best ways to monitor and manage this intensification. But it’s a difficult task. We are attracting great student-athletes, who are  competing at higher and higher levels and wish to continue to compete at that level in college. The competition within the conference has been ratcheted up, and the expectations of support by students and their families follow suit. So it’s no surprise that people are questioning how far this could and should go.

So what is being done within the conference?
Well, on one level, the presidents have been very effective in holding firm to NESCAC’s core operating principles designed to support intercollegiate competition in a manner consistent with our commitment to academic excellence. We’d like to call it “balance”—a balance between academics and athletics. For example, unlike in other D-III conferences, clear limits are placed on the number of games teams can play; the length of playing seasons; what coaches and athletes can do in an organized fashion out of season; how recruitment is done, when, and where; plus, other things.

But that’s not to say that I’m entirely in concert with the NESCAC approach to how we address these issues of oversight. I do believe the NESCAC is the most outstanding D-III conference in the country—academically and athletically. Yet it does worry me that the way we are trying to define the role of athletics among the 11 member institutions is limiting to each institution’s identity and autonomy. How far do we go as a conference before there is an undeniable—and what I would call unfortunate—homogenization of member schools in the conference?

I believe that each school has its own character. Each school has developed its athletic and academic culture over a long period of time; for us, it’s been over 213 years, and it reflects our location, our emphasis on the outdoors, on balance, and on the notion that education is of the whole individual. What I fear most is a conference impinging on the College’s autonomy when it comes to determining who is admitted or is discounted based on criteria that might not be as inclusive as what we like to use.

In the past, we have taken “so-called” chances on scholar-athletes whose test scores might not have been on par with the bulk of our applicants, but our admissions staff and coaches saw in such candidates personal qualities, such as leadership, initiative, perseverance, and a strong will to learn, and we have been very happy that we did so.

Yet the processes we are putting in place to address concerns of the “representativeness” of our student-athletes, which may be too arcane to describe here, are likely to exclude those types of students we, in the past, have accepted—students who have thrived on the playing fields and in the classroom and have added positively to the educational atmosphere on campus.

While what NESCAC has done has raised the level of academic standing of our accepted student-athletes (which is good, of course), we want to be sure institutions can maintain autonomy where it matters—that is, address at the local level those issues that affect a small number of institutions. If the academic and social gaps are seen to be too great on a campus, that campus, not the conference, should make adjustments to address the issue; conference solutions might be unnecessary on a number of our campuses. Collective action is effective, but, in my view, we need to be more selective in applying conference-wide solutions.

You said this system was created 10 years ago…
Right. This was largely the response to a pair of books (The Game of Life and Reclaiming the Game) coauthored by William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, when he was the president of the Mellon Foundation. Bowen raised two important points: a concern that the Ivies and selective liberal arts colleges were offering admissions slots to too many unqualified or lesser qualified student-athletes at the expense of other students, and, far more important in my view, there was developing a bifurcation of the student body at these schools, a divided culture, between athletes and non-athletes.

I’ll address this second issue first. Middlebury has always prided itself as not having a culture in which athletes self-segregated from the rest of the student body. This is largely true, based on my experiences teaching, and my close following of athletics for nearly 30 years. Ironically, and perhaps a result of the increased competitiveness within the conference and nationally, I do see a greater distance between athletes and non-athletes than in the early 1980s. It’s something for us to watch, as it relates to what goes on in the classroom and to the overall experience of our students. Some of this may be due to the intensified nature of practice, of out-of-season conditioning (which is done largely within teams), and other aspects of increased competitiveness of our programs. We need to ensure that our student-athletes continue to contribute to the overall educational mission of the institution and enrich the overall class and the classes around them while they are here.

However, I’m also concerned about how we choose to address any of the issues we believe need to be addressed. I would rather “fix” such issues locally than ask our conference for a solution, as offers of admission go beyond test scores and class ranks. When our admissions office brings in a class, they’re not looking for the students with the highest test scores or the most extracurricular activities or the most of anything. They are looking for a cohort that will have multiple strengths, that, when combined, will create the best learning environment on campus. Part of the residential liberal arts experience is learning from one another. Athletes represent a broad spectrum of strengths, and we want to be sure some of those positive characteristics are not lost.

We need some system in place to keep our academics and athletics in balance, but we need to retain our autonomy, too. It’s been 10 years since we instituted what has become an elaborate scheme for admissions for our conference, and it is time to  step back and ask ourselves: Has it served us well, has it gone too far, how might we improve things to the benefit of all our students.

I recall some discussion about whether another NCAA division was necessary to accommodate conferences with stricter guidelines.
A few years ago, I was convinced that we should be looking into a possibility of Division IV. Division III was doubling to 430 schools, and it seemed clear that we’d be at a competitive disadvantage with our shorter seasons, fewer practices, and other important values that set us aside from other conferences. But our student-athletes disagreed and were of one mind. In various discussions, student-athletes, through their captains, claimed they did not feel disadvantaged and, in fact, said “President Liebowitz: Yes, those other conferences have those advantages . . . but we still win. In addition, we have the opportunity to play more than one sport and time to do other things—to attend lectures, lead student organizations, and take advantage of exploring Vermont.”

Also, it would be hypocritical for me to sit here and say we’re at a disadvantage after we just captured our first Directors’ Cup; Williams, another NESCAC school, had won it the prior 14 years. So no, I don’t think we’re at a disadvantage.

What have we not talked about…?
Well, I think the recruitment game is a big negative in my view. The way recruiting is done is a conundrum to me. I think recruiting has become hard to understand, and, all too often, results in disappointment for student-athletes. Ironically, with more rules in place, there seems to be more suspicion and accusations of violations in recruiting than we used to see. We have very strict rules in the conference about coaches not “making admissions offers” to students—only the Admissions Office can offer admission; and we regulate rather strictly when coaches can send folders to the Admissions Office for consideration. And what we hear is that coaches around the conference somehow misinterpret some of these rules and therefore promise some prospective students that they will be admitted well before any decisions have been made. This creates problems, as you can imagine.

Yet, despite all that we have covered, and all my concerns about institutional autonomy versus a conference approach to regulating athletics, I still see our conference as the best in the country. There is something extremely valuable about being among like-minded institutions that value scholar-athletes, while ensuring that athletics fits within our academic mission.

As humans, we are hard-wired to yearn for, to respond to, stories. I have been working with a student who is interested in the field of science writing, and recently she came into my office raving about a book that seeks to explain just this assertion. In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, the writer Jonathan Gottschall describes stories as a force field that surrounds us and influences our behaviors, our movements. We as humans, Gottschall asserts, have placed stories at the very center of our existence. (In another book, On the Origin of Stories, an English professor in New Zealand asserts that storytelling is a result of human evolution and, as a consequence, is a key to our survival.)

All of this is to say that stories matter. Stories of love, of conflict, of exploration (of the land or of the human condition) have the power to change lives. It is, it has been, and it always will be.

Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of hearing Jacqui Banaszynski speak. In 1988, Jacqui won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her series AIDS in the Heartland, an unsparingly painful, yet exquisitely beautiful account of the life and death of a gay farm couple in Minnesota. (And yes, untold lives were changed after the publication of the series.) Jacqui was talking about storytelling, and at one point she addressed its permanence. “We have been writing stories since we first took up ochre to rock, and we will be writing stories when people figure out how to do it on the stars.”

In this issue, we introduce the next generation of storytellers. How and where they tell stories are evolving—by the day, even—but stories are what they give us. We couldn’t do without them.

I’ve been working as a journalist for the last 15 years, originally in documentary film and then in radio. In between, I went to graduate school with the notion that I wanted to be able to tell stories across media: print, video, or radio, depending on the story. I figured that the more ways I had to tell stories, the better my chances of making a living. I never thought technology, journalism, storytelling, and the Internet would converge to create such breakneck change.

When I started at the New York Times five years ago, I was charged with innovating on the Web. One of my first assignments was to record the sounds of toilets flushing at a children’s museum. Now we’re deep in digital storytelling, weaving text, audio, video, graphics, and photos, as we try to push the boundaries of storytelling.

At its core, digital storytelling hinges on a narrative; yet it’s often nonlinear, interactive, and invites audience participation. The last element is the most interesting to me. I recently returned from four days at the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, where I was speaking on a panel, “Sustainable Stories from Disposable Content,” about two Web series I produced over the past couple of years at the Times: One in 8 Million and Coming Out. Both of those projects built a community as the stories accumulated, and those audiences, in turn, helped to shape the projects.

On the panel, we explored how storytellers know who their community is and how to bring the community into the work. It’s important to identify who you’re telling stories to and for, which seems obvious but is essential. With the ability to collaborate and share online, a part of the storytelling process is about feedback, dialogue, and creating conversation. A sense of joint authorship exists. For this to be successful, it’s the journalist’s role to create the narrative framework so people will want to participate and will understand what contributions are meaningful.

As we push further with digital storytelling, whether it’s interactive documentaries, data visualization, gaming, or otherwise, this is a key question to answer: How can we invite participatory storytelling and keep the narrative clear, especially as we have more ways to tell stories?

Some people I met at SXSW are developing new interactive storytelling platforms; others, programs that allow newsrooms to add maps, graphics, audio, and video to an online story with ease. Programs such as these are answering to demands of journalism and the news—a fast-food version of what newsrooms like the Times spend months to execute, such as “Snow Fall,” a beautiful innovative multimedia story.

It is a bold and exciting future: one where we can explore new ways to tell stories, experiment with how to involve communities in that process, and work to connect individuals around the world through digital narratives. Now I must get back to work and figure out how it has all changed since I started typing here…

Sarah Kramer ’96 is a journalist and multimedia storyteller  at the New York Times.  Before working at the Times, Sarah was a founding member of the public radio project StoryCorps. She can be found on Twitter @sarahk11 and online at www.skramer.me

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America’s media diet is rapidly changing. Online news sites like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are ascendant, drawing millions of readers each month, while circulation at the Washington Post was down almost 9 percent in 2012. Printed magazines are still launching in record numbers, but venerable titles such as Newsweek go digital-only. ¶ Navigating this landscape in Washington, D.C., is a troupe of young, working journalists. Each has one foot in the traditional realm of their predecessors and the other foot . . . where, exactly? Recently, this cohort (featured at right) sat down with writer  Kevin Charles Redmon ’09, to discuss the modern media landscape, the technologies that shape it, and the changing role of reporters and editors.

Jaime Fuller I glanced at the channels on a small-town newspaper website the other day, and there were the usual departments, News, Politics, Opinion. And at the end it said, “Cars”—but what I read was, “Cats.” And I thought, That’s the difference between old media, which makes no money, and new media. We used to sell car ads. Now we sell cats.

Kevin Redmon Cat photos and Ryan Gosling memes seem to be the secrets to success for online news sites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. It’s a little scary. Will our kids grow up in a world without the New York Times?

Ryan Kellett Please. The news of Old Media’s death has been greatly exaggerated . . . by the media.

Brian Fung To its credit, one thing BuzzFeed does really well—which no one had done before—is think about news in terms of the “nugget,” as opposed to the “article.” The idea that you take from a traditional article a quote or an interesting statistic and make that the thing you sell. You’re not selling the article. You’re selling the thing that people will remember and spread around.

Redmon Keeping it shorter, like a quick burst of trivia?

Fung Right. In a print article, you might have five bits of interesting information. Well, BuzzFeed turns that into five different posts, which each get individual attention.

Redmon That kills me. I don’t want to write Web “nuggets.” I want to write long, thoughtful magazine stories. I realize how callow that sounds.

Kellett Keep writing those long pieces. Don’t be surprised when that reporting gets repurposed into nuggets. It’s my job to think about the person who has five minutes waiting in line at the supermarket and how they can get something out of the three months of reporting you did on your story. Some are not ever going to read 3,000 words in a single setting. But can I serve them an interactive graphic or video that tells the same story differently? You bet.

Lois Parshley One of the best pieces of advice I got, starting out, was from my editor at the Atlantic. He said, “You know, it’s great that you want to do long-form stuff. You might be able to do that for part of your job. But we don’t live in an era when anyone gets to do that full time. If you can’t be happy in a middle place—writing some daily Web assignments—then you’re not going to like journalism.” That really struck me.

Redmon Brian, I know one thing you appreciate about the Atlantic is its cult of curiosity. For instance, most Web articles are born at the morning staff meeting, when an editor says, “Why is it that NASA doesn’t take photos of government black sites?” Then someone spends a couple hours researching that question and writing a post about it.

Fung The culture there is very much one of shared discovery. Most news organizations, especially traditional ones, take the stance, “Here’s what you need to know.” With the the Atlantic, it’s very much, “I was wondering about this, and you might be wondering too, so I called up this dude, and here’s what he said, and isn’t it awesome that we were able to find out all this stuff?” I think readers really value the respect that the Atlantic gives to its audience. Another great thing about working there was that everyone had a unique role to play. Everyone had different strengths and weaknesses, a different “game to play,” and the senior editors were great at cultivating those specific talents.

Angela Evancie Did they literally talk about it that way? Your editor would come to you with a story idea and say, “Brian, this is your game”?

Fung Yeah, literally.

Evancie When I started at a small-town newspaper in New Hampshire last year, I really struggled at first. The paper came out twice a week, and I had a five-town beat that I needed to cover in every possible way: local elections, education, crime. I had a hard time producing work that I felt comfortable with. I sometimes cranked out stories in less than a half an hour. I sat down with my editor and told her how I was feeling. She said, “Eventually you learn that only a few stories can be your babies.” You have to give yourself permission to produce work you deem lower quality. That’s as true at a small paper as it is on the Web.

Fung I totally identify with that. I’m not a fast writer, and I spend a lot of time editing as I go. I’ve learned that it’s okay to be not satisfied with the final product. At some point, you’ve just got to let it go.

Fuller The first print piece I wrote for American Prospect was a very daunting thing. I sat down at my computer thinking, Oh my gosh, this is going to be in print. It needs to be the most perfect, timeless writing ever. I turned in my first draft and my editor said, “You need to rewrite this and think way less about it. Pretend that you’re writing a Web piece.” It was a nice reality check. I stopped approaching it like it was War and Peace. I’ve learned that it’s important to stick to your personal voice.

Fung Do you feel like you’ve developed a strong voice?

Fuller I’d say I’m still cooking. But I try.

Fung Voice is something I struggle with every day. I’m doing a lot of policy reporting, which, by nature, is not that exciting. So a lot of translation has to come through in the voice. But to what extent is that a conscious process, honing your style?

Redmon I sometimes pretend I’m writing a radio script—I love NPR’s pull-up-a-chair approach to storytelling.

Evancie That’s exactly what radio writing is meant to be. Editors always tell you, just close your eyes and pretend that you’re sitting across a café table from your best friend, telling them a really interesting story. That needs to come through in your writing and in your delivery.

Fuller No William Faulkner on NPR.

Evancie Right. Ernest Hemingway would be a great radio writer, because he’s all short sentences. In radio it’s “show, don’t tell.” And you get the added bonus of being able to convey emotion with your tone. So you don’t need to say “a solemn ceremony,” because you can just say the word “ceremony” solemnly. You can cut out all your descriptors.

Redmon Speaking of short sentences, let’s talk about Twitter.

Fung Becoming a reporter at National Journal has really altered the extent to which I’m tapped into the national conversation. I’m actually much less hooked on social media than before. A lot of my reporter friends say, “Oh that’s a great thing. You’re spending time contributing to society, instead of making bland cat jokes or sending animated GIFs around.” And that’s true, I suppose. But as a Web journalist, many of the stories I wrote in the past were leads that came from Twitter! I feel like I’m missing out.

Evancie There’s a healthy neo-Luddite streak running through parts of journalism, because there’s something to be said for having a beat and getting to know the people on your beat—your sources, your subjects. I don’t see that happening on the Web. Instead, I see a lot of one-off stories. You don’t ever hear the words “shoe leather” and “blogger” in the same sentence. But those Luddites are battling against a new school that says, “Twitter is absolutely important. This is not only how we’re going to develop better stories, but it’s how everyone’s going to get their news.”  To what extent can we use Twitter effectively, but not be totally broken down by it? Or distracted to a point of paralysis?

Kellett There absolutely is such a thing as a Twitter beat. I call it a social media constellation: the digital connections you have with sources, other journalists, and increasingly readers themselves. Reporters must know that the only way to grow this digital beat is by participating in it, not just listening.

Redmon I think about the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, and how Twitter “covered” that story. Journalists were publishing their articles as works-in-progress; some were rife with rumors and bad facts. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Kellett I’m of the mind that you report the news as it happens with the same high journalistic standards as before. Just be transparent about how you report the story. Readers are smarter than journalists give them credit for.

Parshley There’s some really amazing technological innovation going on, too. Foreign Policy did a couple of e-books this past year, which we dressed up with slide shows and maps. You’re able to take the power of a digital platform—audio recordings, video, multimedia, embedded cartography, infographics—and invest the time and resources you’d put into a magazine piece. I think, I hope, that that’s where long-form is headed.

Redmon I hope so, too. But market forces seem to be working in the opposite direction. You had an experience the other day that I think, sadly, has become typical for freelancers. It was after Raúl Castro announced that he wasn’t going to run for a second term as president.

Parshley Yeah, the Atlantic’s international editor wanted me to do a quick Web hit about it—I’d written about Cuba before, and I’ve been there twice. It was Sunday night, but I wrote back and said, “Sure, I’ll have you a draft by mid-morning tomorrow.” New editor, someone I hadn’t worked with, but I’m comfortable with the subject matter. She responded right away to say, “Oh, and by the way, we can’t pay you.” And I had to write back, “Oh, and by the way, I can’t work for free.”

Redmon A lot of news sites assume that most writers are so excited about having their work published that they’ll give it away for free.

Fuller Most people are unwilling to pay for quality. It breaks my heart.

Parshley So you have to find people who have other jobs that pay the rent—academics or think-tank fellows—who are willing to take the clip instead of payment. Or, you have to find naïve young writers who will do it for free.

Redmon As the model changes, I guess the challenge is to change with it, gracefully. And, you know, still pay rent.

Fung Even if I lost my job tomorrow, I would stay in journalism. Not because I’m enamored with the idea of writing, or because I dream of being the next Seymour Hersh, but because I get a kick out of explaining things to people. I want to help them understand the world better.

43:10

47:24 This technique makes moving snippets of the conversation around pretty easy.  An hour interview has to be pared down to a five- or six-minute story. And that is not easy.

(music)

02:04 My name is Sue Halpern and I’m a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the director of the Fellowships in Narrative Journalism or, as it’s popularly known, the “How Did You Get Here?” (HDYGH) project.

(music)

10:15 I was at a College dinner about six years ago, and everyone was going around the table saying where they were from. “Tel Aviv. Berea. Kabul. Amman. Spokane. Kathmandu.” As they spoke, I found myself asking the same question over and over.

12:07 It was some variant of “How did you end up at this small college in rural Vermont?”

12:59 Three months later, I was talking with Matt Jennings, the editor of Middlebury Magazine, and he was saying that the magazine wanted to do more Web-based multimedia. As he was talking, I thought, “Why don’t we train students to make short audio portraits of their classmates that answer one simple question: How did you get here?”

15:37 I proposed “How Did You Get Here?” and Matt was game.

(music)

Check out the 2013 “How Did You Get Here?” stories

48:42 I’d never done any audio before this. I am a writer and magazine journalist. But I know how to get a story and how to tell a story, and I know that this is something that can be taught.

52:05 I dislike grades. I’ve seen how grades, not learning, can become the goal, and I’ve also seen how sometimes students try to see how much they can get away with not doing. Because I knew that HDYGH was going to be a tremendous amount of work, I only wanted students who were passionate and fully committed.

39:00 Matt and I called it the Narrative Journalism Fellowship, and we put out a call for applications.

55:32 Experience was not necessary but strong writing skills were.

7:19 You get a very good sense of the range and diversity and uniqueness of the students who attend Middlebury from our pieces and from the journeys students take to get here.

11:14 I don’t have a favorite profile since I honestly believe all the stories are incredible. There’s a young woman who was smuggled out of Tibet in a box;  a competitive goat roper; someone who went to a secret school for girls in Kabul during the Taliban; I could go on. You should listen.

20:16 One of the most gratifying parts of the program, aside from the opportunity to tell these amazing stories, is to have created a cadre of very accomplished journalists and storytellers. The skills and competence they acquire in the program serve them well, whatever they do.

62:19 In May of the first year, the fellows mounted an exhibit in the Davis Family Library and provided iPods with a soundtrack of all their stories. Hundreds of people came to the opening; there were not enough iPods. Finally, with the blessing of the library staff, one of the pieces was broadcast over a set of speakers. Students who had been studying stopped what they were doing, got up from their chairs, and lined the balcony. Everywhere I looked, people were standing stock-still, just listening. And when the piece ended, they clapped and asked for more.

(music to fade)

Sue Halpern is a journalist, an author, and a Middlebury scholar in residence.

Stories have ancient roots. We’ve relied on this comforting fact. But if we look at the story’s transformation from Homer to Borges and Cortázar to Deena Larsen, Lev Manovich, and Peter Horvath we experience a monumental socio-cultural-technical shift that moves from the oral to the digital where we’re unsure what counts anymore.

We require new ways of making sense. “If we are entering a new world,” says David Weinberger in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, “then we are also becoming new people.”

New storytellers are engaged in remixing and translating, with great speed and compression, experiencing the story more as a gesture rather than a thick narrative with fully drawn characters navigating a linear plot line.  New storytellers appropriate from one another—and from the past and from other forms: painting, music, film, traditional texts, Web sites; they’re challenging boundaries and disciplines.

New storytellers are drawn to the freshness, the inventiveness that comes with “entering a new world” comprised of multiple selves—the public and the private, the digital and the physical, the psychological, emotional, and spiritual. The new storyteller is the translator of our complex—and subtle—novelty, working to obliterate distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, and our sense of space.

In 2011, half of Japan’s top ten best-selling novels were originally cell phone novels, typically love stories written in short, text message format.  Cell phone novels are the preferred medium of new age authors not out of preference, but out of necessity.

The new storyteller, like an apprentice, is always learning, morphing, adjusting to unstable conditions; this requires an extraordinary sense of audience, inviting the storyteller to sometimes incorporate the reader into the narrative—like receiving a short novel on your cell phone, a serial piece on Twitter, and a drama about how our brains work on RadioLab. All mediums count all the time, like instruments in a symphony orchestra.

In 2012, Margaret Atwood, who has written 13 novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale, went on Byliner, a web site that’s billed as a new platform for writers, and began a serial novel, Positron, where, for a few dollars, readers collaborated with her, commenting on scenes and episodes, and determining the direction of the narrative. Atwood compared her experience to improv comedy, to creating a story live before an audience.

In 1997, Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, predicted the coming of participatory television, the holodeck we, the audience, help create. I think we’ve arrived. Remember the science in Minority Report? Well, John Underkoffler is combining traditional tabular data with 3D and geospatial information manipulated through space, not via a keyboard. It’s here. Now.

We’ve changed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself once a new storyteller, asks, “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” New storytellers are responding to Emerson, carrying on his legacy.  “The sun shines to-day also…There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” he says. “Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

In 1974, the Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, a different sort of story written by three different kinds of storytellers, Vinton Cerf,  Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as shorthand for internetworking and our new storytellers were born. And here we are, moving, becoming something else by as early as tomorrow.

Hector Vila is an assistant professor of writing at Middlebury.

Bellevue is a buzzword. It denotes “nuthouse,” and “loony bin.” It is referenced in countless films and books as the solution for the mad hatter traipsing through the house uttering nonsense. It is its own punch line.

Unbeknownst to many, however, it is also the oldest public hospital in the country and the training ground for many top American physicians; yet, its infamous moniker often conceals the care and compassion that happen inside.

During the past year, I have worked in Bellevue’s child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit, conducting trauma screens, in-take interviews, and assessment scales for various psychiatric disorders. Many of the children I screened were plagued by loneliness. They had slipped through the cracks and seemed lost to the world. They ran the gamut of personas and ranged in age from five to 17.

Some refused to speak; others could not stop talking. Some came from the foster-care system; others from the Upper East Side. Some hugged me; others spit in my face.

Several months ago, I attended the initial assessment of a 10-year-old boy from the Dominican Republic. Having the fewest credentials in the room, I pulled up a chair and sat in the back.

The boy had been adopted and entered the United States at the age of five. Prior to his adoption, he suffered from severe neglect and malnourishment. His mother had admitted him to Bellevue for disorganized thought patterns, increased mood swings, and overt aggression at school. When I entered the room, he sat facing the wall, crouched like a timid animal with eyes tight shut. It was hard to imagine that such a child a few days ago had put his fist through the window.

He was asked questions and answered few. When the boy was asked to recite his birthday, he said he didn’t know. How odd, I thought. With the other patients I had met, even the most damaged, all knew their birthday. Children love to tell you their birthday. They tell you their age down to the very last detail—eight and three-fourths, ten and a half, nine and a quarter. I had never met a child who could not recall his own birthday.

After the assessment, I was invited to meet with the physicians and discuss the diagnosis. I sat in the corner as each resident and medical-school student presented. Their diagnoses were elaborate, layered, and sophisticated beyond the little medical knowledge I had gained. The birthday episode was not mentioned. The attending physician nodded her head and said little. To my surprise, she asked me what I thought.

“I find it very odd that the boy doesn’t know his birthday,” I said.

The attending offered a small, knowing smile.

“Yes,” she replied, “it is quite unsettling.”

It was later discovered that the boy was mentally retarded. In accordance with the group’s original assessment, there were signs of comorbidity with bipolar-1 and generalized anxiety. However, the true culprit was more obvious: the boy didn’t know his birthday because his brain could not comprehend the concept.

I am at the bottom of a long ladder that points toward medicine. Sometimes I’m not even sure if I’ve made it onto the first step. However, I have discovered that my intuition—my ability to sense when something is awry—is perhaps on the right track. Sometimes the solution to the problem is simpler than we perceive. Often, the solution is in our capacity to listen.

Jessica Halper ’11 lives in New York City, where she is finishing her postbaccalaureate for medical school. She currently works as a research assistant on trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder studies at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Let’s back up a moment. I was in Schmitt’s Warner Hall office, chatting with him and the aforementioned Aden, full name being Aden Forrow ’13, an exceedingly quiet, very pleasant young man from the Boston area. In a recent talk, Schmitt had referred to Aden as likely “the most mathematically gifted student I have ever taught.” For the past year or so, the two have been investigating a problem within the area of mathematics known as combinatorics. Schmitt explained that in combinatorics “we are given a finite set of objects and a set of rules placed upon the objects, and our two most basic questions are 1) does there exist an arrangement of the objects that satisfies the rules, and 2) if so, how many?” A Sudoku puzzle is a trivial combinatorial problem, Schmitt said. “But what is more interesting,” he added “is discerning the minimum number of clues that can be given while still providing for a valid puzzle.” The conjecture is 17, and recently an Irish mathematician designed a procedure to prove that no 16-clue puzzle could exist. Tricky thing is, it would take a standard desktop computer 300,000 years to complete the computation.

So Schmitt and Aden are trying to solve the problem using a tool known as the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz . . . and that’s pretty much all I will say about this tool. I asked Schmitt to explain it to me, and another silence arose. Aden quietly chuckled. Then, as polite as he could be, Schmitt attempted to tell me about the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz. Let’s just say that we subsequently both agreed that C. N. is not meant to be understood by a general audience. And, frankly, it’s beside the point.

The point, really, of our discussion was not how Aden and Schmitt were attempting to solve this problem, nor was it about whether they would actually solve it at all. (“One never knows how long it will take to solve a math problem, if you can solve it in the first place,” Schmitt would later say.) No, the reason we were talking that afternoon was because it was so unlikely to be having this discussion in the first place.

Before he met Aden, Schmitt had never found the need to provide a student in an enrolled course with his or her own set of problems, problems that were not a part of the course syllabus. But just one or two days into Aden’s participation in Math 247, Graph Theory, Schmitt knew he had to do something different. “He wasn’t challenged by the class. He picked up on subtleties, special cases that I’ve never seen an undergraduate recognize. There have been times when I’ve noticed disparities between talented students and the whole of a class, but this generally happens in introductory courses. Aden was on an entirely different level.”

So Schmitt decided he would seek out a problem for which he and Aden could apply the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz technique. (Using Sudoku came to him at breakfast one morning while he was having his granola.) “And we have been having an ongoing mathematical conversation that each of us has wanted to have. These conversations have been entirely outside of any syllabus; Aden receives no course credit.”

I asked Aden if this matched his recollection.

He thought for about five seconds and then said, “More or less.”

“Aden is very understated,” Schmitt added.

Aden smiled. “One of the things I like about Middlebury is the amount of attention professors give to their teaching and to their students,” he said. Schmitt mentioned that I could very easily be writing a story about Aden’s collaboration with Noah Graham, in the physics department, “but then you would have missed out on capturing my good looks.”

At this, Aden let out a loud, sustained laugh. It was startling, given how quiet he had been. It was a laugh one shares with a peer.

Aden Forrow ’13 will enroll in the mathematics graduate program at MIT next year. If he has an idea for the Sudoku project, he knows who he will call first.   
    

“

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• If you missed the Narrative Journalism Showcase on Tuesday, you still have a chance to listen to the amazing stories in the “How Did You Get Here?” series on middmag.com. Check out the trailer to get a taste of what’s in store!

• Not only is Sue Halpern the director of the Narrative Journalism Fellowships, she is also the author of A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher.
  She talked to the folks at the Dish about what surprised her most as she visited nursing homes with her therapy dog, Pransky.

• The Solar Decathlon team is hard at work on its entry for the competition next fall, Insite. Recently the Burlington Free Press highlighted the students as they worked to deconstruct a historic barn so they can repurpose the wood to use as siding for their house. Check their website to stay up to date on their progress!
• The school year is winding down, but some athletic teams are still going strong. Both men’s and women’s tennis won their respective NCAA Regionals and are headed to the NCAA Quarterfinals. The women’s lacrosse team is making its 16th trip to the NCAA Final Four this weekend, and the women’s golf team is competing in the NCAA Championship in Destin, Fla.

• Senior Andrew Ackerman has been working hard on this thesis project and as part of his research, he’s been training in extreme mixed martial arts. Recently he took part in an amateur fight night in Plattsburgh, N.Y., in his first competitive fight ever. And he won!

• Finals begin on Wednesday, so it’s quiet on campus and things to do other than studying are scarce. Downtown, at 51 Main, good music is available as usual with a Blues Jam Wednesday night and Mint Julep on Friday night, performing an ecletic mix of swing and Latin rhythms.

• Artist and photographer Edward Burtynsky is receiving an honorary Doctor of Arts from the College at Commencement on May 26. His exhibit, Nature Transformed, will be on display at the Museum of Art until June 9. If you haven’t seen it yet, you still have a few weeks to check it out!