Got a question about the presidential campaign for the Professor Pundits? Send your questions to pundits@middlebury.edu.

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.

• It was a big week in spring sports: With huge weekend wins, women’s lacrosse heads to the final four; men’s golf is off to NCAAs; and track & field teams were strong at New England championships. The news wasn’t so great for tennis teams, both of which were ousted in regionals — men by Johns Hopkins and women by Bowdoin.

• A very large gift box with a cryptic tag appeared in the Davis Family Library lobby.
• Sociology professor Margaret Nelson was interviewed on the syndicated public radio program, “Here and Now” this week to discuss parenting trends in light of a provocative recent cover on Time Magazine.
• In an Associated Press story, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman praised the leadership of Midd alum Tom Stillman ’74, who led a team of local investors in purchasing the St. Louis Blues hockey team. “I know he won’t rest until the players are hoisting the Stanley Cup,” Bettman is quoted as saying.
• It’s a quiet week as finals begin, but for those in need of a study break, check out the country, rockabilly, bluegrass blend of Lila Mae & The Cartwheels on Thursday at 8 at 51 Main at the Bridge. And the Cynthia Baren Band takes the stage at 51 Main Saturday night from 9-12.

• Julia Alvarez’s new book, “A Wedding in Haiti,” is resonating with readers and book critics alike. The Seattle Times called it “a touching, funny, eye-opening and uplifting memoir” that offers “an intimate look at our poorest neighbor in the Western Hemisphere.” The Christian Science Monitor said it’s “a love story that is many love stories.” And just last Sunday, NPR broadcast a poignant five-minute interview with Middlebury’s writer-in-residence for “Weekend Edition.”

• New England Cable News (NECN) network’s Jack Thurston ’02 returned to Middlebury last week to interview “Vermont’s Whistling Whiz,” Yuki Takeda ’14. You can watch the segment here, which includes Jack and Yuki’s rendition of the “Andy Griffith Show Theme Song.”

• Three Panther teams are still in the running for NCAA titles: women’s tennis and women’s lacrosse are hosting regional matches this week, and men’s tennis will be at Johns Hopkins on Saturday. Additionally, golfer Flora Weeks ’12 has qualified for the NCAA championship in Indiana, and members of the track and field team will compete at the Open New England Championships this weekend and at the ECACs and NCAAs later this month.

• Mother’s Day is next Sunday and—hurry!—there may still be time to send mom a card. And to honor mothers locally, the Middlebury College Community Chorus, directed by Jeff Rehbach, will present a “delightful mix of contemporary, traditional, and classical works” in a Mother’s Day Concert on Sunday, May 13, at 3 p.m. in Mead Chapel.

• What makes a healthy building? Middlebury’s visiting lecturer in architecture, Andrea K. Murray, will answer that question in an illustrated lecture on Thursday, May 10 at 7 p.m. in Room 304 of the Johnson Memorial Building.

• The 2011-12 performing arts season will reach a crescendo this weekend with a full slate of performances at the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Events include a choir concert, a musical-theatre revue, a woodwind quintet performance, and a piano recital. Check the arts webpage for details and don’t miss out because after this week things quiet down considerably at the MCFA. Until next September, that is.

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.

• The world knows something new and surprising about black holes, thanks to Frank Winkler, the Gamaliel Painter Bicentennial Professor of Physics, and his international team of astrophysicists. Pursuing a rare transient X-ray source in the nearby galaxy M83, Winkler and colleagues knew they were on to something. Their results will appear in the May 20, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, and are online now.
• Dwayne Nash ’99 was featured in two April issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The former prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office is in his fourth year of Northwestern University’s PhD program in black studies, researching racial profiling. The Chronicle stories include an interview about the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida and two stories on the interdisciplinary growth of black studies doctoral work.

• Maybe you’ve read Kurt Andersen’s best-selling historical novels or his critiques of American culture; maybe you listen to Studio 360 on Public Radio International. Maybe you used to choke reading his and Graydon Carter’s snarky-licious Spy Magazine. Thursday afternoon at Dana Auditorium is your chance to hear him discuss “It Is the Most Radical of Times, It Is the Most Conservative of Times” as the Robert W. van de Velde ’75 lecturer.

• That Paul guy from Liverpool who so totally rocks will perform here Friday night. Yes, Paul Lewis is back–with more Schubert! If you haven’t yet heard the personally unassuming and musically transporting pianist, do! If you have heard him, you know how lucky we are to be one of his concert stops—along with London, Tokyo, Florence…

•  London’s financial district is the setting for Serious Money, playwright Caryl Churchill’s look at greed, power, and politics. The Middlebury College Department of Theatre and Dance presents four performances, starting Thursday.

• The Panthers come out swinging against Bowdoin in a baseball doubleheader, starting at noon this Saturday.

• Has your refrigerator become a hurt locker? On Monday at 12:30, Gary Hirshberg, entrepreneur and founder of Stonyfield Farm, explains the dangers of genetically modified foods and his leading role in the consumer charge to label them. He’s also written the first consumer guide to GMOs in food.

Got a question for the pundits? Send it our way and we’ll do our best to answer online, or in our next video installment. Send questions to: pundits@middlebury.edu.

Daniel Kurtzer

Daniel Kurtzer, who was ambassador to Egypt during President Clinton’s second term and ambassador to Israel during the first half of George W. Bush’s presidency, discussed the Arab Spring (or, as he called it, the “Arab Awakening”) from Israel’s perspective. But he also used the podium to voice his support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine question, and state his opposition to Israeli settlements in occupied territories.

Now a professor in Middle Eastern policy studies at Princeton University, Kurtzer is no longer expected to be a reserved, circumspect diplomat, and he certainly didn’t disappoint his standing-room-only audience in the conference room of the Robert A. Jones ’59 House on April 17.

The visitor said Israel is “one of the few nations in the world largely surrounded by countries that deny its existence diplomatically,” and he skillfully placed Israel’s Arab neighbors in three distinct “baskets: democratizers, repressors, and monarchies.”

On how Israel has responded (or not responded) to the Arab Awakening, Kurtzer said, “Most interesting in this respect is in a society where you normally can’t get people to shut up, Israelis have been uncharacteristically quiet because they have understood over the course of the past year that, to the largest extent, they were not the subject matter of Arab discourse.”

Kurtzer examined Israel’s strategic position in response to the Arab Spring using the three “core challenges” that the State of Israel has faced since its founding in 1947: security, economics, and immigration. And while the basic challenges haven’t changed, he said the Middle East landscape has been transformed dramatically: “The secular pan-Arab nationalism of the mid-20th century is now driven by Islamic fundamentalism.”

The major forces in the region aren’t states anymore, Kurtzer explained. “It’s regional players and non-state actors” that threaten Israel’s security, and he listed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority, among others. He also named Iran and Turkey as two countries beyond Israel’s border that now play a role in the region’s politics.

During his 40-minute lecture, which was initiated by Sarah R. Cohen ’15 of Middlebury’s Hillel chapter, the Princeton professor touched briefly on the second “core challenge”—the development and expansion of Israel’s economy—pointing to the country’s shift from an agricultural economy to a technological one.

On the assimilation of immigrants, the former ambassador said there are now 10-plus million people living between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan including the non-Jewish residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Demographers project that the population of the region will shift to an Arab majority sometime about the middle of this century, which prompts Kurtzer to advocate for a two-state solution. “The crux of the issue [is] whether the two sides really believe in partition, in sharing this land they both claim exclusive control over.”

Ambassador Petr Gandalovic of the Czech Republic addressed the topic of “The Velvet Revolution and Lessons for the Arab Spring” as the guest of Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center and the Vermont Council on World Affairs on April 23.

Petr Gandalovic

Gandalovic, who ascended to his diplomatic post in 2011, delivered 10 minutes of prepared remarks and took questions from Middlebury students and faculty for the rest of the hour. Comparing the events of 1989 among the Warsaw Pact nations to current actions in North Africa and the Middle East, the ambassador noted these similarities: the geographic scale of events, the unpopularity of existing regimes, the “powerful will of the people” demanding democratic change, and the unlikelihood that unrest will stop once it has started.

Similarities aside, he acknowledged that there are numerous historic, cultural, religious, and economic differences between the region where Communism fell and the Arab countries where totalitarianism is being challenged today. Two major forces that shaped the course of the Velvet Revolution—the emergence of popular leaders and support from western Europe—appear to be less influential in the Arab Spring.

During the Velvet Revolution “intellectual leaders played a very prominent role,” he said. “Thinkers like the late President Václav Havel helped provide a unified vision and became symbols for the people. Havel steered the revolution in a civil direction, much as America’s founders. He envisioned a civil society and his writings have become a source of inspiration for other pro-democracy movements around the world.”

The Arab Spring does not have charismatic leaders like Havel or Lech Wałęsa, the ambassador explained. It is a revolution “driven by social media,” which Gandalovic recognized to be a “powerful platform” for organizing uprisings and for communicating both inside and outside the region, but social media itself will never “offer the vision and sense of direction” like strong leadership.

In 1989, “the countries of central and eastern Europe could rely on support from the rest of Europe, which was keen for them to return to the family of democratic European nations. Existing European and trans-Atlantic structures served as a great incentive for further reforms in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. In the case of the Arab countries now undergoing transition, the situation is different,” the ambassador stated, and the relationship between Arab nations and the EU countries is more “complex.”

Nevertheless, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister just returned from an official visit to Egypt, and Ambassador Gandalovic asserted that his country “stands ready to work with the newly elected representatives who want to respect human rights and take their [Arab] nations in the direction of freedom and democracy.”

Photo of Daniel Kurtzer courtesy Jon Roemer.

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