At its monthly meeting on March 8, the Middlebury College faculty voted 97 to 70 to retain the College's winter term. The vote followed a brief discussion of two proposals that were offered by the Educational Affairs Committee for consideration. Proposal A was to continue winter term, but with modifications to the current structure, and B was to eliminate winter term and adopt a two-semester structure.
The faculty's adoption of option A means that option B (no winter term and a return to a two-semester calendar) is no longer under consideration by the faculty. At the April faculty meeting, the proposal to retain winter term in modified form will be considered as an alternative to the current structure of winter term. The process will include further discussion of the proposal selected in March, and ultimately a vote to adopt either the modified option for winter term or to retain the current structure.
The College has signed an agreement with the Town of Middlebury by which the College will make an annual monetary contribution to the Town in recognition of services provided to the College, a tax-exempt institution. The gift agreement was announced at the annual Middlebury Town Meeting on March 1. The agreement, which renews automatically each year unless either party opts out, expires in 2024. The total gift to the Town is expected to be more than $6.5 million.
The new agreement takes effect in July 2004, when a 1994 agreement that provided for a gift from the College to the Town of $1.2 million expires.
The College will make its first annual payments under the new agreement in January and February 2005. At that time, the Town will receive about $200,000 with about $50,000 of that representing a five percent payout from $1 million of the College's endowment.
The College currently pays more than $530,000 a year in taxes on the property it owns. Added to the funds to be paid under the terms of the gift agreement, the College's annual payments to the Town and school district will total nearly $750,000.
The ESPN "SportsCenter" segment that featured Middlebury College friend, Butch Varno, has been nominated for an Emmy Award. The feature originally aired on ESPN on Dec. 7 as well as Christmas Eve and Christmas morning of 2003.
The piece was nominated in the category of "Outstanding Short Feature." Other nominees in the category are features from ABC's "Monday Night Football," HBO's "Real Sports" and a piece from NBC regarding the Ironman competition. The awards will be presented at the 25th Annual Sports Emmy Awards on April 19 in New York.
The segment captured the longtime tradition among Middlebury College athletes of picking up Middlebury native Varno at his apartment and bringing him to home football and basketball contests. Varno is unable to provide his own transportation due to the cerebral palsy that confines him to a wheelchair. The ESPN piece marked the second time Varno was featured in a national media story. Last March, he and the Middlebury students who assist him were the subject of Rick Reilly's column in the March 10 issue of Sports Illustrated.
The Middlebury College Portuguese School (/ls/portuguese/) has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and test Portuguese language materials based on lectures and discussions conducted during the school's inaugural summer of 2003.
Titled "Learning Language Through Cultural Texts: Brazilian Portuguese," the $125,000 project focuses on providing students in Portuguese language classes with historical and cultural contexts that have helped shape contemporary Brazil. Students will read cultural texts from beginning levels through the highest levels of Portuguese language instruction, and hear presentations by scholars, diplomats, business people, musicians, and literary figures.
In keeping with Vermont's agricultural heritage, Jean Hamilton '04 spent the winter months planning her garden for this summer. She and Erwin Konesni '04 established an organic garden last year on three acres of College-owned land west of the campus within walking distance of dormitories and dining halls. Working with other students, Hamilton and Konesni had a successful growing season, and celebrated the harvest with an all-day organic feast last fall. During the recent cold weather months, the two have worked on fundraising and developing a seed-saving project for insect resistant mustard greens.
Hamilton and Konesni, both environmental studies majors, decided to start an organic garden at Middlebury while attending an organic farming association meeting in Massachusetts.
Local farmers, businesses, and volunteers have provided services and donated materials such as bees and seed potatoes for the project. Compost and many of the supplies for the garden and its sod-roofed garden shed were donated by the College's dining services and facility management department, while guidance and encouragement came from faculty members.
Hamilton and Konesni have hired a year-round gardening advisor for the project, and they have spoken about their project at conferences in Vermont and at Yale University's sustainable food project conference "Tilling the Soil, Turning the Tables: Regional Forum on Sustainable College Dining." For photos and more information go to http://go.middlebury.edu/segue?mcog.
Philip Aroneanu '06 was recently granted a campus ecology fellowship from the National Wildlife Federation for a project that ties into the organic gardening initiative. Working with Director of Dining Services Matthew Biette and fellow student May Boeve '06, Aroneanu will create a composting system involving red wiggler worms. Working in the dining services greenhouse, he'll use food waste from the College's dining halls to nourish the worms, and the resulting nutrient-rich worm castings will be tilled into the soil of the garden, enriching the soil for salad greens.
In cold weather sports news, the men's and women's ice hockey teams are both among the final four teams in their respective NCAA Division III championship tournaments to be held on March 20-21. Middlebury will host the women's tournament; the men will compete at Norwich. For results check /athletics.
The Middlebury ski teams also had a very successful season this year, breaking the University of Vermont's 28-year winning streak in the Eastern Intercollegiate Skiing Association Championship, which doubles as the Middlebury Winter Carnival. In addition to winning its own carnival, the Middlebury ski teams won four other Eastern winter carnivals this season. Unfortunately, altitude affected the teams' performance at the NCAA championships held at Donner Summit, Calif., where Middlebury finished seventh. The University of New Mexico won the event, with Vermont placing fifth as the top Eastern squad.