Wiki Warning
It began, innocently enough, as a recurring error on a history exam last fall.
Japanese studies professor Neil Waters was grading exams for his course on premodern Japan when he noticed something odd: in test book after test book, students had consistently provided an incorrect answer to a question concerning the Shimabara Rebellion—and they had all answered it the same way.
Though stunned at first, Waters soon had a hunch as to the source of the erroneous information and within minutes he had confirmation. The culprit was Wikipedia, the “multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia project ... written collaboratively by volunteers.” Handy? Yes. A reliable resource for scholarly work? No.
Fearing that students would cite erroneous information found on Wikipedia in the future, Waters immediately tapped out a policy stating that the online resource was not an acceptable citation. At the next department meeting, he brought up the issue and it took the assembled faculty less than two minutes to approve it.
But the debate surrounding the issue was just beginning.
After attending a history class early in winter term in which Assistant Professor Amy Morsman mentioned the department’s stance on Wikipedia, Brian Fung ’10 wrote a story for the Middlebury Campus with this statement: “Faculty members of the College’s Department of History recently passed a resolution forbidding students from using online interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia for academic assignments.”
Fung’s story was noticed by the Burlington Free Press, which followed with one of its own, as did the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, and more blogs than one could conceivably count.
In a delicious bit of irony, Fung’s initial story—and much of the blog vitriol—was based on an erroneous assumption: that the history department had forbidden students from using Wikipedia for academic assignments. The policy simply stated that students may not cite the Web site, just as a student would never cite any encyclopedia when conducting college-level work. “In a way, it’s beating a dead horse,” Morsman says. “But we have to raise the level of awareness to make sure students are careful.”
Jason Mittell, an assistant professor of American studies and film and media culture, agrees that Wikipedia shouldn’t be cited in academic work, but he’s concerned that the frenzy engulfing the issue has turned into a pro-or-con-Wiki confrontation.
“It’s more than a two-sided issue,” Mittell observes. “It’s an issue of teaching information literacy. A Middlebury student should come equipped with such a skill. The site is fluid and there is no gatekeeper, but check the history of an entry and realize how many cooks are making the soup. The authority on a topic now rises from the output, rather than the predefined credentials of the writer.”
On campus, there is actually more common ground than disagreement. Members of the history department and advocates for a wider use of Wikipedia both agree on the volatility of the site, as well as its usefulness as a starting point on a topic, with Morsman describing Wikipedia as “a great springboard.”
But, for a generation that has grown up with conventional bookshelves, such a distinction is one that has not been readily apparent. Until now.
— Alex Crumb ’07
Sick Spruce
The oldest planted tree on campus is ailing.
The stately Norway spruce that for nearly 150 years has stood down the hill and in the shadow of Old Chapel was apparently struck by lightning last summer. Trauma to the evergreen was discovered late last fall, when a large section of bark peeled off revealing a jagged crack down the tree’s trunk.
Testing conducted by the horticultural lab at Cornell University proved to be inconclusive, but horticulturalists were able to diagnose an abiotic—an environmental, rather than a pathogenic—cause.
Tim Parsons, the College’s staff horticulturalist, says that a team has been working feverishly to save the tree—removing dead wood and loose bark, deep feeding the roots, and “vertically” mulching the soil (drilling three-inch holes a foot-and-a-half into the ground and filling the space with compost).
Parsons says that he will continue to monitor the spruce, but that the prognosis for the great tree is negative.
For now, the spruce still stands sentry outside the new library.
In the Footsteps of a Giant
Bill McKibben has said of John Elder’s latest book, Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: “[it] is one of the soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I’ve ever read. It will be a classic.”
High praise from one of the world’s preeminent nature writers, but praise well deserved.
After receiving a Fulbright Fellowship, Elder, a professor of English, spent a year following a trail blazed both literally and figuratively by the 19th-century writer George Perkins Marsh (Man and Nature), who is widely regarded as the nation’s first environmentalist.
Elder’s travels took him from Vermont (Marsh was born in Woodstock) to Italy and back again. His stunningly beautiful prose illuminates a journey of both body and spirit (Marsh’s and Elder’s), and the resulting narrative transcends the conventional categories of memoir and travel writing. As McKibben notes, the “classic” category will suit Pilgrimage just fine.
Go Figure
7,188: Number of students who applied to Middlebury
600: Approximate spots available for incoming first-years
34: Percentage increase in the number of applicants since 2005
23: Acceptance rate percentage
72: Percentage increase in the number of students of color who have applied since 2005
78: Percentage of students who applied online
Whoa, Food!
On a sun-dappled, late-October morning in northern Italy, more than 9,000 people from 150 countries wandered the streets of Torino and spilled into the Olympic Oval for what can best be described as a global gastronomical gathering.
Among the farmers, breeders, fishermen, and chefs on hand for Terra Madre 2006, a biennual conference held by the Slow Food community, was an official Middlebury delegation: Director of Dining Services Matthew Biette, Emily Peterson ’08, Jon Warnow ’07, and Jay Leshinsky, the adviser to the College’s organic garden. (A number of recent graduates, who all played a significant role in Middlebury’s organic garden, were attending, as well.)
The Slow Food movement is exactly what it sounds like. Founded in 1989, Slow Food is a network of producers and co-producers (what others may call consumers, a term Slow Foodies don’t like because it discounts the importance of maintaining a close connection with the producers) who “believe that the food [one] eats should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way; and that its producers should receive fair remuneration for their work.” Middlebury professor John Elder (who also attended Terra Madre 2006) has referred to it as “tasting the distinctiveness of a landscape,” an experience where one not only savors the locally produced food, but also savors the cultural history behind it. In more practical terms, it also can mean the survival of small, independent farmers and traditional foods.
Terra Madre 2006 featured workshops on sustainable farming, food anthropology, and social justice, while also offering a valuable networking opportunity for third-world producers to find markets for their traditional foods.
Leshinsky says that the Midd folks went primarily to learn more about how institutional buyers can support local producers, but they quickly found that they—and Middlebury—were a model that others wanted to emulate. “As an academic institution that is also an institutional buyer, we have a great opportunity to really educate a lot of people,” Leshinsky says. “That’s one of the main things we brought back with us.”
Since returning, the group has held regular meetings, with plans to organize a Slow Food conference in Vermont, and, further down the line, a symposium at the College. The group is particularly interested in exploring the criticism that the movement is about a class-oriented issue. As Emily Peterson has discussed on her blog, “Slow Food is frequently criticized as a group that caters to the elite—if you’re living on food stamps and working three jobs, how can you possibly prepare a sumptuous, slow-cooked meal for your family every night?” It’s a valid point, Peterson acknowledges, but as the delegation learned in Torino, there are a host of third-world producers in dire need, their product and culture desperate for outlets.
Sweet Honey and the Rocks
Besides being a mouthful, an inductively coupled argon plasma spectrometer is capable of heating objects to roughly 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit—hotter than the surface of the sun. The spectrometer can reduce anything that can be turned to liquid to its most basic form. It can turn rock into elemental vapor.
The College owns one of these instruments, and recently an interested party put some maple syrup in it. Fortunately, the syrup wasn’t too sticky, which was an initial worry.
A few years ago, a simple conversation during sugaring season between professors John Elder and Jeffrey Munroe raised a question that most in the maple syrup business had already pondered but none had ever scientifically posed: is there a difference between the tastes in syrups from different parts of Vermont? And if so, what causes the difference? The answer to the first question was a simple yes. The second, too, had an intuitive answer. The roots of Vermont’s ancient maples course through different types of soil and clutch various types of bedrock in different parts of the state. But finding a provable scientific cause obviously required something more than intuition. Like, say, an inductively coupled argon plasma spectro-meter.
“I think we had a beginner’s mindset when we approached this project,” says Elder, a professor of English and environmental studies. “Our approach was very fresh.”
Elder, Munroe, and a handful of students collected samples of maple syrup from 18 different sugar bushes situated around Vermont; the locales were strategically selected, featuring bedrock that ranged from limestone to shale to pelitic schist.
Using the spectrometer, Lee Corbett ’07, a geology major, and Munroe, an assistant professor of geology, methodically vaporized one syrup sample after another, precisely tracking the mineral makeup of each. The results were as expected: a syrup’s elemental composition was in direct correlation to the bedrock over which its source was rooted. But statistically proving that there was a difference between sugars was not a sufficiently delicious victory.
In stepped food anthropologist Amy Trubeck, a faculty member in the University of Vermont’s nutrition and food sciences department. Trubeck designed a blind/random tasting designed to see just how great the differences were.
The concept is similar to terroir, a French term applied in winemaking that relates soil and weather conditions to the personality of the wine. What sort of bounty will the land yield, even if the crop is the same, in one area versus another?
“There’s such a vocabulary involved,” Corbett says. “We were all involved with the tasting. At first, [the syrups] were all overwhelmingly sweet, but you develop a palette quickly. Some were fruity, others less so; it’s a startlingly wide range. And to be involved with the data behind each sample, you began to really taste something elemental.”
Like much of Vermont, the delicate beauty of syrup is a product of the environment. It’s as much a part of the state as fall foliage or skiing or mud season. A sugaring scene is on the back of the state’s quarter. And it is as unstable as our current environment.
“The environmental movement is on a hinge,” Elder says. “The average bite of food travels 1,500 miles to get to the American plate, and local foods have the potential to conserve land and community in a time of climate change.”
The hope now is that statistically backed analysis of the subtle differences between Vermont’s famous syrups will spur awareness of how sharply the distinct variations could be altered if their land is altered. Individual identity of each sugar bush is even clearer now, and the desire to protect this product of the environment— forests, rivers, the very soil itself—must grow as well.
“Such distinction in syrup would put smaller places on the map,” Elder adds. “People will know of their value and of the cultural and economic value of small sugarmakers in Vermont.”
Adds Munroe: “This research could become a powerful marketing tool for smaller-scale producers. If we could show that there’s a foundation behind these claims, that’d be amazing. And honestly, we haven’t found one that tasted bad.”
— Alex Crumb ’07
Observed
A Valentine’s Day blizzard hammered the campus, dumping more than two feet of snow in the Champlain Valley and forcing the cancellation of classes for the first time in nearly a decade. In addition to the snow, temperatures hovered near zero and winds topped out above 30 miles per hour. According to the National Weather Service, the blizzard was the second largest in the region in more than a century. ...
In February, President Liebowitz announced the establishment of a College-wide project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts. The goal of the initiative, Liebowitz said, is to develop an environment in which students can exercise creativity, pursue innovation, and become more comfortable with intellectual risk-taking. Elizabeth Hackett Robinson ’84 was hired as director. ...
The Bloomberg news service reported that Middlebury led all liberal arts schools in fund raising for the 2006 fiscal year, raising a school-record $61.5 million. n Paul Rusesabagina, the former hotel manager who saved more than 1,000 lives during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, spoke before a standing-room-only crowd in Mead Chapel in early March. By the conclusion of his talk, there was hardly a dry eye in the house. ...
Associate Professor of Chemistry Rick Bunt recently received the 2007 Perkins Award for teaching excellence. The high honor recognizes teaching excellence in the natural sciences or math. ...
Three proposals written by Middlebury students were among the 100 selected in the Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace program. The winning Middlebury projects were “Building a Peaceful Future: A Workshop for the Old City of Jerusalem,” by Daphne Lasky ’07; “Storytelling in Uganda,” by Aylie Baker ’09, Leah Bevis ’09, Vijay Chowdhari ’09, and Chris O’Connell ’09; and “Enlightening Pakistan,” by Hamza Arshed Usmani ’10 and Shujaat Ali Khan ’10. Each project will receive a $10,000 grant. ...
Professor of History and President Emeritus John M. McCardell Jr. has launched a nonprofit organization (Choose Responsibility), which is campaigning to lower the drinking age to 18. According to its Web site, Choose Responsibility was founded to stimulate informed and dispassionate public discussion about the presence of alcohol in American culture. ...
On the morning of March 19, the campus awoke to 3,500 miniature American flags placed in rows between Storrs Walk and McCullough. The flags—one for each American life lost in the Iraq War—were placed in the snow the previous evening. ...
In April, the College announced that the comprehensive and student activity fees for the 2007–08 academic year will total $46,910, a 5.25 percent increase from the previous year. ...
Both the men’s and women’s hockey teams advanced to national title games before falling to defeat. The men lost to Oswego in overtime, 4–3. The women dropped a 2–1 decision to Plattsburgh. ...
Bill Hageman passed away after a yearlong battle with cancer. Hageman, who for years served as a pitching coach for the College baseball team, was 64.