Worthy of Frost
In the summer 2008 issue, the cover story “The Caretaker,” written so beautifully by Alexander Manshel ’09, reads like a poem begging to be written by Robert Frost, but wasn’t.
The caretaker, Leo Hotte, tending to his miles of pipes, puts one in mind of Frost’s memorable line “how thoroughly departmental.”
Dottie Laux O’Brien ’45
Manchester Village, Vermont
Fleeting Memory
Thank you for the excellent article on Leo Hotte and Bread Loaf (“The Caretaker,” summer 2008). It was like a personal tour of the campus: inn, theater, barn, and cottages. The vignette on Earthworm Manor, with its historical references, was particularly enjoyable. W.H. Upson was among the first people I heard about when I moved to Middlebury in 1975. I didn’t recognize the name, but I remembered reading his stories in the old Saturday Evening Post when I was a child. Thus, I was delighted to learn about and visit Earthworm Manor. Upson’s home in Middlebury, built totally of concrete because of his wife’s great fear of fire, is in Chipman Park. His widow, Marjorie Upson, lived there until the mid-eighties.
I would like to make one correction to your otherwise admirable article. The buildings and grounds supervisor who hired the Ryans to dig that well during the Persian Gulf War was Harvey Drinkwine (not Drinkline) who deserves to be remembered correctly. How brief is institutional memory.
Sylvia Robison
Burlington, Vermont
A Courageous Act
I just finished reading President Liebowitz’s baccalaureate address to the Class of 2008, which appeared in Middlebury Magazine. His admission of the alcohol abuse problem and his tying that to the students’ ability, going forward, to create communities in which members care enough about each other to help stop self-destructive behavior is just stunning and wonderful. Congratulations are in order for his courage to say this in a forum in which it would be unexpected.
Jacquelyn Zimmermann, M.A. French’71
Washington, District of Columbia
Leadership that Challenges
I’d like to thank President Liebowitz for a brave, intelligent, and timely speech to the 2008 Middlebury graduates (“Reflections on ‘Work Hard, Play Hard,’” summer 2008). I’m a 1984 Midd grad, received my Ph.D. in English, and taught/chaired the English department of a small liberal arts college for 15 years. Despite my background in the academic workings of a college, three years ago I left my cozy tenured job and joined the administrative team of New College in Florida as the dean of students. This shocked my colleagues, but I’ve always been more interested in the academic life of students than in publishing another paper on Victorian poetry. This job was attractive because it allowed me to teach while trying to take the ideas and philosophy of the classroom and work them into an ethical and wise road map for life. (Yes, I’ve suckled on the ideals and philosophy of Middlebury’s core liberal arts!) And I’ve found the students at this school to be smart, liberal, whimsical, fun to teach, and worth mentoring—not unlike my peers at Middlebury, 25 years ago.
It, however, has been a difficult and eye-opening transition for me. The dangerous behavior, the drug use, the binge drinking, and the unwillingness or blindness of many campus leaders to acknowledge the issues are all stunning to me. I know I’m naive. But it is much easier to praise blindly than pointedly challenge. How easy it is to talk about abstract geopolitical or aesthetic issues of the classroom. How unwilling we really are to talk about the biologically and psychologically dangerous behavior that occurs on campus. I’ve joined John McCardell’s Choose Responsibility, wondering/doubting/hoping that that would bring the issue to the foreground.
President Liebowitz’s willingness as a leader to challenge the students to think about what they have done over their last four years, to urge recognition (as well as re-cognition) seems to be what Commencement is really all about. I really wish others would do the same. His speech made me cry.
Wendy Bashant ’84
Sarasota, Florida
'Everything Goes' Must Go
I’m an alumnus of the College and recently completed my second summer as professor in the Italian School. President Liebowitz’s baccalaureate address made me want to be even more involved in the life of the College.
I especially appreciated the final part of the speech for a very simple reason. Overall, I think that my experience at Middlebury was a positive one. Sure, you can take the kid out of Williamsburg (Brooklyn) but you’ll never take Williamsburg out of the kid.
Basically I couldn’t understand why a certain “clan” (the Exeter, Fieldston, St. Paul, etc., kids) engaged in self-destructive behavior. When I was a kid, all of my free time was dedicated towards either studying or inventing a job to make a dollar here and there. And “fear” was a driving factor in this—fear of spending the rest of my life selling restaurant equipment on the Bowery or pizza in Greenpoint; “fear” of mediocrity when your parents have granted you the opportunity to re-present yourself to the community (after college) as an intellectual who aspires to educate the masses.
The point I’m trying to make is that colleges today create this fantasy world in which “everything goes.” I even see it at Harvard: “give them an A- or else they’ll screw you on your evaluations”; celebrate mediocrity rather than question established patterns of thinking and behavior. That’s why I was relieved to read President Liebowitz’s speech.
Antonio Morena ’97
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Real-Life Message Is Critical
I wanted to thank President Liebowitz for having the courage to confront the issue of binge drinking. I participated in and witnessed an awful lot of it in my day, and I know my attitudes about alcohol were unhealthy, even in spite of having a grandfather who died at a very young age from alcoholism.
I wish I had heard the president’s message back in my Middlebury days. We spend so much time educating students about history, science, math, etc., yet we seem to overlook formal education about tangible, real-life issues like drinking, thinking somehow kids will learn it themselves along the way. Former President McCardell’s approach of changing the culture through lowering the drinking age but requiring education and licensing is a realistic approach that I believe demonstrates the type of leadership and moral responsibility for our community called for in President Liebowitz’s remarks.
Jim Briggs ’90
Williamstown, Massachusetts
No to Reading Marx
I can’t let this pass.
I don’t have Tim Spears’s academic credentials, but I have been a few places, done a few things, and read a little history now and again. Spears thinks of The Communist Manifesto that its ideology “might” be “outdated,” but it still explains “how the world works.” (“Read All About It,” summer 2008)
And what world are you talking about, sir? Not the one where Marxist politics and economics have been tried and tried—and failed miserably every time to deliver on their promises. That’s the world I know. Does Mr. Spears have an alternative?
If I have my history correct, the baseline conditions (circa 1820–30) Marx railed against were in decline because of the effects of free-market competition and other social forces, as he wrote, so that Marx’s work was nearly baseless when published (circa 1845-50), in its accusations of what is evil much less when it was reduced to practice decades later. I use the word “is” because there are too many who still think Marxist dogma is useful. Talk about regressive ... yeah, the Manifesto was “outdated” within years of its publication.
Certainly the solutions Marx proposed produced nice perks for the ruling elites (of which he would have been, had anyone paid enough attention to him then), but pity those who got in the way, the most recent poster nation being Zimbabwe. How many souls perished in the 20th century alone under Marxist regimes? How can such mass slaughter arise from a book, a credo, that is a valid picture of “how the world works”? I never have gotten a good explanation on that. Perhaps you could importune Spears to enlighten me.
For this average GPA Midd graduate of 1973, the best idea Marx ever had was to die. Sadly, for about 100 million people starved, shot, gassed, buried alive, or otherwise “aborted,” this idea came to him late in life. That 100 million does not include those who “lived” and continue to live under the burdens of Marxist socialist regimes, clinging to whatever the state allows them in its wonderful benevolence.
That the acting provost of the College holds Marx in such esteem is hilarious. I did laugh, honestly. Middlebury in my time was a place where some pretty silly things could sound real, such a bubble far away from the nastiness of reality. I guess not much has changed for some, but therein is academia for you. Let’s not learn from failure or reality, nope. If we just get smarter people to try the same things again, everything will be different. Well, maybe not, but neither Mugabe or Chavez are missing any meals, so it works for some, right?
I donated to Midd this year after a hiatus. I guess I will have to reconsider, again.
George H. Schirtzinger ’73
Pasadena, California
Tim Spears responds: I am sorry my recommendation that incoming students read The Communist Manifesto offended Mr. Schirtzinger. He seems to have concluded from my recommendation that I admire or am an apologist for totalitarian politics. In fact, I meant to underscore the importance of the social and economic analysis that Marx helped pioneer. One does not have to be a Marxist to believe, as Marx did, that one’s relation to the means of production—in short, what one has in the way of wealth—says a good deal about one’s place in the world, or how one thinks about the world. Now, in making this comment, perhaps I am guilty of materialist thinking, but one can think this way and also be a free-market Republican.
In academic culture these days, most “radical” thinking is concerned with race or gender construction. In bringing Marx into the conversation, I wanted to suggest that class should also matter to how we think about the world.
Ironically, I first read The Communist Manifesto, along with Freud and Plato, in a high school philosophy class taught by a Midd alum. The books we read were not presented as “truth,” but rather as examples of big ideas, serious attempts to explain how the world works. I admire Marx’s writings for that grand effort to explain how the social world is constructed. And I think it’s still a good idea for 18-year-olds to engage his writings and to try and understand them, if only to set them aside. For this is how we learn, isn’t it?
Cruel Economic Laboratories
I read with interest the article about Elizabeth Farnsworth ’65 and her documentary, The Judge and the General (“Out of Darkness,” summer 2008). I saw the film at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, where it was very well received. Some, however, thought that the film was too easy on the role of the U.S. in the coup and its approval of Pinochet’s brutal repression. Remember, Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976 and assured him that the Ford administration would not punish him for violations of human rights.
What is not so well known is that Chile became the laboratory for Milton Friedman’s “free market” policies. Shortly after the coup, Friedman’s adherents in the United States and Chile hammered out an economic policy for the Chilean government. The plan featured basic laissez faire economics, i.e., privatization of public assets usually at a discount to Western firms, elimination of labor laws and price controls, elimination of trade barriers, and cutbacks on funds for health care and social services. The predictable results were mass unemployment and poverty, along with continued repression for those who resisted. In March 1975, Milton Friedman flew to Chile to meet with Pinochet to encourage him to keep the free-market experiment going in the face of these massive market disruptions with no safety nets. Friedman was successful in persuading Pinochet to continue these disastrous economic policies.
There is a middle ground between a free-market economy and socialism. Remember John Maynard Keynes? Perhaps, Latin American politicians should invite a few Keynesians to their economic planning tables.
Ralph E. Stone ’61
San Francisco, California
Odom Inspires
The spring 2008 issue of Middlebury Magazine has been in my briefcase for several months now. I cannot seem to let it go. I cling to the issue because in it is a truly inspiring story. How happy I was to see Michael Gordon’s moving article about Lieutenant Colonel Mark Odom ’87 who was tragically wounded in action in Iraq (“The Road to Hawr Rajab,” spring 2008).
I cannot stop thinking about Mark Odom, Kevin Conroy ’86, and the tens of thousands of other soldiers who serve our country. It is especially inspiring to me that these men who hold a degree from an institution of privilege and prestige have forsaken potential riches and comfort, under the cover of our great country’s freedoms, to choose instead to defend those freedoms. At Middlebury I had the pleasure of knowing Mark. We played football together, and he was a fraternity brother at Delta Upsilon. I am happy I was able to get to know him. Certainly, many Middlebury graduates give back to their communities and our great society in one way or another, but the vast majority of our commitments simply pale in comparison to the sacrifice our soldiers make to defend the freedom of our country and the democratic world. God bless you, Mark Odom, Kevin Conroy, and the rest of our soldiers and veterans. Thank you for your sacrifice and thank you to the University of Vermont for providing an ROTC program that helped shape these noble men.
Jeff Thomas ’85
Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
Caring Community
I was Nick Garza’s senior class dean at Albuquerque Academy, and I conducted his alumni interview when he applied to Middlebury. As an alumna interviewer and in my 22 years of waving the Middlebury flag here in the West, I have rarely known a student to be so excited about the College. He was giddy, even a little cocky. In the spring of his senior year, whenever I saw him, I would quietly say, “Go Panthers,” and that knowing, excited grin would creep up on his face. I whispered the same thing in his ear just before he crossed the stage to receive his diploma at the Academy. It was the last time I saw Nick.
Needless to say, I was stunned when the local morning news in Albuquerque announced Nick’s disappearance. Within the first 24 hours, I was contacted by Missy Foote and Hugh Marlow '57. For the rest of the long ordeal, Hugh regularly forwarded information updates to me, which allowed me to pass along real and correct information to those who asked me. I was impressed and grateful for this attention, even though I was a couple of steps removed from the event.
As I followed the story from across the country, I was thoroughly impressed with the way Middlebury handled this tragic and awful event. The College clearly did everything possible to welcome and support Natalie Garza and her son as they took up residence in Middlebury during the long search. The information on the Web site was timely, complete, and compassionate, especially in the first days and weeks of Nick’s disappearance. Both the College and the town seemed to exhaust all possible resources in finding an end to this event and never seemed to rest until the moment of locating Nick. Ultimately, for the memorial service held in June at Albuquerque Academy, Acting Provost Tim Spears and the Acting Dean of the College Gus Jordan accompanied at least 10 of Nick’s friends to attend and participate. I know this participation by College leaders and Nick’s friends made an impression on our community and meant a great deal to the Garza family. Choosing to sit in the Middlebury “section,” I had the good fortune to briefly speak with some of those visiting Middlebury students and, in short, they were fine young men who represented Middlebury with honor, maturity, and grace. This final act by the Middlebury College community blew me away, and though the circumstances were terrible, I was and continue to be very proud to be a part of the same Middlebury community.
Ann B. McCollum ’86
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Letters Policy
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