Provost's Office

Middlebury is currently undergoing a comprehensive evaluation for Reaccreditation by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE). The evaluation is focused on nine standards defined by NECHE. The Reaccreditation steering committee compiled a Self-Study to respond to the standards and forms the basis for the visit. The review team will be hosting an open meeting for all Staff. All staff are encouraged to attend at this time. Open Faculty and Student meetings are held at other times.

Michael Wood, long time Bread Loaf faculty member and Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton, will discuss what we may hear when we listen closely to the work of Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison, paying special attention perhaps to what they don’t say. It will also consider the effect of listening with them, tuning in to some of the unforgettable jazz that gave a title to a Morrison novel, and that was never far away from any of Hughes’ poems.

Unlike in countries such as the United States and Britain, Germany had no process for soldiers to legally express conscientious objection to military service in WWI. This has led historians to conclude that such dissent in Germany was very limited in comparison, with the isolated cases of Germans who did express such opposition being relegated to the purview of physicians and psychiatric institutions.

One of the keynote speakers for the Creating Connections Consortium (C3) Summit, sociologist of education Eve L. Ewing will discuss her latest book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press). Dr. Ewing will talk about the story of Chicago’s 2013 mass public school closures—the largest wave of such closures in the nation’s history. The event will include a reading of excerpts from the book, behind-the-scenes context, and the deeper story of the research project.

As one of the keynote speakers at the Creating Connections Consortium (C3) Summit, Chastity Lord (Chief Operating Officer at the Color Of Change) will deliver a lecture entitled, “The Sidelines Have Disappeared.”

Beyond the Page is a new project at Middlebury College started by The Bread Loaf School of English and led by Craig Maravich. This project partners with professional actors/teaching artists, faculty and students to embed theatre arts practices across the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. This talk will explore how this pedagogy fosters creativity and critical thinking, and has the potential to revolutionize teaching in the liberal arts.

How does one write about challenging political issues for a medium that is primarily consumed as entertainment? How do we balance the specificity of a fictionalized story about individual characters with broader national issues like “Black Lives Matter” and abortion?

Anthropogenic climate change threatens coral reef ecosystems in several ways. By comparing coral samples from a reef that experienced bleaching at high temperatures, and one that did not, we determined biological factors indicating temperature stress resilience. These data improve our biological understanding of these reefs, and provide insight for conservation efforts.

Professor Eggleston had been scheduled to teach at Alumni College this August. Though Alumni College had to be cancelled, we are pleased to have her as part of Faculty at Home summer series.

Julia Alvarez discusses her first novel for adults in fifteen years with John Elder. Afterlife — a novel about what happens when the life we plan goes awry, retirement after a long career teaching, and honoring the diversity in each other and ourselves — is especially timely in this moment in our national and global history.

For the last three decades, Jesse Bowman Bruchac and Conor McDonough Quinn have worked both together and individually in Abenaki and other Eastern Algonquian language revitalization efforts. They see this work as not only about language, but also about the strengthening of culture and community. These efforts have led Dr. Quinn to develop and implement an Indigenous inspired relational approach to teaching language, in concert with Jesse’s culturally guided incorporation of music, and technology.