Fall Family Weekend
Thank you for coming to Fall Family Weekend 2022!
We were happy to welcome many of our students’ families during a beautiful and sunny Fall Family Weekend, October 7–9, 2022. Thank you for visiting, enjoying the various sporting and performing arts events, and contributing to the Middlebury experience!
Presidential Panel
President Patton and some of her senior administrators share the state of Middlebury today and answer questions from families.
- Thank you, Meg. Good morning, how’s everyone doing? Got your cup of coffee, got your cider donuts? Check, check. If not the cider donuts… Oh, I like that. Before I start, I also just wanna say a big thanks to all the Alumni and Parent Program staff, volunteers, who’ve helped to put this together, so thank you. I am Smita Ruzicka, and I am the Vice President for Student Affairs here at Middlebury College, and I am just thrilled to be here this morning. Joining myself, of course, you’re gonna hear in a few minutes from President Patton, who will share some insights into Middlebury today. Joining her are additional members of her senior leadership team. We have David Provost on the end right there, he is our Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration. He also has the privilege of sharing the first floor of Old Chapel offices with me. That’s really his greatest joy. We have Michelle McCauley, who is our Interim Provost and Professor of Psychology. We have Dr. Khuram Hussain, Vice President of Equity and Inclusion, and an Associate Professor of Education Studies. And we have Erin Quinn, who is our Director of Athletics. We will be happy to answer questions, following President Patton’s talk. Now, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Laurie L. Patton, Middlebury’s 17th president and the first woman to lead the institution in its 221 year history. Yes. From her first days in office, President Patton began to design a new agenda for Middlebury. In her inaugural address, Patton described division of a Middlebury that would actively engage with the most critical issues facing society and challenge the community to have more and better arguments with greater respect, stronger resilience, and deeper wisdom. In 2016, Laurie launched Envisioning Middlebury, the planning effort that created a strategic framework to guide the institution over the coming decade. In 2019, she announced Energy2028, Middlebury’s bold plan to address the threat of climate change and put the institution on the path toward a complete shift to renewable energy. Laurie’s an authority on South Asian history, culture, and religion. She is the author or editor of about 11 books in the field and has translated the classical Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita. President Patton joined Middlebury on July 1, 2015, after serving as the Dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. I think… Okay, no, we’re back. Laurie earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1983, and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1981. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. I’m gonna do a little bit of an ad-lib introduction. In addition to all these accomplishments, she is a wise mentor, a wonderful leader, and a great friend to all of us, and we are so privileged to have us… Have with us, Laurie Patton today. Please welcome, and join me in welcoming, President Laurie Patton.
- Thank you, Smita. I so appreciate your kind words, and I will say your pronunciation of “Bhagavad Gita” was perfect. Thank you so much. I wanna say how delighted I am to be welcoming you here today. Good morning families, and friends, and cousins, and old neighbors, and all the people who have come to us this weekend. This is a weekend we look forward to every year. It feels… Even though we had it last year, it feels as if people are really, really with us in a kind of newly energized way. And I have to say, I’ve noticed a lot of Middlebury swag in this room, so I wanna thank you for that as well, and our bookstore thanks you. We’re delighted that so many of you could join us. We’re back to our old numbers, which is also really wonderful. Meg is absolutely right, we made that call. I said, “Oh, they’ll have coffee. “They’ll be warm enough.” And Meg said, “No, they’ll be warmer in here.” But please do go to the games, I’m gonna share a little bit more about that in a second, later this afternoon. I hope you’re gonna have a chance to walk across our campus with your students, take in the mountain views, which a friend of mine called “heartbreakingly beautiful this time of year,” and that is absolutely true. Trees are putting on a magnificent show for you. I always take a morning around this time of year to drive through, up and over the mountain, where our Bread Loaf Campus is. I call it “driving through colored lace,” and that’s exactly what it feels. Let me just share a bit, before I share about Middlebury today, about our highlights for the weekend. Our varsity teams are competing in nine different contexts. Our sailing team is racing on Lake Champlain, if you wanna race up there and back. And our equestrians are riding at the Eddy Farm, they are particularly excited about their race today… Their ride today. You can also take in a marathon reading of The Iliad at any time today or tomorrow, which is always fun. And also, tonight, you can hear… Enjoy a choral concert, or hear pianist, Clayton Stephenson. We do have a lot going on, but it’s not that much more than what we have going on at Middlebury on any given weekend. And also, don’t miss the first year’s show at Hepburn Zoo. You won’t find animals at Hepburn Zoo, but you will find incredibly creative students performing in a black box theater. And if there are… None of those things appeal, you can always check the calendar events for other things that might be going on. As you are probably experiencing in your own work lives and your own home lives, you are moving, as we are, from pandemic to endemic, from crisis to living safely with COVID, and evolving to live in that post-COVID reality, where the disease is still here, the disease is still something to watch for, and we are moving on with that reality to our daily lives. We are no longer mandating regular testing. We do expect faculty, staff, and students to test for COVID-19 if they’re experiencing symptoms consistent with the virus, or are identified as a close contact. Antigen kits are ready and available for students, and we are… In fact, just yesterday, we are holding a number of COVID booster clinics this month and next for our folks. We want to say thank you for all that you have done to support your students, whether they were in high school during this time or at Middlebury through this incredibly difficult two to three years. I just wanna share with you that Middlebury had one of the lowest rates, if not the lowest rate, of COVID in the country during that really difficult first year. I think it had to do with Vermont, but it mostly had to do with your students. Our students, that we share together. They were deeply community-minded. In a survey that we put out, two years in a row, they consistently rated care for others above care for self. That translated into an incredible care within the community. One of the most moving moments that I have had in my educational career was when a student said in January, who lived off campus, said to me after we finished a really good first semester, “I think we’ve earned the community’s trust.” And what an incredible thing to learn as a young person, that you are carrying the health of the community in your hands. I’m sure it did not hurt that when we moved from our first very restrictive phase to our second, I took a day off and went personally to every single off-campus house with a bag of cookies, a Middlebury Panther, stuffed panther, a blanket saying, “Yay, you guys did it. And by the way, if you have an off-campus party, you’re out.” So that helped. They were not expecting to see the president walk to their door, so I’m sure we created a memory for them as well. But since then, since that time, I truly feel that we have internalized the wisdom and the kindness that should be the result of caring for each other, and being together, and staying a learning community during the pandemic. And right now, it’s my peeps. My peeps are here, they’re awesome. Treat ‘em well. It is my job, and my team’s job, to listen and to pause, and to take the time to understand what experiences your students have gone through, and what they’ve brought with them, and invite them to evolve with us. Every year, I name a theme, and this year, it is “Evolving community and growing community,” because we do have that challenge before us as we move into a post-pandemic learning community. And it really does need to incorporate all of the different challenges that we’ve learned about from the past few years. And I charged last year’s graduating class with being recovery artists, and that’s really what they are. Our recovery artists. And there were so many ways and examples that we could share with you about what they did to help us recover and to rebuild the world, which they are now out and doing. So today I also wanna talk to you about what I call “Liberal learning for the 21st century.” I believe that Middlebury is uniquely equipped to lead in four major areas that span our curriculum. They are “conflict fluencies,” particularly because Middlebury is a language school, as you know. We talk about fluency and literacy a lot. So we feel that these four areas of fluency in conflict transformation, fluency in data, fluency in cross-cultural engagement, and fluency in environment and particular climate action, are the literacies and liberal arts for the 21st century. Now, that doesn’t mean that we are going to suddenly reorganize all our departments. We have, as you heard from The Iliad, some very traditional departments, as well as some crosscutting engagements, these four fluencies, that invite all of our departments to partake, and to be part of that new sense of literacy. So let me say a little bit more about these. The first, “data fluency,” is an initiative we are calling “MiddData,” and it integrates data science throughout the curriculum. We have a wonderful large J term course where humanists, and social scientists, and scientists all teach, and they really focus on not data just as a research tool, that is pretty much ubiquitous everywhere, but data as a better way to answer basic questions, and questions that inspire us. We are question-driven at Middlebury, and we find that the use… The wise and judicious use, and reading and interpretation of data is the thing that will help our students thrive in the mid-21st century world, including data methods and data science, regardless of major. The second, “environmental fluency,” takes the form of a collaboration between our academic departments and Energy2028, and the Environmental Council’s work on justice and sustainability. And they sponsor, with our faculty, a Sustainability Solutions Lab, which is really exciting because it focuses on problems, and everyday problems, whether that’s looking at an initiative to do an energy inventory over in the town of Bristol where our students were helping the town select board there, or looking at our own energy consumption. The goals of Energy2028, which is that wonderful initiative that was really led by students to get there, include a total use and fueling of our entire campus, by 2028, by renewable energy. We are well on our way to it. We’re real excited about it. We have started a biodigester, built a biodigester, in collaboration with a company called Vanguard that is up and running and is the only one in the nation directly to fuel a college campus. We also are now building a… The largest solar field in Vermont. We inaugurated… Did a groundbreaking with Patrick Leahy and several other of our partners last year. So we’re incredibly excited about being fueled entirely by renewable fuels by 2028. We also have a major educational initiative which focuses on these solutions. We will also be divested of all fossil fuels by 2028, are well on our way to that as well. So these are incredibly exciting initiatives, and we also hold that climate action should be as much a part of liberal arts and our curriculum as all of the other areas of focus. Particularly, getting our students to understand, What are the trade offs? What are the political processes? What does it feel like to be world-ready as we move forward with climate action, and climate… And addressing the issues of climate change? Incredibly exciting work. Our third area of fluency is conflict transformation, and that is the ability to work across difference and through conflict. You’ve heard of conflict mediation, you’ve heard of conflict negotiation, conflict management. Conflict transformation is a school of approach to conflict that says, “Look, conflict’s always gonna be with us. “Our job as ethical citizens “in the public square is “to make sure that as we deal with conflict, “we take the inevitable tension “that’s never gonna go away “and move it to a positive direction “rather than to a destructive direction.” And that means that we analyze the systemic sources of conflict as we move forward. John Paul Lederach is a wonderful thinker in this area. He was just with us a week and a half ago for our all-campus intellectual conversation, and we choose a theme each year. This year was “conflict transformation.” And we have recently received a $25 million grant from an anonymous donor to fund the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, and we see it as an incubator for the development of a particularly Middlebury pedagogical tool for how to think about conflict more broadly, and help them, and ourselves, be ethical citizens in that public square. So we’re training students and community members in conflict transformation to tackle that growing polarization and divisiveness that we all feel. And already, I would say, this grant is making an impact. Twenty-one students had local and national internships this summer through our Poverty and Privilege Program, which looks at the effects of poverty and its contribution to the ways that conflicts are exacerbated by differences in poverty and privilege. A wonderful story from the summer that I’ll share with you is a student who was in a restorative justice program, locally, who said, “I really did not wanna work with this one guy who had did damage to the community in ways that I really was offended by. I did not want to be near him. He didn’t want to be part of this program. But over the course of the summer, I understood what it meant to have a relationship with him.” Again, those are the moments that really make an educator’s day, when you hear those kinds of things. The final one is something that Middlebury has been doing for at least 100, if not more, years; Cross-cultural fluency. Particularly, as you know from the strength of our language schools, as well as our campus in Monterey, California, which has a very large component of graduate training in cross-cultural training, and translation, and interpretation, and language. And here at the College, we are particularly focused on developing the area of Black Studies, where we’ve already raised funds for two professorships, and hope to focus more across the curriculum. We think that Middlebury can bring particular tools to the questions of racism that have really roiled our country for the last two or three years, and been part of our heritage in ways that we think we can build in a constructive way forward through relationship and cross-cultural training. So one of the ways we also ensure our students are fluent in these areas when they leave Middlebury is through experiential learning. And as faculty learn new ways in our pandemic to teach and to engage with students, many turn to experiential learning as a way of translating theoretical knowledge into practice. Even as they turned to Zoom, they were creating exercises that really pushed students to go out into the real world. We have a number of entrepreneurship, and innovation, and creativity programs, whether it’s mini-startup programs, MiddCORE, which allows us to really focus on cold calling, financial health, all those life skills that you need, to help our students experience life and, as I mentioned before that phrase that we love so much, become world-ready. And we also have found that our classroom is becoming more expansive as we look at our place in the communities we inhabit. Our accreditors, two years ago, when they came to be with us, they’re paid to say… To point out the places where we can improve. And what they shared was that they see us as a leader nationally in that integration of experience into the classroom. And that really takes our academic staff, our Student Life staff, and our faculty in collaboration to work with each other on those programs. And they include summer experiences and internships, our career center, our Centers for Creativity and Innovation, I just mentioned, our incredibly dynamic Center for Community Engagement, and our new Life Skills Residential Education Program, which is headed by a faculty member, Rob Moeller. It’s called Compass. And in addition to MiddCORE, which is a more intensive course that I just mentioned, Compass is something that is a series of workshops that students can take throughout the academic year, a little bit less intensive. But this too will allow them to acquire those critical life skills that help them succeed when they leave Middlebury, and even at Middlebury. Financial wellness, effective conflict resolution, personal wellness, and other topics like this that we all struggle with, depending on our life stage, but certainly, ones that our students need to be aware of and have skills in during their time in college and beyond. The thing that’s really exciting about Compass is that students chart a personal path through Middlebury that enables them to take advantage of all the resources and opportunities at the college, and they’re supported by trained mentors who sign up Our staff and faculty are mentors that are just another adult, in addition to the coaches, and the RAs, and the faculty, and the advisors, and the librarians. You’ll have a mentor for just a life… As someone said, “My mentor is my life guy.” And I’m like, “Okay, good. You can have a life guy, I like that.” And then I also wanna mention, since Erin is here and very happy to take your question about athletics, we have a really robust athletic program that, I would say, in its capacity for education in its own right. It is a Division III area, which means we are scholar athletes. And in its capacity for driving excellence through personal growth, I think Middlebury’s reputation, as well as its practice, is unmatched. We can see it partly through another very esteemed liberal arts college having some trouble with some of the athletics, which we also struggle with. Don’t wanna be pie-in-the-sky in any way, but he was looking around and my board chair said to me…. Well, he called me up and he said, “Everybody says if you’re having trouble with athletics, look at Middlebury and talk to Middlebury,” and I was thrilled. Again, board chairs aren’t paid to tell you good things. They’re paid to tell you all the ways you need to improve, so we are particularly proud of that. And our Title IX champions in the… The way I talk about them in the 50th anniversary of the year of Title IX, we had three national championships. Four women in field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse. It was, I think, unprecedented, and they are extraordinary women. You sent us extraordinary students. I could go on and on about the stories that I’ve shared, but I’ll let Erin tell the better stories. And I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention our robust alumni and parent network, Midd2Midd. It has over 6,000 alumni and several hundred parents who volunteered to mentor our students, and to offer career advice for students and graduates. And if your students have not yet visited the Center for Careers and Internships, Peggy Burns is here today. And also, you should sign up for Midd2Midd. I hope you will do so and I hope you’ll encourage your students to do so. I frequently talk about academic life as having actual capital, we need that, of course, prestige capital, that goes up and down, and social capital, and where Middlebury’s heart and soul is, is really in that social capital. We love taking care of each other. And then, I wanna talk a little bit about the futures that your students can think about. Thanks to the programs I just mentioned, and our faculty, and residential, and career, and experiential staff, our graduates do leave Middlebury for exciting futures. Our recent grads that, just last year, 94 percent are employed, in graduate school, or pursuing a fellowship. So for the 30 or 40 other students, we want to leave them alone to travel or do whatever else they’re doing. We have a 93 percent cohort acceptance rate into medical school. The average is about 48 to 49 percent. And an 89 percent law school admissions rates. So we have some very exciting work done by our students right out of college. And in addition, we are always one of the highest folks colleges who receive Fulbright Fellowships and other fellowships, such as Watson, and Kellogg, and Goldwater, and Blakemore, are often on our list. These are students putting their education into practice, being world-ready, around the country and the globe. They are problem solvers, innovative… Innovators and civic-minded citizens. And when I think about our mission statement, “Through a commitment to immersive learning, we educate students to lead engaged, consequential and creative lives, contribute to their communities, and address the world’s most challenging problems.” I always choose one word from that mission statement to remember every year, and we really feel that that last phrase about addressing the world’s most challenging problems is more and more essential to our liberal arts education. And I hope that every single one of your students, whatever they’re pursuing, and I’ve talked to parents already, yesterday and today, they have students just falling in love with French, they have students who didn’t know that biochemistry was so fun, I am not making that up, and they really have discovered courage, a kind of newfound courage to pursue their dreams as they move out into the world, and we are really grateful to you for being part of what I call that collective genius that is Middlebury, and sharing and learning with them. Before I go to questions, and I will wrap up with an inspiring story at the end of questions, I wanna invite you to join our learning community in one other way, and that’s by participating in the Faculty at Home webinar series, which brings you to talks each month by some of our exceptional faculty. They love doing it, and it’s a really, really fun webinar. So I will end by reminding you that Middlebury values, I see as five and they always come in a package. Integrity, rigor, connectedness, curiosity, and openness. And if you meet one of your students on the path, or one of your students’ friends, or one of those old roommates, if you’re an alum, you will notice that they have those five qualities. Middlebury is low ego and high impact, and I think it’s because of those five values of integrity, rigor, connectedness, curiosity, and openness, that we’re able to do what we do in the world. So I’m gonna close here, and I’m gonna now open it up for questions. Usually, I go on for hours and hours, and my team has told me, “Stop and open up for questions,” so I’m doing exactly that. I’m just gonna share a little bit more about each one of the people that are on the stage. David Provost, our CFO. One of the things I say frequently is, “If you want your college to succeed, hire a CFO who loves to educate, who is himself an educator.” Most of the really hard work that we’ve done around the environment, around the endowment, you name it, David’s there with students, talking to them, hanging out. Erin Quinn, I’ve already mentioned. He’s my buddy, my soulmate. We both are very connected to thinking through competitiveness and grounding… Personal and psychological grounding in the midst of being in a competitive team sport, what that looks like. Erin’s personal connection with students and coaches just makes the world of difference. Smita Ruzicka has come to us most recently from Johns Hopkins University, this is her second year. She has hit it out of the park. She’s redesigning our Student Life and Student Care, and we are just incredibly excited to think about all of the innovations, and I hope that she can share some of them with you that she’s starting. Michelle McCauley, Professor of Psychology, been on every single committee that Middlebury has ever sponsored, stepped into the breach in an amazing way when we very suddenly lost our number two of all of Middlebury, Jeff Cason, this summer, our provost. There was one name that kept rising to the top as I rushed home from Maine and had about 60 conversations, and that was Michelle. My test for that was, “Who do you want in the room when X really tough decision is being made, and nobody agrees?” And I gave three or four names, and Michelle always came out on top. So thank you for being here, Michelle. She’s already incredible, and she was before this, the director of our Conflict Transformation Initiative. Khuram Hussain comes to us… Is our newest. Comes from Hobart William Smith, as our VP for Equity and Inclusion. He has served as Dean of Students, also works in education in the history of black activism, as well as has training in conflict mediation. He’s one of the most relational people I know. He loves to work with communities, is already connecting with the Midd community town, as well as the College. And he’s still in the honeymoon phase, I just wanna warn you, and everyone is still coming up to me going, “Oh my god, that hire has been so fantastic.” So I just wanna share, these are my peeps, and we can open it up for questions. And just to remind everybody, the mics for the Q&A are on either side. Don’t be shy. Hi. And if you could introduce yourself, and where you’re from, and what your student’s up to.
- Sure. I’m Gary Wilson from Oxford, Mississippi, and thank you for having us today. I was actually here a year ago with my son, he’s a freshman now. And we stumbled upon family weekend, we didn’t know his family weekend. And it was a Sunday morning, it was like nine in the morning, and we had visited two other schools and we were going to visit another one, and the energy was incredible. It was beautiful. I’m from Massachusetts, but we’ve lived in Mississippi, and it was just amazing. I think we were welcomed by so many people. It was very unique, the energy was great. My son applied early decision, was accepted, and he’s had a great start. He seems real happy, so it’s good to see him. I guess my question for you, or comment, is living in Mississippi, which you might not have a lot of people from the South, you get a sort of… When you mention to people about Middlebury, the impression is this far left, close-minded place. And so, in the back of my mind, I wonder, when he gets here, what’s it like? Is it really close-minded? You see on free speech surveys, some criticism about Middlebury, and there’ve been some incidents over the years and stuff, so it was a little bit of a worry for me. Is it really like old school free speech? You go to college, you just learn about the left, the right, you have all these discussions. And certainly in Mississippi, it’s a conservative place and different sensibilities. And so, in the back of my mind, I’ve had this sort of concern. And talking to him, he says, “No dad, this is really overblown. This is a place where you can say what you want, where people listen, where people talk about stuff.” So that’s a relief. And I just hope, going forward, that this open-minded, free speech, old school… I’m not a fan of cancel culture, where people can really… And I’m glad to hear about the conflict transformation and how to talk about this stuff. I just think it’s been a very divisive environment. So I hope… I’m a little center right, my wife’s center left. We live in Mississippi, I grew up in Massachusetts. I just really would love that people can talk to each other, and really embrace kind of a lot of different parts of the spectrum. So thank you for what you’re doing, appreciate it, and it’s great to be here.
- Gary Wilson.
- [Pres. Patton] Gary? Gary, it’s great to meet you. Jump in here. So I think… Oh sorry, you can hear me now. Thanks, yeah. I think one of the things that is an important element for us to… Or the way I respond usually in… To the kind of question that you’re raising, which is essential for our time, is “Be with us,” right? The press is not our friend. We love the press in many ways. Come and be with us. And what you’ll find is exactly what your son has found. I will also say, just because every college struggles with these kinds of questions and incidents, this was a long time ago that… 2017, in college time, is a long time ago. But since then, we… That was a tough time during the elections. A number of different places, I’d counted about 20, 21 schools, just that month, having concerns and challenges. We always teach our students and ourselves, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it. And our community came together and created an engaged listening project, which was helping faculty to address and manage classrooms across difference. We already did it, but we doubled down on that in a major way, very similar to the kind of approach that Claremont McKenna has. Claremont McKenna is a kind of companion school in certain ways. But engaged listening was different because it focused on listening, and really hearing where students were coming from. And it also focused on a technique called “deliberative dialogue.” I have a piece coming out in Inside Higher Education on “scaffolded conversation,” which means you take one part of an issue, and not the whole issue at once, and you go slowly through each of them. A lot of town selectboards in Vermont are now using this technique to make sure that governance, even in state, becomes less polarized. As a result of that success, as well as a number of other successes that was funded by a million dollar grant from Mellon Foundation, folks in higher education that are in the know, know that we rock this, and we do so. As a result of that really great record, we were able to get this $25 million grant. I now sit on a national board for the public sphere and creating democratic practices in the public sphere. And many of our other folks here on this panel are national leaders in this space as well. So that’s just a little bit of a story for you, which is, I believe, a profound success story that we’re particularly proud of. But I’ll turn to, I think, Michelle, maybe Khuram and Smita.
- I think I’ll get that on. I think it’s a great… So the moment we’re in, and it’s not new, right? We know that in democracy, people have to be able to talk across difference. And it really doesn’t matter what area your focus is, discipline, area. Whether you are in… You’re pre-med, or law, or environmental issues, or you’re thinking about social justice, you have to be able to sit down and have conversations where you listen. And we have really been doing a lot of work to help both the faculty mentor those, and opportunities for the students to practice and engage in the classroom and in the community.
- Sure. Yeah, I really appreciate the sensibility underneath the question. I think back to when I was an undergraduate student, and I still stay in touch with my roommate and we are on the absolute opposite side of this room politically. And we have never had a meaningless argument, or an argument that was targeted towards somebody’s values or their moral center. And so, I think that’s probably true for a lot of us in this room. And we’re also confronting a generational moment where that’s less and less true for everyone, to have that capacity to hold space for views that make us uncomfortable, that make us feel a little bit threatened about where the truth is. And I think that what we are required to do, what we’ve done for a very long time, from everything I’ve witnessed at Middlebury, is to be able to deliver content and knowledge that gives you a vast sense of the world and what it means to participate in the world. And what we are now called to do is to make sure that how we process that, not just the what we’re learning, but how we’re learning, the experiential piece, is an existential question now for higher ed. This is the future of the world that we want our children and our children’s children to be able to participate in, and the future of democracy itself. So the stakes are extraordinary. And so, as much as we could get the same knowledge from global leaders in research and scholarship on these issues, being in a space where you can sit in circle, where you can sit in community, where you can sit across the table and have intentional dialogues that get us somewhere, even though it’s hard to get there. And that’s where I think a lot of what Laurie has laid out really matters right now. And that’s what’s exciting for me to be in this space, because all of this work for me is about relationality. It’s about how we make sense of the world of ideas in ourselves in relation to others. And those “soft skills,” it used to be called, are now the vital skills of leadership that everyone’s expecting in public and private spaces of industry. So I really think that the urgency of your question is alive for us right now.
- Smita, I’m gonna turn to my Republican work husband over there, David Provost. Go ahead, Smita.
- I’m very curious to hear that part now. Thank you for that question, Gary. And I wanna preface by saying I’ve spent the majority of my life and my professional career in the South. I was at a large public institution, University of Texas at Austin, and spent some time in New Orleans, Louisiana, so I really appreciate the question because as I moved farther north, I had some of my southern friends go, “Oh, you’re going up to the hippies, right?” Clearly not, maybe. I think for me, in the work I do and my team does with students, I really want us to move beyond the labels. I want us to move beyond conservative/liberal, far left/far right. I wanna move beyond the 120 Twitter headlines that our students are constantly reading. I wanna move beyond just the ads and the articles that show up for our students on… Well, they don’t use Facebook anymore. We do now. But I think it’s a muscle that we actually have to train our students to develop, and that muscle is moving away from looking at the surface, but digging down. It’s a muscle of really… While we value debate, I think it’s a muscle of developing how to have dialogue. And in conversations around difference, we have to shift from debate to dialogue. And many of our students, and us as well, we’ve been socialized all our lives to debate our point, to get our point across. And while there’s value, when we’re having conversations that are important around people’s lived experience, we have to come to a place of dialogue. And for our students to understand that there sometimes is not just one truth, there are multiple truths, and multiple lived experiences. I come from a family of storytellers, I’m a storyteller, and one of the best ways that I have found to engage our students is to create spaces where students can tell their own stories, and that is powerful. And it takes away the fact that Gary’s son is from Mississippi, and let me just make all kinds of assumptions about Gary’s son. It takes that away and we really get to know him as a person and his story. And so, we are trying to create those spaces, whether it’s in our residence halls, from the moment we pair up roommates who may be coming from different places, and helping them live together and negotiate the daily things of living together, to being part of our student organizations. And how do we… How are we teaching leaders of our student organizations, especially those that may have a political bent, of how are we really ensuring that your membership reflects that of the entire college? I advise our Student Government Association, and I’ve advised student governments in the four campuses that I’ve been in. And oftentimes, those student governments are oftentimes labeled as, “Oh, they are the liberals, right?” And I have to continually challenge our leaders to say, “How are you ensuring you’re representing your entire student body? How are you bringing the voices that typically are not at your table?” So it’s about setting the table, it’s about helping our students develop and actively use the muscle of dialogue, storytelling, and to understand that there are multiple truths and lived experiences. So that’s what I think we all are trying to do.
- Thanks. David, and then Erin, quickly. I wanna get to other questions.
- So I came here almost six years ago, and I was meeting with Laurie, and I said… I had the same fear that you just described. I said, “My oldest brother wrote speeches… He was the chief speechwriter for George H. Bush. Is that gonna be a problem here at Middlebury?” And all I will say is what we have in this leader is someone who prioritizes the discussion of difference more so than the outcome. And to watch people… People assume that any president of any company, any corporation, any institution, has made up their mind, and that they’re being polite, and they’re saying, “Hey, offer your thoughts, offer your opinion, give us your thinking, show us the data.” People always walk into the room, the first time they see it, and they go, “Yeah, that’s just lip service.” And to watch people try to navigate that with Laurie, it’s fascinating, because no one believes it. And after you do it for five years, you’re like, “No, she really wants to know what you think.” And that has been filtering through this institution to our faculty, to our staff, to our students, and it makes it a richer place.
- Thank you, David. And David and I are both fiscal conservatives in the best sense, and we do really translate that financial sustainability and responsibility more broadly as well, and that has made a huge difference educationally too. Erin, final word ‘cause it’s such an important question, thank you.
- I’ll just add quickly, because I think it demonstrates that we are not operating in silos. These are all colleagues I work closely with. This is not an issue, say, that Khuram and his role is addressing specifically, but then, over in Athletics, we’re just trying to run around and play games. So a little over a week ago, we had over 500 varsity athletes in Virtue Field House. We had a Middlebury alum, Andrew Plumley, who played football and basketball at Middlebury, and is the Director of Equity and Inclusion for all of the museums in the United States, and we did a 90 minute workshop with over 500 athletes, “Embracing Difference.” And we’re not only facilitating those conversations, and allowing those students to have the conversations, but, over the course of the year, also teaching them how to have those conversations. Not just sort of throwing ‘em out there and saying, “go talk about these hard issues.” How do you listen? What is a ladder of inference that makes me jump right to, “Oh, you’re from Mississippi, so it must be this, this, and this. You’re from Vermont so it must be this, this, and this?” So understanding those concepts as you go into these conversations, being able to sit, breathe, relax, and listen to other people. So we’re even doing it in Athletics.
- Thank you. I wanna share a very cool statistic, which I just learned about, in the ways that we are leading in this area. And that is that Washington Monthly, again, not a magazine that is prone to celebration but rather is focused on critique, they did a ranking of all the colleges in the United States of how colleges prepare their students for citizenship based on activities, community engagement, and voter registration, and conversation across difference, and Middlebury was ranked number two in the entire nation. So we’re getting there and we’re real excited about getting our students there as well, preparing for democracy. So thanks for that question. Other questions? Yeah, hi.
- I’m Theresa Clark, I’m from New York, and my son is a sophomore. And my question is another big picture question that follows the last one, based on something that’s been in the news last few days, and that is around the NYU professor who was dismissed. And I guess for anyone who doesn’t know, this was the NYU professor who had been tenured at Princeton, wrote an influential textbook in organic chemistry, was retired, got very good student reviews for many years, but then his grading was too hard, and many of the students signed a petition saying that they were failing and they thought that the grading was just too hard, so NYU fired him. I’m just curious to know how you comment on that ‘cause it raises a lot of interesting questions about academia, and the relationship between students’ views and how universities respond to those.
- Yeah, thank you. That is a… It’s a heartbreaking case and it goes to the heart of some of the things and challenges that we feel every day. If you’re an educator, you see it with your colleagues, you see it in other places. I’ll start, and then I’ll turn to Michelle, as our chief academic officer. I think, first of all, the question of student expectations and professorial expectations, and intergenerational differences around that, it’s very real. One of the things that we do, actually, at Alumni Weekend, is have an intergenerational panel to feature and focus on that very issue and question. And I think you see it, sometimes in the classroom. So I think one of the things that the Engaged Listening Project, before our Conflict Transformation project, focused on, and it will remain a core for us in Conflict Transformation, is “how do you negotiate difference before it becomes “whoa”?” Like what happened there, where it became such a big thing so quickly because people were kind of going along, along, along, maybe not listening, maybe not pausing, and then it blew up. So our hope is, especially when we think about intergenerational dialogue, but also just classroom dynamics with our professors and our students, more generally, what are your expectations and how do you negotiate when you don’t feel that your professor’s being fair? How do you find the language? How do you talk about that? Middlebury is really different than NYU in a couple ways. One, we have first class international researchers here. However, liberal arts and sciences colleges professors are there because of students, because teaching is their first love, so they are evaluated and tenured on teaching. We have a very low rate of non-tenure track professors here, which also makes a difference in terms of our professor’s investment in their community and engagement with students. So the number one thing we talk about, and Smita does in her orientation, is “talk to professors, they want to talk to you. They really wanna talk to you. They’re here because they love teaching.” So that makes a big difference. I also think that because pedagogy is a major focus for us, we have something called the CTLR, which is the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research, which holds, pretty much, weekly sessions on pedagogy. We also… For anyone across the campus. And in addition, we have a science pedagogical community that meets, I think, every two weeks or monthly to talk about pedagogy in the sciences. So hopefully, with all of those things in place, as well as with this approach, deliberative dialogue, that would have been addressed earlier on. You never know, you can never say for sure, but I think there are a number of different safeguards that Middlebury has in place, as a liberal arts and sciences college committed to pedagogy, that we hope would catch that earlier. And it’s really… It’s a really tough question. And grading is an issue… To share the other part of the issue that came up in your really great question, has to do with grade inflation and how we think about that in the academy. That’s a really tough and important issue. Phi Beta Kappa at Middlebury just met and said, “We are now going to be considering breadth in curriculum as well as depth, as we think about electing members to an honor society.” So I think that kind of thing is the things that professors across the country are thinking about too. So thanks for that. Michelle.
- So I’ll speak more kind of from the focus of Middlebury, and this is a challenge, and it’s a challenge for students in that weighing of their understanding of the role of time and then assessment, right? And a lot of from… As Laurie said, the people who choose to come to Middlebury, to teach here, are people who value their scholarship, and are amazing, top-tier scholars, but they wanted to be in a place where they could take that excitement and work with the students on that. And so, really, it’s about bringing students… Meeting students where they are and bringing them along, and thinking about that from a really… Motivation that is towards intrinsic motivation. This works… The path for this is really when you have a good relationship, and when you can have the conversation and make sure that students know we do wanna see them in our office hours, we are happy to come talk. I’ll talk about my own child for a moment, when she said, “If you already knew everything, why would we pay for you to go to college? What’s the point?” The point is that you don’t know, and you’re bumping on that edge of what you know, and we wanna help you find it. And so, that’s really, I think the… Most of the colleagues and the people teaching here are working towards that. And yes, there will be a time when we have to say, “Okay, how far did you get?” We’re moving from that coach and iteration, to where we’re at? But so many of our courses, as I think of them, in data, in writing, are about “Try it out, play, learn, redo.” And that allows you to get to the point where we want everybody to be at the end.
- I just wanted to… When I work with faculty, the first question I ask is, “What is the most salient value that you’re bringing into your classroom?” And what I’ve found to be really important is that those are really student-centered values. They’re about drawing out students’ curiosity and connecting it to the content. It’s not about filtering students out of a major or minor, or creating a competition of removal. And so, I think at a student-centered place, the real question that resonated with me, when Laura, you were speaking, is “what have we done before? What relationship have faculty developed with students in the classroom?” Because they care deeply about the student experience in the classroom. They want students to really actively engage with the subject matter they’re so passionate about. So that, I think, an intentional, integrated approach to supporting faculty development is much more generative in a place of this size, with folks that came with a student-centered sensibility. And so, I would hope we had done a lot long before we ever got to a place like that.
- Okay, I think my boss is telling me we have one more…
- [Meg] No, you can end with your story you wanted to share—
- Okay, I will end with the story.
- [Meg] And then I will offer up if you wanted to have any individual conversations, the panelists have promised to stick around for a little while. So thank you.
- We are here, and we’d love to talk to you individually. Thank you for these excellent questions. I wanted to end… I think both of the questions really raised the key issues that we’re dealing with, both nationally and more globally, which is, “how do we maintain excellence in a tumultuous world? How do we think about democracy in a tumultuous world? How do we stay connected as human beings?” Some of you may remember that last year, as the United States was pulling out of Afghanistan, it was a very tumultuous exit. We had two alums who, one is someone I’m particularly proud of, who is the biggest advocate… The top freelance reporter for sure in Afghanistan when it was trying to be a democracy, and big advocate for freedom of expression, something he learned at Middlebury, graduated 2011; and another woman who created the first woman’s boarding school in Kabul, and a graduate in 2010 who went back to Afghanistan. And they both made it out very, very harrowingly. One connected with us and said, “I’m a freelance reporter and I can’t get on a company plane, I can’t get on CNN, I can’t get anywhere because I’m not an employee of them. But I’m being interviewed by all of them because everyone knows and and loves me, and I can’t get on the plane.” So he had no country left, he had no company, he had Middlebury. So there are times in a leader’s life when you drop… When you have to decide to drop everything, even though everything demands… A lot of other things are demanding your attention. And we mobilized our resources. Out of his own wit, he was able to make it out just barely, through his connections with the Qataris. He was escorted out in a caravan that was escorted by the moderate Taliban, as well as the Qatari government. A huge irony for him as he had run as… In a rural province as a pro-democracy candidate. The other woman, Shabana, has founded a school called SOLA. She had one day to get 240 women and students out. And you might have heard about the terrorist incident that just happened a couple of days ago by ISIS, where they were… They attacked a women’s training center, because there are a lot of women’s training centers that are happening in private now. So it is still a very real issue. She knew that… She’d prepared for this moment. She knew that the Taliban were down the street. She had to use acid, and not fire, to burn the documents to protect her students and her family. She made it to Rwanda with her students, and faculty, and staff, as well as some alums, where they had already negotiated with the Rwandan government to teach in Kigali in order to be safe. So SOLA, the school is still in Kigali now. And she wrote me, and then we Zoomed about three days after she got out, and she said, “I have several alums with me who are enrolled at Asian universities, and would feel safer if they were in the United States. Would it be possible for you to think about admitting them to Middlebury?” And so I got my Dean of Admissions together with Smita, and a number of other students, we raised three to four million in about two weeks, and went through a global international admissions process for each of the women, nine women. And we are happy to say that nine of those women from… Graduates of SOLA in Afghanistan, have completed their first semester here last spring. So we are just delighted that that sense of connectedness, and community, and integrity, and rigor was something that we were able to share with the alum who created that school. And she’s still educating Afghani women all over the world. So they’re out and about on campus. If you see one of them, we have a number of Afghan parents here on Family Weekend, usually. Please do give them an extra hug. So thank you so much for all of your support, your care. This is a deeply caring community. We try to live up to that ideal every day. We know that being in college is a challenge, as well as an exhilaration, and we want to hear about both from you. And thank you for helping us build the Middlebury that we love, and have a great weekend.
Student ROTC Panel
Current students in ROTC share their experiences and future hopes in their careers. Sponsored by Midd Vets Give Back.
Jim Shattuck:
I am Jim Shattuck, one of four leaders of Middlebury Vets Give Back, an affinity group of about 100 volunteers, that would be 80 percent Vermont and 20 percent Monterey, who have registered on the Midd2Midd platform with the mission of encouraging and supporting students and alumni to recognize, prepare for, and value careers of national service including military and national security. Interestingly, there are about 700 or 800 Middlebury graduates on record who declare some affiliation with military service from enlisted to officer, from private first class to brigadier general. All Middlebury, all liberal arts, 10 or 15 are now on active duty, men and women.
Today’s gathering is unique. It all started last May at lunch with McCullough. I’m not sure which part of McCullough. It might be the Student Center. There are three parts: the Student Center, the Grille, and the Crossroads Café. But we were there. The only person that cannot be with us that was with us in May is Cadet Liam Hoagland, now Lieutenant Liam Hoagland. But all had the firm and resolute commitment then to serve in the military.
As with most Middlebury students, the notion of liberal arts seems to start in high school, and in many cases the idea of military service might start there as well, with parents like you or perhaps the first or second year in college. Certainly, the early years of college matter as influences from family, faculty, and college experiences, including athletics, shape student opinion and choices. Today, we are privileged to hear their points of view about their experience at Middlebury and ROTC, the Army Vermont National Guard and National Service.
On that note too, I want to welcome Major Jason Beams, who leads the ROTC component at the University of Vermont, and Lieutenant Colonel Bob Burke, who leads the Vermont Army National Guard component in Colchester, and their respective colleagues to today’s gathering. Both organizations are important, transformative catalysts for this idea of connecting liberal arts education with national service, including military, and we are delighted that you can join us.
Before moving to the panel, some quick thank yous. First to President Patton for the collaborative leadership she offers as evidenced in her examination of the myriad ways students and alumni engage in giving back to others. Copies of President Patton’s Wired for Service essay, published last November, are available if you haven’t read it yet. Secondly, to the Middlebury students, faculty and administration, Vermont and Monterey for supporting the notion of national service including military and national security. Thirdly, to alumni and parent programs, Linda Graf in particular, and the Center for Careers and Internships, Matt Kuchar, Peggy Burns, and colleagues within the CCI cohort. We thank them for their creative and steady support on all things liberal arts, rigorous study, and preparation for life after Middlebury.
Since I see him in the audience, I want to also thank Director of Athletics, Erin Quinn, who with an amazing staff of coaches and assistants has consistently offered an array of competitive learning experiences for students. You’ll soon meet a softball player, rugby player, and football player among others, including, I might add, a long distance runner, but they’re all competitive run runners, aren’t they? Whether on the athletic field, dealing with academic and career choices, leadership, integrity and so much more, it can be a long and twisting road.
Enough from me. Let’s get to the panel. Our moderator is Matt Kuchar, associate director of Alumni Student Mentoring in the Center for Careers and Internships in the Kitchel House, which is where we will be gathering after this event which concludes at four o’clock. All are welcome. While Matt did his undergraduate degree at Colby College, and you’ve probably heard of that, and graduate work at the University of Oregon, both his wife, Molly, and Matt’s brother-in-law were ROTC in college. In fact, many in Matt’s respective families have served in the military and demonstrated commitment to national service. So in a word, and as President Patton so eloquently stated, giving back is embedded with Matt and his work at Middlebury. I’m pleased now to introduce Matt, the moderator, Kuchar. Take it away.
Matt Kuchar:
Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Jim, and Midd Vets Give Back. Jim and I have had the opportunity to work together since about 2018. It’s always a fantastic experience, and I’m honored to be moderator for this event. A couple things before we get started and turn to our panelists, this is a Zoom event as well as an in-person event. It means that we do have people who are joining us virtually. What we’ll do at about 3:45 is turn to your questions and to their questions, and we’ll do a mix of the questions that you have and questions that our Zoom attendees are asking as well through the Zoom chat feature.
With that, welcome. I don’t want to delay things anymore, and I want to turn to our panelists. Maybe what we could do to start out is if you could each take a minute or two to introduce yourselves, tell us your class year, your major, what you’re involved in here on campus, and what your involvement is with military service at this point in time. Aidan, maybe we could start with you, and we’ll just work all the way across.
Aidan McKenrick:
Hi, thank you all for coming today. My name’s Aidan McKenrick. I’m the C 2023, so that means I’m a senior this year. My major is international politics and economics with a minor in Russian language. Here at Middlebury, I’m involved in a few things besides Middlebury ROTC. I’m the captain of the men’s varsity swimming and diving team. I’m the executive chair on the Community Friends board, which is a community service organization that interacts with children in the community. I’m also a fellow at the Center for Global Studies here.
Ronan Corley:
Hi everyone, my name is Ronan Corley, Class of 2025.5. I’m a sophomore [inaudible 00:08:43]. I’m measuring in econ and geography. I’m originally from Minnesota. At Middlebury, I’m on the cycling club and the tennis club as well. I’m currently an SMP cadet in the Vermont National Guard.
Emily Lieb:
Hello, everyone. Sorry about that. My name is Emily Lieb. I’m in the Class of 2024. I’m a political science and biology double major. I’m also on the varsity softball team, and I sing in the Middlebury Mischords a cappella group. I am in my third year in the ROTC program.
Roy:
Hi, I’m Roy. I’m from Houston, Texas, a member of the Class of 2025, but I am a sophomore. I’m an intended political science and film and media culture studies major. On campus, I am part of the afterschool program at the local elementary school. I am a high school college access mentor, part of the college Democrats, and of course, ROTC, and with that, I am an SMP cadet, similar to Ronan Corley.
Ryan Whitney:
Hi, everyone. My name’s Ryan Whitney. I’m a senior at Middlebury College, my fourth year at the ROTC program. I’m from Exeter, New Hampshire. I’m also a member of the football team here at Middlebury College. I’m a physics major and a philosophy minor as well.
Corey Prior:
Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name’s Corey Prior, I’m a senior here at Middlebury. [inaudible 00:10:24], Florida. This is my fourth year in ROTC [inaudible 00:10:28]. Outside of ROTC, I play rugby, and I am a physics major with a geology minor.
Matt Kuchar:
Thank you all. Here is the format that we’re going to be using. I’m going to ask a series of questions. The cadets are welcome to answer. If you have something to say, you’re welcome to follow up on a colleague’s response. Don’t feel like you need to jump in on every single thing. I did remind them my background is from Harvard Business School. Cold calling is a big feature there, so I can cold call. It’ll be a warm call. I promise it won’t be brutal if we need that.
With that, we have a couple of different types of cadets who are up here, SMP and ROTC. You’ve heard both. I wondered, for those in the audience who may not be familiar with what it means to be a cadet or what ROTC and what the National Guard SMP Minuteman Scholarship is about, if you could take some time to explain how it works, and, again, what your involvement is with it.
Aidan McKenrick:
What that kind of entails is in addition to our standard course load here at Middlebury, we also take classes at University of Vermont in military science and we [inaudible 00:11:46] training there all to prepare us to eventually [inaudible 00:11:48] commissioned second lieutenants in the Army when we graduate.
Matt Kuchar:
So to get granular on that, what obligations do you have through ROTC or through your training with the Guard that are different from your curriculum here at Midd?
Corey Prior:
I can tackle this one. So a general week, we’ll have class once a week, so we’ll travel up to Burlington, and we’ll attend, generally it’s either an academic class where we’ll sit down and we’ll talk about leadership theory or talk about soldier skills and things like that. Sometimes it’s a lab which we’ll spend time out in the field doing practical exercises, so for instance, land navigation, cold weather survival, mountaineering skills. Coming up this week we’ll be doing our first tactics, so the cadets will go out, and we’ll divide into squads, and we’ll conduct missions. Usually once a semester, we’ll do a field training, so we’ll take a weekend and occasionally a couple extra days. We’ll go out and we’ll spend that entire time in the field just do it military skills. That’s a pretty typical ROTC commitment load, I guess
Ryan Whitney:
Another great thing about the program is the way it scales from your freshman to senior year. Coming into college you don’t know anything about the military experience. You’re fresh, and you spend a lot of time learning. You’re a fish in a big ocean. You have no idea what’s going on a lot of the times. Then as you go through the program and you learn more and more about what life is like in the military and the skills it’ll take to become an officer, you transition into running the program itself. So the seniors typically run the program, will coordinate training events, and will basically teach classes for the younger cadets and pass on that information to them as they come up through the ranks.
Matt Kuchar:
Is that part of your responsibility now, Ryan?
Ryan Whitney:
I am the assistant S-3, which means I am the assistant training officer for the battalion, so I’ll help coordinate things, like Prior was saying, the FTXes and the squad training exercises we’ll be doing, planning those out, creating mission orders as well as reconning those and planning those out. I think McKenrick and Prior also have different responsibilities in Battalion, too.
Aidan McKenrick:
Myself, I’m the S-2, which is the intelligence officer, so I accompany any organized recons of training areas, make sure that they’re safe, and I conduct risk assessments of those training areas to ensure no injuries happen. In addition to that, I’m also the club president of Midd ROTC here on campus, which means I work with the administration a lot and I do a bunch of organizing between the ROTC program and the Middlebury College administration because we are through the University of Vermont.
Corey Prior:
I am the program’s assistant S-1, which means I’m in charge of personnel and welfare. I’m generally tracking, for instance, people who can’t be at events, injuries, etc. I also assist and maintain accountability on people and equipment.
Matt Kuchar:
Great. Thank you. For those of you who’ve been with the program for a number of years, to talk to your peers and to talk to the audience too, what can someone like Ronan or someone like Roy expect as they come up through these programs and maybe what advice would you have for them as they’re just starting out on this path?
Ryan Whitney:
The biggest thing is just to be eager to learn. I remember my freshman year, everyone’s throwing around terms and phrases and I have no idea what they mean, looking around just kind of wide-eyed as everything’s flying by me. So take in as much as you can as it’s coming along, stuff will start to stick later, and you’ll see the bigger picture. Then as you see the bigger picture, just trying to bring it all in and help others along the way.
Matt Kuchar:
Emily, I see you nodding. [inaudible 00:15:38].
Emily Lieb:
Yeah, I completely agree. Take good notes, learn as much as you can. As you go through the program, you’ll get progressively more and more responsibility, and you’ll be ready and prepared for it.
Matt Kuchar:
One thing that a number of people were curious about was what it was that prompted your interest in the program. Think of this in terms of cadet with National Guard or with ROTC or with military service in general. What was it that prompted that interest, and why did you decide to pursue this in conjunction with Middlebury?
Aidan McKenrick:
My reasoning for doing ROTC and eventually a desire to join the Army is a three-pronged approach. First one is I’ve always had a desire to serve my country in this way. I think I’ve been privileged growing up in this country with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and that there’s a history of people defending that Constitution, and I want to do my part to continue that.
The second part is, the Army career path is a really interesting one. I’m going to graduate with a guaranteed job. I’ll get to travel. I’ll get a plethora of benefits. It’s something that you can really only do a few times in your life. You can’t join after a certain age, so it’s really something that I want to do now while I still can. I don’t want to look back one day and think, “Oh, I really should have joined the Army when I could’ve.”
The last part is family history. My family’s had a really strong history of serving in the military, and it’s something that I want to continue. My dad was an ROTC grad, his two brothers went to West Point, my older brother graduated from West Point, and our two cousins also graduated from West Point. So there’s a strong tradition there of serving in the military, and that’s something I want to continue.
Matt Kuchar:
I just want to interject for a moment. It sounds from our Zoom comments that they’re having a little trouble with the audio. You’re great in this room. If you could maybe lean into the mics just a little bit more, we’ll see if that addresses that. To our virtual audience, we apologize. They’re great directional mics, but maybe we should get a little closer.
Roy:
Similar to that point, I joined ROTC through the National Guard Scholarship because I want to do that service and I want that community involvement aspect of the National Guard. For a two-pronged approach, I want to serve a country that I was born in and protect the rights that other people have fought for in the past, and then as well, the experience itself is something new and a lot of people don’t really experience, have the opportunity to have this experience. I think it’s just something that would build to my character doing the training with ROTC rather than after ROTC.
Ryan Whitney:
Talking a little about ROTC as a choice on its own, I have a similar pathway to service to McKenrick and Roy here. Picking ROTC on its own, ROTC is a great opportunity and a great program where you’re not necessarily in a military college like West Point where you get to come to a liberal arts school like this, participate fully in that education, and do all of the things that we get to do here from a cappella to football to rugby, get to participate in all of those for four years before starting your service while also learning and training to become an officer along the way. I think that made a big difference and was a big incentive to join the ROTC program as instead to OCS or a commission at the West Point.
Corey Prior:
I think that something to touch on is that, as a career path, the Army’s very unique in just the kind of profession that it is. Because when you go home, you take that uniform off, you’re still a soldier. You’re expected to live with a certain set of values. You’re expected to embody this idea of what a soldier is. Having a career where I’m constantly holding myself to a higher standard and pushing myself to be better and improve, that’s something that really stuck out to me when I was deciding what I wanted to do in my life. Even I know someday when I retire and I take that uniform off for the last time, I still have my achievements and my accomplishments in the Army, and those will follow me for the rest of my life. So I think that’s one of my big motivators for being here.
Matt Kuchar:
Thank you for that. I wanted to follow up, Ryan, on something that you said and a question to turn to all of you. Through your experience as cadets, the vision is for you to become lieutenants who distinguish yourselves through knowledge, through deed, through character, and that aspect of leadership. As Middlebury students, so going back to the liberal arts lens, the vision is for you to lead engaged, consequential lives in which you contribute to your communities. I’m curious how those two things are integrated together. Do they work together? Are there times when they come into conflict? When they are working together, what can you say about a more holistic approach to leadership or your vision of leadership through both lenses?
Aidan McKenrick:
I can start us off on this one, if the audio’s all right. The thing about ROTC and the Army is that it produces and trains some of the best leaders in the world. If you think about it, every single organization in the world needs to have leaders, and that’s something that you don’t necessarily get in a normal classroom. I can see it already how it’s applied to me here at Middlebury. I don’t think, without the leadership training that I’ve gotten from ROTC and the Army, that I would’ve been able to be team captain of the swim team or to be an executive member of a community service organization or to be a fellow leading the creation of this fellowship program in its inaugural year here in the academic sense. So for me, ROTC and the leadership training I’ve gotten really pairs really nicely with what I’ve been able to do here and accomplish at Middlebury.
Ryan Whitney:
I’ll continue off of that as well. I like to see ROTC and Army service as an application to the liberal arts education where you can become this well-rounded, intelligent person through your education here at the school where you’re eager to learn, open-minded, and ready to handle all of these different challenges that are thrown your way. Then being able to apply that and be able to apply yourself to the world and the situation, the Army provides an outlet for that where being able to participate in one of the most trusted and global professions in the country and in the world is you get to see that impact, and you have the opportunity to make an impact in some of the largest points of friction in the community, in the world as well, so whether that’s from natural disaster relief to larger-scale conflicts to helping with aid of communities during a national, global pandemic. So I think there’s an opportunity there where you can apply yourself outside of just improving your own intelligence for yourself as a person.
Emily Lieb:
I completely agree with that. Building off of that, I think something that’s integral to both ROTC and also a liberal arts curriculum is an emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I think my skills that I’ve learned through ROTC from in-classroom learning about leadership theory and critical thinking theory to actually applying that in the field has really translated well to my liberal arts education. And vice versa, solving problems in class has really expanded my mind and encouraged me to think about the different ways to combat problems.
Matt Kuchar:
Emily, could we build on that? Could you say a little more perhaps about how you feel you’re perceived here on campus and how you’re seen by your colleagues, fellow students, and by your professors?
Emily Lieb:
Here at Middlebury, every Wednesday we wear our uniforms to class. I think a lot of students look up to us, and we’re just treated like everyday students in discussion. It’s been my experience at least.
Matt Kuchar:
Would all of you concur?
Ryan Whitney:
Yeah, totally. I don’t think Middlebury’s community has looked at us totally different. If anything, it’s almost to a higher standard. So being able to wear the uniform and live to those values has been something to try to strive for, and you have to represent the uniform as well.
Matt Kuchar:
As you’re talking, I’m going through some of the comments from our virtual audience. John Gill wanted to say how much he appreciated highlighting critical thinking, both as a student but also as a soldier and a human. So he wanted to give kudos for that. If any of you do want to riff on that a little bit further and talk about how critical thinking from your time as a cadet does apply to the classroom or your life at Middlebury outside the classroom, I welcome you to do so.
Ryan Whitney:
I think one of the greatest parts about this education is I’m a physics major and not every situation in life lens itself to the quantum realm of stuff going on. But being able to look at problems and situations and scenarios and be able to say, “Hey, I see what’s going on here,” and think through the different steps there, that’s a skill that I’ve learned through the school and through my time at the College. Then being able to pass that on and apply that to situations, whether that’s in ROTC or life in general, it’s been great.
Aidan McKenrick:
I think with critical thinking it’s really cool because the skills you learn in the Army and in ROTC, like critical thinking, they apply to everything. Like Ryan over here is a physics major and I’m studying politics and economics, but we’re able to apply the same skills that we learned through our ROTC training to both our academics. I know in countless discussions and debates and writing papers, I’m able to see things in a different lens to approach things from different angles than normal students are because of my experiences in ROTC.
Matt Kuchar:
What do you want your fellow students to know about your experience that perhaps they don’t know?
Roy:
I could start it off with sort of a half thought. I joined this year, ROTC. My friends sort of approach me with this open-mindedness and this curiosity into what I’m doing as a cadet and as a future second lieutenant in the Army. They came with me with a skepticism, I think that’s how you pronounce it. But the one thing I would like them to know is that it’s an amazing adventure, and it gives you a new approach to how you solve, how you approach difficult things. Right now, I’m learning how to swim. A couple weeks ago I learned how to repel. There’s just these different activities that you don’t really do, and it’s an amazing opportunity to tackle that curiosity that a younger self would want.
Aidan McKenrick:
I know when I first joined my first year, all my friends thought I went up to Burlington every Wednesday and shot guns for three hours and came back. Like we’ve touched on already a little bit, it’s so much more than that. It’s about learning values, skills, leadership that you can apply to every section of your life and take with you and to improve yourself and those around you.
Ryan Whitney:
I’ve got a similar sentiment to McKenrick is my friends think I go off and hang out in the woods, run around, and that’s not totally untrue. But being able to look at the Army and all the opportunities it offers in terms of career paths is the big one. I want people to know that the Army isn’t something you have to do in separation of your career or aside from your career. It’s something that you can do as part of your career or to further your career as well. So you can combine service and your education as well as combining service and your career in almost any field you choose.
Matt Kuchar:
Maybe we could go there next. I’d love to have each of you share a little bit about what you see as your life path as you know it at this point with respect to military service, and if there is a career beyond military service, what that might be.
Aidan McKenrick:
I can start, and we can go down the line. As a senior, I’ll be commissioning into the Army at the end of this year. As we just found out, me, Ryan, and Corey will all get the opportunity to go active duty, which means the Army will be our full-time job once we graduate, which is all what we wanted. Then past that, I want to do my service. Then eventually I’d like to end up doing policy work in Washington, DC, where I feel like I can effect change on a really grand scale across the world.
Ronan Corley:
Roy and I still have a while before we graduate. Part of the reason we’re doing the National Guard SMP [inaudible 00:29:25] is because it gives you the opportunity to continue your education after Middlebury. I’m hoping to go to grad school after I graduate and potentially work in international finance along with serving in the National Guard [inaudible 00:29:43].
Emily Lieb:
Hello. As a… I’m not sure this is on. As a political science and biology major at Middlebury, I have a lot of different academic interests and focus. I’m definitely interested in military intelligence, so that’s something I see in my future as being a military intelligence officer. I’m also hopeful to work in wildlife ecology and wildlife biology and incorporating those as working on major issues such as climate change in the future from the political perspective.
Roy:
Like Ronan said, I am an SMP Minuteman Scholarship cadet, so I’m going to the National Guard after I graduate college. I went that route because I want to go to law school after undergrad. Hopefully I do law school and go through the JAG route, which is the Judge Advocate General because they’re the lawyers of the Army. Do that route and part-time in the National Guard and pursue the life of an attorney in the civilian world as well.
Ryan Whitney:
As McKenrick was saying, me, Prior, and him just discovered we could go active duty, and soon we’ll find out what branch we’ll be elected to. I’m hoping to become an infantry officer in active duty. From there, I’m inspiring to platoon command and then company command along those lines. Then after that I would like to pursue an MBA.
Corey Prior:
I am hoping to branch engineers and ideally I’d be able to get platoon time and company command time. But after the Army, I’m intending to get a job in either the Army Corps of Engineers or to pursue a career with the geological survey because I’m a rock minor and I really like rocks. That’s the plan right now, and hopefully it works out that way.
Matt Kuchar:
Great. All of you, when you introduced yourself, talked about your majors. We have a tremendous range of both experience and interest up here in the panel today. I wanted to ask some big-thought questions. At this point in history, there’s no lack of conflict across the globe, both in terms of actual war but also in terms of issues that are more and more defining our times from climate change to access to food and fresh water to just inequity across any number of different areas. I was curious, if through the lens of your studies or through the lens of your time as a cadet, if there were any of these issues that really resonated with you. If you could just share your perspective a little bit or chat about why you think it matters and how you’re seeing this.
Emily Lieb:
[inaudible 00:32:48] pass the mic. I can actually go ahead and get started on this one. Something that I’m really passionate about is climate change mitigation. I know that climate change has such a big impact on the world from climate refugees to biodiversity loss to resource shortages and rising sea levels. I actually had the opportunity last year to go to the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs at West Point. I was part of the climate change round table. That round table really made clear in my mind the connection between national security and climate change issues. So I see that as a really defining feature of our time dealing with climate change, and hopefully I will have a role to some degree in stopping climate change, whether that’s as a wildlife ecologist or further along after my military career dealing with these issues as a potential political leader or advocate.
Matt Kuchar:
In kind of a small world coincidence, I think that panel and that event was sponsored by the Class of ‘72 at West Point. Is that correct?
Emily Lieb:
It was.
Matt Kuchar:
That was my father-in-law’s class.
Emily Lieb:
Wow. Small world.
Matt Kuchar:
He may have been back for it as a matter of fact. Everything comes through Middlebury at one time or another. What are some other reactions to that question?
Corey Prior:
To kind of expand on what Lieb said, my specific field of focus, in at least geology and earth science, is hydrogeology, so I’ve spent some time looking at glaciers as well as ocean floor dynamics and coastline studies. I think that’s what I would like to both pursue my graduate degree in and also hopefully work on in the future. So I’m hoping that some of the techniques I learn as an engineer officer will have applications in the civilian world mitigating these issues and protecting coastal communities.
Ryan Whitney:
I’ve said before that I’m hoping to become an infantry officer. As an infantry officer, I won’t have a large impact on climate change, at least as far as the global scale goes, but I will get to deal with people and people in those points of conflict, like you mentioned. So up to where the Army sends me, I’ll have a sphere of influence as an officer. I think in that sphere of influence, whether it’s a small or larger scale, depending on the time of my career, I think I can make a difference personally just on a people level is going to be that goal.
Matt Kuchar:
Great. Thank you, Ryan.
Aidan McKenrick:
I actually have a little anecdote about this question. I study politics and economics here, and I have a minor in Russian language, which seems pretty applicable today. But last fall I was studying abroad at the University of Oxford, which I was still able to do even though I was doing ROTC. There I was taking a course one-on-one with an Oxford professor on European politics. We looked at the structure of the European Union power dynamics and how it all kind of plays together. My culminating work for that class back in December was a presentation on why I thought Russia was going to invade Ukraine and why NATO and the EU was not going to use any hard power resources to combat that. That’s kind of how it’s played out.
That was a combination of my coursework and ROTC coming together that I saw viewpoints that other people didn’t know, and I was able to come to that conclusion back in December. Then obviously, as I go forward in my career in the Army, that will be very real for me, and I’ll be effecting change on the ground level for that. Then hopefully in the future doing policy work, I’ll also be able to effect broader change on that topic.
Matt Kuchar:
That’s fascinating. So this was December?
Aidan McKenrick:
Yes.
Matt Kuchar:
So this was about two months before the invasion. Are there points that you nailed, and are there points that you missed in your analysis?
Aidan McKenrick:
There were some points I nailed, like the reliance of the EU on Russian oil and how that played a role. Not just in the EU, I missed how much it played a role across the world as we all saw gas prices here. There are definitely a few points I missed, but some pretty big takeaways where taken away from it. We were actually discussing this in our military science class the other day of inefficiencies in Russia’s military structure that led to its ineffectiveness and how other places, such as China, are learning from those mistakes and restructuring their own military to more resemble our own which I think will play a role in a future conflict possibly.
Matt Kuchar:
Fantastic, thank you. Anyone else want to chime in? If not, what I would like to do is turn this over to our audience for your questions, both for those in the room but also those who are joining us via Zoom. These panelists are all yours. I’d love to steal a little bit of their time at the end, but for now, please feel free to ask your questions. We have a couple folks with mics, so once they get to you, this’ll help our Zoom attendees here as well.
Greg Moore:
Good afternoon. I don’t so much have a question, but some words of encouragement for you. My name’s Greg Moore, Class of ‘76. I was a medical officer in the Navy for 25 years. My wife, who’s sitting next to me, was a nurse corps officer for 27 years. Our daughter’s a Marine Corps officer. Our son did a tour in the Marines and in the Army. So we’re pretty dialed into the military.
Candace and I actually met in a refugee camp. As you can imagine, in a refugee camp, there’s lots of languages, lots of cultures, lots of different agendas, both among the refugees and the people taking care of those refugees, all of which I think a liberal arts education is the ideal preparation for that kind of a situation. Those kind of opportunities may well come in for all of you during your military career, and I think you can look forward to that. All what you’re thinking right now may change. I certainly never in my life thought I was going to be a career officer. I was. The opportunities keep coming up, and they keep looking better all the time. After the Navy, I taught college for 17 years.
Matt Kuchar:
There was another hand up I think back here. Lynn, we have someone over here.
Bruce Bailey:
I apologize, I was a little late, so I would love to just a few… You probably already covered this in terms of how many Middlebury students were involved with the program, how many are female, what’s your commitment to… Back a hundred years ago when I was in the ROTC program here, it was a two-year commitment after graduation, and I’d just be interested to know what that status is today. Thank you. I’m Bruce Bailey from the Class of ‘63.
Matt Kuchar:
Thank you, Bruce. Does someone want to give some of those stats and some of that info or background?
Aidan McKenrick:
Right now, this is the entirety of our program here at Middlebury, the six of us. We are growing. This is the biggest group we’ve had in my time here. What our service commitment looks like after is, because me, Ryan, and Corey were on scholarships from high school, the three of us will have a four-year active duty commitment once we graduate. Then after that, some time in the Reserves at a minimum. You want to speak on your scholarship?
Ronan Corley:
Roy and I are also scholarship through the National Guard right now, so after graduation we’ll have an eight-year National Guard commitment.
Roy:
Along with that commitment, so it’s eight years after graduating undergrad, but during our time at Middlebury, because we sign our contract with the Vermont National Guard, we do have active drill weekends every month, plus our two weeks out the year.
Matt Kuchar:
Bruce, does that sound similar to your commitment?
Bruce Bailey:
No.
Matt Kuchar:
Other questions from our audience?
Tommy Wisdom:
Hey, everybody. I’m on Zoom. Just wonder if it’s coming through.
Matt Kuchar:
Erin Quinn.
Erin Quinn:
Thanks. Hi, I’m Erin Quinn, director of athletics. A comment and a question. Comment, thank you for your commitment. My question is, I know some of you personally and I know a bit of your schedule as a varsity athlete. I think for any student, if you have your academics, and all of you seem very engaged in your academic life, you have your academics and you have one other major commitment, say a varsity sport or a club sport or whatever that other commitment is, the service that you’re doing, Aidan, with Community Friends, that could be enough and keep you busy. If you don’t mind talking a little bit about how you balance all these activities. I know some of you as athletes are very engaged, but you seem engaged in these activities as well. While people are pretty overwhelmed with their experiences, you’re managing a lot. Anyone can address that.
Ryan Whitney:
One of the things our football coach says is be where your feet are is one of his phrases he talks about at the beginning of the year. So that’s something I like to think about a lot as I jump from academics to athletics to ROTC is just being where I am at any given moment. So when I’m here, I’m here, and then jumping around to the next place, I’m there. So thinking ahead, making sure I’m organized is one thing, but just trying to stay in the moment as I’m there and getting the most out of wherever I am is the big thing.
Aidan McKenrick:
Pretty much what the Army teaches you is how to juggle everything when you get a million things thrown at you at once and how to stay cool, calm, and collected in the moment. That’s what I’ve taken and applied to my time and in all my extracurriculars here. Because at times it can get overwhelming and it does. I’m still able to be effective and, like Ryan was talking about, being present in the moment because I do care deeply about every single one of these organizations that I’m a part of, and I want to see them all succeed. So I’m doing everything I can staying in the moment and taking lessons I’ve learned from each one of them and applying them to each other so that everything can succeed.
Roy:
For me, first year in ROTC, it taught me structure. I didn’t have any sort of structure. Like, time management-wise last year where I would wake up super late and then go to sleep super late. Well, now I wake up early for PT, and then I have the set time I go to sleep. But in that day I’m not procrastinating because I know I have the commitment from ROTC. I know I have the commitment for my job for the peer mentors that I do and then for class. It just gave me the structure that I needed, and I feel like that structure is what’s helped me out right now.
Ronan Corley:
Like Roy said, it’s our first year in the program, but definitely already, even just a couple months, it encouraged me to reevaluate my time a little bit and be more intentional about the things I do and when I’m doing it. Definitely, your hours of when you’re doing things change a little bit. You’ll be waking up at 2 a.m., and your roommates are still finishing a movie. You’re like, “All right, this is a little different.” Overall, I think it actually has helped me to be more intentional about when I’m trying to get work done. Like Ryan was saying, I think you definitely feel more in the moment, and you are where your feet are when you’re working under time constraints and things like that.
Matt Kuchar:
Other questions? I would also encourage our Zoom attendees to use the chat feature to send in questions that way. I wanted to share one comment as we’re plugging away so that everyone can simmer and come up with fantastic questions while we have these six wonderful panelists. We have an alum here, Tommy Wisdom, Class of 2005, who didn’t have a question but a comment that he wanted to share with all of you. He was a Marine Corps Cobra pilot. He said, “You will always be an anomaly wherever you go, but be proud of that. Middlebury will serve you well in your military service and, of course, beyond that as well.” I think what Tommy means is there are so few of you relative to the general population, but certainly be proud of that. We had a lot of alumni veterans who are both joining us but many who couldn’t and who wanted to express how proud they were of all of you and how glad they were to see the college putting on events like that. So we’re glad that this audience is a part of that as well.
I did have one question based on what you were saying and to piggyback off of Erin’s question. It strikes me that you’re all insanely busy, both as captains of sports teams or deeply involved in leadership there, your commitments across clubs and orgs on campus, your coursework which you’re very serious about, and military service and your training as a cadet. How can you do it all without having nervous breakdowns? What is it that gives you energy and wants you to plow forward with balancing all of this?
Aidan McKenrick:
This actually goes back to a book we read last year called Start With Why, and it really comes down to it. Whenever I get freaked out about something or stressed out about everything I have going on, I think about why I’m doing what I’m doing. Looking back on what’s motivating me just gives me the energy, the brain power I need to keep going so that I can do what I want to do and accomplish everything I want to do in my lifetime.
Roy:
I also like to enjoy my free time, too, when I get it because throughout the week we’re pretty packed with ROTC and then with classwork and then extracurriculars. Whenever I get time to just relax, I like to be in the moment in that time, just be there and not worry too much about what I have to do in three days or four days. That’s how I avoid the mental breakdowns.
Matt Kuchar:
Any other questions from our audience?
Peggy Burns:
Hi, I’m Peggy Burns, and I head up the Center for Careers and Internships. For those of you who are heading straight to active duty after graduation, could you tell us a little bit about what that looks like in terms of logistics? Is that June 1? Do you get a little bit of time off? When do you hear where you will be going? You mentioned you’re not sure yet what area you’ll be in. Tell us a little bit about how all of that unfolds.
Corey Prior:
I can tackle this one. We’ve already found out our… We know that we are active duty eligible. Right now, the various branches of the Army or the different career fields that officers can go into, they’re currently reviewing our files. We interviewed with them, and they’re going to rank us. Based on that ranking and our preferences, we’ll find out November 30 what branch you’re going to. Once that’s done, we’ll begin to pick our duty stations, so we’ll put in a list of where we would like to be stationed, and the Army will probably consider that list, maybe not. Regardless, once we graduate, there’s not really a set time between graduation and BOLC, which is our Basic Officer Leader’s Course. It’s really up to the Army and where you stand on the OML and when BOLC classes start. So there’s a lot of factors that are going to determine how much time off we get. If we get too much time off, the Army will send us to Fort Knox to run Advanced Camp. So there’s a high degree of uncertainty in where we’re going, but hopefully in the coming months that’ll all get ironed out.
Ryan Whitney:
To add on that, Advanced Camp is the training we went to this summer where you go to after your junior year. It’s a five-week training at Fort Knox, which is the culmination of your training at ROTC where you get a rank, and you go over all the skills you learned and test your leadership among all other cadets from the nation.
Aidan McKenrick:
There’s a phrase that people like to say when talking about the Army career path. It’s “needs of the Army,” because we do get input and they do consider that, but ultimately we’ll go where the Army needs us so we can best serve and be best utilized by them. But for me, Ryan, and Corey, we all have a desire to serve. So no matter where that is, we’ll go where the Army needs us so we can serve in our best capacity.
Matt Kuchar:
Great. We had a question from a virtual attendee. We’re so grateful to UVM and to Major Beams for letting us join the UVM program and be affiliated with it. This question was from a nostalgic alum who wonders if ROTC will come back to Middlebury with its own independent program. Perhaps some of you could answer. Major Beams, if not, perhaps you could talk about the role that you play with ROTC and, I think by extension, Staff Sergeant Coburn, if you want to jump in on the National Guard and your role.
Major Beams:
Major Beams, UVM ROTC and a full-time active duty soldier with the Vermont National Guard. As far as a Middlebury standalone ROTC program, unfortunately it probably does not look like it’s going to be a standalone program. It would become one in the near future just based on requirements of the Army for structures changing from a Army’s global aspect. So the need of Army officers is kind of staying at a status quo. There’s not a higher demand or increase of demand for officers. Given that Middlebury is within a 50-mile radius of an already dedicated host program such as UVM, they’re under what would be considered a crosstown school. That is an umbrella of St. Mike’s College, Champlain College, and Middlebury. So given the proximity of schools, the host program at UVM and the current sized structure of our program in general from UVM across Middlebury, St. Mike’s, and Champlain College where we’re roughly 50 cadets.
Unless there’s a huge burst of needs of the Army for officers and growth there, I can just envision that the Middlebury program will continue to grow and develop down here. With that would probably come the ability to have further cadre engagement down here, such as hosting classrooms. Instead of having a requirement for cadets to drive to Burlington, we would be able to provide cadre to come here to facilitate classes on Middlebury’s campus based on numbers and throughput. So that’s probably the goal we’re looking at is growing the program to have a dedicated cadre down here to facilitate lectures and development classroom processes to mitigate the travel back and forth. Hopefully that answers.
Matt Kuchar:
Thank you.
Aidan McKenrick:
If it’s alright, I’d like to speak on one of the benefits of having our program be a satellite program with UVM. We talked a lot today about how our Army training and ROTC training relates to the liberal arts, but working with UVM gives us the opportunity to go outside of the bubble that is Middlebury College and liberal arts education and interact with people at a state university that don’t have the same liberal arts education that we do. At the end of the day, once you leave Middlebury College and go into the real world, everyone is not a Middlebury College graduate. Everyone does not have a liberal arts education. So this really gives us an ability to further the purpose of liberal arts, which is to round ourselves and to be well-rounded individuals.
Matt Kuchar:
We’re winding down on time. I wondered if we had any more questions from our audience.
Speaker 15:
I actually am going to ask a question for somebody in the audience. If you were looking at someone who was in high school who was considering, what advice would you give them in their junior or their senior year?
Ryan Whitney:
One of the things I’ve said when I’ve talked to recruits about ROTC is it’s worth going for it. You can apply for the scholarship, because ROTC is a great path. The best way to join the program is while you’re in high school, and to take that opportunity, go meet with some other cadets, see if you can attend training events. That’s always an opportunity, too, to see what the program’s like, to talk to the cadre who run the program, to talk to other cadets in the program, and see if it’s the right fit for you. Definitely look at the scholarship as an option, and the high school time period is where you apply for that. Because after you get into college, it’s harder to get money.
Aidan McKenrick:
One piece of advice, I would say, is to not be afraid of the challenges that may arise. I know when I was in high school and I applied for the scholarships and all this was going through my head, I was pretty scared about what it would entail, what it would actually be like. But now having done it and being almost done and ready to go into the Army, I’d have to say, yes, it was challenging and there were at times where things were really difficult, but all it did was help me grow as a person. I know we’ve all grown immensely since joining ROTC, and we wouldn’t be the people we are right now sitting before you if it weren’t for the program.
Emily Lieb:
Piggybacking off of that a little bit, I think ROTC has really helped me build in my confidence. I’ve accomplished things and done various physical and mental tasks I never would’ve imagined myself being able to do a few years ago. So my advice to people thinking about ROTC, and maybe you’re intimidated by some of the things we do, is you’ll learn. You’ll learn from example, you’ll learn from classroom work, you’ll learn from practical exercises, and you’ll really grow as a person, like Aidan was saying.
Corey Prior:
One more thing to add is that, at least from talking to people, I see that a lot of people have the conception that everybody in the Army is an infantryman, kicking down doors, doing crazy stuff like that. In reality, the Army offers a lot more opportunities than just the combat arms. So taking the time to explore those opportunities and understand what you can do… For instance, Whitney might be going infantry, but I know Ronan wants to go into law and study law, and there’s an opportunity to do that in the Army. There’s opportunities to pursue a doctoral degree. There’s opportunities to pursue a career in the medical field, in aviation. So understanding the opportunities available to you, understanding what the active duty commitment means and what the National Guard and Reserve commitment looks like and what you can do while you’re fulfilling those commitments, I think is very important for someone who’s considering an ROTC scholarship or serving in the Army in general.
Roy:
Then commenting on that, too, if I understood the question correctly, that advice I would love to give myself as if I was in high school would it be take the step. It’s going to be a journey, an exciting time for you, an exciting career, but also talk to yourself in a sense and see if this is really what you want. If other people aren’t super supportive of your decision and this is what you really want to do, reach out, do your research and all that, and take the step. Because as far as me, none of my family had any sort of commitment in the military nor experience, and all of them were not super supportive of me starting this journey. But it’s what I really wanted, and the experience and the career that I wanted is what pushed me to pursue this opportunity.
Matt Kuchar:
We are winding down time-wise, and I wanted to do a few things to close us out. One is to invite all of you right down the hill to Kitchel House. It’s just down the street and across the intersection. We’re going to be hosting light refreshments. That means cider donuts, cider coffee, and cookies. So please come join us if you want to chat further, and we hope to see you there.
Secondly, thank you to both our virtual audience and also to all of you in the room for joining us. This is a remarkable group of students and a remarkable group of cadets, and I’m so grateful to them for sharing a little bit of their time with us, and I’m grateful to you for being here. I wanted to give them the last word. Throughout our comments and throughout our questions, we talked a lot about leadership and leading others. It strikes me though that one thing about military service is you are a part of a cadre, you are a part of a team, and you have a lot of people to thank and be grateful toward. So I wanted to give anyone who wants the opportunity to just take a moment to thank someone who’s been influential on this path for them. I can’t think of a better way to close it out.
Ronan Corley:
I’d like to just thank Sergeant Coburn and Major Beams who are here right now, too, because Roy and I, we joined pretty recently, within the past year. I think just throughout that process, these guys were very helpful in answering all of our questions, especially mine, I had way too many, and they were just super patient with us. They made the process very smooth. Yeah, just very appreciative of that.
Roy:
On that note, me too. Thank you, Sergeant Coburn and Major Beams. I’m from Houston, and we started the process at the end of last year, and I left for Houston at the end of last year. So it was all virtual and trying to find how to do it from 2,000 miles away, it was super helpful, and I appreciate the commitment and the opportunity that you all gave to us.
Ryan Whitney:
I’d want to thank Liam Hoagland, Alec Wilson, and Hunter Graham for running the program and bringing us up into it and setting the foundation for us being where we are now.
Matt Kuchar:
Great. Well, let’s let that be the last word. We do have some people on the Zoom who unfortunately weren’t able to drop in because of our audio arrangement, Second Lieutenant Liam Hoagland being one of them. For our Zoom attendees, thank you so much for being here. We hope to set up another event where you can play a more active role, and we can get your voices in this conversation. Please, all of you parents enjoy Parents Weekend. If you’re here as an alum returning to campus, thank you for being here. I hope we get the chance to chat further over donuts and coffee.
Resources for Parents and Families
Visit the Parents and Families website, where you can find many resource links, lodging and dining information for the weekend, and answers to frequently asked questions.
Questions?
Contact the Alumni and Parent Programs team at alumni@middlebury.edu or call 802-443-5183.
Alumni and Families
700 Exchange St.
Middlebury, VT
05753