Good afternoon. On behalf of the faculty, staff, and trustees of the College, I extend a warm welcome to you, the Class of 2010, and to your parents, families, and friends who have joined you on campus this weekend to celebrate your accomplishments.

Today we reflect on your experiences over the past four years and on your contributions to our community and the world beyond the College. And, of course, since this is Commencement weekend, we look ahead, as well, to the opportunities that await you as you begin the next chapter of your lives.

Let me begin by telling you a few things about the graduating class:

• There are 641 graduates in this class (including February and May graduates), 301 men and 340 women.
• The six most popular majors were economics, international studies, English and American literatures, political science, psychology, and environmental studies.
• Nearly 70 percent of you studied at least one language other than English.
• And 339 of you studied abroad for at least one semester, in a total of 40 countries.

Members of your class have won:

• A Thomas J. Watson Fellowship
• A Keasbey Scholarship
• A Gates Cambridge Scholarship
• A Fulbright Beginning Professional Journalism Award
• A St. Andrews Scholarship for graduate study in Scotland
• A Compton Mentor Fellowship
• And a Weidenfeld Scholarship for study at Oxford

In addition, eight of you were elected to Phi Beta Kappa as juniors, and you have been joined by 58 others whose election we celebrated this morning.

In keeping with long-standing Middlebury tradition, many of you have published papers in scholarly journals and presented your work at national conferences. And one of you found a great outlet for telling the stories of other students in the Middlebury Fellows in Narrative Journalism Project.

The scholarship and imagination of your class were vividly demonstrated on April 16 at the fourth annual College-wide symposium recognizing student research and creativity. One hundred and ten members of your class participated in that symposium, reporting on an amazing array of research projects.

Arts events associated with the symposium and performed that evening at the Mahaney Center for the Arts and the Hepburn Zoo included a presentation of a classmate’s play, Jekyll, an adaptation of the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was recorded for presentation a couple of weeks later as a film; a performance of After Miss Julie featuring two of your classmates in the leading roles; and the work Walking the Curb, an independent project involving three seniors.

And there were other impressive achievements in the arts: Eight of you will be part of the New York City-based Potomac Theatre Project’s 2010 summer season; a member of your class won the American College Theatre Festival’s Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship; and another classmate received a scholarship for a yearlong apprenticeship at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention another arts project that would not have happened without contributions from members of the Class of 2010: The Midd kid video, which as of today has been viewed nearly half a million times on YouTube. Not that the College administration has anything official to say about the video . . .

Outside the classroom, more than 20 of you worked on various projects in the Old Stone Mill, home of Middlebury’s Project on Creativity and Innovation.

In addition to scholarship and artistic endeavors, a Middlebury education also involves civic engagement, and this senior class has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to volunteerism and community service. More than half of the class volunteered in town or in Addison County, helping an extraordinary number of Vermonters along the way. One of your classmates, who volunteered for four years at the John Graham Emergency Shelter in Vergennes, recently received Vermont’s highest honor for a college student engaged in public service, the Madeleine M. Kunin Public Service Award. And personifying the Class of 2010’s broad and deep commitment to making a difference in the climate change movement, a member of your class was among just six students to be honored nationally with the 2009 Brower Youth Award, presented by the Earth Island Institute to young environmental leaders.

Awkward Family Photos (Three Rivers Press)
By Mike Bender ’97 and Doug Chernack
If you haven’t had a good belly laugh in a while, run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore and pick up Awkward Family Photos. Based on a popular Web site of the same name, the book captures the essence of that posed, often painfully arranged, usually completely unnatural family photo that is sitting on the mantel at home. The humor is universal, whether you’ve ever had to sit for such a photo or not, and Bender and Chernack have intentionally kept it good-natured. Divided into camera-worthy topics, the book covers everything from vacations to Grandma and Grandpa, with fitting, laugh-out-loud captions and stories that lend an added dimension to the embarrassing portraits. But in the end, as the authors point out in their introduction, the book isn’t about how families may choose to depict themselves; it’s about “celebrating the family experience and shining a light on all of those deliciously awkward moments that come with the price of membership.”

Midnight Fires
(Perseverance Press)
By Nancy Means Wright, MA French ’65
For anyone who enjoys historical fiction rich in the flavor of the period, Midnight Fires offers an intriguing view of the 18th century. Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, is the story’s central figure. Unwilling to accept her culturally assigned role as a subservient, lower- class female, Mary fulfills her appointment as governess to Ireland’s aristocratic Kingsborough family with independent resolve. During her voyage to Ireland, a sailor aboard the ship begs Mary to deliver a letter for him, and then he falls, or is stabbed and pushed, overboard. Thus begins a mystery that unfolds around Mary, compelling her to act. The story is richly told, with fascinating historical details, from descriptions of personal hygiene and fashion to the trauma experienced by a female asleep in her remote castle bedroom and considered to be fair game in the middle of the night.

Siren
(Egmont)
By Tricia Rayburn ’00
Siren is a great read for the beach. In fact, this young-adult suspense thriller unfolds on the beaches and craggy cliffs of Winter Harbor, Maine, where nothing is what it seems—from a bizarre pattern of violent storms that hit only the tiny village to a rash of smiling corpses washed up on shore. The story is told by 17-year-old Vanessa, a beautiful, brainy, mouselike girl who is scared of everything. Still reeling from the suspicious death of her charismatic older sister, she gradually discovers her own temerity, along with a slew of eerie secrets, as she searches for answers in a town that’s coming unhinged. Intelligently written and fast paced, this is Rayburn’s first foray into young-adult fiction (she also wrote the tween-focused Maggie Bean series) and it’s a seamless transition. Nudging into the crowded field of supernatural page turners, Rayburn is very effective at tapping themes on the minds of her teen audience—including romance, loss, self-discovery, parental relationships, peer acceptance—and wrapping it all up in an edgy, irresistible narrative.

Wise Ones of Mull:
A Gift of Vision
By Helen Prentice ’47
Steeped in the richness of Scottish folklore, yet set in a real place in real time, this book weaves an enchanting story of a young girl born with the gift of vision used by the Wise Women to understand and influence the natural world. Taking place on the Isle of Mull in the 16th century, the tale blends historical events and politics with a magical, mystical element that is seen through the eyes of Ishbel as she learns her ancient craft. Apprenticed to Anna, the Wise One called the Doidag, Ishbel witnesses the Doidag’s power as ships sink at sea and a gold-laden Spanish galleon is blown up; a changeling left in a crib by the Gentle Ones is exposed and the stolen baby returned; and a young playwright is inexorably drawn from London to Mull for a purpose unknown to him. As Ishbel learns her lessons—the magical and the practical—she herself becomes a Wise One and faces challenges and dangers she must use all her powers to avert.

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs
(Algonquin Books)
By Heather Lende ’81
In choosing to frame each chapter of her latest memoir with an epigraph of Episcopalian wisdom, it’s clear Heather Vuillet Lende has experienced something life changing since we last met her in the more lighthearted If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name. To learn that the experience was one of being run over by a truck and nearly killed is startling; her straightforward account is not. Lende’s style is simple and sincere, as she writes comfortably of ordinary days and nights in her hometown of Haines, Alaska. She cans jam from berries she picks with her daughter, smokes salmon she buys from a friend, and attends Native Alaskan Tlingit ceremonies among her neighbors and friends. And even though these activities are far from ordinary for most readers, she has a way of welcoming you into her world that makes them seem so.

Sixty to Zero
(Yale University Press)
By Alex Taylor III ’67
Alex Taylor, a journalist with more than three decades of experience writing about the auto industry, chronicles the collapse of General Motors and the foibles of the big three American automakers over the past 50 years in Sixty to Zero. The personalities of the top executives—Roger Smith, Lee Iacocca, John Z. DeLorean, and others—blossom into vivid, attention-grabbing characters as Taylor’s account unfolds. Striking just the right tone with his personal, narrative voice, Taylor takes the reader from his childhood in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, during the “car-crazy fifties” to his career-long quest to discover the plans, potentials, and intrigues of the car companies. The story that emerges is as fascinating and complex as the characters and personalities of the men running the shows. But this book is much more than a recitation of auto business plans and failures aimed at car buffs and business-school case studies. By focusing on his personal experiences and his impressions of the major players in the American auto industry, Taylor has given his readers a delightful, historical narrative to ponder at this critical juncture of our economy.
—Susie Davis Patterson ’67

Life After Favre:
A Season of Change with the Green Bay Packers and Their Fans
(Skyhorse Publishing)
By Phil Hanrahan ’86
During the summer of 2008, when Green Bay Packers fans were left to agonize over their team’s indecision about the future of All-Pro quarterback Brett Favre, Phil Hanrahan decided to pack up, move to Green Bay, spend a year as a Packer “Cheesehead,” and chronicle the experience. He takes readers inside the training camp and into the Packers’ locker room, like any accomplished sportswriter would. But the author delves deeper into the Packers mystique: he visits a Packers’ shareholders meeting (convened in the bleachers of Lambeau Field!), travels in a front-row seat on the Green Bay tour bus, offers reflections on the origins of the team, and takes excursions to Packers eating and drinking establishments across the land. Along the way Hanrahan comes to internalize what it means to be a Packers fan and to enjoy the hospitality of the locals, even though Favre never returns to the team and Green Bay finishes the season a disappointing (but not surprising) 6-10 without him.

]]> http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/summer-reading/feed/ 0 http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/contributors/ http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/contributors/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:54:02 +0000 Matthew Jennings http://middmag.com/?p=2145 Bridget Besaw (“Held, In Place”) is an award-winning environmental photojournalist based in northern Maine.

Gabriel Cooney (“A Matter of Faith”) is a photographer in Haydenville, Massachusetts.

Sierra Crane-Murdoch ’10 (“Hollowed Ground”) is a Virginia-based freelance writer. She was a 2009-10 Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism.

Angela Evancie ’09 (“Hollowed Ground”) is a photographer based in Middlebury.

Sarah Franco ’08 (“Raising Canes”) recently received a master’s degree in education from Northeastern University.

Richard Hawley ’67 (“Held, In Place”) was the headmaster of the University School in Cleveland from 1988 until his retirement in 2005. He is the author of 18 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Lucas Kavner ’09 (“The Class Notes {Of Your Mind}”) is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Caleb Kenna (“The Journey of Roberto Véguez,” p. 36) is a Vermont-based photographer. His work can be found at

Ed Koren (“No English Spoken Here,” Cover) has contributed more than 1,000 cartoons and illustrations to The New Yorker. He lives in Brookfield, Vermont.

Tad Merrick (“Summer Reading”) is a photographer in Middlebury.

Marian Richardson (“Raising Canes”) is an illustrator in Holland, Michigan.

Graham Roumieu (“The Class Notes [Of Your Mind]”) is an illustrator based in Toronto.

I love hearing what readers think of the magazine. One of the best things about this job is that I get frequent feedback from folks about, well, just about anything we do. We get plenty of letters to the editor, of course. But I also receive just as many notes, e-mails, phone calls, and impromptu conversations in places like the local coffee shop, in which people are eager to share their opinion about a story we published, a cover choice, an unfortunate typo (!). Often these comments are complimentary, but they can also be critical, and while I’ll never tire of hearing how much someone likes the magazine, I can honestly say that I welcome and encourage dissenting opinions. Constructive criticism not only makes us better at what we do, but it also reminds us that we have an engaged and passionate readership. (Nothing screams I READ AND I CARE more than an angry letter,
not even a gushing e-mail.)

For some time now, I’ve wanted to conduct a reader survey that would give analytical credence (or rebuttal) to information we have already been receiving anecdotally, so last fall we worked with both our national professional organization and a research firm to conduct a 25-question survey that would query constituents— selected randomly—on their reading habits and their opinions of Middlebury Magazine. Enough people filled out the survey to give us an error rate of plus or minus 3 percent, and while we’re still analyzing the data, we couldn’t be much happier with what we’ve learned so far.

Among our findings:
*Ninety-five percent of you read every, or nearly every, issue of the magazine.
*Of those, 64 percent read all or most of the magazine, cover to cover.
*You keep it around: 84 percent hold on to an issue for a month or longer.
*Ninety-four percent of you want to receive the magazine in printed form. We were somewhat surprised to learn that 78 percent will only read the magazine in print, while 16 percent want both print and digital forms. We hope this “both” figure ticks up as you become more familiar with the robust multimedia offerings of our new digital magazine (found at www.middmag.com).

Among the things you’re interested in: campus controversies (79 percent); issues facing higher education (73 percent); admissions policies (71 percent); student issues (70 percent); alumni profiles (69 percent); international issues (69 percent); the academic experience (68 percent); and, of course, class notes (85 percent!). What are you least interested in? Religion (34 percent) is one; donor stories (28 percent) are another.

And while I’m thrilled by the high marks you’ve given us for content (89 percent give a thumbs-up), cover choices (90 percent), writing (89 percent), and design (87 percent), what might be most heartening is the fact that 94 percent of you believe the magazine strengthens your connection to the College. You lead full and busy lives, most of you far from these hills, so it’s nice to know that when we arrive in your homes, your thoughts—be they happy or angry—turn to Middlebury and its place in the world. I look forward to when I hear from you again.

Not that long ago, an Episcopal priest could accurately be described as being the following: male, white, straight, and English speaking. He looked a lot like Ian Douglas ’80, the newly elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.

Yet with Douglas’s April consecration before a congregation of 2,000 people that included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, the diocese made a resounding statement: it was time for a change. That this agent of change happens to be male, white, straight, and English speaking only tells part of the story.

It’s easy to talk to Ian Douglas. He has a friendly smile and an open manner, and in conversation, he speaks quietly but clearly and with an assurance that demonstrates a grounding in his faith and convictions.

For the past 22 years, Douglas had served as the Angus Dun Professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’d considered putting his name forward in the past for bishop positions, but the timing had never seemed right. His children were young and his family was established in Massachusetts. However, he and wife Kristin Harris ’79 knew their life circumstances were changing when their oldest son, Luke, had graduated from Middlebury, their middle child, Timothy, was in college, and the youngest, Johanna, was graduating from high school.

Digital extra: An audio slideshow featuring Ian Douglas.

Colleagues suggested he look into the opening for bishop in Connecticut. Douglas had reason to hesitate. In the 225-year-history of the Diocese of Connecticut, a bishop had never been elected from outside the state. “When I read the profile of the position,” he admits, “it so seemed to fit my sense of who I am and what gifts I have to offer that I felt like, okay, I need to do this. And so somewhat on a lark, somewhat with some fear and trepidation, I said, sure, let’s enter this process.”

The process was a quick one. From the time he submitted his name to the time he was publicly nominated, only eight weeks passed. A few months later, in October 2009, when lay people from each of the parishes and all the clergy came together and voted at the diocese’s annual convention, Douglas was elected. “After the results of the first ballot were read, there was a collective gasp from the 800 people there,” says Sylvia Ho, chair of the search committee. “He was almost elected on the first ballot. That has never happened before.” On the second ballot, Douglas had enough votes. He began work February 1.

*

During the last decade Douglas has spent a signifcant amount of time traveling around the world to meet with Christian leaders, lay and ordained, in an effort to help them understand what the “new world” of the church is. Douglas discusses this “new world” a lot. In the past half century, the worldwide Anglican community, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, has undergone immense changes that have challenged its historical view of itself. From a predominantly white, male-led, English-speaking, Western industrialized community, it has become a radically plural, global, multicultural membership with 80 million members worldwide. “The historic margins, who have always been in the church, are now achieving their full stature and coming to the table,” Douglas says. “And that includes the margins in the West as well—women, people of color, specifically African Americans, most recently gays and lesbians—who are saying, we’re here and we deserve a place at the table, too. And I say thanks be to God. I think we’re a lot closer to what God is up to in this world, with this plurality represented.”

He suggests, however, that those representing the old hegemonic norms of the Anglican Communion are challenged by the new multicultural demographics of the church and fear they have a lot to lose. “The oldest trick in the book, if you don’t want anything to change, is to get one historically marginalized group, like the African Church, focused on another historically marginalized group, such as gays and lesbians, and if they’re fighting and challenging each other’s authenticity, nothing changes.” So a lot of his work has been to try to provide a frame by which leaders can have “deep and meaningful conversations across their differences and appreciate that they have more in common than the particularities they are focusing on.”

Douglas hopes to draw on the skills he used at the international level in a more localized setting, and he feels that Connecticut is a particularly suitable place.

“It really is a microcosm of the United States,” he says. “Here you have some of the richest counties in the U.S. and some of the most economically challenged cities. You have very rural areas, populated areas, and ocean and mill towns and suburbs, black, white, theologically quite conservative, theologically quite progressive—it’s just got everything.”

And obviously Sylvia Ho’s search committee, and ultimately the diocese, felt that Douglas’s experience reflected where they were headed in these changing times.

*

Douglas almost became a long-haul tractor-trailer driver. A political science major at Middlebury, he did not pursue religious studies in college, although he’d always had it in the back of his mind that he might go to divinity school. At graduation, he applied to seven trucking companies and Harvard Divinity School. The trucking idea fulfilled his sense of wanderlust, a desire to reconnect with his working-class roots, and his countercultural reaction to the commonly tread path from Middlebury to the ranks of the employed on Wall Street. Three companies offered him work; Harvard also accepted him. He chose divinity school over the open road.

Since earning his degree and becoming an Episcopal priest, Douglas has seen many changes in the church in the United States. The historic white male leadership has diversified to include women and gays and lesbians. In 1989, the first female bishop was elected, and, in 2003, Gene Robinson became the first gay man to become a bishop. These changes have created a good deal of divisiveness in both the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion. (After Robinson’s ordination and confirmation in New Hampshire, four bishops defected from the church, along with the majority of their dioceses and numerous parishes around the country, totaling about 100,000 members.) The strife was exacerbated at the 2009 General Convention when the church voted to open any ordained ministry to gay men and lesbians.

But when asked how that convention will affect the future of the church, Douglas remains hopeful. The voices heard at the convention were honest. “They were saying this is who we are. We don’t have it figured out. It’s not easy. But we’re being truthful in how we are wrestling with what we think God is up to in our midst. We’re discovering a new way of being a church beyond the politicized divisions that have defined a lot of the church’s conversations in the past few decades. I think as a church we are beginning to find our voice as a whole.”

]]> http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/a-matter-of-faith/feed/ 0 http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/raising-canes/ http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/07/26/raising-canes/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:11:54 +0000 Matthew Jennings http://middmag.com/?p=2119 What began as a bequest has become an endearing Middlebury tradition.

Gamaliel Painter was not an idle being. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 22, 1742, he eventually migrated to Vermont and cofounded the town of Middlebury. Not content with this trifling accomplishment, Painter went on to serve as a member of the Constitutional Convention,
a judge of the County Court, sheriff of Addison County, and representative of Middlebury in the state legislature. Just when you start to feel inadequate, I should interject that he also cofounded our dear Middlebury College.

When Painter died in May 1819, he bequeathed $13,000 and his four-foot-long cane made of oak and ivory. With this gift, Painter not only saved the institution from financial ruin, but also left us with two centuries of cane-related customs.

Starting in the 1880s, the freshmen and sophomore classes sparred in the cane rush, an event so boisterous the College eventually instituted rules prohibiting slapping, pinning, punching, and the wearing of spiked shoes.

The May 1927 edition of the Middlebury College Newsletter tells of another custom in which “the President may carry [the cane] only after an athletic victory over Middlebury’s chief rival, the University of Vermont.”

But the tradition with which recent alumni are most familiar is the giving of canes to graduating seniors at Commencement. This occurred in fits and starts over the last century, and then became a consistently observed tradition after 1995. (Lest anyone who graduated prior to 1995 feel neglected, the College gave canes to alumni when they returned for reunion until 2000.)

With thousands of replicas dispersed throughout the world, I wondered: What do alumni do with their canes now? This inquiry flashed across my mind as I vacuumed the cobwebs from the canes my husband and I have stashed in the corner of our bedroom. Do alumni do as Kate Winslet has done with her Oscar and keep it in the bathroom? Or do they erect shrines in homage to our alma mater? I decided to find out.

Alumni like Namik Kirlic ’05, Mark Barber ’06, Hannah Washington ’08, and her spouse Elizabeth Gordon ’09 are in good company and stow their canes in their bedrooms.

Philip Picotte ’08 claims to be in possession of Painter’s original cane, which resides on his parents’ hearth with all the fireplace tools, including “the big puffer thing.” Elizabeth Robinson ’84 gives her grandmother Alla Fitzgerald Smith’s cane a less incendiary location. Bestowed in 1929, it has a silver top and ivory tip and hangs above Robinson’s mantel, out of reach of the conflagration.

Ollie, an otherwise charming canine who unfortunately mistook the memento for a chew toy, destroyed the cane Chris Dayton received in 1987. However, Levi, Mary Mendoza’s four-legged companion since childhood, hangs his own mortarboard upon her cane, having “graduated” from Middlebury on the same day, in May 2006.

Shawn Rae Passalacqua ’93 writes from California, “It’s hanging on one of the walls in my college counseling office. Hopefully, a symbol and inspiration for my college-bound high school students.”

Closer to home, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music Peter Hamlin ’73 says, “It is watching over me in my office.” He pauses before adding, “It’s nice to think that one of the College’s founders so long ago is still remembered in this vivid, idiosyncratic, and very physical way.”

Hamlin’s closing thoughts remind us that while Painter’s cane may have lost its original utility, it has gained a position more befitting the history reflected in its cerulean ribbons.

A student moves to West Virginia, where mountains and politics turn inside out.

On a humid night along the Big Coal River, in a restaurant just north of Upper Big Branch Mine, Carrie Lou Jarrell counted her steps to a wailing country beat. Eight matronly women followed. They rocked, shuffled, and turned with unlikely grace. They scuffed their heels and toes along the floor, stomping at the end of each beat. An old man pressed his nose to the window and moved on unnoticed. When the dance ended, Carrie Lou sat at a table pushed against the wall and rested her elbow on a napkin dispenser. “Keeps me healthy,” she said, breathing heavily. She drew a cigarette from her pocket and offered me a seat.

Carrie Lou, 65, has wide sassy eyes and a mouth pinched to a frown. Dancing was her idea 15 years ago when she gathered the first “swinging grandmas” in a dingy basement and had a friend teach them the steps. She only missed a few nights since, when Virgil, her husband, fell sick and when she was bedridden herself. Carrie Lou had a tough few years. First the coal dust got so thick in town she could barely breathe. She had the aneurysm; Virgil’s lungs gave out. They lost money when they closed their restaurant. And then the mine explosion: she had known miners to die, but never that many at once.

If you followed the news, you know the story. On April 5 this year, a fiery ball of methane gas killed 29 men in Upper Big Branch, a Massey Energy Company mine set between Montcoal and Whitesville, West Virginia. Rescuers hoped that a few missing men were still alive, but anyone who had worked in the mines knew it was impossible—the miners had died instantly. Reporters camped out along the Big Coal River for weeks as they dug for the best story. Had the company disabled the methane detectors on mining machinery? If the mine had been unionized, would this have happened? Was Don Blankenship, Massey’s CEO, responsible? Many locals cursed Blankenship long before the explosion. He’s a classic villain: dark eyes, a handlebar mustache, shrewd business sense, and indifference to the law. The man could make any story interesting.

It was the explosion that drew me back to the Coal River Valley this April. The last camera crew left by the third week, the articles slipped off the front pages of the national newspapers, and I, knowing the story went deeper than the incident itself, decided to return to the place I had lived and visit the people I had come to know. I had first moved to the Valley in early 2009 to stay several months in Rock Creek, a town missing from most maps, set 10 miles south of Whitesville. At first, I was hesitant to move. In my last semester at Middlebury, a professor had encouraged me to coordinate a project called Power Past Coal, a national effort among communities and organizations to transition away from coal. “Why not live in the coalfields while you work?” he had said.

So I called a friend in West Virginia to ask where I should live. I was looking for something cheap. “Can’t get much cheaper than the Coal River Valley,” she said, and that’s where I ended up.

It’s hard to measure the cost of living in a place like the Valley. Even before the explosion at Upper Big Branch, the region ached with loss. Casualties are commonplace in the mines: roof bolts give way to collapse, off-gassing feeds fires, and sparks from machinery turn rock dust into gunpowder. By the time a miner’s retired, he’s likely to have black lung. And the industry’s changed, making it hard to find a job. Many mines closed in the nineties, sending able workers to Cleveland and forcing old miners to retire. The company that reopened the mines—Massey Energy—hired many miners from out of town to keep the union from reorganizing. Now the union has all but disappeared.

In 50 years, West Virginia has lost over 80 percent of its mining jobs while coal production continues to increase. Machines have replaced men, and to reach the thin, shallow seams of coal that underground mining often can’t, peaks are exploded and the coal scraped out through a method called mountaintop removal. To clear land for the mines, Massey buys up houses—sometimes, whole towns. The company saves money and speeds production by dumping mine waste into the valleys and streams, leaking arsenic, selenium, and heavy metals into people’s wells. Cancer and disease rates have spiked—the last nail in the Valley’s coffin, emptying towns that were never meant to exist without coal.

But somehow, people like Carrie Lou Jarrell have held on. In a town riddled with ghosts, she and her line dancers are among the few signs of life. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t find a parking spot in Whitesville on a Friday night,” I’ve heard her say. Now she owns one of the last open buildings in town, though she hasn’t kept a business more than a few years. When I first came dancing two winters before, she had just closed her restaurant, the Country Corner. The walls were tacked with Coca-Cola signs and yellowing Elvis photos clipped from newspapers. The deep fryers shone like mirrors, and the coolers still had a few warm cokes. Now there’s Nuttin’ Fancy, serving the same greasy corn bread and sweet pork beans. The new owners replaced Carrie Lou’s cutouts with nylon flowers and cheap, nostalgic paintings of pastoral valleys and bustling city streets.

“Life is what you make out of it,” said Carrie Lou. She rested her burning cigarette on the ashtray and winked at me through the smoke. “I could sit here and bitch and complain and bellyache, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. So why do that? Turn the music on and dance a little.” She clapped her hands and rose for the next song—“Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll.”

Roberto Véguez was 18 when he came to the United States from Cuba, a young university student fleeing the revolución and Castro conscription orders in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.  His arrival in New York led to a job cataloguing books in the library of the Columbia University Medical Center; soon he was taking night courses at Columbia’s School of General Studies, where he met his future wife, Susan, and earned a degree in 1968.  A Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin followed, and then in 1972, Susan and Roberto came to Middlebury.

Now, on the eve of his retirement, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish reflects on the journey—past, present, and future.

When I was very young I always thought I was going to be a teacher. But I had never envisioned being a university teacher. It wasn’t until I came to the U.S. that I thought it possible.

Either trouble followed us or we followed trouble. We were [at Columbia] when all hell broke loose during the student riots . . . Students for a Democratic Society . . . that was my final semester. Then we went to Wisconsin, and there were protests and bombings and tear gas. Interesting times. We followed trouble.

Fear of the draft had pushed quite a lot of people into education, so jobs were scarce in 1972. Susan was from Massachusetts, so we had decided to focus on the Northeast, but that’s as particular as we got. I blanketed schools in the area with requests for interviews at the Modern Language Association [conference], and Middlebury answered. “Sure,” they said. “Come for an interview.”

Now, I was coming from a cold place—Madison, Wisconsin—but we came here and it was so cold, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. We came to the Middlebury Inn, and there was no one there to receive us. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then we realized that it was Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody was watching the football game.

Middlebury was the smallest place I had ever lived. I lived in what was then the second largest city in Cuba (Santiago de Cuba), New York, and Madison, which was less crowded, but still a city, very lively. It took some getting used to here.

My first advanced course at Middlebury, I made the classic mistake that every professor made back then: I turned it into a graduate course, just like the ones that I had just finished at Wisconsin. It was just a disaster. I was assigning them huge amounts of reading . . . after about three weeks, I knew it couldn’t go on. It was awful. I was lost. I had to recalibrate. Like a GPS.

We lived on the second floor of 105 South Main. When we arrived, we knocked on the door of the first floor apartment. This woman opened the door, and I said, “My god, it’s you.” It was my French teacher from Columbia, Ann Stern. So we had an open house. It was almost like not leaving graduate housing.

I’ve always had very good students, but now, they’re getting so good. The faculty should be paying admission to be allowed to teach them. The students we get here are a luxury. I’m very close to my students from the Class of 1980. That was the year I got tenure; Susan and I went abroad with them as juniors when I was the director of the School in Madrid; and the next year, we had a very intense bonding experience over a play that the entire Spanish department produced.

Okay, in English the play was called In Burning Darkness. One of our majors, Robert Ackerman ’80, was directing and producing it (he was a double major, Spanish and theatre), and he cast all of us in it. Every character in the play was blind, and I played the blind director of a school for the blind. I was playing myself, except blind. It was art imitating life.

At some point, I had five children of former students here at Middlebury at the same time. It’s part of the Woody Allen formula: success is just being there. I’ve been here for so long, some of these things are bound to happen.

The head of our department, Miguel Fernández ’85 (and MA Spanish ’89), is one of my former students.

The rewards of teaching? You see the results. That’s why I think everyone should teach a first-year course, because you see even more results, faster.

I think I’m most closely associated with my Quixote course. Quixote teaches the importance of considering someone else’s point of view. It can be seen as a philosophy of life. It’s the entire range of society contained in 1,000 pages.

The Spanish School has a special place here. One of these days I’m going to finish the history of what I call “The Golden Years of the Spanish School.”

In 1937, the first of the exiles from the Spanish Civil War came to teach here. This place became the summer place to meet for everyone who was exiled to the eastern seaboard and beyond. Federico García Lorca’s entire family came here; the poet Pedro Salinas. People have been saying, “Someone has to write that history,” so I thought I’d give it a try. That’s what I’ll do in my retirement.

Teaching can be a lot like being a doctor—do no harm. Just point the way and get out. Let [the students] do it, and they will.

Years ago, when I fancied that I was becoming a scholar, I went off to study at Cambridge University. Twenty-five years old and newly married, I was writing a doctoral thesis in political philosophy, and my reason for going to Cambridge was to study the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead under the supervision of a distinguished disciple of his, the Reverend Dr. William Norman Pittenger.

Dr. Pittenger was a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and as I climbed the stairs to the great man’s rooms for our first tutorial, I was as nervous as I had ever been. But as it happened, Dr. Pittenger turned out to be as gracious as he was learned, and he put me immediately at ease. He asked me to tell him my story, where I had studied, how I had become interested in philosophy. I got as far as mentioning my undergraduate years at Middlebury College, when he raised a hand to stop me. He was beaming with pleasure. In his deep, plummy voice, he declaimed, “The strength of the hills is his also!”

This of course is the lovely line from the 95th Psalm chiseled into the entablature above the portal to the Middlebury College chapel, where apparently Dr. Pittenger had once been a visiting lecturer. As a student I had made no point of remembering it, and no one could have accused me of spending much time in the chapel, but as he intoned the words, I immediately felt myself back in the bracing air of Middlebury and feeling, for some reason, that I was home.

That impression—that in the deepest sense Middlebury was my home and that it was somehow calling me back to it—would grow even stronger in the years that followed. I have now had 40 years to consider the matter, and I cannot attribute that calling to mere nostalgia for my college days, satisfying as they were. All of that—the almost unbearable scholastic rigor, the experience of daily living in a dense hive of unforgettable new people, the high spirits, the exhilarating and humiliating self-discovery—was undeniably formative and important to me, but that is not what beckoned. Something older and more elemental, perhaps even geological, seemed to be at work, something like the strength of the hills.

For most of my life, Vermont has been, literally, far from home.

I was born in Chicago and grew up in what became a suburb northwest of the city, Arlington Heights. The native Vermonters I have come to know call midwesterners “flatlanders,” among many other things, but unless they have ever been to Arlington Heights, Illinois, they cannot know how apt the term is. There are no heights in Arlington Heights. I have clear memories of first learning to ride my bicycle and then, as I grew older and stronger, cycling miles and miles trying to find some grade in the pavement that might be considered a “hill.” There was nothing at all aversive about my youth as a flatlander.

In fact, I believed, in those Eisenhower fifties and pre-Kennedy assassination sixties, that I lived in the benign epicenter of an unassailably prosperous and happy land. My larger cultural reference at the time came from the weekly magazines we got at home, the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Life, and Look. Norman Rockwell used to paint covers for some of those magazines, and while some people maintain that he prettified and sentimentalized American life in his renderings, they looked exactly like Arlington Heights to me.

One humorist’s take on an alumni magazine staple: Class notes.

Alison Crane just received her MS in Environmental Progress from Oxford and Cambridge and is on track to receive three Ph.D.’s in Academic Excellence from the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale respectively. She lives in a floating house in Beijing and made a robotic dog out of compost. The dog cooks breakfast for her and her incredible husband, Arnaud, the last remaining relative of Johannes Gutenberg. * Linda Ray and John Frankley were married in a beautiful ceremony overlooking a glistening bay on top of a secret mountain made of gold in the Adirondacks. You didn’t know there was a mountain made of gold in the Adirondacks, did you? Well, there is, and that’s where the wedding was. All of your closest friends were there, except you, since you had to stay in the city and work on a PowerPoint presentation about how to reduce the number of PowerPoint presentations in the new fiscal year. Linda says, “It was the best weekend of everyone’s life. Seriously. It was so so so so so fun. Oh, man! If only you were there. You really missed out. Wow! I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about how much fun we all had on top of the golden mountain and then, later that day, swimming in the glistening bay. We also saw four moose.” * Brian Arnold just got back from multiple trips to Thailand to consult with his new company, the Thailand Company for Extremely Successful Businessmen. He also wants to remind you that he still disagrees with all the things you said in your Chaucer Seminar sophomore year and, as his final Blue Book essay proves, The Miller’s Tale definitely includes consistent elements of dramatic irony. The fact that you never picked up on that is laughable. * Speaking of right and wrong, That Guy Who Lived Across the Hall freshman year still has possession of your original Nintendo and the first three Super Mario Brothers games. You left it in a box outside your room on the last day of the semester while you were moving out, and he stole it. “In your face!” he says, holding up the game system triumphantly from the basement of the glass house that he built with his bare hands in Syracuse, N.Y. * Lindsey Braider is at med school in Boston and having a blast with her roommates, Ashley Payne and Monica Saronson. Med school’s great and all, she says, but they mostly just sit around and talk about how they still have huge crushes on you, even after all these years. Lindsey, especially, sits by the phone most nights waiting for you to call and tell her you still have feelings for her, and she definitely remembers that one night at the Khakis-and-Pirates party in Gifford where you did that hilarious impression of Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men in Black. She’s laughing now just thinking about it. Dude, you should totally call Lindsey. * Jack Strauss found $29,450 on the ground outside Port Authority. He’d love to take you out for a beer after you’re done with that last PowerPoint presentation. “You’ve been working so much, you really deserve a beer and some fries!” Jack says. Your class correspondent agrees. * Erin Mariner never went to Middlebury and does not exist. You made her up that summer after freshman year when your ex-girlfriend asked if you were seeing anybody. But, if she did exist, she’d agree that you’ve really got to hold off on all those PowerPoint presentations and hit up that golden mountain in the Adirondacks. And go get back your old Nintendo.