College-Centric Courses Explore Middlebury Themes

Author: Pierce Graham-Jones

Embroiled somewhere in the vicinity of the recent debate about the worth of Winter Term is a surge of Winter Term course offerings centered on aspects of Middlebury College. These are courses that could never be offered at another college - not because of some unmatchable Middlebury resource or innovation, but because the courses treat a portion of the institution within which they are taught. In fiction, it's called metafiction. In life, metaphysics. Does the concept of meta-academics work?

According to Lecturer in English & Film and Media Culture Don Mitchell, "The tragedy... is that such opportunities don't present themselves more often." He is referring to opportunities such as that embodied in his course, "The Modern Novel at Middlebury," which will critically examine the novels of five Middlebury professors. This course, along with "The Collegiate Way of Living: Middlebury's Commons in Historical Context" and "Middlebury College and American Higher Education" deliver the newest, and largest, semester's worth of Middlebury College's offerings focused on Middlebury College.

This phenomenon traces back to the Winter Term of 1999, when Professor of History Jim Ralph first taught "Middlebury College and American Higher Education." The following year, three courses were offered under the heading "Middlebury and the Bicentennial" - Ralph's course, " 'The Town's College:' The Practice of Local History" and "Diversity at Middlebury: An Historical View."

After nearly 205 academic years, Middlebury professors have only implemented self-examination as a subject of course studies in the past five. Inevitable questions arise: "Does this trend make sense? Should subject matter be mixed with the academia within which it is taught?"

Nobody interviewed for this article saw a reason why it should not. In fact, they rallied behind the idea. As Scott Kleiman '06, co-chair of Ross Commons Council and future student in "The Collegiate Way of Living," said, "Contrary to detracting from my ability to examine the subject matter, I think that my (and Middlebury's) experience with the commons will allow students to tie the theoretical aspects of the class into the real-life occurrences at Midd, thus furthering the depth of examination."

His instructor-to-be Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Robert O'Hara takes this one step further, arguing that individual experience with the subject matter is integral: "I would hope very much that [the students] will bring their personal experiences and ideas to the course so I will be able to learn from them and they will be able to learn from each other. Only through the collision of ideas, as John Stuart Mill says, will our understanding advance," he said. This, however, might be the very problem. A typical class of Middlebury students would have had much more similar direct experience with the commons system than they will have had with "world poverty," one of the possible topics of "Contemporary Moral Issues," a course which also depends upon a collision of students' ideas. Usually, as a consequence of Middlebury's commitment to diversity, students will bring much different experience, both in breadth and type, to any given subject matter. This diversity is partially expunged when the subject matter is the one thing that the classmates all have in common - Middlebury College.

With Mitchell's course, on the other hand, one of the major purposes of the course is to familiarize students with an aspect of Middlebury that they have not been exposed to - the literary creations of their professors. And he is quick to acknowledge the obvious objection. "I suppose someone might be wary that the level of critical engagement with 'home-team' texts would tend to be superficial and somewhat laudatory and self-congratulatory. But anyone who would feel that way must obviously a) not know me, and my style of teaching, and b) must not understand that serious writers thrive not on obsequious adulation, but on being read seriously and considered with critical acumen by engaged and intelligent readers." However, since the grouping of authors and their novels is based solely on Middlebury College (not a traditional point of literary comparison), their grouping could be interpreted as literarily artificial. Thus, insofar as it is a course of critical examination, it cannot be as coherent as a carefully arranged examination of, say, "The Realistic Novel." At the very least, it is a variation on the professor's usual method of composing a syllabus based on books of particular interest or connectivity to him or her within a literary genre or era.

Ralph sees his course as a "window" into the subject of higher education "through the prism of Middlebury College." That is both the innovation, and the dilemma, of all three of these courses. There are great advantages to using material that is close at hand - Mitchell notes that "many or most of the authors we'll be reading are planning to attend a class meeting to directly answer questions about their work" and Ralph and O'Hara will both be able to draw from the benefit of all of their students having had personal experience with the subject matter. But there are also potential sacrifices.

The ultimate priority will be to acknowledge the process of self-examination. Assistant Professor of English Timothy Billings agrees that it makes sense to mix subject matter with the academia within which it is taught "insofar as the best intellectual inquiry always includes within its scope the conditions under which that inquiry is undertaken."