Community Council maps upcoming year

Author: Brian Fung

The College's Community Council outlined its agenda for the coming months and appointed new student and faculty representatives to handle judicial appeals during its first meeting of the year, held Monday, Oct 2.

The Council spent much of its first gathering of the year discussing issues that have come to its attention in recent months. Dean of Student Affairs and Co-chair of the Council Ann Hanson declared that the College's Carbon Neutrality Initiative is one such high-priority issue.

"We want to be environmentally responsible," Hanson said. "What we are hoping to do with this initiative is to put back what we take out." The proposal calls for reducing or eliminating waste produced by heating, cooling and food preparation such that consumption falls to a more environmentally sustainable level. The Council has yet to define a timetable for the program, but pledges to examine the topic next week.

The Council also announced its plans to review the school's alcohol policy. College officials are now treating so-called "open containers" with greater suspicion after an incident last spring involving hard alcohol and the alleged consumption of drugs slipped into a punchbowl.

"No one is saying, 'we want to get rid of kegs,'" said Hanson. The Council's target shall remain the open containers that could easily be drugged in the absence of supervision. Nevertheless, Hanson hinted at the possibility of prohibiting hard alcohol altogether from the College campus in the future.

Hanson also supported the related topic of SafeRides, suggesting that the program, if expanded, might encourage students to stay safe on weekends. "My goal is to make social life at Middlebury such that students are not finding it necessary to go off campus," she said.

Meanwhile, Tim Spears, dean of the College, seemed enthusiastic about a proposal to adjust the judicial board system into a commons-based format. "We have had a number of conversations about the judicial process," Spears said. "I think this is something the Council would be interested in." Under the new arrangement, each commons would feature its own judicial board, and would have jurisdiction over student misbehavior within its particular commons.

Spears expressed further optimism regarding Hanson's proposal that the school draft a social honor code to complement the academic contract Middlebury students are expected to sign upon their initial arrival as first-years. "We have an excellent academic honor code," Hanson said, but she made it clear that the school would benefit from a "thou shalt not lie, cheat or steal" pledge similar to those institutionalized at other colleges.

The Council, in addition to overseeing the appointment of its members to the judicial board, is responsible for making decisions about campus issues and offering recommendations to the college president. Last year, the Council addressed a number of issues on campus, including smoking in front of building doorways and proposing a Burlington shuttle service to replace that provided by Greyhound.

Following procedure, the Council elected new faculty and student members to serve on the panel responsible for handling judicial appeals in the discipline process. Psychology professor Matthew Kimble will be serving this fall as the staff representative, with Douglass Sisson '07.5 as the student representative and senior Julia Bredrup as alternate.