Editorial What we take for granted

Author: [no author name found]

There are many things to be said and much advice to be given about how Middlebury as an institution can improve. But as one member of the greater Middlebury community pointed out last week, couldn't one nice thing be said about the College every five or six weeks of the semester?

It is a valid point, not that newspapers hold a responsibility to seek out and exploit good news where it does not exist, but that in this case, Campus critiques of everything from social life to e-mail policies to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s, recent visit, have overlooked a crucial element of the Middlebury community. In each case questions could be posed: Social life may be down, but what about the stuff students do in those other forty hours of the week? Student e-mail may seem bad, but how is it in comparison to that of the faculty? Whatever you think of Roberts or Rehnquist, what about the donor's decision to establish a new faculty post? In each question, the element of Middlebury life that we have taken for granted is our professors.

We could debate endlessly the methods of popular national college guides, but we could not dispute their conclusions that year after year rank Middlebury professors at the top of the pack: this year they placed number one over Harvard, Williams and Amherst, according to The Princeton Review. Whatever we say about Middlebury's after-hours, there are few complaints about the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. chunk of the day. At Middlebury, like almost nowhere else, students engage professors in small-group seminars, one-on-one tutoring sessions and cordial dinner parties, where faculty go beyond the classroom to see that students learn and understand what they study.

Several weeks ago, this page considered the possibilities for reigning in the use of all-student e-mails that flood inboxes and irritate students. But barely mentioned was the barrage of e-mails managed every day by college faculty. From meeting requests to response papers, from paper drafts to advisee questions, we do a lot of communicating with our faculty. While professionals in many fields may manage inboxes that dwarf those of the average Middlebury professor, few handle round-the-clock messages from students whose workdays do not end at 4 p.m. The issue became national news two years ago when The New York Times first published an article on professors' inboxes, and the demands to respond promptly to student requests. Taking into account Middlebury's lack of social life opportunities would suggest we have even more time than your average student body to be e-mailing a professor at midnight on a Saturday. And yet, by in large, the faculty keep up with us.

And of course, whatever the dispute over a professorship honoring the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, the bottom line is that an anonymous donor made a contribution to support a new faculty position. While classrooms, dorms and libraries are all important elements of our infrastructure, those friends of the College who contribute resources for faculty arguably make the most direct contribution to the intellectual life of the community. New professorships offer the promise of expanding the faculty while freeing financial resources for other elements of the Strategic Plan, including student financial aid. Secretary of the College John Emerson said this week that the establishment of additional endowments would be a major priority for the administration in the coming years. We are glad to hear this.

Many things can be written about the ways in which Middlebury can and should improve, but it is equally important to consider why Middlebury is a top-ranked liberal arts college, why first-year admissions seem to become more competitive every year and why it is that we upperclassmen keep coming back. The answer is Middlebury's professors.