Middbriefs

Author: Leslie Lim and Scott Greene

Former foreign language chair, German professor dies

Long-time German professor M. Kimberly Sparks passed away early on Oct. 30, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz announced on the College's Web site. Professor Emeritus Sparks began his time at Middlebury in 1966, one of a group of professors that then President James Armstrong hired away from Princeton. He was first appointed associate professor of German, then the chair of the German department and first holder of the Jean Thomson Fulton Chair of Modern Languages and Literature before becoming the Charles A. Dana Professor of German in 1969 and an Old Dominion Foundation Professor of German in 1971.

Sparks continued to be a presence at Middlebury, as chair of the newly formed committee on foreign languages in 1973 and later as chair of the foreign language division. Sparks also contributed to the College as director of the Middlebury College School in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, before retiring in 1993. He was appointed professor emeritus of literary studies in 1994 and later taught as professor emeritus before receiving another appointment as professor emeritus of German in 1999.

His background includes a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1956, the university from which he graduated summa cum laude and with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and a doctorate from the same institution, which he recieved in 1962. However, his undergraduate days were interrupted in 1951 while Sparks served in the United States Air Force Security Service in the U.S., Germany, and England for nearly four years . During that interlude, Sparks studied Russian at the Air Force Language School. Sparks held National and Samuel S. Fels Fellowships in graduate school, in addition to being a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Vienna. Personally, he is survived by his wife, Suzann, their three children and several grandchildren.


Black enrollment at Midd stagnates, new survey says

Middlebury ranks 24th in first-year enrollment of African Americans at the highest rated liberal arts colleges in the country, according to a study published on October 25 by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE).

The College is one of seven high-ranking liberal arts colleges with first-year classes that are less than four percent black. The class of 2010 is 3.5 percent black, or 20 out of 571 students. Furthermore, 52.6 percent of black applicants were admitted into the College's freshman class, compared to 21.9 percent of all applicants. The College also has the same amount of black freshman as they had a year ago, according to the survey.

Swarthmore College set the standard for the liberal arts elite, with 43 black enrollees, or 11.6 percent of its first-years. Middlebury peers Amherst College and Williams College also ranked near the top, at 9.9 and 9.7 percent respectively.

This is the fourteenth consecutive year that JBHE has published the survey, which includes information on the number of African-American applicants, their acceptance rates, enrollment numbers, and yield rates.

For the sixth time in the last eight years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill leads all other institutions in the percentage of black students in its first-year class, at 12.3 percent.


Campus celebrates religion with month-long campaign

Kicking off a month of programming highlighting religious practices on campus, the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life has named November the first-ever Religious Life Awareness Month at the College. The month-long event is an expanded version of week-long awareness campaigns held in 2005 and 2006.

"It was started as a result of students in our Religious Life Council wanting to dispel what they saw as campus stereotypes of religious students," said Ellen McKay, the program coordinator at the Scott Center.

As part of the celebration, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is sponsoring a symposium running from Nov. 9 to Nov. 11 about social justice and the role of Christianity. The symposium will present a series of lectures about religious social activism and conclude with a concert by Lamont Hiebert of the rock band Ten Shekel Shirt on Nov. 11.

Other events during the month include a lecture by Winona LaDuke titled "Environmental Justice from a Native Perspective" on Nov. 14, performances of the plays "Looking for the New World: A Shtetl Girl's Journey in America" and "Getting 2 Real" in the Hepburn Zoo, Catholic, Celtic, Jewish and Unitarian/Universalist religious services and an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship-sponsored trip to Weston Priory in Weston, Vt. on Nov. 18.