Editorial A letter from the editors

Author: Editorial Board

To the Reader:

"What in the world is happening to Middlebury?" wrote a parent responding to a recent Campus news article online. "Why would anyone reading this year's Campus publications want to send a son or daughter to Middlebury College today?"

As the editors and writers who informed this reader, we found the question jarring. Perhaps it was our choice to make the Rehnquist professorship controversy a semester long news item, or our exploration of the fact that Middlebury's cost of attendance will soon exceed nearly all of its peers, or our ongoing reporting of the recent quips and quibbles between residential life staff and senior administrators, that led this reader to his desperate rhetoric.

Whatever it was, we challenge the notion that Middlebury College is somehow lost in the woods. The truth is that the news media, ourselves included, reports the extraordinary more than the everyday. But our concerned reader should know that the heart of the Middlebury experience has never been so strong.

Over the past year we have also reported how the students in the social science programs have engaged scholars from the Chief Justice of the United States to the humanitarian hero Paul Rusesabagina. The natural science faculty and students have been recognized with some of the most prestigious grants and fellowships in their fields. The athletics program has sent teams to NCAA championships across the country, and the theater department was singled out by the American College Theater Festival as one of the top undergraduate programs in the nation. Student environmentalists would be indignant if we failed to note that they had launched a national campaign for climate change legislation, and a local campaign that is officially slated to make the College carbon neutral by 2016.

Not surprisingly, Admissions has also seen the highest application numbers in its history, and donors are eagerly contributing to Middlebury's half-billion dollar capital campaign.

There are significant challenges ahead, to be sure. We continue to pursue that illusive, healthy balance of hard work and safe play. We still struggle to respectfully promote diversity of ideas and peoples. We can always be more open about our problems, more collaborative in our solutions and more cognizant of how our actions mold and shape this college. But passionate disagreements, like those that might have led our reader to his question, remind us how deeply people on both sides of each argument care about the College community.

To answer this reader's question, lots of "things" are happening to Middlebury - some good and some bad. We have done our best to report them all.


Best wishes for a restful summer,

The Middlebury Campus Editorial Board