notes from the desk Middlebury a college of many rules

Author: Andrea Glaessner

A woman stopped me in the dining hall and said, "I don't think you're going to eat all those sandwiches here." I said, "You're right. I'm taking these to my friends who don't have time to go to the dining hall right now. They're all students too. Does it matter whether we eat them here or there?" Scrutinizing me with skepticism, she snorted and retorted back, "Yeah, right." Who does she think I am, The Hamburglar? I just want a sandwich to-go, is that too much to ask?

The College, at times, feels like a community of rules. Rules can be benign, even positive, as in the Rule of Law, "you rule!," Ja Rule or the Golden Rule. But sometimes rules start to define you - you become a community of rules, and rules are stifling, oppressive reflections of a bureaucratic administration comprised of too many Type A personalities with way too many connections to the Puritan passengers of the Mayflower.

Reflecting on your time at Middlebury, ask yourself how many conversations you have had with friends about how the rules are keeping you down. I can think of too many to fit in this column, but I'll go ahead and name a few that come to mind.

The study abroad rule. The College will not grant credit to a student seeking to study in a country either at a university or an SIT program without taking two years of the country's language if it is offered at the College. My friend, who has no interest in learning Portuguese, wanted to spend a semester doing an SIT program in Brazil studying GIS in the Amazon. To be clear, the number of Portuguese-speaking people living in the Amazon is pretty low. But the study abroad office has (gasp!) rules to follow! No, you cannot go to Brazil and learn about GIS in the Amazon because the national language of Brazil is Portuguese and if you were a good little Midd-kid, you would have your entire four years of college mapped out before you even got here and taken Portuguese like the rules say you should. End of discussion. Go to Africa because we do not offer Setswana … yet.

The off-campus rule. The College permits 60 seniors to live off- campus. The limit of 60 is based on a commitment to the residential nature of the College and an evaluation of the rental market in the town of Middlebury. And here's the best part - if you are one of the lucky 60 eligible by a lottery to escape from the trappings of dorm life for one year, you get $3,000 back from tuition, $1,500 back if you're stupid enough to admit that you will be eating on campus. If the school did actually evaluate the rental market to determine that a whopping 60 empty beds exist in the town of Middlebury (which is a blatant lie), did they happen to notice that $3,000 is nowhere near enough money to pay for a semester of rent, food and other living costs? Why is the amount we pay for room and board not broken down for us on the comprehensive fee Web page and why are off-campus students not reimbursed the full amount? Because rules are rules and I said so.

The requests we make are hardly unreasonable. I want to talk to someone who can take a step back, put themselves in my shoes, understand what I am saying and work with me, not against me. Hopefully, someone up there in the ivory tower will read this as an inspiring call to open up just a little bit. We're all trying to coexist in this artificial bubble without going insane. Maybe instead of stress lectures, we should have a rule-breaking day where everyone can break one rule for just one day. At least it would give us a chance to vent.

Andrea Glaessner '08.5 is a Local News editor.