Notes from the desk In defense of Comps

Author: Grace Duggan and Melissa Marshall

We are senior English majors. We spend winter term Friday nights explicating Milton instead of trying to dissect the ingredients in the punch at the Mill. We are some of the only students setting up camp in the blue library chairs on Sunday afternoons (anyone taking Organic Chemistry for the month has our empathy). While many other Middlebury students zip down slopes at the Snow Bowl, we trudge through Eliot. You won't find us sipping hot chocolate at Rosie's Diner, but buying strong coffee with an underlined copy of a Stoppard play in tow. We are senior English majors, and because of it we still operate under our sleeping schedules from the fall and find ourselves unable to get through a dinner in Atwater these days without arguing over the redeeming qualities of Austen or the dramatic tropes of Shaw. The rumors are true: this class takes over your life, but to borrow from another well-loved dramatist, it's a wonderful life.

We write to express our disappointment and disagreement with the English and American Literatures Department's decision to cease teaching Comps after this year. If we had received an e-mail in December publicizing the demise of this famously time-consuming legend of a class, we would have said, "Great! Want to cancel it for us, too?" Once class began, all of the apprehension and anxiety we had felt - some of which had been developing since we declared - disappeared. Call us nerds, call us crazy, but we love Comps, and talking to our classmates last Thursday when we heard the news showed us that we are not the only ones.

We take issue with not receiving this significant piece of news in the spring, when it was voted on within the department. You expect articulate opinions on The Waste Land, a work that has influenced poets for decades. Why, then, didn't you ask the English majors what they thought about Comps, a course that has shaped generations of Middlebury graduates? Febs in the major have the choice to take Comps as either senior or super senior Febs. The ENAM Department should have informed its majors of this change in the spring so that rising senior Febs could have chosen whether or not they wanted the dubious distinction of taking part in Comps' bittersweet last hurrah.

In three weeks, Comps has succeeded in making us feel like part of a large, academic family. After three and a half years of reading, writing, analyzing and absorbing (Rossetti makes us think in lists, swapping fruits for gerunds), we find ourselves enjoying this seemingly larger-than-life rite of passage. We can think of no better capstone to our time spent studying literature than to speak with our fellow senior English majors this month in an intimate and dynamic setting previously unknown to us at Middlebury. We know that the administration has decided on a mandatory senior work requirement beginning with the Class of 2013. As valuable as the experience of writing an essay or thesis can be, reading JSTOR articles and attempting to chain ourselves to our carrels cannot help us question and shape ideas like our peers can.

We'd like to thank everyone who was involved in organizing this course, especially Sue Coburn and Professors Berg, Bertolini, Napier and Price. We've read too many good endings from the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens to try and come up with a satisfactory closing of our own. It's the middle of the night, and we may or may not have some reading to do.