Town/gown

Author: Grady Ross

If you ever watch infomercials you'll notice a trend among consumers: people love things they can do at home. Thanks to credit cards and paid programming you can sculpt firm abs, create the hottest celebrity hairstyles, make restaurant-quality pasta, remove dents from your car and - my personal favorite - repair sagging earlobes, all in the privacy of your own home.

But while the EarLift is available to a universal audience, I find myself with a unique at-home opportunity. Middlebury College has offered me the chance to shift my paradigm, mature my beliefs and interact with diverse and cultured people, all without leaving my home (and all for the low, low price of $48,830 - if I call now). This dawned on me over dinner several weeks ago when a friend was reflecting on a recent change of opinion. She recalled that in the traditional Southeast Asian environment in which she had been raised, she had been wary of homosexuality. However, upon coming to Middlebury, where she was confronted with a new culture of acceptance, this attitude began to change. As I listened to her, it occurred to me that I was in an exceptional position: I see the same buildings daily that I encountered in my pre-college life. I shop at the same stores. I, unfortunately, experience the same weather. And yet, my life now is defined by a very different culture.

Middlebury College is not really a part of Middlebury, Vt. How many of you, for example, have ever been mud-boggin'? Oh, the joys of driving an old pick-up truck through a water-logged pasture on a beautiful spring day. Or who has tapped maple trees? Pancakes taste so much better drenched in syrup that you carried from tree to sugar house when it was still unrecognizable as Vermonters' liquid gold. And who among you has gone fencing? I'm not talking about two people foiling in plastrons: there is something old-fashioned and wonderful about walking miles of fence line to repair the spots where the heifers got out. Put away all of the flannel and Timberlands you Green Mountain masqueraders: you ain't seen nothin' yet.

I'm not trying to make Vermonters out to be hicks (I am one, after all). But in a state where cows outnumber people, there are elements that are lost on a campus that boasts representation from 49 states and 36 countries, just in the Class of 2012.

Recently, at a conference, an activity leader instructed everyone to stand if they felt that their values had changed since enrolling in college. I stood. I live eight miles from the house I grew up in, and I stood. And as I did I realized that a community or a culture does not consist of the physical environment or the infrastructure as much as it is made up of its people. And the people on campus create a reality unlike any I have ever known. When would I have previously talked with a woman who was trained to ski for the Soviet army? Conversed with a peer who studied in China for the Olympic martial arts team? Traded stories with a former member of Cirque du Soleil? I am a different person for this: I have a new conception of education, a different outlook on certain issues and an appreciation for things I once took for granted.

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