To The Campus: Thank you

In times of either crisis or laziness, it’s easy to fall back on cliches. I try and avoid them, but sometimes they apply perfectly, and one I’ve been using lately is “punching above your weight class.” Thanks to Covid-19, I’ve seen example after example of this from across the Middlebury community. This shows our resilience — we’ve always been tough. Our well-kept facilities, or faculty, our sports teams, everything we do can just seem miraculous for a small liberal arts college in Vermont. But really, the best example has been happening for several years now, and it’s The Middlebury Campus newspaper.

Twenty-five hundred-ish students, with a weekly campus newspaper written as if there were for 10,000. I recall a day in early March this year when the news was breaking that students may go home, and there were members of the editorial board sitting around a table in Atwater brainstorming not only stories, but the future plans for the paper. And what plans they turned out to be. The dedication and willingness to put the community before self is inspiring.

In the last several years, I've watched The Campus grow and transform, now not merely for students but as essential reading for the entire community. Staff, in particular, have felt we have been listened to, heard, written about with grace and compassion, and The Campus has helped enact positive change on campus for us. You’ve helped bring a stronger sense of community to all of us, and we’re ever grateful.

So to the graduating journalists, go out and give ‘em hell, we deserve it. To the rest of you, thanks for carrying on this remarkable tradition. You’ve been handed a wonderful gift.

Tim Parsons is the college’s landscape horticulturist and president of Staff Council.