After seven years, why Zeitgeist?

The Campus just launched its annual student survey on Monday, March 31, marking the seventh time we have asked Middlebury students to answer dozens of questions about academics, sex and love, social life, politics and other topics. Last year we received completed responses from over 1,200 students; this data has become a touchstone for our reporting on Middlebury’s community, and it has shaped how faculty, staff and administrators understand the student body.

The survey is currently open and will run through Monday, April 14 at midnight. You can access Zeitgeist here or at go/zeitgeist/ and as a reward for completing the survey, we are holding a raffle for hundreds of dollars in rewards. We’ve added new questions this year: Have you ever been in love while at Middlebury? Do you value Middlebury’s national ranking? How would you describe the college’s political environment?

As former Editor in Chief and Zeitgeist founder Bochu Ding ’21 wrote in 2019, Zeitgeist makes an earnest effort to answer questions on identity, student culture and politics that are “left undiscussed because they are uncomfortable, nuanced and often difficult to approach.” We do not promise the survey is perfect; just last week I realized a question that could have been cut three years ago had unwittingly survived until now. Instead of perfection, we hope it informs productive, evidence-based conversations about the Middlebury community.

The value of Zeitgeist is not only as a passing curiosity or pure entertainment. Rather, the survey represents our best effort to make an empirical, quantitative study of the Middlebury student body at a specific moment in time. We use Qualtrics, Datawrapper and occasionally R to interrogate, analyze and visualize the thousands of responses we receive each spring, participating in a larger trend in the past 15 years that emphasizes data journalism. 

While the college has its own data on the student body, we make all of our results publicly available. Furthermore, The Campus is committed to publishing the data no matter how it reflects on particular departments and specific majors, the institution as a whole or us as a student body — for evidence of that, just see our graphs that show an increasing number of students breaking the Honor Code each year. 

The reporting we do in our annual student survey has real-world implications, too. Those questions on the Honor Code, A.I. and academic integrity have shaped conversations among faculty and administrators surrounding revisions to institutional policies. Our reporting has also gained attention beyond the borders of our campus: I’ve received inquiries from editors at other student publications who want to start their own student surveys modeled on Zeitgeist, and the data we collect has been cited in national publications such as the Atlantic.

No matter how the statistics are used, Zeitgeist provides a unique opportunity for students to share information anonymously that would otherwise be swept under the rug. This principle applies to our questions on sexual assault at Middlebury, which is routinely underreported to the Title XI office, as well as suicide and other topics in our Safety & Wellness section. All of this provides insight into the lesser-known areas of student life that will not be found in an admissions brochure or federally-mandated disclosures. Even the lighter questions about intimacy, sex and sexual orientation speak to important aspects of our lives that are not often talked about openly on campus.

On a personal level, Zeitgeist has also defined my time at Middlebury. This is my third and final year running the survey; planning has to start in early March, running through a nine-week schedule entailing hundreds of hours of emailing, brainstorming, writing, editing and analyzing data from over a dozen of our editors across all six sections that culminates on publication day in early May. I had never done any statistical analysis before joining Zeitgeist, and I had no experience with survey design or data analysis — almost everyone on our staff majors in the humanities. Running this project has challenged me to leave the written comfort zone of my history major, and as I look to hand off the work to our younger editors, I know my quantitative forays have been a formative part of my college education.

Whether you think of this survey as a fun, momentary distraction at lunch in Proc or your chance to voluntarily write essay-length responses to our wrap-up question, you are contributing something valuable to our endeavor to understand Middlebury College. So take some time this week or next to look through Zeitgeist 7.0 and submit your answers by April 14 at midnight.

Part of the beauty of Zeitgeist is inherent to its definition — as a moment in time, a temporary window into student life and culture at the college. Our survey is not an experimental research project on Middlebury students, nor the all-encompassing nature of college-collected data. 

To see official statistics and institution-wide trends, look to the college’s website. To understand the attitude of students, our passions and pastimes, love lives and changed minds — to see the pressing issues and the not-so pressing issues alike — look to Zeitgeist.

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Ryan McElroy

Ryan McElroy '25 (he/him) is the Editor in Chief.

Ryan has previously served as a Managing Editor, News Editor and Staff Writer. He is majoring in history with a minor in art history. Outside of The Campus, he is co-captain of Middlebury Mock Trial and previously worked as Head Advising Fellow for Matriculate and a research assistant in the History department. Last summer Ryan interned as a global risk analyst at a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina.