Protect this house

I’ve written many times on Middlebury’s traditions, and I’ve exhausted the subject. However, the sub-zero temperatures have slowed my usually enormous imagination. Furthermore, the cold front coincides with Middlebury’s recent cold shoulder to the housing wants of our students. It’s with some hesitance that I take up the quill/keyboard again on behalf of all those who stand, as I do, very passively, in the name of all things good.

When I characterize the various years or experiences of my life, I look to specific moments in my life which are indicative of my greater surrounding and prevailing attitudes at the time. For instance, when asked to recall my Kindergarten experience, I immediately recall the moment when my long-time friend showed me an Ancient Egyptian relief of a woman and explained to me what a “boobulla” was. This moment of revelation speaks not only of my Kindergarten environment but of the bright-eyed bushy-tailed first-grader self that I was, a self who now seems nearly alien my current self, more learned or not.

However, this little insight dually provides me with a sense of identity and continuity that I wouldn’t have otherwise. What’s equally valuable about this memory is that that friend can, more or less, corroborate that occurrence to this day. Hence, my connection to this event and my former self is all the more substantiated by its collective nature; it is not an imperfection in my memory.

In general, however, I fear that time has cruelly, and irrationally, vanquished the less significant, and one-off experiences of my memory and left me with a reductive, rose-colored misunderstanding of these things. However, I like to believe that, as a result of the continual process of forgetting, I continually place significance on these moments that I do remember, in order to counteract their fleeting nature. I hold that memory to me dearly, like I do as a senior with my many moments of my Middlebury career.

It is my assertion that the college, intentionally or not, uproots traditions. And what I am more or less leading into is that it’s important to keep these traditions available to students because it provides a source of identity and continuity to Middlebury students. I readily accept that things will inevitably change, and that one students’ experience will vary greatly with another’s, however, I look towards housing as one such experience that resists change longer than others. Middlebury carefully preserves its architectural history, and it should also preserve the traditions within its stone walls ­— it is of equal importance. Ask students to define their freshman year, and they will explain the significance of their housing situation as it affected the many facets of their college experience.
When I recall my sophomore year, I look to my many merry instances in Pearsons and Fletcher, as a navigator might a lighthouse in the fog. These experiences, substantiated by my roommates and friends who share them, now form the ground which provides a sense my past experience and self, which, in turn, influences my current course of identity.

During the golden years of Fletcher, they maintained a tradition, despite a flux in its inhabitants. Its dissolution was a dissolution of a small tradition, one which many admired and were a part of. It was fortuitous that Munford has to some extent filled this void. The conglomerating of the Mods will similarly be a dissolution of tradition. Among the many potential traditions we could lose is that of near folklore, Mod-a-Palooza. Similarly, Sperry house has fallen by the wayside somewhere; KDR too teeters precariously; and as Ian Trombulak noted last week, the Dungeon is in peril of castration.

I see a trend to it all. After several years, or more, students form a tradition within a dormitory. The administration, for whatever reason, changes the housing situation and disrespects the continuity of students’ experience. In a few years I would like to know that Mod-a-Palooza still runs strong. I would like to know that the Dungeon is still worthy of its name, indicative of suppressed male angst. I would like to know that despite the constant flux of the world, some little things don’t change. What’s more, I would like to know that my experience goes beyond my own and transcends time. My memories might irrevocably fade off, but I’ll have the comfort knowing that I won’t be missing anything that I haven’t done myself. Call me cliché.