Speaker does not reflect College values

Author: [no author name found]

Given the College's commitments to international studies and civic engagement, as well as its location in rural Vermont, the choice of Ann Veneman ["Veneman To Address Grads," March 16] as commencement speaker would seem an inspired one: she was raised on a "family farm in a small rural community" and became the first woman to serve as Secretary of Agriculture, from 2001 to 2005, before her most recent appointment as Executive Director of UNICEF. (It should be said, however, that the "small rural community" was outside Modesto, Calif., an agribusiness hub whose current population exceeds 200,000, and that the patriarch of the "family farm" represented Stanislaus in the California Assembly and later served as an undersecretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under President Nixon.)

After some reflection, however, we are concerned that the choice is inconsistent with the values of the College and with the values of most Vermonters. Those who applaud the College's efforts to support local farms, for example, will find her long association with agribusiness and genetically modified foods troubling, to say the least. Between her tenure as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in the first President Bush administration and her appointment as Secretary of the California Food and Agriculture Department in the mid 1990s, for example, she served on the board of directors at Calgene, and represented the interests of Dole Foods in Washington. Later, as Secretary of Agriculture, she would receive a joint letter from the members of Vermont's Congressional delegation, who cited the treatment of dairy farmers as an example of the administration's "farmer unfriendly" policies.

Environmentalists will likewise be troubled that, in her role as overseer of the United States Forest Service, she led the administration's efforts to reverse the Clinton administration's protection of 60 million acres of public lands from road construction, logging and other development. As an editorial in the Washington Post (July 16, 2004) noted, the new policies, intended to ease land use restrictions, "would … eviscerate protections for some of the country's last unspoiled wilderness."

Those concerned about the effects of "unchecked globalization" on nations both rich and poor will perhaps also be disappointed. Since the Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT), at which she served as a negotiator, former Secretary Veneman has been a prominent advocate of unfettered trade. Indeed, her positions on agriculture and trade are related: as Secretary, for example, she opposed the "precautionary principle" that would allow countries or, in the case of the European Union, groups of countries, to regulate imports of genetically modified foods pending further research.

It comes as no surprise, then, that her appointment as Executive Director of UNICEF has drawn criticism. In a recent "Online Beat" column for The Nation, John Nichols quotes from a letter from Ravi Narayan of the People's Health Movement to Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which Narayan concludes that "her performance in [her previous positions] has been characterized by the elevation of corporate profit above people's right to food (U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25). Such a philosophy and practice would reverse almost six decades of UNICEF's proud humanitarian history and prove disastrous for the world's children." Furthermore, a recent article in Planned Parenthood's Choice! raised important concerns about her positions on women's rights and sex education, and their implications for UNICEF's mission.

We do not mean to suggest that there is nothing to admire in her record, or that other colleges and universities would not find her an inspirational commencement speaker. We believe, however, that our own commencement should celebrate better the particular values that characterize Middlebury, both College and town.



David H. Bain, English

Eduardo C. Béjar, Spanish

Jeffrey Carpenter, Economics

Jane Chaplin, Classics

David Dorman, Mathematics

Elizabeth Endicott, History

Gloria Estela González, Spanish

Leger Grindon, Film and

Media Culture

William Hart, History

Ana Martinez-Lage, Spanish

Christopher McGrory Klyza,

Political Science

and Environmental Studies

Peter Hans Matthews, Economics

Paul Monod, History

Sujata Moorti, Women's and

Gender Studies

Kamakshi P. Murti, German

Margaret Nelson, Sociology and Anthropology

Michael Olinick, Mathematics

Ellen Oxfeld, Sociology and

Anthropology

Paula Schwartz, French