Bowdoin vs Colby vs Middlebury vs Colgate

[MWolf]

Something which puzzles me about how people here express themselves about Middlebury.

On one hand, I read a lot about how everybody is preppy and/or a Jock, and how athletes are dictating the social life, controlling the student government, etc.

Then I read people claiming that the student body is being controlled by a bunch of crunchy, Social-Justice-Warrior types, and how they are dictating the social life, controlling the student government, etc.

I’m just wondering how people are managing to hold these two mutually exclusive, contradictory ideas at the same time. I mean, maybe the students there are all granola-munching, football-playing, SJWs, who wear teva sandals and polo shirts with popped collars. I would love to see one of them, but they must hide them when parents come to visit.

@citivas

Neither my son or I had ever heard of the term NARP (Non-Athlete Regular Person) until he attended an accepted student overnight at Midd. He went in pretty positive about the school and came out dead set against it. He met so many students and they all either talked about or actively participated in the defining of the student body as either athletes (on top) or non-athletes (bottom, tolerated but lesser being). He heard this from both sides. They overnighted him with a group of athletes who talked about it a lot but he also sat in with a band rehearsal where some of them talked about it too. I then set him up to chat with a recent graduate who was the son of a colleague who liked Midd. But when asked he told my son that this social bifurcation was real.

The problem in remembering things that happened a number of years in the past is that later events can change our memories of what actually happened. Here is what you wrote when the memories were fresh:

@citivas

We just got back from the Middlebury Preview Days. His experience the first day was pretty good but after the overnight it had dropped down on his list. There was no problem – the host was perfectly nice and he was in a room with a bunch of other prospective students too. But he said of the 12-15 current and prospective students he spent real time with, to the last one they all talked about liking to have drinking parties and do recreational drugs. And that’s just not his thing. It exists at his high school too of course but he’s found a pretty large group that also aren’t into it and fill their time with cooking parties, games, playing the Wii, movies, outdoor stuff, etc. He doesn’t care what others do but got the impression he would be an extreme outlier there by not being into that. He said a few of the current students claimed the student body is divided into three main groups - “Bros” (i.e. jocks/preppies), “Nerds” (hardcore only-have-time for study and nothing else) and “normal” but that normal still meant likes to party hard. “Work hard, play hard” was evoked by multiple students. My S’ wants to "work reasonably hard, play moderately.

No mention of “NARP” versus Athlete, but rather Bros, Nerds, and “normal”. He also heard it from “a few”, not “they all talked about it”. No talk of how this plays into social status, either. Your son spent time with a mix of prospective and current students, and what turned him off was the talk of drinking and recreational drug use.

Again, it’s been six years, and it’s not surprising that you don’t remember it well. However, when providing one’s perspective of a college, it is only useful to provide the actual perspective, not the one that is remembered some years later. What I do when trying to remember an event is to go back and see what I wrote or commented at the time. I’ve been embarrassed by wrong “memories” in the past (and likely will be in the future).

In any case, not liking a “work hard, play hard” ethos is a perfectly good reason to decide against a college. However, it is a different type of criticism. I would agree that this attitude is not uncommon at Midd, and it’s likely that it would be more common among their athletes (and is reflected in the behavior of many of the athletes). However, it is not the attitude of the majority of students.