I present this issue with a heavy heart. We, at Middlebury, are going through a workforce planning process (a euphemism for layoffs) in a bid to reduce compensation costs and correct our long-standing deficit. Every loss will be felt deeply on the MIIS campus as we are a small community and the absence of each person will be experienced both on a personal and institutional level.

We enjoy the interactions with all of you through this section in the newsletter. Thank you to everyone who participated in our second poll on the topic of Trigger Warnings. We received 177 responses with many comments that helped us understand the various perspectives of our community about trigger warnings.

In this issue, we highlight a letter written by the VPAA condemning bullying on our campus, blogs written on topics related to diversity and equity, work done off campus by the CDO and the formation of a Diversity Committee comprising of faculty and staff.

This section presents personal stories and experiences of some of our community members. In this issue we highlight Ruxin Zheng, Caroline Zeiher, Priscilla Lorenzo, and Marie Butcher.

Allies at MIIS is an activist group but never have we been as challenged as we were this semester. Our challenges came primarily from trying to figure out how to best address the fallout from the cyberbullying incident on campus.

It’s easy to champion the cause of a community of people far removed from us. It’s significantly riskier to stand up against acts of prejudice or bias when it is happening within our closer circles.  We risk being outcast or ostracized by our own social group. But would it help you to know that 75-95% (Luxenberg et al., 2015) of people in schools disagree with bullying?  

When we say bullying, it usually conjures up images of middle and high school students engaging in some very aggressive behaviour which leaves victims scarred for life. Bullying has reached epidemic proportions, unfortunately now very prevelant in the political realm. Social media has contributed to its spread and has even modified the way bullying plays out in social, educational and political spheres.

News coming out of other Higher Education Campuses is very interesting to our work on diversity and inclusion. In this section, we look at the Varsity Blues scandal, surveys highlighting the status of race relations on U.S. campuses, and President Trump’s recent executive order in support of ‘free inquiry’.

In this issue, we present two books and a TV series that you might enjoy reading and viewing in your free time!