Learning at Middlebury is not restricted to the classroom and laboratory. Every aspect of campus life is designed to create an environment that encourages students to experiment and take intellectual risks. The College is committed to enhancing the constellation of programs, facilities, and technological resources required to create and maintain that environment. To that end, Middlebury recently launched the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts to foster creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial experimentation outside the classroom.
“Middlebury doesn’t only teach its students to think,
Middlebury teaches its students to do. In a time when complaints of
a globally apathetic youth are on the rise, Middlebury stands out as
a place of compassion, and of action.”
— Astri von Arbin Ahlander ’07
Hometown:
Stockholm, Sweden
Major: English, Film and Media Culture
Mentor: Ted Perry, Fletcher Professor of the Arts
“Ted has acted as a guiding hand in the choices I’ve made at Middlebury. He taught me to see moving images in a new way and helped me to understand and appreciate the abstract. He also gave me faith in my ability to remain a creative person in a practical world, to take what I learned through my Middlebury education and use it to pursue my own vision.”
Backlash,by Susan Faludi. “This book is a classic, and a terrifying one,” Astri says. “A must-read for anyone who ever asked themselves: “How did ‘feminism’ get such a bad reputation?”
Unbending Gender: Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It, by Joan Williams. “This book offers a comprehensive look at the current state of the American workforce, and it is a very inclusive approach to feminism that sees society from a holistic perspective.”
The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard. “A beautiful collection of autobiographical essays that offers an incredibly intimate, and real, glance into one woman’s trek from childhood to adulthood.”
Tillsammans, a film by Lukas Moodysson. “This Swedish film from 2000 gives a quirky and alternative look at family living, and reminds us how fundamentally human it is to want to share your life with others.”
www.thelatticegroup.org The Web site for young professionals and college students to explore work-life balance and gender issues that was developed by Astri and her partner. “The web site aims to be a forum for the re-imagining of our working world.”
Like most college seniors, Astri von Arbin Ahlander faced her graduation from Middlebury in May 2007 with some uncertainty. She wanted to go to graduate school and to get started on a challenging and creative professional career and to have a family. But which should come first, and was it even possible to have it all?
The
American Way of Working
- Of 177 countries worldwide, only four do not guarantee paid leave for parents to care for their newborn babies: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States.
- Almost half of the private sector employees in the U.S. (55 million individuals) are not entitled to paid sick days.
- About 70 percent of private sector employees in the U.S. (86 million individuals) are not entitled to leave to care for an ill child or family member.
- The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 mandates overtime pay after a weekly threshold of 40 hours, but the law does not prohibit mandatory overtime or limit the amount of overtime that might be required.
- The United States offers less government support for childcare than any other industrialized nation.
Many of her friends were equally uncertain about how to build the kind of career they wanted without putting the rest of their lives on hold. Astri started interviewing young professionals to see how they were coping, and they all told similar stories of 10- and 12-hour workdays, with no time to take vacations or pursue interests outside of work and no flexibility to arrange work schedules around family obligations.
Those interviews were in fact the beginning of Astri’s post-graduate career. Together with her classmate Yelizavetta Kofman, she launched the Lattice Group, a grassroots campaign to connect young people across national boundaries in an ongoing conversation about issues of work/life balance. The heart of the Lattice Group is a web site (www.thelatticegroup.org), where college-educated men and women share experiences and advice.
A native of Sweden, Astri observes that the American approach to work
is based on the assumption that employees don’t have family responsibilities. “I
think the American system is extremely traditional. It’s based
on a gender-divided model of the family, where you have a male breadwinner
and a female helpmate,” she says. “I was surprised when
I interviewed boys at Middlebury and realized they assumed they would
have a stay-at-home wife. To my mind, that’s like a Stone Age perspective.”
In Europe people have more time to devote to the needs of the family. “Employers there can’t make it mandatory for people to work overtime; everyone takes vacations; and everyone is entitled to paid sick leave and paid parental leave,” Astri says. Government programs in other countries are also more supportive of working parents. For example, the United States offers less government support for childcare than any other industrialized nation.
With
support from Middlebury and several private grants, Astri and Yelizavetta
are now starting chapters of the Lattice Group in the United States,
Germany, Russia, Spain, and Sweden. As they travel from country to
country, talking to college students, employers, and young professionals,
they keep adding new perspectives and practical advice to their web
site. They also plan to turn their research into a book and perhaps
a documentary film. Astri hopes that the information and ideas they
are collecting will encourage both workers and employers to seek a
better balance between the demands of work and personal life.
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