Contact: Tanya Tabachnikoff, 802-258-9263, [email protected]
Students at Marlboro College (VT) voted overwhelmingly against TV at their most recent Town Meeting, where each have the same vote as the college president, Paul LeBlanc.
LeBlanc had offered to foot the bill to install satellite dishes and televisions in a number of the dorms, but the students' vote emphatically rejected television. They said they preferred the funds be allocated to other priorities, such as new books for the library and Internet access in the one dorm without it.
Founded in 1946 on the philosophy that all that is needed for a sound education is "a student, a teacher, a book, and a log to sit on," Marlboro College has a long tradition of having no television on campus.
The question of whether or not to bring Internet to the campus five years ago was never debated. The college received a $3.7 million Title III grant from the government to wire the entire campus and bring state of the art technology to the remote campus. Marlboro was also the first to create an e-commerce degree, a master of science in Internet Strategy Management, as well as the nation's only Teaching with Internet master's degree.
But television gets quite a different reception from Marlboro students.
"We already have the Internet and phone systems on the campus, and the culture of the college hasn't been changed for the better because of them," said Gretchen Jaeger, an undergraduate at Marlboro. "Television is a less usable tool than either of the others."
Student Julie Fins echoes the sentiment. "Television seems unnecesarry to me," she said. "If the school is going to spend the money, I think they could use the money for other things instead. Television would really ruin the ambiance of the school because it is something you cannot ignore."
Richard Sobiecki disagrees. He feels that watching television is a choice for the students to make for themselves, not something they should be forced to endure or ignore.
"As if there were a higher power against television," the local Brattleboro Reformer reported, "the electricity in the hall went out right before debate on the issue started. Cheers subsided a few seconds later when power was restored and the debate resumed...In the end, the motion was defeated."
After the story went on the Associated Press wire, Marlboro College's students' rejection of cable television was then reported by numerous radio and television stations across the country. A commentary by Paul Harvey praised Marlboro students' values to its 19 million listeners.
Marlboro sophomore Carrie Sterr was asked by a New York radio newscaster, "What do the students do for fun then? Do you dance? Aren't you going to miss 'Friends' and 'Frazier'?" Sterr responded that at Marlboro students benefit from all kinds of human interraction and that they don't need tv to have fun. "We have conversations with our friends," she explained. "And of course we dance."
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Quotes excerpted from The Brattleboro Reformer, Brattleboro, VT. Photos available from the Vermont bureau of The Associated Press.
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