The College has adopted a new mission statement. This is what it means.
By President Ronald D. Liebowitz
College mission statements are crafted as a requirement for academic accreditation, as well as for the more-well-known purpose of projecting what an institution would like the outside world to know about it. So every decade or so, usually coinciding with an external review, institutions offer a short description of their primary mission.
A major challenge in writing a mission statement for a residential liberal arts college is how to distinguish itself from its peers. If you were to read literature from the leading colleges, you may find it difficult to discern among the schools, including how they explain their mission.
Middlebury’s mission statement, which was drafted as part of the College’s recently completed strategic planning process, reflects the special qualities that make Middlebury what it is. In this column, I elaborate on the thinking behind each of the passages; as always, I encourage readers to respond with comments.
At Middlebury College we challenge students to participate fully in a vibrant and diverse academic community. Many academic mission statements tend toward the passive. This opening sentence, however, underscores our expectations that students at Middlebury will be active learners, involved in multiple endeavors, all in a diverse learning environment. Vermont is among the most homogeneous states in the nation (3.2 percent nonwhite), without a community as large as 40,000 (Burlington is the largest “city,” with 38,900 residents). Yet the College has been successful in diversifying its student body during the past two decades through its aggressive recruitment of international students and Ameri-can students of color. In 1980, international students and American students of color made up just 5 percent of the student body. In this September’s incoming class, that percentage will be 35 percent (22 percent American students of color and 13 percent international). In addition, the strategic plan recommends changes to our financial aid policy in order to increase the socioeconomic diversity of the student community.
We strive for diversity, including diversity of thought, because we are convinced students learn best in an environment where people hold different views and perspectives, have had vastly different life experiences, and see history and current issues with a different set of lenses. These differences come to life in classrooms, in the dining and residence halls, and elsewhere on campus, the consequences of which are great for the quality of education our students receive while at Middlebury.
The College’s Vermont location offers an inspirational setting for learning and reflection, reinforcing our commitment to integrating environmental stewardship into both our curriculum and our practices on campus. Middlebury’s rural and beautiful setting in Vermont is a draw for many reasons, and it has influenced the College’s commitment to the study of the environment and to environmental stewardship in its operations. Our location provides students with a learning and living environment in which there are few distractions, where friendships tend to become more intense and meaningful due to Middlebury’s relative isolation, and where one can learn about the natural environment and live in a more environmentally responsible way, both on a campus and within a state that take environmental stewardship most seriously.
The College is recognized as a national leader in environmental education, on account of its innovative and rigorous multidisciplinary environmental studies program; and in environmental management, because of policies designed to minimize the negative impact of College operations on the environment. The College’s location, then, plays a significant role in its mission. At Middlebury, one need not graduate with a degree in environmental studies to become aware of and conversant about environmental issues and their growing impact on the world.
Yet the College also reaches far beyond the Green Mountains, offering a rich array of undergraduate and graduate programs that connect our community to other places, countries, and cultures. This sentence reflects how Middlebury has become far more than a traditional New England liberal arts college, and how it aspires to educate its students to engage cultures beyond the familiar to meet the challenges of 21st-century citizenship. It also represents an effort to acknowledge and integrate several parts of the College—parts that for too long have operated in relative isolation of the undergraduate college, and yet have contributed so much to the College’s luster.
The intensive summer Language Schools, which began operating in 1915, have educated a sizeable portion of the country’s secondary school foreign language teachers. They have also prepared nondegree students who need foreign language competency to complete the Ph.D., journalists who need to prepare for an overseas assignment, and those who simply wish to be able to understand other cultures. The Schools award approximately 200 M.A. degrees and five doctoral degrees each year in five languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Russian), and enroll more than 1,300 students on the Vermont campus each summer.
Our seven Schools Abroad offer undergraduate and graduate students a remarkable array of opportunities for study abroad. The philosophy of the Schools Abroad, like that of the Language Schools, is “total immersion,” which means most of our students who enroll study in their target language (non-English) alongside local university students at one of our 21 partner universities in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The courses they study range from art to economics, politics to mathematics; most of the Schools have sites in both a major metropolitan center (e.g., Paris, Florence, Moscow) and in at least one provincial site (e.g., Poitiers, Ferrara, Yaroslavl) in order to allow students to study either where they will find the richest cultural, political, and social opportunities to advance their studies, or where English is rarely heard.
The Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE), today the largest graduate English literature program in the United States, began on the College’s Ripton mountain campus and now operates at five sites—Ripton, Oxford (England), Santa Fe, Juneau, and Asheville (North Carolina). BLSE’s early mission focused on educating a large proportion of the Northeast private schools’ English faculty, but during the past 15 years it has expanded its mission to include a significant number of secondary school teachers from rural and inner-city public school systems nationwide, which has helped improve the quality of the teaching of English in secondary schools across the country.
And finally, there is the College’s new affiliate—the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a graduate school of 700 students in California, whose orientation toward Asia and the Pacific Rim complements Middlebury’s historic ties to Europe. Programmatic integration between Middlebury and Monterey will allow our undergraduates to study—during winter term or during their junior year—subject matter we don’t offer in Vermont and to intern or do research in one of the Institute’s research centers, such as the nationally renowned Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
It will offer our Language School students a chance to pursue graduate degrees in translation and interpretation and in teaching second language acquisition—two areas we cannot offer during our summer sessions because of our “no English” Language Pledge. And it will enable our students to pursue graduate education in international business and international policy studies.
We strive to engage students’ capacity for rigorous analysis and independent thought within a wide range of disciplines and endeavors, and to cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community. We believe the residential liberal arts college environment is the most conducive to educating future leaders who will need to navigate a complex world. It is essential that students learn to develop their own opinions, based on personal conviction that is informed by the knowledge and skills they develop within the academic program, in particular by working closely with dedicated faculty. By working with faculty who are committed to teaching, students have the opportunity to delve deeply into their academic material, to be mentored in a wide range of subject matter and in their creative/intellectual pursuits, and to learn how to apply their knowledge to the many issues they will confront in our fractured and complex world.
Through the pursuit of knowledge unconstrained by national or disciplinary boundaries, students who come to Middlebury learn to engage the world. This summarizing sentence speaks to the College’s commitment to providing the finest educational environment for our students. Through the remarkable resources on the campus and beyond, and through our innovative interdisciplinary curriculum, we provide our students with a unique opportunity to study a wide array of disciplines in multiple countries and cultures, so that after four years, they have the foundation and confidence to pursue their passions and engage the world, armed to make a difference in whatever they choose to do.