All Campus Address
September 18, 1995
President John M. McCardell, Jr.
Good afternoon, and welcome. We gather today early in the new academic year, as in recent years we have annually gathered at this hour, to pause for a few minutes to recall where we have been, and a few more minutes to consider where, in the coming year, we are headed and what, to make this a year of satisfaction and accomplishment, constitutes our agenda as an institution. These remarks will be brief, running no more than about 30 minutes. Their purpose is very simple: to define what I see as the issues and challenges before us in the year ahead and to offer to this community what I see as our collective agenda. I thank each of you for coming.
Though the year through which we have just passed remains familiar to many of us, for 25% of the student body who are new students, an additional 40% of the senior class who studied off campus last year, and new faculty and staff, a brief setting of context, in the form of recalling the year 1994-95, is very much in order.
It was a most eventful year. Exactly one year ago I stood in this same pulpit and put forth a vision of the College's future. Simply put, that vision sought to make Middlebury the "college of choice," and submitted that our status was most likely to be enhanced and our distinction heightened by seeking to build "peaks" of academic excellence
-- to place ourselves on the cutting edge of language teaching and pedagogy;
-- to enhance further global understanding that has as its core linguistic and cultural competency;
-- to create the preeminent undergraduate program in literary study;
-- to become the environmentally aware campus, where an understanding of, and a respect for, our natural environment permeates not only our curriculum, where science becomes to environmental study what language is to international study, but also what we do beyond the classroom;
-- to expand opportunities for students to apply what they learn about the liberal arts to "real world" situations.
To enhance these conspicuous strengths, the work of building a strong and diverse faculty and student body must remain paramount. In addition, what I identified one year ago as that list of requirements before each of us in order to carry the College forward remains instructive and guiding:
1. a commitment to work of the very highest quality by every member of the College community;
2. a disciplined allocation of human and financial resources;
3. a commitment to innovation, of which technology must be a significant instrument;
4. increased opportunities for off-campus study;
5. quality facilities and equipment that support our core academic program and reinforce our commitment to excellence;
6. a recognition of the important role played by social and residential life in the education of our students;
7. a commitment to secure vast new resources.
This vision represents the work of a decade. In embracing it, and in also endorsing a set of planning assumptions and an ambitious facilities plan last May, the Board of Trustees made the pursuit of the vision College policy and offered the first glimpses of what the College of the future would look like:
-- a gradual increase in the size of the student body over the next 10 years to an enrollment of 2,350, and the enhancement of the quality of the student body;
-- an expansion of the faculty by up to 30 full-time equivalents;
-- an expansion of the support staff to provide the necessary services for our students and faculty;
-- an expansion and renewal of the physical plant to meet the infrastructural requirements of a larger enrollment before the enrollment is increased.
It was indeed an eventful year, and, now that a year of planning has come to an end, the course has been set, and the years of action begin. For the balance of my time this morning, and keeping the context just outlined in mind, I want to place before this community the actions we must take in the coming year to begin to make the vision a reality.
Let us take each area, in order.
Last year, special task forces, comprising faculty, staff and students, devoted a great deal of time and energy to exploring the visionary "peaks" and offering specific recommendations to action. These important reports, and their recommendations, will be placed before the appropriate committees this year to transform words and rhetoric into deeds and reality.
To explore the implications of these reports is to begin to identify the central theme for the year ahead. That theme, simply stated, is coming to grips with growth. Though all implications may not yet have been fully discerned or probed, it is clear that growth will mean change. It is unreasonable to expect that we shall predict in every particular the dimensions of the changes to come, but we need to do the best we can to adapt ourselves and our institutions to the inevitable changes growth will bring.
For this reason, I intend to appoint a small, College-wide, steering committee, which Vice President of the College Ronald Liebowitz will chair, to begin the process of first preparing for and then, gently but firmly encouraging, change. I have often stated that "the way we've always done it must be required to bear the burden of proof," and mean for this committee to extend the challenge implied by this statement into every sector of the College - from faculty hiring, promotion, and definition of professional development to student responsibility and accountability to the role of staff and the need to ensure for our staff opportunities for training and professional advancement.
I mean for this statement, and all of its implications, to hold our processes up for careful scrutiny, even our most cherished, if occasionally dysfunctional, processes: and I will be specific -
-- I mean the process by which budgets are made and approved.
-- I mean the process by which our resources are allocated.
-- I mean the processes by which we govern ourselves.
I will be even more specific.
- The budget process needs to be simplified and more clearly understood.
- Faculty, students, and staff should have a larger degree of responsibility for their own affairs, including the allocation of resources, with a correspondingly higher degree of accountability for how that responsibility is discharged.
- The efficacy of our current governance structures, many of which date from a different era and some of which have drifted well away from their original purpose, needs to be held up to critical scrutiny. Does a gathering of 180 faculty eight times a year offer the best setting for discussing or deciding major educational issues? Do our committees still offer clear and clearly understood ways of addressing the pressing questions of our own time? Do the concerns, the fears, the assumptions, of the 1940s, or the 1960s, or 1991 enhance or limit our collective ability to shape a stronger and better college of the future? I do not presume, nor should anyone, to have the answers to these questions. I do presume to insist that they be asked, and asked this year.
Answers to these questions may be neither immediate nor clear. There are also, however, other, and important questions that must be answered this year.
One set of these involves our facilities plan. The next major capital project on the College's agenda is the Science Center. By December, we will have chosen a site, and by February an architect for this, the most ambitious, complex, and expensive capital project in the College's history. Likewise, as the pool is completed, the program for McCullough needs to be set so that work can begin. Though many options offer themselves, I am most concerned that the new McCullough include a first-class bookstore, that welcomes the browser, that offers an extensive inventory, and comfortable surroundings, a place that makes a statement about the kind of community we are and the life of the mind that we live here.
Furthermore, we need to complete our plans for dining. We need to take library planning to the next phase. And we need to take up the question of the type, configuration, and site of the housing we must gradually create to accommodate a larger student body.
As that larger student body is contemplated, we need to consider where those students will come from and how we will recruit them. Last year, I offered as one definition of the "college of choice" as our ability to compete more successfully against 4 schools - Amherst, Williams, Dartmouth, Princeton - with whom we have the greatest overlap of applicants and acceptances but the least success in attracting matriculants. This point is still misunderstood. I do not propose to attract a different kind of student to Middlebury or to try to make Middlebury more like some other place. I do believe that we ought to attract a higher percentage of those students we are already accepting to choose Middlebury. This is what is meant by yield. In theory, we should neither need a larger applicant pool nor dip more deeply into it if we can increase the number of matriculants from the pool of those already accepted. Skeptics on this point will need to explain our 15 percent jump (6 percentage points) in yield from last year to this, and even they should be reassured that the next 2 entering classes are projected to be smaller than the class that entered this September.
As our Admissions Office plans for a gradual increase in enrollment, it -- and we --must address an important, related question. More than 10 years ago the Board of Trustees set as one definition of socio-economic diversity the goal of having 40% of the Middlebury student body on financial aid. It was an ambitious goal, greeted by predictions that it could never be attained.
We have, this year, attained it, and this is an accomplishment we should celebrate, even as it encourages us to set new, equally lofty, goals. And now that we have attained it, we need to decide whether that definition is still appropriate. Put another way, what is the most effective way of deploying one of higher education's most generous financial aid budgets so as to attract to Middlebury College the greatest number of the best students? Let me make clear what the posing of this question does and does not mean.
It does not mean, necessarily, any change in financial aid policy. It does not mean, absolutely, any change in financial policy for current students. It does not mean, emphatically, that there is a crisis or anything resembling a crisis. It does not mean an abandonment of need as the basis for financial aid awards.
It does mean that the time has come, having reached a goal, to decide what, if anything, needs to happen next.
This is not the agenda for a president or an institution that is satisfied with things as they are. Though, as you know, I shall be taking 5 1/2 months of academic leave November 1, I do not mean for this to be a year of standing pat. Indeed, I shall monitor from afar the progress the College makes in pursuit of this agenda, and I shall return next April to bring many of these initiatives to completion.
You have much to do while I am away, but, as I contemplate my southern sojourn, I repose every confidence in those to whom the administration of our affairs has been entrusted, especially Acting President Ed Knox, and I am reminded that no one is indispensable.
To lay out so large and challenging a program for the year, finally, must not cause us to overlook those many enduring things that make the College what it is, that continue to attract good students, and that draw us back each year to recommit ourselves to its service. That, in the end, is why each of us is here: to be a part of something larger and greater than ourselves, not presuming that any one of us is indispensable to its greatness, but acknowledging that, without commitment, it cannot be great. It is that challenge, and the joy we derive from it, that draws us, and keeps us here, and that, this fall, launches us again into a new academic year of purpose and hope.
I close as I have each year: let us seek to set our feet on lofty places. There is work to be done. Let's get on with it.