STRENGTHEN OUR CORE
Middlebury’s core is the College, its students, faculty, and staff, and its residential liberal arts teaching and scholarly mission. That core is grounded in our Vermont campus, extended by our Schools Abroad, and enlivened each summer by the Language Schools, Bread Loaf School of English, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Initiative: Our People
Initiative: Community and Connection
Initiative: Human Intelligence in the 21st Century
Excellence. Purpose. Joy.
Middlebury’s strategic plan is the culmination of an institution-wide effort to rearticulate our mission, purpose, and aspirations for the next decade and beyond.
Three Strategies, Seven Initiatives
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SERVE OUR WORLD
Explore Our World
From the beginning, Middlebury has known itself as “the town’s college”—a way of naming our commitment to the town of Middlebury and our broader dedication to the civic worlds around us. We are a public-minded private institution, committed to being ever more so: for our town, state, nation, world, and planet.
Initiative: The Town’s College and a College for Vermont
Initiative: The Nation’s College and a College for the World
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PREPARE FOR OUR FUTURE
Explore Our Future
Our age is one of dramatic technological innovation, intensifying climate change, remarkable advances in medicine, and a rapidly altered world of work. To prepare ourselves, our students, and our world for that future, we must embrace a spirit of agility and innovation while staking out a distinctive position in areas where Middlebury has the demonstrated capacity to lead.
Initiative: The Middlebury Labs
Initiative: The Planet’s College
Three Guiding Words
Our ambition is to be the best residential liberal arts institution in the world, purposefully and joyfully excellent in everything we do—for our students and for our world.
Our Foundational Commitments
The plan is organized around three linked strategies, each supported by initiatives and key actions. Three commitments—to diversity and pluralism, academic freedom, and academic excellence—underpin everything we do and are stated here as foundational commitments.
Diversity and Pluralism
We will build a truly plural Middlebury: a staff, faculty, and student body drawn from around the nation and world, and from all backgrounds and perspectives, advancing teaching and scholarship on the rich diversity of the world’s histories, cultures, and traditions of thought, and celebrating the difference makers in our history.
Academic Freedom
We will make Middlebury a model of academic freedom, supporting faculty and students in teaching and learning across perspectives, fostering civil discourse and civil disagreement.
Academic Excellence
We will uphold academic integrity and rigor by fostering a culture of honesty and trust, maintaining clear standards for academic honesty, and supporting faculty in implementing assessments and grades that promote critical thinking, originality, and deep learning.
Our Vision
We strive to be the best residential liberal arts institution in the world—excellent, purposeful, joyful—for our students and for our world.
- At Middlebury, we have long distinguished ourselves as both the town’s college and the most global liberal arts college in the world; the college most alive to the languages and cultures of the world; the college most dedicated to addressing the crisis of climate change. We will continue to be that place.
- In an era of dramatic social, technological, and global change, it is time for Middlebury to lead in demonstrating that liberal arts learning is more vital than ever; that the students best prepared for the shifting future are the ones who can combine multiple forms of intelligence: critical intelligence, creative intelligence, technological intelligence, historical intelligence, and the forms of ethical and entrepreneurial intelligence necessary for them to thrive and for their communities to flourish.
- In a time of civic fracturing, it is time for Middlebury to lead as a profoundly civic-minded institution: a college for our students and for our world.
We are a place defined by what we are for, not what we are against: a private institution with a public purpose.