The Middlebury College faculty is composed of outstanding, dedicated teachers who are also accomplished scholars. Students have many opportunities to work closely with their teachers, and intellectual exchange with the faculty goes on outside the classroom as well as during class. The liberal arts education offered by the College is designed to enable students to lead rewarding lives of ongoing intellectual and spiritual growth and to prepare them to meet the challenges of responsible citizenship in a complex, changing world.
The College curriculum is designed to ensure that each student's education includes a certain breadth of experience, as well as in-depth study in one area defined by the major. Curricular breadth is achieved through a set of distribution requirements that encompass seven academic categories and four courses in different cultures and civilizations. There are also other general requirements—which Middlebury sees as opportunities—providing the chance to explore new areas of inquiry. In all of these areas students have a broad range of choices.
For example, each student must take at least one course in seven of the following eight categories: literature, the arts, philosophical and religious studies, historical studies, physical and life sciences, deductive reasoning and analytical processes, social analysis, and foreign languages.
In addition, Middlebury believes students should have broad educational exposure to the variety of the world's cultures and civilizations. Each student must take at least one course in each of the following four categories: Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean; Europe; northern America; and the process of comparison between and among cultures and civilizations, or the identity and experience of separable groups within cultures and civilizations.