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.
We have as an ideal the kind of person a Middlebury education should help to make: a person who can think logically; who can write and speak with accuracy, clarity, style, and an individual voice; who can appreciate the visual and performing arts and participate in their creation; who can reason with numbers and symbols and apply rigorous techniques of analysis in seeking answers; who can read critically and imaginatively; who can make intelligent value judgments; who has an informed sense of the varied, eventful path humanity has taken to reach the present; who is aware that the frontiers of understanding and knowledge are always shifting and expanding; who understands the principles and methods of the natural sciences and knows what it is to experience the excitement of scientific discovery; who has a sense of the interaction between people and society in the United States and in other countries; who has an understanding of the relations between humans and the environment; who is mindful of the responsibilities present generations have to future generations and of the need for long-term thinking; who can understand, read, and speak a foreign language and thereby has the access to foreign cultures that only proficiency can bring; who knows how to discipline the body, as well as the mind.
Expecting students to seek such an ideal asks a great deal of them, but each student admitted to Middlebury is capable of achieving these goals. The faculty and staff at Middlebury College have dedicated their talents and their efforts to both challenging our students and making such achievements possible.