Building a stronger intellectual community at Middlebury.
By President Ronald D. Liebowitz
As the 11 task forces of the College's strategic planning process work toward offering their preliminary recommendations, one issue seems to permeate many of their discussions: the quality of Middlebury's intellectual community. In fact, this issue has been under consideration on our campus for some time.
Several years ago, some faculty organized discussions to find out why, in their view, students, faculty, and staff seem to come together less frequently today to exchange ideas freely than they did in the past. That campus-wide conversation continued this spring, when Dean of the College Tim Spears organized three open meetings on the subject, each with a panel of faculty and students offering comments, followed by discussion among those on hand.
The most common theme to emerge from these meetings was that today, unlike years ago, faculty, staff, and students simply don't have the time to reflect on all they teach or learn, or on the major issues of the day. Everyone is too busy to find time for reflection. Student schedules are full with what were described as more rigorous or demanding course expectations than yesterday, along with participation in a greater slew of cocurricular programs (athletics, student organizations, volunteer work, etc.). Faculty and staff schedules were also described as fully booked, either because of higher expectations for faculty to publish in order to be promoted or because of increased bureaucracy that has come with growth and technological innovation.
One can't argue with the observation that students and faculty on our campus are very busy. And there is no administration more focused than mine on cutting through the intellectually deadening load of "busyness" by finding ways to free up faculty from tasks beyond teaching, research, and mentoring students, by encouraging students to choose wisely among the panoply of learning opportunities and activities capturing their time and attention, and by releasing the bureaucratic restraints preventing staff from taking a more active and rewarding role in the intellectual life of the campus.
But to really solve the problem, we need to understand that this is hardly a Middlebury issue. If one follows trends and discussions on campuses across the country, one would see this need—to increase the meaningful engagement between and among students, faculty, and staff on campus, to encourage members of our community to reach into new areas, with one's existing ideas challenged, and newly learned materials engaged and discussed—generating concern at every kind of institution of higher education.
This, perhaps, is the bad news: a perception that on college and university campuses across the country the quality of intellectual engagement is in decline. But why has intellectual community weakened on college campuses in recent decades? In large part, it is because changing standards of performance facing faculty have had a powerful impact on the intellectual climate on college campuses. Within the academy at large, the determinants of success for faculty today are tied more closely than in the past to a faculty member's contribution to ideas specific to one's discipline. A vibrant intellectual community requires the integration of the specific knowledge made possible by strict disciplinary boundaries with the energetic engagement of ideas that are much bigger and broader than any one discipline. Yet, the professional incentive system for faculty skews one's work toward the narrow and specific, with less attention to the broad and general.
As faculty engage their colleagues within their disciplines on issues that appear to outsiders to be somewhat arcane, with little incentive to link their specialized knowledge to education broadly defined, it becomes more difficult to create a vigorous on-campus intellectual community. We need to remember that the overwhelming majority of our students are not studying history or biology or anthropology to join the professoriate. Rather, they are engaging new ideas through one particular discipline as part of their pursuit of a liberal arts education—of becoming broadly educated. Thus they are not as fascinated by what appear to most of them to be narrow issues within a field, no matter how important those issues are; students remain interested in big ideas, and would most likely engage those big ideas more readily and naturally if the linking of what faculty are doing in relation to those ideas were more apparent.
The current sense on campuses, then, that there are weakened intellectual communities, stems less from the interests of students, as many would argue, than from the pressures exerted by the academy. The result is the stifling of discussion among colleagues across disciplines, and with the wider community at large.
The good news is that Middlebury's geographical isolation and small size, combined with our faculty's deeply felt commitment to undergraduate teaching, are distinctive advantages in the face of this nationwide challenge. In large universities, colleagues can easily find a critical mass of academics with whom to find their own intellectual community. This is not solely on account of the number of faculty and students at an institution, but also because larger institutions are often part of national and worldwide networks of large research consortia that offer multiple points of contact. In addition, geographic isolation means that our faculty does not have the various cultural and intellectual amenities of an urban environment to absorb and nurture their intellectual energies. Therefore, faculty members at Middle-bury are naturally encouraged to reach out to each other, beyond disciplinary identities, in creating their various intellectual communities.
Combine this geographical context and scale for building intellectual community with the distinctive disposition of the Middlebury faculty to take undergraduate education very seriously, and our comparative advantages for creating a rich intellectual community become even more apparent. For certain types of scholars—Middlebury's faculty at its best—being forced to put their specialized knowledge in a larger context of big ideas, in a rich cross-disciplinary way, improves their scholarship and increases the likelihood for innovation in their own disciplines. It also happens to be the key to inspiring a vibrant intellectual community beyond the classroom.
If we are able to capitalize on these two advantages—our need to rely on each other for intellectual engagement, and the distinctive talents of our faculty at integrating disciplinary innovation with big ideas—we have the opportunity to take the lead in addressing the issue of intellectual community on the national stage of higher education. To do this, faculty need to encourage members of the community to take risks in expressing viewpoints that further the debate, discussion, and understanding of the broad implications of their scholarship.
Our year of planning would be less consequential than it should be if we examined how best to improve the vibrancy of intellectual life on campus without recognizing our specific strengths in this area—qualities that deserve much more attention as strengths than they have received so far.
To reach Ron Liebowitz, you may e-mail officeofthepresident@middlebury.edu
For more information on Middlebury's planning process, please visit www.middlebury.edu/administration/planning
To comment on the planning process, you may e-mail the planning steering committee or any of the 11 task forces at planning@middlebury.edu