Chapter Three: Curriculum & Faculty

At the heart of our mission as an institution of higher learning is encouraging Middlebury students to explore the full range of the liberal arts and sciences and at the same time to pursue a deep understanding of the specific areas they choose as majors. Two other goals are implicit in this one: fostering an ambitious, coherent curriculum and cultivating a superb faculty, who provide a model for students of the intellectual engagement offered by in-depth exploration of a field.

We begin this chapter with a proposal to increase the size of the faculty. In moving swiftly from that point to a discussion of curricular recommendations, we want to affirm that the most compelling justification for seeking additional faculty resources is the potential they offer for deepening and refining the program of study that Middlebury offers its students. In addition to enabling specific curricular changes as outlined below, a more competitive student-faculty ratio would ensure that faculty are able to continue to devote a great deal of time to individual students while also enhancing Middlebury's academic reputation through their scholarly and creative accomplishments.

The additional resources will give our members of our faculty more time to teach, advise students, and do research. They will enable the College to become even more competitive in appointing faculty whose highest priority is superb teaching, yet whose scholarly credentials would also make them especially attractive to top-tier universities.

Recommendation #33: Increase faculty resources and enhance student-faculty interaction.

Intensive interaction between faculty and students is at the core of Middlebury's mission as a liberal arts college. For students, the opportunity to work closely with faculty, so that their intellectual development can be guided by professors who come to know them well, is a defining feature of a Middlebury education. For faculty, the rewards of providing mentorship and developing ongoing relationships with excellent students are the reason they choose to teach at a liberal arts college rather than a university. Preserving and enhancing this unique relationship is critical to maintaining Middlebury's position among the hundreds of educational institutions in America, and to ensuring that Middlebury continues to be the school its alumni love.

While the dynamics of student-faculty interaction cannot be precisely quantified, the "student-faculty ratio," as a standard indicator of faculty resources available to each student, is one point of comparison between institutions. Prospective students, parents, faculty job candidates, and the creators of college rankings all use student-faculty ratio as a measure of an institution's commitment to making faculty as available as possible to students. Middlebury's ratio is now approximately 9 to 1 when calculated using standard methodology, as compared with an 8 to 1 ratio found at some of our peer colleges. This difference translates to a heavier teaching load than at such other institutions and to a greater number of large-enrollment classes. We have been very fortunate in having a hard-working faculty that stretches to meet student demands, but it will be difficult to sustain this high level of faculty availability without both using our faculty resources more efficiently, and expanding them in the years to come. We therefore recommend 8 to 1 as the new standard we intend to achieve.

Enhanced faculty resources could be used to further many specific curricular and educational goals. Reducing class sizes would be a primary objective. Additional faculty FTE's could be used to reduce the number of lecture classes in the 50 to 75 student range, and to bring medium-sized classes down from 45 to 50 students to 35 to 40 students. Freed from the staffing constraints that prevent the awarding of teaching credit for the substantial work of advising student theses and research projects, we could allow for a more equitable distribution of thesis advising to serve a wide range of student interests. This would be necessary in order to institute a common senior work requirement, as is recommended below. Finally, additional faculty members would allow us to build in staffing redundancies that would ensure that our complex curriculum can be well supported by departments and programs, and that no individual faculty member's contribution would be "irreplaceable" when they are on leave.

Ten curricular recommendations follow. The first seven of these address the overall structure of the curriculum; the next three deal with the pathway by which an individual student experiences that curriculum.

Recommendation #34: Consolidate the College's distribution requirements.

Distribution requirements were established to ensure that each student gains breadth in the study of the liberal arts. Both students and faculty have expressed a sense that our current distribution requirements have become a complex series of hoops to jump through, however, rather than a meaningful structure for shaping an individual student's course of study. We thus propose reducing the number of requirements demanded under the present system—in which students must take courses in seven out of eight groups. A relevant fact is that, as many courses have grown more interdisciplinary over time, assigning appropriate "tags" to them has become more difficult, weakening the clarity and integrity of the academic categories. We would prefer at most four or five distribution requirements. This would require re-designation of the academic categories, perhaps along more conventional "divisional" structures. Such consolidation would both make a stronger statement about the major areas we expect students to balance in their coursework and open up more options for students beyond required courses. In considering whether students would need to take all categories within a new structure, or be able to opt out of some, the EAC and faculty should engage the question of a language requirement. Recognizing that there are many practical and pedagogical reasons why a language requirement, which involves a multi-semester commitment, has not been supported by many language faculty members, we nevertheless recommend that any discussion of distribution requirements include renewed consideration of the appropriate place of languages within the general Middlebury curriculum.

The "cultures and civilizations" requirements, which were revised by the faculty four years ago, could either be part of this consideration of distribution requirements or could remain as they are, independent of changes in the academic categories. The faculty clearly supports their overall goal of requiring students to explore a variety of cultures. It is important that we continue the advances we have made in adding greater diversity to the curriculum, and strive to represent a wide range of cultures, religions, and ethnicities in the courses that we offer.

Many of our peer institutions have far simpler distribution or general education requirements than we do. For example, at one sister institution students are asked simply to take 10 courses from 10 different departments outside their major; distribution requirements simply mean that they must distribute their studies across the curriculum. Other schools typically have fewer categories than in Middlebury's requirements, with more options for satisfying each. Our planning group undertook a study of the distribution requirements at 23 similar institutions, including our group of 20 comparison colleges, and found that 19 have a science requirement, 8 have a lab science requirement, and 15 have a language requirement.

By way of example, we offer the following set of simplified distribution requirements that would achieve our objectives: Students would need to take two courses in each of the following four areas: Languages and Arts, Humanities and Literature, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. One of the courses in the Natural Sciences or Social Sciences category would be designated a "lab" course, providing a significant opportunity for independent experimental work. These new categories would replace the current eight distribution tags with four new tags.

Recommendation #35: Institute a laboratory science requirement within the new distribution requirements.

The accelerating pace of scientific discovery and the impact of new discoveries on humankind require the well-informed citizen to have a fundamental knowledge of science. Direct contact with the scientific method teaches students the value and meaning of empirically derived knowledge and critical thinking—understanding of great importance in many of life's domains. It also affords students opportunities to gain experience with varied forms of technology. Our current system gives students the option of avoiding science altogether. The objective of a science requirement would be for all graduating students to have had some course experience with hands-on, experimental science, either in the laboratory or in the field. With our state-of-the-art science facilities and laboratories, Middlebury is in a good position to consider implementing such a requirement. Many peer institutions with equivalent or lesser facilities and faculty complements already successfully mount a lab science requirement. The concern that many science faculty have expressed about whether science has a sufficiently prominent role at Middlebury might be partially addressed through such a requirement, which would send both students and prospective students a message about the significance of scientific inquiry here. The areas in which we believe that specified courses will be able to introduce students to the scientific method in a hands-on way include Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Computer Science, Geography, Geology, Mathematics (Statistics), Neuroscience, Physics, and Psychology.

Recommendation #36: Enhance academic advising.

Academic advising by members of the faculty helps guide students toward establishing their academic paths. We believe that a simplified structure for distribution requirements would allow for more meaningful advising by faculty, who often feel that advising has become a mechanical exercise in checking requirements rather than an opportunity for substantive dialogue about a student's interests and aspirations. Good advising requires not only that faculty have a solid knowledge of the curriculum, but also that they be prepared to help students understand the nature of a liberal arts education. We recommend that the administration seriously consider ways to reinforce the faculty commitment to general advising and to prepare faculty for their broader and more philosophical advising role.

Recommendation #37: Eliminate triple majors and reduce the number of double majors.

At Middlebury as elsewhere, increasing numbers of students pursue majors in two or more disciplines. While multiple majors can allow students to develop useful strengths in complementary disciplines, multiple majoring also complicates their schedules and often discourages students from exploring the breadth of our curricular offerings. With more active advising in this regard, we can make students aware of the philosophical and practical compromises that may occur as a result of double majoring.

Middlebury's large percentage of double majors also places a heavy burden on the curriculum and on the faculty. A student with two majors needs a place in two senior seminars, meets with two advisors, and charts two pathways to completion that must be carefully integrated. Some departments with high enrollment pressures could relieve large lecture courses by adding more sections, but lack the staffing to do so because many senior seminars are offered to guarantee spots to the majors and double majors who need them to graduate.

We propose that the EAC consider legislation that would completely eliminate the option of a triple major, and that would allow double majors to be declared only through the end of the fifth semester. Many students now return from junior year abroad, discover that they are just a course or two away from a double major, and collect that credential by declaring a second major in their senior year. Invariably, such late registrations become a problem for departments in the scheduling of senior seminars and advising of theses. (Joint majors, as planned integrations of related fields, do not pose the same problems as double majors.) This proposal would demand that students plan to devote focused attention to their major discipline, and would allow for greater emphasis on independent senior work. Similarly, we recommend not approving "special student" part-time status for students who simply want to fulfill an extra requirement or two and thus complete a double major.

Recommendation #38: Streamline departmental major requirements.

Even students who major in only one field often end up devoting a substantial portion of their courses to major requirements. While many of our top competitors offer majors requiring 8-10 courses, at Middlebury majors are generally between 12 and 16 courses. This not only reduces the breadth of students' experience, it places a heavy burden on faculty who must offer a rich array of specific courses on a consistent basis in order to permit students to satisfy major requirements. We recommend that the EAC work with departments and programs to streamline the requirements for majors to reduce these pressures on departmental curricula and enrich the liberal arts experience for students.

Recommendation #39: Highlight the strengths of the sciences and arts at Middlebury.

As we refine and enhance our curriculum we want to express our commitment to the excellence of all our programs. While continuing to celebrate recognized strengths like environmental studies, international studies, languages, and literature, we should no longer use the language of "peaks" to distinguish these areas. At this moment in Middlebury's history, we particularly want to enhance recognition of the sciences and the arts, and to convey the distinctive qualities of these programs in our descriptions of the College.

As we have found with the Bread Loaf School of English, secondary school teachers who are familiar with our academic programs can serve as wonderful ambassadors of these programs. We therefore support the creation of a small summer program that would bring a number of high school science teachers to campus each summer to study some area in depth together with one or more of our own faculty members. Such summer mini-courses could rotate among interested individuals and departments in the sciences, including biology, chemistry and biochemistry, computer science, geology, mathematics, and physics.

In addition, we strongly endorse the recommendations of the Committee on the Arts that support a more structural integration of arts into the curriculum and campus life. Arts events should be more fully incorporated into the curriculum, and we should devote greater emphasis to interdisciplinary courses and team-teaching that connect the arts to other, non-art disciplines. We also recommend raising the level of support for the College orchestra and choir in order to involve and retain more of the talented musicians in our student body in these flagship organizations. In particular, we propose that the EAC consult with the Chair of Music about whether the current level of academic credit for participation in these groups is adequate to sustain student commitment. There is a complementary need to develop a wider range of performance opportunities for students. The College should also consider funding national and international tours that would increase the visibility of our music programs and serve as incentives for student involvement. We feel that the Committee on the Arts has already made significant progress in increasing the integration and visibility of the arts on campus, and we support continued efforts to establish dialogue between the arts departments and other departments and groups on campus. We encourage continued discussion of whether a Director of the Arts position at Middlebury would help foster these goals, or whether there are other means by which they might be achieved.

Recommendation #40: Strengthen Winter Term.

A prominent theme in comments from students, faculty, and staff was a desire for students to have more "quality time" for thinking, and a less frenzied schedule of commitments and obligations. Winter Term can be an excellent time for innovative courses that provide more opportunity for reflection and independent work. While the mixed feelings many faculty have about Winter Term were apparent in the extended debate on the issue two years ago, the strong majority of faculty who voted to retain Winter Term recognized that its unique schedule and configuration offers opportunities as well as challenges, and we recommend that those opportunities be used to serve the goals of this report. The Curriculum Committee and administration should encourage faculty to develop proposals for Winter Term courses that create a more intensive and independent experience for students.

In particular, off-campus Winter Term courses have provided some of the most rewarding educational experiences, as described by students and faculty alike. The planning committee proposes the immediate restoration of this program, which was eliminated several years ago for budgetary reasons, and recommends that there should be the opportunity for up to three off-campus courses per year. The major expense involved in off-campus courses is the high cost of the extra financial aid needed, so support of this program may be a goal for advancement staff to pursue as they seek contributions for financial aid.

Off-campus internships during January also provide students a unique learning experience that should be fostered within our curriculum. We address the related topic of experiential learning below.

Recommendation #41: Reinforce the first-year seminar program.

The FYS program is already a jewel of the curriculum, supported by an outstanding Writing Program. The EAC and the Dean of the Faculty need to look closely at departments' level of participation, however, to make sure that it becomes a truly cross-curricular commitment. The EAC should work with departments and programs to establish a regular rotation of FYS teaching for full-time faculty. Further, all faculty should take advantage of the excellent preparation offered by the Writing Program in order to ensure consistency of FYS courses in advising, requiring an adequate number of writing assignments, providing full response to students' written work, and creating regular time to discuss writing in class.

Recommendation #42: Explore possibilities for Commons-based courses.
 
In order to expand the Commons' connections to our curriculum and enable the Commons Heads to establish ties with students based on their shared experiences in the classroom, we urge the development of academically oriented programming that builds on the success of the Commons-based FYS program. For example, the Commons program could help the College to find imaginative ways to strengthen the sophomore curriculum. We recommend that the Commons Heads explore possibilities for integrating the academic program and the Commons, and that they discuss their ideas with the administration and forward specific proposals to the Curriculum Committee.
We also propose that the College establish clusters of Commons-based Winter Term classes that would give first priority to Commons residents. Joined together by a shared theme or a pedagogical approach (for instance, service learning) and organized by Commons Heads, these courses would take advantage of the Winter Term schedule through a combination of field trips, symposia, and special research projects. By building upon the model of the Commons-based FYS program, this plan would strengthen the intellectual framework of Winter Term.

Recommendation #43: Require senior work in all majors.

Independent senior work teaches students how to ask questions, how to seek answers to them, and how to communicate their discoveries clearly. Middlebury graduates should be more than good students; they should be prepared to function as autonomous learners and "teachers" of what they know. Undertaking a significant research project, creative work, or other independent work during the senior year gives students the opportunity to put into practice what they have learned about their chosen field of study. Sharing these projects with faculty mentors, fellow students, and others tests their ability to articulate and defend their ideas within a larger intellectual community. The new Office for Undergraduate Research can play an important role in supporting senior work and making student research accomplishments more visible.

Members of the Planning Steering Committee believe strongly that all departments should require an independent senior project of their majors. Such senior work can serve both as the capstone of students' work in a particular discipline and as the culminating example of the close faculty-student interaction characterizing the Middlebury experience as a whole. A senior work requirement would represent an ambitious elevation of the quality and shape of an undergraduate career at Middlebury, bringing a more sharply defined contour to a student's entire education and assuring that all our graduates gain the ability to function at a significant level as independent learners.

Such a requirement would only be feasible if the College is committed to an improved student-faculty ratio, as described elsewhere in this report. In many departments, it would in fact be impossible for the current faculty to advise substantial projects by all of the students majoring in that area. Although a reduction in double majors would partially address this problem, additional faculty resources would still be needed.

Recommendation #44: Promote student research through a day-long research symposium.

The planning committee recommends that the College institute a day-long research symposium, of the kind developed successfully at other colleges, which focuses on student work. Activities would include public lectures given by students and poster-presentation sessions that would highlight student work in senior theses, independent projects, or internships. Such a day-long celebration of student work would take place late in the spring semester, and would replace the day off for Winter Carnival that currently takes place early in the semester. It would support, and be supported by, a new expectation for independent senior work in all departments. The Office for Undergraduate Research would be responsible for developing, coordinating, and promoting this event, which would give visibility to student independent work and encourage students to regard their independent work, and that of their peers, as a serious commitment that is highly valued by the College.

The curricular recommendations outlined in this report are intended to produce a certain kind of graduate: a person who has read and thought broadly on a wide range of topics within the liberal arts and sciences; whose close relationship with teachers and advisors has given him or her a sense of participation in a vibrant intellectual community; who has become sufficiently advanced in a specific area of study to have expertise worth sharing with other students and faculty; who can critically analyze and investigate problems using appropriate information resources; and who leaves Middlebury with a capacity for independent thought and analysis that will foster a lifetime of continued learning.

Experiential learning opportunities, including service learning courses, internships, and independent projects, all extend learning beyond the classroom in important ways. Summer internships often exemplify the kinds of experiential learning programs that have benefited Middlebury students in recent years. Student employment on campus can also have a valuable educational component. The planning committee supports increasing the opportunities for experiential learning and expanding internship opportunities. Two specific proposals have emerged that we support as part of the strategic plan:
 
Recommendation #45: Increase funding for student internships.

Internships will be increasingly important in a liberal arts context, and students' financial circumstances should not exclude them from these valuable opportunities. We support augmenting the funding for student internships; this would enable equal access to internship opportunities, regardless of financial resources, and would contribute to our goal of attracting a more diverse student body.

Recommendation #46: Create a database for service learning projects.

We recommend that the College create a "Request for Proposals" database to solicit service-learning project ideas from potential community partners and alumni. This would serve to increase experiential learning opportunities for students, provide a source of meaningful project ideas, and better engage community partners and alumni in the educational process. At least one of our peer colleges has been very successful in using this approach to match community needs with learning opportunities for students.

Recommendation #47: Make better use of current teaching resources with a goal of achieving a more competitive teaching load for faculty.

The growth of our complex, interdisciplinary curriculum has demanded a significant investment of faculty time and attention. The complexities of student schedules often require that a student consult with multiple advisors or department and program chairs. The number of distribution and major requirements to be fulfilled means that students often have very specific curricular needs that must be met in a given term; this is particularly the case because many Middlebury students go abroad their junior year, creating a need for even low-enrollment courses to be taught very frequently. A parallel issue from the faculty side of the equation is that the present teaching load guidelines have sometimes led to departmental offerings being designed in order to satisfy individual instructors' prescribed teaching responsibilities, rather than for the purposes of maximum efficiency and pedagogical effectiveness.

We believe that the review of the curriculum outlined above should be accompanied by a careful assessment of teaching resources in all departments. Streamlining department and program requirements, reducing double majors, and creating equitable teaching loads that do not drive departmental curricula may all yield teaching resources that can be used to implement some of the above recommendations. Moreover, reconsideration of the tasks currently required of department chairs and other administrators might make it possible to reduce the course releases currently given as compensation for administrative work, which would in turn allow us to devote more faculty resources to curricular innovation.

Careful attention to current resources, along with a gradual increase in the number of faculty, should thus make it possible to move in the direction of a standard teaching load that is more comparable to that of the very best liberal arts colleges.

Recommendation #48: Develop a more flexible approach to faculty leaves.

Beyond improving the student-faculty ratio to 8 to 1, as described in the first recommendation of this chapter, the College should also make changes to ensure that faculty research time is used most efficiently. A more flexible approach to faculty leaves would allow us to maximize opportunities for grant funding of faculty research. Specifically, we propose allowing faculty to pursue exceptional opportunities that may fall outside the normal leave sequence. This would not only enhance the academic prestige of the institution, it would also promote the level of research engagement that allows Middlebury faculty to model and mentor meaningful research on the part of students. We also recommend enhanced faculty development funding that would offer better support for faculty and reduce the time spent securing support. Some of the recommendations in this area are already in the process of being implemented.

Recommendation #49: Provide more centralized staff support to reduce administrative burdens on faculty.

Recognizing that faculty time is a valuable resource, we recommend a reduction in the amount of time faculty spend on administrative work that the institution could support in other ways. The increasing demands of technology have meant that many faculty members spend a substantial amount of time on technical or clerical tasks that did not exist ten years ago, or were done by other offices. Providing more centralized and coordinated support for a variety of support tasks—such as creating course web pages, digitizing information, or placing course materials on electronic reserve—would free faculty time that could be better spent working with students, preparing for class, or conducting research.

The Planning Committee offers the preceding recommendations as a unified sequence—intended to strengthen the faculty, to clarify the goals of a liberal education and to shape the four years of a student's career at Middlebury into a more progressive whole. Such an ambitious enhancement of our undergraduate program will of course need to be deliberated with the utmost seriousness by the entire faculty, working through its elected committees. We emphasize, however, that revisiting so many curricular matters in this coordinated fashion holds enormous promise for the College. It can reinforce our mission and provide a meaningful context for academic advising. It can re-affirm the common cause for which faculty and staff, students and administration are all gathered together here.

Over the past several decades, Middlebury has made striking commitments to a new Commons system as well as to the construction of world-class facilities in the arts and sciences, an extraordinary new library, and a residential system second to none. We celebrate the fact that so many achievements have come at a time when interdisciplinary initiatives were also enriching our College so dramatically. The further changes proposed in this report focus primarily on our educational activities per se. Our committee's firm conviction is that the present recommendations build upon and consolidate the College's recent gains in a coordinated and strategic fashion. If enacted, they will assure a new degree of curricular coherence, a sense of community that more fully integrates members of the staff, and an intensity of student-faculty interaction equal to or exceeding that at any college in the country. The changes described here do not simply call for new faculty resources or institute new requirements. Rather, they offer a compelling vision of educational quality in which students, faculty, and staff all undertake specific new responsibilities in a cooperative spirit. We contemplate this package of recommendations as a remarkable opportunity to advance in our mission and in the success with which we implement it.