Knowledge without Boundaries:
The Middlebury College Strategic Plan
May 11, 2006
Planning Steering Committee and President's Staff
- John Emerson, Dean of Planning and Secretary of the College, Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics (Chair)
- Amy Briggs, Associate Professor of Computer Science
- Rebecca Brodigan, Director of Institutional Research
- Alison Byerly, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Professor of English
- Robert Clagett, Dean of Admissions
- John Elder, Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies
- Betsy Etchells '75, Executive Assistant to the President
- Ann Craig Hanson, Dean of Student Affairs
- F. Robert Huth, Jr., Executive Vice President and Treasurer
- Ronald Liebowitz, President, Professor of Geography
- Michael McKenna, Vice President for Communications
- ReNard Rogers '07, Philosophy
- Michael Schoenfeld '73, Vice President for College Advancement
- Timothy Spears, Dean of the College, Professor of American Literature and Civilization
- Charlotte Tate, Assistant Director of Rohatyn Center for International Affairs
- Michael Wakefield, Facilities Services
- Johnathan S. Woodward '06, Environmental Studies and Biology
* * *
- Kristen Anderson, Budget Director (Advisory)
- Catherine Bilodeau, Assistant to the President (Staffing)
- Amy Emerson, Senior Financial Analyst (Advisory)
Acknowledgment of Task Force members
The Planning Steering Committee and the President's Staff acknowledge the imaginative contributions and the hard work of all members of our planning task forces and other planning committees. The reports submitted by these groups last May provided the foundation upon which our planning report was built. They will also serve the College community well in the coming years in other venues. We are deeply indebted to all task force members, whose names appear at the end of this report.
The Middlebury College Strategic Plan
Table of Contents and Recommendations
Introduction - Page 1
Strategic Goals:
#1: Strengthen support for a diverse student community.
#2: Strengthen the academic program and foster intensive student-faculty interaction.
#3: Reinforce the role of the Commons as a place to bring together academic and residential life.
Recommendation:
#1: Adopt a new mission statement that reflects our aspirations and future directions.
Chapter 1: Shaping the Student Body - Page 11
Recommendations:
#2: Seek more applicants with special academic talents.
#3: Implement an academic rating system for all applicants.
#4: Identify and recruit more top-rated academic applicants.
#5: Move gradually toward a voluntary February admission program.
#6: Increase the grant component in our aid packages.
#7: Increase the socio-economic diversity of the student body.
#8: Enhance recruitment and retention of students of color.
#9: Maintain our strong international enrollment.
#10: Create an admissions advisory committee.
#11: Create a financial aid advisory committee.
#12: Continue to offer leadership in addressing the relationship between intercollegiate athletics and academic mission.
#13: Establish a systematic procedure for consultation between coaches and other faculty members about the balance of athletics and educational mission.
Chapter 2: Enhancing Community - Page 21
Recommendations:
#14: Cultivate leadership qualities that address societal needs.
#15: Clarify and enhance the status of the Commons Heads.
#16: Further integrate the Commons system and the curriculum.
#17: Expand opportunities for staff involvement in the Commons.
#18: Initiate a weekly College-wide convocation.
#19: Enhance educational opportunities for staff.
#20: Support staff matriculation at Middlebury College.
#21: Increase professional development opportunities for staff.
#22: Create a staff professional development leave program.
#23: Encourage staff participation in intellectual community.
#24: Strengthen supervisory training programs.
#25: Promote greater work-life balance.
#26: Encourage a culture of collaboration.
#27: Cultivate and support creativity and innovation.
#28: Increase recognition of employees' accomplishments.
#29: Expand the ways we engage alumni in the life of the College.
#30: Re-examine and strengthen our communications both within and beyond our campuses.
#31: Expand and support diversity in the staff and faculty.
#32: Recognize "Community Partners."
Chapter 3: Curriculum and Faculty - Page 32
Recommendations:
#33: Increase faculty resources and enhance student-faculty interaction.
#34: Consolidate the College's distribution requirements.
#35: Institute a laboratory science requirement within the new distribution requirements.
#36: Enhance academic advising.
#37: Eliminate triple majors and reduce the number of double majors.
#38: Streamline departmental major requirements.
#39: Highlight the strengths of the sciences and arts at Middlebury.
#40: Strengthen Winter Term.
#41: Reinforce the first-year seminar program.
#42: Explore possibilities for Commons-based courses.
#43: Require senior work in all majors.
#44: Promote student research through a day-long research symposium.
#45: Increase funding for student internships.
#46: Create a database for service learning projects.
#47: Make better use of current teaching resources with a goal of achieving a more competitive teaching load for faculty.
#48: Develop a more flexible approach to faculty leaves.
#49: Provide more centralized staff support to reduce administrative burdens on faculty.
Chapter 4: Middlebury's Graduate and Specialized Programs - Page 43
Recommendations:
#50: Increase collaboration across Middlebury programs.
#51: Establish a Board of Trustees subcommittee devoted to the summer program, schools abroad, and affiliates.
#52: Strengthen connections of alumni from the Language Schools and the Bread Loaf School of English with the Middlebury alumni community.
#53: Ensure that the needs of the College's summer and auxiliary programs are represented in committee and administrative structures that are responsible for operational planning.
#54: Strengthen financial aid for the Language Schools.
#55: Expand the scope of the Language Schools curriculum by integrating broader cultural content in Language School courses.
#56: Consider adding summer graduate programs in languages that are currently taught only at the undergraduate level.
#57: Explore possibilities for adding new sites abroad that support the undergraduate curriculum.
#58: Integrate the Bread Loaf School of English into the College's international focus by considering further expansion beyond the U.S. borders.
#59: Upgrade facilities at the Bread Loaf campus to ensure longevity of its historic buildings and allow for support of new teaching technologies.
#60: Develop stronger ties between the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and our academic year programs.
#61: Explore opportunities for future collaboration with the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
#62: Establish a liaison group to explore programmatic connections between the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Middlebury programs.
Chapter 5: Campus, Infrastructure, and Environment - Page 53
Recommendations:
#63: Revise and expand the campus master plan to reflect the strategic plan.
#64: Complete the Commons physical infrastructure.
#65: Equalize housing opportunities for seniors.
#66: Improve space for departments and programs.
#67: Create more space for the arts.
#68: Strengthen our environmental leadership and reputation.
#69: Pursue alternative environmentally-friendly energy sources.
#70: Design energy efficient buildings and operations.
#71: Consider the various impacts of development on the College campus and the natural environment.
#72: Support sustainable agricultural practices.
#73: Continue to manage College lands responsibly.
#74: Continue making alterations to facilities that improve their accessibility for those with disabilities, and work toward universal access.
#75: Better utilize existing facilities through efficient scheduling and management.
#76: Increase availability of alternate forms of transportation.
#77: Search for creative ways to reduce reliance on private vehicles.
#78: Convert Old Chapel Road into a pedestrian-friendly campus artery.
#79: Explore ways to support development of a Cornwall Path.
#80: Cultivate open dialogue with the Town.
#81: Limit the use of community housing by students.
#82: Address traffic and commuting concerns.
Chapter 6: Finances and Strategic Planning Priorities - Page 62
Strategic Priorities:
#1: Increase financial aid to provide better access to Middlebury and thereby enrich the educational environment for our students.
#2: Expand the faculty to support intensive student-faculty interaction.
#3: Develop further and plan to complete the Commons as the cornerstone of residential life.
Acknowledgements - Page 68
Table of Contents for Appendices
Page 1: Historical Undergraduate Admissions Data: 1996 to 2006
Page 2: Middlebury College Undergraduate Enrollment by Racial and Ethnic Group: Fall 1994 to Fall 2005
Pages 3 and 4: Comparative Undergraduate Enrollment by Race and Gender: Fall 2004
Page 5: Middlebury College Study Abroad Summary: 1994-95 to 2005-06
Page 6: Comparative Financial Aid: Fall 2005
Page 7: Middlebury College Average Financial Aid Awards for Students with Financial Need: Fall 2005
Page 8 and 9: Majors of Seniors: Fall 2003, 2004, and 2005
Page 10: Comparative Endowment per Student: 2000 to 2005
Page 11: Middlebury College Faculty Grant Summary: 1996 to 2005
Page 12: Comparative Student/Faculty Ratios: 2005
Page 13: Enrollment per Faculty FTE: 2000-01 to 2004-05
Page 14: Faculty Composition: 1996-97 to 2005-2006
Page 15: Baccalaureate Origins of PhDs for Top 30 Liberal Arts Colleges: 1996 to 2004
Page 16: Comparative Number of Degrees Awarded: 2003-2004
Page 17: Total Giving, All Gifts and All Sources: 2005
Page 18: Comparative Alumni Giving Rates: 2005
Page 19: Language School Degrees Awarded: 1995 to 2005
Page 20: Profile of the Bread Loaf School of English: 2005
Page 21: Implementation and Resource Needs of the Strategic Plan
Pages 22 to 33: Implementation Table for Planning Recommendations
Knowledge Without Boundaries
Introduction and Overview
At Middlebury College we have undertaken a strategic planning process in order to re-evaluate our educational mission, our identity, and our direction. We have examined our institutional priorities and asked whether some adjustments or even an overhaul of these priorities will better serve us now and in the future. The Planning Steering Committee presents this report in the belief that it will guide the College in the pursuit of our highest aspirations while preserving what we value most deeply about Middlebury.
Charting the Future of Middlebury
A strategic planning process requires an understanding of our past and present realities, but it is mostly about our future. What are the external forces that are likely to influence our place in the larger world of higher education? What is it that will enable such an expensive mode of education to survive and thrive? What are the internal forces? Will we grow or shrink? Will we devote substantial new resources to our infrastructure? Our curriculum? Our people? What kind of students do we hope to attract to Middlebury in the future? How can we better address the needs of the larger society that we serve?
Such planning also brings with it some concrete and practical benefits. It helps us to allocate and/or reallocate our resources in ways we believe will most benefit the College in the long run, and it articulates the priorities and directions on which we will need to focus in future fund raising. Within this context, it promotes communication with thousands of loyal alumni, parents, and friends of the College about where their help and support can make the greatest difference. It prompts us to ask how we can better keep these loyal friends and alumni engaged in the life and mission of the College, and with those aspects of the College that hold the greatest meaning for them.
Most importantly, strategic planning helps us to look beyond external pressures to define for ourselves the College we want to be. It articulates the strategic goals that we believe will help us to fully realize our vision of Middlebury as a place in which the pursuit of knowledge knows no boundaries.
Although our broad-based planning process developed more than 230 planning proposals and initiatives, we have found that much of what our community values and hopes for is not easily framed in specific proposals. Some of our most important aspirations are nuanced, particularly those relating to the culture of our own community. Middlebury's identity has long embraced care and compassion, and we want to preserve these values for Middlebury generations to come. We understand that we are a privileged community, and we aim to serve the society at large. Our roles and responsibilities are specific and often unique, and we seek to be a part of a cohesive community that values and honors each others' successes. The context for higher education, and even the global context, is changing rapidly and we hope to unleash creative and imaginative responses from within ourselves. We recognize challenges both to the environment and to economic and social justice in our world, and we long to contribute to solutions that aid the very survival of our society and our planet. In short we are idealists, and we yearn to reflect our ideals in what we do and how we educate our students.
Strategic Goals
Among the many recommendations identified through the planning process, three strategic goals stand out as critical to Middlebury's future development. These three strategic goals form the rationale for many of the specific recommendations found in the report.
Strategic Goal #1: Strengthen support for a diverse student community.
For many years, Middlebury's strength has derived in large part from the quality of its student body. We should continue to admit those students who are most gifted intellectually, best able to contribute to the education of their peers, and have the greatest potential for strong leadership. Middlebury's success over the past decades in creating a more diverse student community has already contributed immeasurably to these outcomes.
Our first strategic goal is to attract an ever-stronger and more diverse student body to Middlebury by lowering some of the financial barriers to a Middlebury education. A diverse student body broadens the horizons of each student to include perspectives, attitudes, cultures, personal circumstances, and histories different from one's own, and it thereby contributes to the learning of all students. But matriculating a diverse student body is costly. The costs of a college education, whether private or public, have increased faster than the consumer price index for more than two decades. At the same time, financial aid programs from government sources have tended to shift resources away from outright grants and into loan programs. Some very able students and their families, lacking the financial means to pay for a private education at a selective college like Middlebury, are discouraged from even applying for admission and financial assistance at private colleges. At least a few of these colleges have started to respond to these realities by publicizing new financial aid packaging that increases grants and therefore reduces the debt incurred by their students. These circumstances mean that competition for the best students from families with limited resources is greater than ever. Improved financial aid packages with a reduced reliance on borrowing, especially for families with the greatest need, will help Middlebury College continue to attract the best students.
Strategic Goal #2: Strengthen the academic program and foster intensive student-faculty interaction.
This plan makes recommendations designed to ensure that a Middlebury College education will continue to be worth the substantial investments made both by students and their families and by donors to the College. The individualized attention given our students by faculty and staff members is a key part of this value. Significant teaching resources are required to support an engaged and active faculty, and to ensure small classes, excellent advising, and meaningful mentoring. Increasing the size of the faculty, while also making the best use of current teaching resources, will enable some important curricular changes. Our curricular recommendations are aimed at what we believe our students will need after leaving Middlebury as they engage the 21st century; the changes will strengthen the overall academic program. These proposals include required independent senior work in various forms, a laboratory science requirement, and revised and simplified distribution requirements that ensure a liberally educated student body. Enhancing faculty resources will also strengthen the academic profile of the College by ensuring that faculty members are able to maintain the high level of scholarly and creative achievement that makes Middlebury a vibrant intellectual community.
Strategic Goal #3: Reinforce the role of the Commons as a place to bring together academic and residential life.
Middlebury's residential Commons system has sought to provide a seamless interface between academic life and other spheres of our students' lives. Although the infrastructure is completed for just two of the five Commons, many successes in the Commons program are already visible. The decentralization of student deans has meant that students are better known to those who provide them with administrative and personal support. The location of many first-year seminar groups within a single residence hall in a Commons affords several advantages to the first-year seminar program and its associated academic advising, including out-of-class engagement among classmates that otherwise would not happen. The Commons have provided many of our students with opportunities for leadership and for programming initiatives. Commons serve as hosts for lectures, panel discussions, and other programs of enrichment, and they give participating students more immediate and personal access to these programs.
Even with these successes, many in our community believe that the Commons have yet to realize their full potential for enhancing student experiences. Our recommendations focus on expanding Commons programming over the next few years. We encourage greater connections between the Commons and the academic program, and an elevated role for the Commons Heads as intellectual leaders in the community. When College resources permit, we also support the strategically phased completion of the Commons infrastructure in the other three Commons. The College's financial capacity will dictate the pace at which we can complete the Commons physical infrastructure.
These strategic goals relate to the human dimension of Middlebury and the way in which all members of the community can work together to attain them. Our planning has also led us to see the value of expanding Middlebury's reach beyond the boundaries of the campus. Collaboration with other institutions, illustrated by our Language Schools' expanding affiliations with other universities, may be increasingly important in the coming years, both because of growing complexities in higher education and because of economic and technological challenges and advances. More connections to our local communities, and more openness to relating a liberal education to the needs of society, will play a role in shaping the Middlebury College of the future. We should strengthen our offerings in service learning to provide more opportunities for students to link what is learned in the classroom with applied work in the community and the larger society. Building on our existing strengths in specific areas of the curriculum, the College should seek enhanced support from foundations and other sources that will facilitate innovation and help develop emerging areas.
We already value leadership in students, both through our admissions decisions and in opportunities provided by our campus community. We should foster a campus culture that supports creative, imaginative, and ethical leadership by our students, and reduces bureaucratic barriers to student initiative, encouraging them to take the intellectual risks that are an essential part of learning. Students should develop a sense of balance and personal responsibility in their own lives that helps to cultivate a sense of civic responsibility and stewardship in relation to the world beyond. These qualities will be increasingly important in the world community that our students will enter when they leave Middlebury.
Mission and Mission Statement:
What Makes Middlebury Special?
From its proud history spanning more than two centuries, Middlebury College has emerged as one of a handful of the most highly regarded liberal arts colleges. Middlebury is unique among these schools in being a classic liberal arts college that also offers graduate and specialized programs operating around the world. Our planning has aimed to build on these strengths in a time of global change and intense competition in higher education by redefining the boundaries of the institution for a new century. Middlebury College is committed to educating students in the tradition of the liberal arts. This tradition embodies a method of discourse as well as a group of disciplines; in our scientifically and mathematically oriented majors, just as in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the languages, we emphasize reflection, discussion, and intensive interactions between students and faculty members. Our vibrant residential community, remarkable facilities, and the diversity of our co-curricular activities and support services all exist primarily to serve these educational purposes.
As a residential college, Middlebury recognizes that education takes place both within and beyond the classroom. Since our founding in 1800, the College has sought to create and sustain an environment on campus that is conducive to learning and that fosters engaged discourse. Middlebury is centrally committed to the value of a diverse and respectful community. Our natural setting in Vermont's Champlain Valley, with the Green Mountains to the east and the Adirondacks to the west, is also crucial to our identity, providing refreshment and inspiration as well as a natural laboratory for research. The beauty of our well-maintained campus provides a sense of permanence, stability, tradition, and stewardship. Middlebury has established itself as a leader in campus environmental initiatives, with an accompanying educational focus on environmental issues around the globe.
Middlebury's borders extend far beyond Addison County. Middlebury's Language Schools, Schools Abroad, Bread Loaf School of English, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Monterey Institute for International Studies provide top-quality specialized education, including graduate education, in selected areas of critical importance to a rapidly changing world community. These areas include an unusually wide array of languages, literatures, and culture—including our programs in English and writing at Bread Loaf. The first of Middlebury's internationally acclaimed language programs originated at the graduate level more than ninety years ago, and the Bread Loaf programs were inaugurated in 1920.
Both in our central mission as a liberal arts college and in the various forms of specialized study and outreach with which we extend it, Middlebury seeks to promote the values of learning, reflection, leadership, community, local responsibility, and international awareness.
We expect our graduates to be thoughtful and ethical leaders able to meet the challenges of informed citizenship both in their communities and as world citizens. They should be independent thinkers, committed to service, with the courage to follow their convictions and to accept responsibility for their actions. They should be skilled in the use of language, and in the analysis of evidence, in whatever context it may present itself. They should be physically active, mentally disciplined, and motivated to continue learning. Most important, they should be both grounded in an understanding of the Western intellectual tradition that has shaped this College, and educated so as to comprehend and appreciate cultures, ideas, societies, traditions, and values that may be less immediately familiar to them.
Recommendation #1: Adopt a new mission statement that reflects our aspirations and future directions.
Our new mission statement reflects Middlebury's evolution over the last several decades and conveys our sense of the College as a place of unlimited possibilities where students can transcend the boundaries of their own experience by learning about different cultures, exploring new areas of study, understanding the interrelationships among different academic disciplines, and integrating that knowledge into their social and residential experience.
The following statement has now been adopted by the Middlebury College Board of Trustees through the action of its Prudential Committee on March 2, 2006.
Middlebury College Mission Statement:
At Middlebury College we challenge students to participate fully in a vibrant and diverse academic community. The College's Vermont location offers an inspirational setting for learning and reflection, reinforcing our commitment to integrating environmental stewardship into both our curriculum and our practices on campus. Yet the College also reaches far beyond the Green Mountains, offering a rich array of undergraduate and graduate programs that connect our community to other places, countries, and cultures. We strive to engage students' capacity for rigorous analysis and independent thought within a wide range of disciplines and endeavors, and to cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community. Through the pursuit of knowledge unconstrained by national or disciplinary boundaries, students who come to Middlebury learn to engage the world.
The Report of the Steering Committee
This document relies on reports from fifteen task forces and committees, surveys of all constituencies in our extended community, meetings with many groups on campus as well as with the Trustees, and well over one hundred hours of its own meetings and retreats throughout the past sixteen months.
Even with the diversity of approaches taken by the task forces and other contributors to the planning process, there was a surprising commonality of purpose. Middlebury's commitment to the personalized education of undergraduates is widely regarded as essential to our mission.
The focus of the plan is on strengthening the human dimension of the institution, and this means different things for different members of the Middlebury community. For faculty this means support for their creativity and growth as teachers and scholars as they work to balance these complementary roles. For staff, it represents opportunities for professional development and greater participation in the life of the College. For students it means diversifying the student body to enrich the overall learning environment and prepare them for citizenship in the world; for alumni, it means having better opportunities to stay connected with one another and with the educational mission of the College.
Chapter One: Shaping the Student Body
Every year our student body grows stronger by most measurements. One aspect of such growth has been its increasing diversity—racially, ethnically, geographically, economically, and in other important regards. One of the distinguishing aspects of the student body at Middlebury is its inclusion of many international students. Those who commented about the composition of our student body often affirmed the value of diversity for our community, and we are committed to building upon recent gains in this area. In addition to the distinguishing factors listed above, we are motivated to attract more students with a special interest in the sciences and in the arts—areas in which we offer superb programs and facilities.
Financial aid is a major influence on our ability to recruit the students we would like to have at Middlebury; in this regard, however, we have fallen behind some of our peer colleges. The major recommendation in this chapter is thus for substantially increasing financial aid at every level. More specifically, we propose shifting the form of aid decisively toward outright grants as opposed to loans, thus limiting the level of debt for all aided students. The chapter goes into detail about how this expensive priority should be accomplished.
Chapter Two: Enhancing Community
This chapter highlights the human dimension of Middlebury College. A superb student body requires superb faculty and staff. We know the College's employees are among the finest in higher education. But there are important ways in which faculty and staff could be better supported. For faculty, research funding and staff support are increasingly necessary in order to pursue teaching and scholarship at the highest level. Technology has become central to the mission of faculty members, and it often requires specialized support. Much attention also focuses on staff, and on opportunities to integrate them more fully into the educational life, including Commons life, at Middlebury. Staff tuition-support for study both here and elsewhere, as well as increased professional development funding, are among the measures strongly supported in this chapter. The recommendations of this section are geared towards creating a fully integrated community of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents who have a shared understanding of the College's educational mission.
Chapter Three: Curriculum and Faculty
The curriculum is at the heart of the College. One of our three major priorities, as measured by resource demands, addresses this area. We recommend a phased schedule that will take Middlebury's current student-faculty ratio to approximately 8 to 1. Although such a shift will certainly make us more competitive with the other premier liberal arts colleges, we approach it in an emphatically qualitative, programmatic context rather than in an externally oriented and overly quantitative one. Specifically, we look at an improved student-faculty ratio as a way to move toward a carefully shaped four-year program for students that reflects the faculty's ability to model the varied stages of the learning process through their own research and creative work. We would like to see every academic major at Middlebury include some independent senior work in its requirements. This work will vary in format from discipline to discipline, and it will be facilitated by a new ability to recognize faculty members' time-consuming involvement with individual students and small groups as they pursue independent projects.
An improved student-faculty ratio will also allow our faculty to continue to pursue the scholarly and artistic work that has already contributed to raising the College's academic profile. We recommend supporting this continued success in scholarship with additional resources for faculty research and development. Our strengthening of the faculty will enable major advances in the quality of a Middlebury education.
Chapter Four: Middlebury's Graduate and Specialized Programs
Middlebury's unique breadth is exemplified by the specialized programs, including the Language Schools, Schools Abroad, the Bread Loaf School of English, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the newly affiliated Monterey Institute of International Studies, that complement the undergraduate college. Distinguished ventures in their own right, these programs collectively demonstrate an institutional commitment to education that extends beyond the college years and beyond the borders of the Vermont campus. This chapter lays out the strategic issues and challenges relating to these programs, and makes specific recommendations designed to bring these programs into a more cohesive relationship with one another and with the undergraduate program.
Chapter Five: Campus, Infrastructure, and Environment
This chapter focuses on three closely related topics. One is the College infrastructure as it relates to the Commons system. Middlebury has made a major commitment to a system of five Commons with contiguous living and social spaces, and the Planning Steering Committee reaffirms this direction. The continued development and eventual completion of the Commons is one of three chief priorities of this report. The completion of the Commons physical infrastructure will necessarily proceed in phases over many years. In the meantime, we will give priority to the continued development of programmatic aspects of the Commons, with a goal of fostering more vibrant communities and a more seamless connection with our academic programs. Over the next few years, we should plan with students how best to provide upgraded senior housing opportunities for those Commons whose facilities are not yet completed.
A closely related consideration is the relationship between the campus and the new buildings needed not only by the Commons system but also for additional classroom and office space to accommodate an improved student-faculty ratio. Finally, we looked at the larger environment of the College and at the way in which our management of lands and natural resources may reinforce the prominent place of environmental stewardship at Middlebury.
Chapter Six: Finances and Strategic Planning Priorities
We have been guided at every stage by detailed financial projections that helped inform our discussion of resource allocation and prioritization. This chapter presents the implications of the most ambitious recommendations for the College budget and for future fund raising. It also provides the financial assumptions we will use to guide our thinking and planning for the next five to ten years. We recognize that the recommendations set forth in this plan are ambitious and some of them are expensive; we have therefore suggested a carefully timed phasing of the implementation of some initiatives in order to take into account both the College's financial capacity and its plans for an equally ambitious fund raising campaign.
Appendices: Supporting Information and Data
The appendices provide background information and data that relate to many of the areas addressed by the major recommendations of this plan. As we monitor progress in implementing the recommendations of the plan, we will update this information periodically and report our findings to the community. A table included in the appendices lists all numbered recommendations and identifies the senior administrative officer who is responsible for each recommendation; it also indicates those offices, departments, and committees that will participate most directly in the implementation, and it provides projected dates for implementation.
An Overview of Middlebury's Planning Process
Soon after becoming Middlebury's sixteenth president on July 1, 2004, President Ronald D. Liebowitz and his senior staff began laying the framework for a new strategic plan, the first since 1992. A primary goal of the process was to involve many people from throughout the campus, and another was to be transparent for interested individuals in all parts of Middlebury's several constituencies.
During the fall term, Dean of Planning John Emerson worked with President Liebowitz and his staff to assemble many teams of individuals who would serve on planning task forces; these groups typically included students, faculty, administrators, and staff in their membership. A few existing committees also were given revised charges that meant they would function much as the planning task forces. By January 1, 2005, fifteen planning task forces and other planning groups had been appointed and were ready to undertake their ambitious assignments over the next four and one-half months. Among the subjects assigned to these task forces were the composition of the student body, the curriculum, staff and faculty development, and institutional change and culture. The planning task forces and the Steering Committee met regularly, from January through mid-May, when fifteen reports from the task forces and other committees were submitted to the Planning Steering Committee.
Throughout the process, the President hosted a series of open meetings for the College community to consider key themes as they emerged. In addition, the Planning Steering Committee surveyed students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents to solicit views on several subjects of interest in planning and to learn what the respondents most cherished about the Middlebury experience. Altogether we received responses to the surveys from 394 students, 126 faculty members, 210 staff members, and more than 3,500 alumni and parents.
We designed the planning process to encourage the generation of new ideas and imaginative contributions to our planning. The many open meetings, faculty meeting deliberations, intensive staff interviews, town meetings for students, e-mail exchanges with alumni, readings, and discussions resulted in an intense community-based dialogue engaging hundreds of people. The task forces and planning committees had members drawn from diverse areas of the College with the hope that they would challenge many assumptions and provide fresh views about familiar campus issues. In short, we sought to engage planning as a community of learners—with ample opportunity to teach each other, learn, challenge ourselves, and engage in lively debate.
A Plan With Vision and Flexibility
This plan offers a broad vision for the coming decade of Middlebury's evolution, and it also provides many specific proposals for change. It captures much of what the Middlebury College community values about our College, and it embodies many of the aspirations we share for Middlebury's future.
Although "Knowledge Without Boundaries" is more detailed and specific than many strategic plans, we believe that its focused recommendations improve the likelihood of our achieving the ambitious goals it sets out. At the same time, we expect that this plan will be amended and strengthened as time passes and circumstances change. The plan is a dynamic document that can be adapted to new contexts as necessary. Circumstances will change with the passage of time. What will not change is the commitment of the Middlebury community to making the College ever stronger and more effective in serving its students and its global society.