The Ron and Jessica Liebowitz Fund for Innovation
The Fund for Innovation provides support for experimental and unconventional projects that have the potential to create lasting, positive change and strengthen Middlebury’s educational experience.
At Middlebury, we define a culture of innovation as one that embraces experimentation as a means of continuous improvement in the world we live in.
The Ron and Jessica Liebowitz Fund for Innovation (FFI) was established in 2015 to honor Middlebury’s 16th President and his wife by a group of donors who believe that a distinctive culture of creative thinking is essential to the Middlebury community. The FFI is committed to the idea that creative work should serve the institution’s needs and welcomes proposals for experimental ideas and projects that have the potential to create lasting, positive change to Middlebury’s educational experience.
Through the process of creating, reviewing, and developing the ideas that come to the FFI, we hope to expand our collective understanding of what it means to be innovative in an academic setting.
Examples of projects supported by this fund include:
Beyond the Page-For decades, a diverse cohort of professional actors (the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble) have served as part of the Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE) teaching force, collaborating with faculty to bring theater arts practices into Bread Loaf classes and catalyze critical thinking. This project expands the reach and impact of this work – from the graduate to the undergraduate classroom and from the discipline of English to diverse fields across the arts and sciences.
Developing a History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (HSMT) Track within the History Major-Through this initiative, several faculty in the History Department established a new track within the history department’s curriculum to allow students, be they science-minded or humanities-based, to focus on the history of science, medicine and technology (HSMT).
Midd.data- A group of faculty and staff members worked to create midd.data, a “major new initiative designed to provide students equitable and inclusive access to powerful tools for empirical research, data analysis, and critical digital scholarship from the moment they arrive on campus”.
Middlebury Escape Room-Designed with Middlebury community members as the target audience, the Middlebury Escape Room is grounded in Middlebury’s value of inclusivity and focuses on conveying information about the Energy 2028 Initiative and the Twilight Project as well as aspects of the natural environment of Middlebury.