Clarifying Policies Around Open Expression

The following email was sent to the Middlebury campus community on Thursday, August 29.

Dear Middlebury Community,

We hope you’ve had an enjoyable and restorative summer. We’re looking forward to having everyone back on campus and classes and activities being in full swing. To our newest students, we’ll be welcoming you soon in person to Middlebury! This is always an exciting time for staff and faculty as we make preparations in anticipation of a new term. We hope you’re feeling the same.

As we come together as a community, we’re also mindful of how our beautiful corner of the world is connected to the critical issues and events of regional, national, and global significance. We’d like to take this moment to outline our expectations about how we live together and engage. Providing this clarity is especially important during a contentious presidential election, ongoing violence in Gaza and Israel, and the numerous events that impact us and our loved ones even if they don’t make the front page. 

Our Guiding Principles

As we look to our new academic year together, we continue to be focused on our educational mission as a learning community. Our academic mission entails a commitment to open expression, free inquiry, and ongoing dialogue in a culture of mutual regard, as well as an obligation to ensure the well-being and safety of all. We expect robust engagement and empathic listening in our classrooms and residence halls, and through curricular and extracurricular programming. 

What You Can Expect this Semester

Based on those principles, we expect to continue much of our work from the previous semester. Administrators, trustees, and faculty will continue the conversations with the Gaza solidarity group that were held during the spring and summer, which led to a productive resolution around the encampment demonstration on our campus in the spring. They will continue to discuss creative and sustainable ways to ensure our commitment to resolving conflict while guided by our institutional practices, including with our investments. We share the goal of creating paths to education for college students displaced by the war, and members of our Admissions Office are working with key organizations to make sure those applicants consider an academic home at Middlebury as well as finding other ways to support peacebuilding efforts in keeping with our educational mission. As we did last year, we will be sharing our educational efforts with the community, and we will be in touch via Middlebury Updates in coming weeks to let you know of these activities. 

The events from the spring taught us some valuable lessons that have informed our approach to engagement in the fall semester. Foremost, we want to note that the demonstrations, protests, vigils, and teach-ins were conducted with care and respect, and we’re grateful to our students, faculty, and staff whose aim was education and awareness. This must be our way forward, too.

In the context of honoring our collective and individual experiences, we also wanted to share that President Laurie Patton has endorsed an institution-wide effort to better understand, document, and create data around the experiences and needs of Arab, Israeli, Jewish, and Muslim students, faculty, and staff. This initiative will build on the activities of the Working Group on Anti-Semitism and the Working Group on Islamophobia. It will focus on data collecting and storytelling from a wide variety of stakeholders, similar to the Equity Narratives project conducted across campus last year. The insights from the data and documentation will inform future policy and equity practices to support the thriving of Arab, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian members of our community. We will be communicating more about that effort in the coming weeks.  

We also note that our activities around these issues need to be sustainable. By the end of the 2023–2024 academic year, there was a cumulative sense of fatigue—emotional, psychological, physical—experienced by nearly every member of this community: student organizers; students with divergent views of the situation; staff and faculty members who either volunteered to support these events or whose jobs required that they ensure the events occurred safely; and those conducting the routine business of their lives on campus. We will continue to support and ensure compliance and safety during the exercise of open expression in the year ahead. We are also mindful of the fact that last year, many additional resources were deployed, especially the time of our staff employees, to support and to ensure open expression, respectful dialogue, safety, well-being, and compliance. 

Clarifying Our Policies and Practices 

During the leadership team’s discussions of our human and institutional capacities in a time of tumultuous global events, a key theme has emerged: the need for clarity of our policies and practices. We were asked to explain more clearly some rules that were seen as ambiguous or obscure, and to make more visible Middlebury’s policies around what is and isn’t permitted when one engages in expressive activity on our shared campus. We’ve done that in the list below, and it’s important that we review together the assumptions and policies that sustain Middlebury’s commitment in this area.

We will continue to ensure that our primary mission to educate students is not compromised and that no student confronts unreasonable barriers or challenges to accessing their education due to the actions of other community members. This primary commitment will be reflected in the following ways:

• The College reserves the right to determine the time, place, and manner of protests. This is because we must balance our support of open expression with the reality of sustainably and fairly apportioning our resources to fulfill our primary mission as an educational institution. 
• All protests, demonstrations, and similar events must be registered and approved by the Office of Event Management, which will determine if the space requested is appropriate. The office assigns event locations and determines which resources are needed to appropriately hold the event. Given the huge array of events on campus that relate to our educational mission, we must coordinate times, places, and resources.
• We do not allow camping on any Middlebury property without advance written approval. Nor do we allow the creation of structures, including tents and other installations, on Middlebury property. Overnight residence anywhere other than assigned rooms in residence halls is not permitted, consistent with safety requirements. Our facilities staff already works 24/7 just to support the existing campus facilities so that students, staff, and faculty can live and work safely and sustainably in pursuit of their educational goals. 
• Posters and banners must be displayed in designated areas.
• Protests and demonstrations that cause substantial disruption to academic activities and essential business operations are prohibited and subject to discipline. 
• Unregistered protests and demonstrations are subject to discipline.

A Sustainable Public Square

Middlebury has always, and will always embrace the need for thoughtful and open expression about the issues impacting our community and the world beyond, in a robust and inclusive public square. This semester, as we encourage our members to navigate disparate views and conflicts through critical inquiry, dialogue, and empathic listening, we must remember that our public square also needs to be sustainable. We know we can support each other in expressing our disparate views in a difficult time in our nation and world. We also know the deep value of our vibrant learning community as we debate, discover, and explore. 

Respectfully,

Smita Ruzicka
Vice President for Student Affairs

Khuram Hussain
Vice President for Equity and Inclusion

Michelle McCauley
Executive Vice President and Provost

David Provost
Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration