How, Together, We Will Meet the Moment
Incoming president Ian Baucom delivered the following remarks at a reception yesterday in the Samson Center on the Monterey campus of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
Thank you for being here and for hosting me and Wendy. It’s so good to be with you. It’s good to be at MIIS. It would be hard for that not to be the case given just how beautiful this place is. When I found out I was becoming president of Middlebury, I knew I’d need to learn how to ski. I didn’t realize I’d also have to learn how to surf.
But the goodness of this place is about much more than its beauty. It’s about who you are, what you represent, how you embody a way of Middlebury being in the world, and a way of the world gathering itself in Middlebury: from our home campus in Vermont; through our schools around the globe; to the shores of this astonishing and climate-threatened coast.
I want to thank you for that: for choosing to be part of Middlebury; for making us more international, more cosmopolitan; for making us more alive to the vibrancy, richness, and difference of the world family we are.
“A Fundamentally Interconnected World”
And I want to thank you that you have chosen to do so in an urgent and demanding way: committing yourself and asking us to think about the nature and future of global conflict; international relations; the precarious ecosystems of our planets and oceans; the vital need for us to understand one another across our differences of language, history, and politics. I want to thank you for understanding the difference that is made when we do and don’t interpret those differences rightly—the difference that language makes, the difference that interpretation makes as coming from diverse places and differing perspectives we seek to build common healthy futures for our planet and our world.
Thank you for reminding us that we live in a fundamentally interconnected world—as an institute of international studies so urgently must—and that it is one of the great tasks of education to help us better understand that interrelated world so that we might live well together in it.
That is something Middlebury has long embodied, through our Language Schools, Schools Abroad, climate commitments, commitment to conflict transformation and cultural understanding. It is something we have embodied through our commitment to opening ourselves to students and faculty and staff coming from all over the globe, as over the course of our history the town’s college has become not only the nation’s college, but the world’s college, and a college for this one planet we call home.
It is good that we have embodied these things. It is good to be able to name them.
But because you have committed yourself to urgent and difficult questions, it’s important that I also name difficult things.
“We Live in a Time …”
The first is that we know that we live in a time when that ethos—that deeply Middlebury and MIIS ethos—of living in and committing to a fundamentally interconnected world is under threat here and in nations around the world. We know that we live in a time of hardening nationalisms, tightening borders, and the sundering of international and transnational economic and political relationships. We know we live in a time when what many of us hold to be true of an interrelated and interdependent world cannot be assumed but must be rearticulated and defended.
We also know that we live in a time of stringent financial challenges for all institutions of higher education, Middlebury among them: a time in which the postwar partnership between colleges, universities, and the federal government that has enabled countless research discoveries is at risk of being dismantled; a time of market instability; the possibility of increased taxes on the endowments we rely on for financial aid, faculty salaries, and basic operations; and the threat that our doors of admission and federal partnership on financial support for students from around the nation and the world—which we have been working for decades to widen, across all our campuses—may for the first time in our history be pushed more tightly closed; to name only a few of the headwinds blowing.
We know that if we are going to navigate this time while holding our grounding commitments to research, discovery, and student financial aid that we must do so from the strongest possible financial position, making difficult decisions now to protect our core mission and secure our pledge to Middlebury’s future, as prior generations have done for us. It’s for that reason that I support the truly difficult financial decisions affecting the College that our board, President Snyder, and his leadership team have recently made. As members of our Middlebury community have expressed, their cost is real, they affect real lives, but I firmly believe that they come from a deep loyalty to the institution, a sincere desire to avoid the greater human pain of significant layoffs, stabilize a budget in structural deficit, safeguard us as best as possible from the financial threats of this moment, and secure a route to our future. As hard as this has been—and because of how hard this has been—I am deeply grateful in particular to President Snyder, Provost McCauley, Executive Vice President David Provost, and Board Chair Ted Truscott for their courage and leadership of the Middlebury I know they profoundly love. I am also grateful for the insight that the members of the College Faculty and Staff Councils and other colleagues who equally love Middlebury have shared with me. Thank you, sincerely, all.
When I become president on July 1, it will be among my first responsibilities to work in partnership with our faculty, staff, students, leadership team, and board on how—with these hard decisions made and a sounder base under us—we can now move forward to build a stronger financial future together, one not predicated on scarcity but on possibility, one committed to further investing in the faculty and students and staff who are the heart of who we are. I embrace that responsibility and will take it on.
Standing with you here, today, in Monterey, at MIIS, I also know that even as our colleagues in the College are feeling these financial strains that there are equally real financial pressures facing the Institute. I know that you have been taking steps to address them through the plan you have been working through with the Middlebury leadership team and the board. I know that there has been pain here too. Thank you also for the truly hard work you have undertaken.
“Our Core Principles and Commitments”
Even as I thank you, I also know that there are more difficult decisions to come. It is too early in my time—and I am not yet president—to know what form those decisions should take. But come July, I will also be intensely focused on those decisions and options for MIIS, on learning more and working collaboratively as we work through them and acting in ways that are best not only for the moment but for the long future to come—the future of Middlebury as a whole.
As I join that work, I pledge that our core principles and commitments will remain: we belong to a fundamentally interconnected planet; Middlebury is grounded in place and in the world; our differences enrich us; we will constantly seek to open our doors to students and faculty and staff from around the globe and welcome all as family.
And, because we are family, one last word on the challenges of our moment. Beneath these economic hazards and challenges to the idea of the world as constitutively intertwined across national horizons, our moment—as we know well—contains a deeper current of threats, felt across the College, Institute, Schools, and all of higher education alike: threats to the academic freedom and freedom of expression core to our mission, and threats to the equally core freedom to speak regardless of who we are or where we come from. On these fundamental matters of value, I do not need to wait to become president to express what I believe and what I know we all believe. As I said in the remarks I gave in Wilson Hall a few weeks ago, we are for academic freedom and freedom of expression. We will not waver in defense of those freedoms. It is for that reason that I strongly supported the decision by President Snyder for Middlebury to join an amicus brief, as clearly noted on the Middlebury website, “filed by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration in a lawsuit, brought by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association, which challenges the detentions and deportations that have been occurring to members of higher education communities.”
It is also for that reason that both President Snyder and I have signed a public letter in defense of academic freedom—jointly organized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and endorsed by over 100 college and university leaders—affirming these key principles:
American institutions of higher learning have in common the essential freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.
We believe in those principles and we will not back away from them. As Alan Garber, president of Harvard, rightly and powerfully put it in his recent letter to the Harvard community: “Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.”
“What We Are For”
I agree and I know that all of Middlebury agrees. This is what we too are for. We always have been, and we always will be.
One last thing. We are not afraid of this moment. It is the time we inhabit and it is giving us a chance—too rare when life is easy—to say what we are for. So, with your permission, let me repeat here what I had the chance to say a few weeks ago on our home campus in Vermont. Above all, we are for the pursuit of truth. “We are for the wisdom, in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, that the arc of the moral universe is long, and that it bends toward justice. We are for the conviction that the arc of knowledge is equally long, and that it bends toward truth. We are for the knowledge that in the end truth prevails, and that it does not have a party. It is neither Republican nor Democrat. It seeks its own end and will risk the anger of partisans of all closed perspectives and welcome the friendship of all open minds. It always has, and it always will.”
And that, at the beginning and the end, is the beauty of this place. More beautiful than the astonishing Pacific Coast. It is the beautiful truth that you, like everyone who is part of Middlebury, across all our differences of nationality, history, or political perspective, have risked yourself to come pursue the truth: the truth of the international, the truth of language and interpretation; the truth of the climate science, policy, and education on which the future of our planet depends; the truth of the world’s differences joined together, and of the world’s young people living and studying together. How can we be afraid of our moment when those truths sustain us? Whatever course the future runs, how can we be afraid when we know what we are for? To our students—at MIIS, the College, around the world—thank you in particular for coming to Middlebury to pursue those truths. Thank you for your courage. Wherever you go from here I promise you those truths and that courage will sustain you. And we will always call you family. And wherever you go in the world, Middlebury will always be your home.
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You can learn more about Ian’s appointment, vision, and values in these readings and films.