Will college students return to Middlebury in the fall? If so, how will we ensure their safety and the safety of the wider Middlebury community? These are the questions that have driven us at the College since we sent the great majority of students home last spring and effectively evacuated the campus.
Once again, we are bearing witness to unconscionable acts of violence, rooted in racism, directed at Black people in the United States.
Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed, George Floyd, and countless other Black people have been murdered. For their family, friends, and the Black community, here and around the world, grief and loss have been exacerbated by a literal witness to their death in media—something none of us needs or wants to see, but also knowing that without it, once again, justice would not be rendered.
We write to make you aware that during the next few weeks various students from the College will retrieve their belongings from campus while others will move.
I write to offer my deep congratulations to all of you on the occasion of our graduates receiving their degrees from Middlebury, and my special congratulations to the members of the Class of 2020 themselves.
We are writing to you today about Middlebury’s policies for work at any Middlebury location, in order to comply with local executive orders. Our first priority is the safety of all our employees.
We write to follow up on our April 24 message about guidance on returning to work. We want to share with you what is taking place initially and what will be the next step.
Even though we are in more of a steady rhythm now, we didn’t want to let a week go by without updating you on the progress we are making in determining how Middlebury will operate in the months ahead. Like every institution around the country, this week we have been scenario planning. Scenario planning is its own form of storytelling.
I want to invite you to visit a new Middlebury website we’ve created to support those of you who have transitioned to temporary remote work. The site includes a variety of links and articles as well as free online training classes and workshops you might find helpful. We’ve also consolidated much of our Covid-related policy information into one area so you can easily find answers to your questions.
It is understandable that you may be eager to get back to work on campus. All of us would like this to happen but for the sake of everyone’s health and safety, if you have been working from home, please continue to do so until you have permission to return. Human Resources will coordinate with supervisors to plan a transition back to campus, and supervisors will continue to communicate directly with staff.
We write now with a small view into our financial future. Before we do, we thought it worth reminding you of our current fiscal state. In an earlier note we described how we are projecting a $13.0 million deficit for this year ending June 30, 2020, having been hit hard by the stock market downturn and a number of other factors. These include our obligation to refund unused room and board for undergraduates as well as fees from Study Abroad students, expected shortfalls in philanthropy, and lost revenue from auxiliary sources like the ski areas and bookstore as they needed to close early.