The Endowment’s Long Legacy

Over the past two centuries, generous donors have provided gifts to create individual endowed funds. The Barton Hepburn Women’s Professorship, for example, was established in 1908 by A. Barton Hepburn, class of 1871, with a gift of $60,231.16 The fund helped Middlebury to diversify its faculty by supporting scholars who were women—a rarity in academia in the early 20th century. Today the fund is valued at $1,375,056.75, and the professorship supports Marcia Collaer, Barton Hepburn Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Donor support continues to be critical in fulfilling Middlebury’s commitment to academic excellence. In fiscal year 2021, gifts to the endowment from alumni, parents, and friends totaled $9.3 million. Over time, the endowment has benefited from the continued support of generous donors and the power of investment compounding of those endowment gifts. Without these gifts, the endowment’s value and impact would be significantly lower.

To ensure that the institution continues to thrive two centuries from our own time and beyond, Middlebury must balance the interests and needs of current and future generations of Middlebury students. Maintaining the inflation-adjusted value of the endowment underpins this concept of intergenerational equity.

Endowment in Action

Since its creation by members of the Class of 1962 at their 25th Reunion, the Ronald H. Brown ’62 Summer Internship Program Fund has enabled more than 680 students to gain the skills and experience to chart their life’s course. 

Some can draw a direct line from that internship to their current careers. Others discovered that the career they’d thought they wanted was not the right fit. In each case, the opportunity to pursue an internship was pivotal in determining next steps and achieving a meaningful career.

Since 1987, the critical need for students to pursue an internship as part of their college education has increased exponentially, and the fund and its impact have grown to meet that need. Over the past 35 years, the fund has received over 220 individual gifts, totaling $498,788, and has grown in value to $1.9 million. In 1987, the Ron Brown Fund supported 5 student interns. In the summer of 2022, 22 students received an internship stipend of $4,000 each from the Ron Brown Fund. That kind of intergenerational impact is possible because the internships are paid for by a permanent, endowed fund established to support students in perpetuity. The original gift has been conserved, and a portion of the returns is spent and a portion is reinvested each year.