History of the School of Spanish
View the recently released video of the School of Spanish in 1939 for images of Middlebury College, the Chapel, Hepburn Hall, and the town of Middlebury.
Middlebury College has been delivering life-changing summer immersion language programs from beginner to graduate level in Vermont for over 100 years. Middlebury’s first summer language school—the German School—was founded in 1915, followed by the French and Spanish schools in 1916 and 1917, respectively.
The Language Schools continue to follow traditions of the Language Pledge, cocurricular activities, and dining and living in facilities assigned to each school. In 1939 students ate on the second floor of Hepburn extension and had individual dining rooms assigned to each Language School. Each student in the School of Spanish was assigned a specific table, and the professors rotated so all students had a chance to eat with all of the professors.
For more on the history of the School of Spanish, see En las montañas de Vermont (Spanish) and In the Green Mountains of Vermont (English), written by Professor Roberto Veguez in 2017.
The School of Spanish now enrolls over 250 students each summer. We offer the 7-week immersion program as well as graduate programs which can be completed over 4-summers in Middlebury, Vermont, or a summer in Vermont followed by a year in Madrid, Spain. In either case there is an option to study a summer in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In addition to German, French, and Spanish, Middlebury Language Schools now offers 13 languages (Abenaki, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish).
