2019

November 21, 2019: New Policy on Open Expression

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,

I write to you today about Middlebury’s new Policy on Open Expression. Its purpose is both to protect the expression of every member of our community and to prohibit substantial disruption of someone else’s expression on our campuses. Our commitment to open expression is integral to our vision of a world with a robust and inclusive public sphere where more and more voices can be included and heard. Pursuing our vision means creating an inclusive environment with academic freedom, where all members of our community are encouraged to engage with each other across difference, and to do so with respect. Inclusion and open expression are values that reinforce each other. The new policy reflects our dedication to these two principles.

We are also providing additional resources to explain and offer guidance on how the policy will be interpreted and enforced.

The policy grew out of the statement about Academic Freedom, Integrity, and Respect created by the College faculty and endorsed by the Institute faculty in 2018. The College’s Faculty Council then appointed a Policy Working Group made up of faculty, students, and staff who wrote a new policy on open expression. Their proposal, which Faculty Council shared with the campus for feedback in May 2019, is the primary basis for our new Policy on Open Expression. The Senior Leadership Group and I adopted the new Open Expression Policy in November 2019.

The Open Expression Policy will replace the current Demonstrations and Protests Policy in Section I of the Middlebury Handbook and will be linked to updated Demonstration Regulations, FAQs, and a new page of open expression resources that we expect to update in the future. Please send your suggestions for additional resources or new FAQs to openexpression@middlebury.edu.

As I shared in my November 1 message, we are developing additional resources for inclusion, including ways to promote a culture that simultaneously embodies academic freedom, integrity, and respect with people who invite speakers as well as in our classrooms, residences, and other spaces. Our five-year action plan on diversity, equity, and inclusion is currently being circulated in draft form to key stakeholders for feedback and will be shared with the community at the beginning of the year. If you are interested in contributing to that work, please contact Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández or Director of Education for Equity and Inclusion Renee Wells.

My colleagues on the Senior Leadership Group and I greatly appreciate the efforts that faculty, staff, and students have made to our new Policy on Open Expression, including all the members who have served on the Policy Working Group during the last two years. You have given time and careful thought to these issues. In a recent communication I expressed thanks for the deliberations of the Committee on Speech and Inclusion, for many colleagues’ work to implement and use Restorative Practices, for the Engaged Listening Project, and for the multiple Critical Conversations we’ve undertaken. I want to reiterate my gratitude here. Our community will continue to benefit enormously from these efforts as we move forward engaged in dialogue with one another.

With appreciation,

Laurie Patton

President

November 1, 2019: Speech and Inclusion Update

Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff,



I write today to let you know about the progress we’re making on an issue fundamental to Middlebury’s well-being: moving us toward a truly robust and inclusive public sphere. As I’ve stated before, I believe we can and will fulfill our equal commitments to free expression and a truly inclusive community on all of our campuses.



But we can do that only if we continue to engage in the process that we began in earnest a few years ago—which has taken rigorous self-reflection, research, and, perhaps most important of all, assuming good intentions.



I’m confident that this work can be a force for creativity. This is the Middlebury we’re trying to create.



As is often the case with dual commitments, there’s a tension here that isn’t easy to resolve. Every week, we read about institutions’ struggles over questions of speech and inclusivity. We ourselves have experienced them firsthand. Society, as a whole, has too, sometimes in painful ways.



Our work is therefore a work in progress.



Last spring, we canceled an event because we didn’t have sufficient security resources to address growing safety concerns. Criticism in response to our decision was passionate and vocal, from inside our community and out. But ensuring safety often involves judgment calls that we must make and will continue to labor over. A commitment to free expression—which lies at the heart of teaching and learning because it is based on the principle that all community members can participate equally and all voices can be heard—must be supported by a safe environment.



As our Committee on Speech and Inclusion stated in its January 2018 report, “Attempts to curtail speech that is considered offensive or controversial by some can lead to a chilling effect, in conflict with the spirit of our vision statement.”



At the same time, we must recognize that dignitary harms may be experienced along the way. As a community we need to be prepared to be supportive and attentive to those harms.



Over last summer and into fall, we’ve been working to shore up our policies and protocols to increase our ability to enable a robust range of perspectives to be included, heard, engaged with, and argued over. In the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing these policies and enhancements with you, which are based on our twin values of freedom of expression and inclusivity. I’d like to give you some brief details about them now.

• Thanks to the incredibly thoughtful efforts of the Policy Working Group (appointed by Faculty Council), whose deep dive into our existing Protests and Demonstrations Policy last year surfaced a number of relevant issues, we’re developing a new Open Expression Policy. This policy will affirm that our civic discourse is premised on the fundamental equality of all Middlebury community members; recognize the historical importance of nonviolent public protest and demonstration; and explicitly define key disruptive behaviors that will be subject to penalties.
• We are exploring establishing programs, such as the Open Expression Observers, to protect the rights of speakers and demonstration participants to express their opinions in nondisruptive ways, and to protect the rights of other community members to conduct normal business.
• We’ll share a revised Policy on Scheduling Space for Middlebury Events, whose purpose is to better anticipate the impact of speaker events and execute appropriate security and support measures.
• We’ve studied best practices at peer institutions and consulted experts in safety and security. We’ve strengthened relationships and planning practices with our local law enforcement partners and increased resources to ensure that all speakers invited by our students, faculty, or staff may speak, and that those who disagree may voice their perspectives safely.
• We’re developing workshops for students on how to express opinions while adhering to our policies and in the spirit of our community values; FAQs on the new protocols; and online resources regarding campus speech and inclusion. We’re outlining ideas and actions that will provide space and support in the community during and around a controversial event.

My colleagues on the Senior Leadership Group and I look forward to sharing more details in the weeks ahead. Different elements will be led by certain SLG members, but we’re united in our commitment to both open expression and inclusivity.



Please know how grateful we are to you for the thought and care you’ve given to these truly difficult issues. The deliberations of the Committee on Speech and Inclusion, our commitment to Restorative Practices, the Engaged Listening Project, the multiple Critical Conversations we’ve undertaken—so many of you have done much work to strengthen our ties and our understanding of what it means to be accountable to each other in a community of learners.



Thank you all for continuing to map a constructive way forward for Middlebury.

With appreciation,



Laurie Patton

President

September 6, 2019: Address to Faculty Bread Loaf Meeting

Greetings!

This summer I’ve been reading Maria Popova and her beautiful work of intellectual history, Figuring. From the book jacket: “Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement. … Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world.”

Popova travels through the lives of “artists, writers, and scientists—mostly women, mostly queer—” who rose out of heartbreak in their private lives “to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe.” Astronomer Maria Mitchell and sculptor Harriet Hosmer are less well known, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller more so.

Maria Popova has become someone I deeply admire because she calls herself a reader and a writer—that simple. She writes about what she reads on the website Brain Pickings, and I highly recommend it to any of you who read and write, which is all of you. As her biography tells us, she also hosts The Universe in Verse, an annual celebration of science through poetry. Popova spent her childhood in Bulgaria surrounded by the study of music and mathematics. Brain Pickings is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive.

I love the fact that reading and writing are what Popova is all about, straightforward with a deep love of history and scholarly pursuit even in the face of adversity. I go to her website frequently for inspiration, particularly about a topic that interests her the most: How people remain curious and creative in the midst of heartbreak and tumult.

I spend time describing her to you this morning because I believe we all have committed ourselves to reading and writing—and most important, to teaching—in the midst of adversity, in a world that understands less and less the life of the mind and engaging across boundaries. We’re being asked to remain curious in the midst of heartbreak, to become better educators in the midst of chaos. These are key to the Middlebury identity.

The chaos strikes at the heart of our educational mission. Students turned away as they arrive to study from another country. Students, faculty, and staff essential to our nation’s academic mission afraid to travel across the country. Slow-moving storms and sea-level rise making our coastal universities and colleges unlivable. Our alumni who have become journalists unable to write as they have learned to do.

And yet, there is hope, as Toni Morrison reminded us. “I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos,” she wrote, “naming and violence.” She went on to observe that there is also a third response—stillness and creativity. She felt that writers who produce meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. I believe the same thing is true of those who teach. We who teach can and should produce meaning in the midst of chaos, perhaps especially in the midst of chaos. And those who teach must remain true, as Maria Popova is, to their simple identity as readers, writers, and thinkers.

If we do this, we’ll fulfill a vision for Middlebury that I have built from listening. I frequently share with you my vision for Middlebury 10 years from now, and will do so again here:

In 2028, Middlebury is a place where we:

• have taken advantage of our global network of offerings to enrich our curriculum in all our units;
• have achieved a 5 to 10 percent increase in financial aid;
• have named and achieved a new environmental goal;
• as Middlebury citizens (faculty, staff, and students) dwell comfortably and rigorously in the public sphere, using data to craft our arguments;
• see ourselves as drivers and incubators of curricular innovation;
• as faculty have given ourselves the flexibility that we need to make changes and keep traditions;
• have built a better learning community through increasing inclusive pedagogy in the classroom;
• have a commitment to experiential learning across the curriculum and cocurriculum;
• have built a deep culture of restorative practices where we take responsibility for our conflicts;
• have built an improved residential experience giving students a sense of belonging;
• regularly engage the arts to make more inclusive spaces;
• have a sense of empowerment and alliance between administration, staff, and faculty;
• possess a shared articulated sense of values that we remind ourselves of often.

That is our vision. I would like this year to focus on building that learning community, particularly through the faculty-student relationship. I feel that we’re called to do so in new and important ways.

Before I turn to that, let me begin by sharing progress we’ve made on important fronts as teachers and learners.

Financial Sustainability

As I reported to you last spring, we’ve turned a corner. Our budget projects a $324,000 positive margin that we’ll reinvest in our mission. We’ve attained financial sustainability thanks to your help, and we’ll be challenged to maintain it. This year, we’ll start a new budgetary process, in which we put yet another plank in our shared governance platform. I define shared governance as regular and meaningful occasions for consequential input, and in November we’ll have an open meeting to outline budget parameters and invite input from all who would like to be there. We’ll hold a subsequent meeting with elected officials of staff, faculty, and students to talk about next steps and priorities. In February, we’ll share the next phase of this work with the same group of elected officials of staff, faculty, and students. This effort will be a pilot, a chance to smoothe out the kinks and have a regular process in which people feel engaged and empowered.

We completed workforce planning without any layoffs. While we were thrilled that we could do so, we haven’t been able to complete other necessary priorities with staff, which we’re eager to turn to this year: working on a better wage for all workers and a better rewards and recognition system. We were also only partially successful in reducing workloads in the process of workforce planning, with some departments maintaining previous levels of work with fewer people to do it. We know the impact that this has, and we’re actively working with Staff Council and others to address this.

In fundraising, which is the best thing I can do on your behalf, we raised new commitments of $44.8 million last year, including $16.5 million for financial aid for the College, the Institute, Languages, and Bread Loaf. Annual giving reached $23.9 million. Since I have become president, financial aid commitments have totaled $52.4 million ($34 million in endowment and $18.4 million in current use).

Academic Programs

Last May we approved several new programs, which were enthusiastically received by faculty, students, and staff. One, Black Studies, was decades in the making. Another, Food Studies, was a recent but highly relevant area of interest for many of our students. We’ve found a way to staff these programs and are delighted to be launching them. They were faculty driven, faculty deliberated, and it’s our job to maintain the right level of support. Our ongoing challenge will be to fund the areas we know we need, and where students are asking for important additions to the curriculum, while at the same time deepening our identity as a liberal arts and sciences institution of the highest quality.

We’re also focusing on the academic themes we shared with you last year—deepening our student-centered approach. We learned from alumni and heard from faculty in the Envisioning Middlebury process that students need and want to work with data. In fact, everyone is doing data, but I hope, with your insights, we can do it differently here within the liberal arts and sciences. We know from the great work of the Engaged Listening Project that we’ll constantly need to develop the skill of listening better. We distinguish ourselves from other schools our size by the intensity and breadth of our international offerings, and as Provost Cason and our students have put it, we’re moving from a global footprint to a global network. This means we have important work to do to clear the underbrush to make it easier for students to travel across all of Middlebury’s programs. I want to create and deepen our intellectual identity around global—which is our signature—and I welcome your ideas about how we might do that, department by department.

Environmental Sustainability

Our work in Energy2028—our comprehensive plan to completely shift our main campus to renewable energy in the next 10 years—continues to be a bellwether of the consistency of our educational mission to educate students to address the world’s most challenging problems. Two weeks ago, we broke ground on the anaerobic digester that will process manure and food waste at a local dairy farm into renewable natural gas. This is Vermont’s first biodigester and the first in the nation to fuel a college campus directly. The gas from that biodigester will provide about half the energy we need for heating and cooling our main campus, a big piece in helping us reach our renewable energy goal. It will also enable a local Vermont farm to become sustainable once again. Environmental Council faculty, students, and staff are hard at work on the next phase. Through faculty leadership and partnership with the Sustainability Solutions Lab, we’re creating inspiring projects to get us to the next level of 100 percent energy renewability.

Community Well-Being

The mental health challenges our students are experiencing are part of a nationwide concern, and I’ve asked our student affairs office to continue to focus on this critical area. Since 2015, we’ve put in place almost twice the counseling and programming staff and installed two new programs—one that allows a student access to a mental health professional 24/7, especially from abroad, and the other helps students triage and gets them to the right form of care any time of day. We’re also partnering with JED, a movement for mental health awareness, which has a particular focus on suicide awareness and prevention. The death of Eric Masinter ’21, and that of Thibault Lannoy ’20 before him, are a sign of our times.

Restorative practices are a second part of deepening our approaches to student wellness. Right now, we have more than 100 people trained in restorative practices, including all of residence life, and last year we saw the positive effects on campus of students taking on management of their own conflicts. We’re in the midst of setting a goal for how many restorative practices we have. We’re also focused on creating spaces that support our students—big, long-term projects that will allow them to connect differently and feel more welcomed in an open campus. That begins with a new student center and a replacement of Battell, projects we hope will come to fruition over the next five to 10 years. The community worked hard last year—faculty, staff, and students—on new recommendations for the Commons.

We’ve also begun to talk specifically about how we fundraise for faculty and staff positions in all of the areas I’ve described, as well as for our larger capital projects (like the student center and replacement of Battell) and even the possibility of a new museum to strengthen our burgeoning work in the arts. We’ll have more to share about this in the months ahead.

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So, what does this year look like for faculty and our common work together? I would like to name this year the year of focus on the faculty-student relationship. Let me share with you why I think this is where Middlebury lives and thrives. A 2016 Gallup poll showed that the three college experiences that were predictors of fulfillment later on in life—note fulfillment, not “success” or “earnings”—were a relationship with a mentor, an application of knowledge learned in the classroom somewhere outside the classroom, and a long-term research project. Middlebury excels at all three. And at the heart of those three is the faculty-student relationship.

Several things follow from this emphasis. First, we have renewed leadership and interest in this area across our Board of Trustees, administration, and faculty. Our new board chair, George Lee, is very interested in this topic, and we’ll be featuring student, faculty, and staff pairs at board meetings to share their experiences of learning together. I have reached out to key people on campus to think about starting an oral archive for those who might want to participate in a broader way of sharing those stories of that transformative relationship throughout Middlebury’s history. We are also focused on energizing the faculty intellectual connections to the Commons so that everyone benefits.

Second, we’ll have a suite of funding to help deepen that relationship. Some of it exists already but will be focused in this arena, and some of it is new. Our Fund for Innovation has made a turn to supporting innovative educational practices in the past two years, and I’ve asked Provost Cason to emphasize educational projects that further and deepen this faculty-student relationship as he moves forward with the call for funding this year. We’ll do the same with Envisioning Middlebury funding.

Finally, we’ve been able to raise a $100,000 fund to focus on faculty-staff-student research projects that connect with Energy2028. We’ve had a groundswell of faculty coming forward to offer courses in this area and want to move forward with a research and teaching fund that can help faculty, students, and staff in the work they’re doing in questions of energy and climate change. I’m also working on a larger fund that will be entirely focused on transformative research in the context of faculty-student mentorship, for all students and for all subjects. This is where Middlebury thrives. This is where the creativity is. We as an administration need to support it as much as we possibly can.

Last year, I asked us all as a faculty to focus, department by department, on what free, inclusive, and effective pedagogy looks like in 2019–2020. I asked Faculty Council’s help in doing that. I asked our improved and emerging shared governance structures to do that. When we focus on students, we’re better. I’m calling on the depths of our shared pedagogical mission to help us stay in deliberative community. I’m calling on the depth of our vocations as teachers, the depth of our obligations to the next generation, which both needs us and is profoundly different from us. That means, in the year of focus on the faculty-student relationship, I exhort all of us to think about inclusive pedagogy. I want to pause here. No matter how many generalizations we might read about Gen Z—and how much background we can learn about their orientations, their challenges, their habits of mind—it’s not the same as doing the daily work of engaging students in 2020. That work demands yet another level of rigor. And most important, of curiosity. I worry that we’re not curious enough about whom we are teaching, and we need to be.

Over the summer, we’ve developed an Inclusive Pedagogy Program, a series of ongoing workshops throughout the year that I encourage all faculty to participate in. While anyone can come and engage in any workshop, it is in fact a curriculum in its own right. I want to emphasize here the community practitioners’ aspect of that work. The program is designed to create space for the participants in the program to explore, share, and problem solve together. We also want the program to be an avenue where faculty can take knowledge from workshops and apply it in their own classrooms, and then share the impact of those efforts with their colleagues in their home departments as a way to build internal capacity. They can share application strategies with their colleagues that are adapted for their specific disciplines. Every department is different, but I ask all departments to embark on this reflection. Even if you disagree with the language, even if it seems as if you’re already doing it, I ask you to embark on this process of reflection as a way to cultivate curiosity about whom we are teaching and about how to become more effective teachers.

I believe we can also do this through reflection on Middlebury’s engagement historically with inclusivity and diversity in all their many forms. In response to faculty interest, we’ve raised funds to help the institution explore its own archives, in collaboration with the local community. Rebekah Irwin and Bill Hart will communicate to the College specific details about this long-term project, called the Twilight Project, to commence officially later this year or early next, as we continue to develop it with an eye toward organizing a major symposium in fall 2023 to mark the bicentennial of Alexander Twilight’s graduation from Middlebury College.

To return to my beginning of this talk: Toni Morrison stood in this very spot and read for us. I think we need to follow her model—renewed reflection on the simple and hugely complex act of teaching. I’m going to keep Toni Morrison’s words with me: There are two human responses to the perception of chaos—naming and violence. And a third response, of stillness and creativity.

And I’m going to keep reading Maria Popova to explore how people remain curious and creative in the midst of heartbreak and tumult, and how we can keep working together to achieve this vision.

As educators we need to continue to name what is happening in the world around us—for the sake of all of us. We need to be still and creative as teachers, for the sake of the deep, humane consequences that spring from an ethical life of the mind.

Right now, today, this week, and this month, and this year, you as teachers and thinkers—in pursuit of an ethical life of the mind—are the bulwark against chaos. You’re the salvation of our public life. We need you to keep naming and keep creating, for the sake of our common world. As we live through deep disagreement, we have an opportunity to deepen our common purpose. I’m personally honored, in the last of the summer stillness, to welcome you to this new year. 

May 25, 2019: Baccalaureate Address

Good afternoon, and welcome to your penultimate ritual at Middlebury. As I look at all that you have done since you began here, there is no doubt in my mind that you are fully prepared to take on the challenges of the world. Seated in front of me right now, you are the 644 members of the Class of 2019, who have come to us from 42 different states and 69 different countries. Together and as individuals, you have already accomplished what most people couldn’t dream of doing in a lifetime. 

Let me offer you some numbers as evidence.  132 of you completed joint or dual majors. Thirty-eight of you majored in a foreign language, 82 attended the summer Language Schools, six of you studied abroad for the summer, 369 of you went abroad for a semester, 36 of you for a year, to 38 different countries, studying in another language. 

You have competed in athletics. Among you are three individual NCAA champions. You have been part of 17 NESCAC championship teams and five NCAA champion teams –and that may be more after this weekend. Women’s lacrosse is playing in the NCAA Final Four for the third time in four years and we just got word fifteen minutes ago that they won in the semi-finals against Wesleyan, 16-8! We will wish them well in the championship game tomorrow.  Seven members of the Class of 2019 are competing in the NCAA Division III Championships Outdoor Track and Field Championships. Beyond varsity athletics, you’ve  played a dozen club sports, including men’s and women’s Ultimate Frisbee, which once again competed in the Division III National Championships just last week. The women made it to the quarter- finals, and the men won their second national D3 title.

You have created connections through community service in Addison County and beyond.  Sixty-five of you participated in a Middlebury Alternative Break trip; 13 of you led your fellow classmates on week-long service trips over February break to explore urban food systems in San Francisco, youth education and inequality in St. Louis, and environmental restoration in Costa Rica.

Fifty of you received Cross-Cultural Community Service Fund grants that supported your projects in international community service, advocacy, and activism in places like Serbia, Ghana, Nicaragua, China, and England.  Twenty-two of you are current Community Friends mentors who have spent two hours or more each week with an elementary-age child in Addison County—and seven of you have been paired with the same child for all four years. Thirteen members of the class of 2019 served in Privilege & Poverty summer internships: 7 with local organizations, 6 with national placements, and two of you completed the full requirements of the Privilege & Poverty Academic Cluster, to graduate as P&P Scholars. Eight of you were DREAM mentors; thirteen of you collaborated with Vermont schoolteachers to help teach world languages. 

Then there’s what you’ve accomplished as individuals and in small groups. You helped to organize Nocturne, an all-night campus art festival; you created a new line of women’s outdoor pants. You conducted research on the interaction between computers and music; and on shimenawa, the sacred ropes used in Shinto ceremonies; and on social capital and albinism in African populations. You helped curate museum exhibitions, performed choral music in the Baltic States, theater as part of a professional company in New York City, and jazz in our concert hall.

And you challenged us, helping us reach our goal of carbon neutrality; increasing campus diversity; reiterating our support of our DACA and undocumented students; broadening our understanding of accessibility and of gender identification and inclusivity; expanding the kinds of conversations we are having on campus; reconfiguring our curriculum.

You also helped us achieve one of the most remarkable things in this community’s history—Energy 2028.  The collaboration of students, faculty, staff, and trustees to create an Energy plan that will make our campus powered by 100% renewable energy in 2028. We have already begun plans to build a solar field to help with that.  This winter, we will begin to build a bio-digester using food and manure that will do many things at once. It will be the first of its kind to provide fuel directly to a campus community. It will help decrease the phosphorous levels in Lake Champlain. It will help with our food waste, and allow a local farm to thrive again.  Our endowment will be fully divested of fossil fuels in 10-15 years. Patient, persistent, student activism and work over many years drove all of that.  You kept with it, and your success has created a real milestone for all of Middlebury.  

I mention Energy 2028 because it is a wonderful example of what I am about to charge you to do.  I rarely charge members of a class to go out and do something specific. I usually charge them to go and find their life’s work— however complex, however simple. To find the internal voices that spur them on and to heed the external ones that nurture and inspire them. And you should do that. All of you. All the time. You should find your question— the one question that only you can ask—the question that you will never get tired of asking and you’ll never know the answer to.

There is nothing more important than finding your question. But there is one question that all of us should be asking: how do we care for our environment? It is our collective question. The one question we should never stop asking. The one we must ask on behalf of the world. Bill McKibben said of you this past year that you are the most important generation of our times.  You didn’t ask for that status. But, since earlier generations have failed to address climate change, the fate of the earth lies in your hands.

So today, I am going to ask you to do something specific. To carry on a particular legacy. I am going to ask you to do what you did in helping build Energy 2028: use your education to protect the environment. If we have educated you in science, you will understand scientific consensus that gives us ten to fifteen years to address the carbon damage. If you have been educated as social scientists, you will know the large-scale displacement of people due to climate conditions. If you have been educated as humanists, you will know grief —the loss of plant and animal species, indeed, entire landscapes, that is accelerating all around us. If you have been educated as artists, you know the vibrant color of life in a coral reef.

You can still be a lawyer, or a financial analyst, or biologist, or a writer or a traveler or an educator.  But, as you do all those other things, make your profession work on behalf of the planet. Because you have learned biology. Policy. Poetry. Painting. Ethics. Astrophysics. Everything you have learned here, you can put to use on behalf of the environment.

Some of you might not find this hard because you are already embarking on environmental careers. Others of you might be anxious because I have asked you to do something extra. “How do I do this? I’m set for graduate school in math. I’m headed to Bank of America. I’m going to be a carpenter in New Hampshire,” you’re thinking.

In answer, I will say something very simple: keep the lessons you have learned from this landscape with you.  You have all taken walks and seen the shadow of the mountains in the moonlight. You have crossed pastures where the swamps and stubble are heavy and unexpected. You have swum in lakes bluer and colder than you ever thought possible.  You have watched trees on campus turn a shade of red that has made you weep.

 Every landscape has lessons to teach. This New England landscape is no different. Take them with you.  Let me turn to the words of your literal Elder—emeritus professor and renowned environmental writer, John Elder.  In his interview with Leath Tonino in 2013, they were discussing the late environmentalist Roger Deakin, who was often described as an “explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.”

John Elder goes on to elaborate on why that is also a good description of his own work. He has become an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby because of the particular power of the New England landscape and how close it all seems.  He writes of his life in Bristol, Vermont, the town next door, where some of you have gone to get a cup of coffee or to swim:

I can walk out my back door and see bear tracks in the mud. I can climb the little hog back ridge east of the village and get lost every time. It’s hard to know what your elevation is in those thick forests. You don’t have much of a view. But I never worry about starving to death, because sooner or later I can spot Lake Champlain and figure out which way West is. I’ve often wandered for two or three hours in those woods but I tend not to miss supper.

So too, you can be that kind of explorer of the landscape—wherever you find yourselves. As you do something for the environment, as you work on this massive challenge on behalf of the planet and the human race, think about doing so by learning about and working on behalf of the undiscovered country of the nearby.

By taking lessons from this landscape, right here, Elder learned that he was able to discover more and more, closer and closer to home. I believe you can too. Work in your town, your neighborhood, your house, your room, your cellar, under your sink.  There is no place too small to start working. That is not because we can check off some environmental box if you do something like buy better cleaning solution.  It’s because the only way that we can accomplish something like healing the planet on such a massive scale is for each of us to understand the undiscovered country of the nearby.  As you do so, you will bring this New England landscape with you. You will use the four years of your time here—the mountains, trees, grasses, bushes, blooms—to imagine something new and different for all of us. 

Let me be even more specific about what you might have learned from this landscape. For Elder, there is a thickness and intricacy to the Vermont mountains—what one student of his from the vaster landscapes of the West called “living in a teacup.” In that teacup, there is the density of the forest floor, with layers of history that tell of the clear cutting done by those of who built homes here last century, and the century before that. There are the old stones that they placed, now barely visible and that now seem like part of the ground. There is the history of violence, too, as those who settled here displaced the Abenaki people who lived in these hills and fished in these waters. That, too, is sometimes barely visible, but so much a part of our legacy, the history we inherit.   Thickness. Intricacy. These are two things you have learned from the New England landscape during your four years here.

You have also learned messiness. When Elder first moved here from the west and started taking walks in the New England woods, he found it profoundly messy. “There are twigs and bushes and decomposing logs everywhere. I had to lift my feet to move through it all.” Elder tells us, “Messiness helps us to avoid simplistic thinking. Instead of wanting everything neat and smooth and clear, we remember that a healthy forest has all stages of growth in it.” Messiness helps us to avoid simplistic thinking. Your generation, your class, you—you are inheriting a messier, more complex world than has ever existed before. That means that you cannot afford the luxury of simplistic thinking. In order to heal our planet, you need to embrace the complexity, and avoid that longing—so deep within all of us—for there to be a neat, and smooth, and clean, and clear solution.

Everything you do must be at least complex enough to take both humanity and nature into account—as the Robinson Jeffers poem implies, you need to “love the earth and not humanity apart from that.” You are tasked, more than any other generation, to love both earth and humanity. And to find a new relationship between them.

Middlebury graduates: Historians, geologists, artists, physicists, and so many more. You are extraordinary young people with drive, and energy, and courage.  If Middlebury has done its work, then you will thrive and, in doing so, help our planet to thrive. Go and explore the undiscovered country nearby. Embrace its complexity and its profoundly messy challenges. Go with the Vermont landscape inside you. That landscape has taught you well, if you take the time to listen to it. You can, and must, heal the world. We are so very proud. Congratulations!

May 21, 2019: A Financial Milestone

Dear Members of the Middlebury Community,

As some of you know by now, this month the Middlebury Board of Trustees approved a budget for the upcoming fiscal year that projects an operating surplus for the first time since 2012. This is an important milestone for our institution.

It also is a shared accomplishment. While we have benefitted from extraordinary leadership on the part of my senior staff in this journey (more on that later), our success, ultimately, is due to the work and ownership of our staff and faculty. Together, you have made hundreds—probably thousands—of decisions in the course of your work that prioritized our educational mission and brought our expenses into line with our revenues.

For all you have done, I thank you.

I want to share a bit of perspective on the progress we have made. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2016, just three years ago, Middlebury’s deficit reached $16.7 million. On top of that, we used $5.9 million in supplemental funds from the endowment. Put simply, we spent $22.6 million more than we took in that year.

There was no choice but to act boldly. In September 2016 we shared with you a plan called The Road to a Sustainable Future. It contained a number of specific actions—most of which we have taken. Given the toll on our community, we determined last year that we needed to accelerate our work toward financial sustainability. Next year’s surplus comes a year earlier than we initially planned. And it comes with a true 5 percent draw from the endowment with no extraordinary funds taken from reserves.

It is important to recognize the effort this took. This process has been both lengthy and challenging, and caused many in our community significant uncertainty and discomfort. Thanks to your participation, the process was successful.

Next fiscal year, our total expenses, including salaries, benefits, non-salary expenses, depreciation, and interest, will be $300,000 less than in FY 2016. The largest change will be in compensation, including benefits. It is important to note that we achieved the compensation savings entirely through attrition and incentive separations. Even though separations may not have been what some had originally planned, I am deeply appreciative of all the work that made it possible to avoid involuntary layoffs. David Provost, Karen Miller, and Jeff Cason, who have led us so admirably through this process, will write to you shortly with more information about the results of the Incentive Separation Plan and the Faculty Incentive Retirement Plan.

We are all profoundly grateful for everyone’s efforts and the impact those efforts will have on ensuring Middlebury’s long-term financial sustainability. Maintaining our secure financial footing will require continued care and attention. The Board of Trustees will consider a proposal at the fall meeting that will require the administration to submit a budget each year that shows an operating surplus. Any proposed deficit would require a supermajority vote of approval.

As we move toward the end of the academic year and Middlebury College’s 218th Commencement Exercises, I thank you again and wish you a restful, warm, and sunny summer.

I am proud to be part of this community.

Yours cordially,

Laurie Patton

President

April 18, 2019: Message to the Community

Dear Members of the Middlebury Community,

Yesterday’s decision not to move ahead with the scheduled lecture by Ryszard Legutko was both difficult and necessary. The safety of our community is essential for academic engagement. But this decision does not define who we are.

Middlebury is committed to the values of academic freedom, academic integrity, inclusivity, and respectful behavior, which are intertwined at the core of our educational mission. Over the past two years, we have constructively engaged many controversial speakers, demonstrated peacefully and persuasively, and stayed in conversation with each other over very difficult issues. We will continue to do so. I appreciate that the organizers of the lecture and of the event the students planned in response have worked with us. Working together and listening to each other is the way we live up to our core values.

The event planned by the Alexander Hamilton Forum with Ryszard Legutko is protected by our commitment to academic freedom and free inquiry. The Hamilton Forum has extended a provisional invitation to Legutko to return next fall.

It is equally important to note that this event did not occur in a vacuum. In recent weeks we have experienced several incidents of bias that are causing pain and anger in our community. It is clear that we need a deeper campus-wide engagement about classroom climate and inclusive pedagogy. Members of the STEM faculty have expressed interest in a facilitated dialogue about course content, its potential impact, and how to develop and maintain more inclusive classroom environments. We will meet with those faculty members early next week. That conversation with them can become a model for engaging all faculty in every department in these dialogues throughout the rest of this semester and continuing in the fall.

It has been a difficult time on campus. As a community, we must continually reaffirm and balance our commitment to the inseparable values of academic freedom, academic integrity, inclusivity, and respectful behavior on our campus and in our classrooms. Living these commitments is the biggest challenge facing not just Middlebury but colleges and communities across the country.

Sincerely yours,

Laurie Patton

President

February 4, 2019: Important Update on Workforce Planning

Dear Middlebury Faculty and Staff,

As we enter an important week in our workforce planning process, I am writing today to share my thoughts on the progress we have made over the last six months and the foundation we are building for a sustainable and inspiring future for Middlebury.

Last July, we launched workforce planning with a goal of envisioning how our work—particularly the work of staff—can become more focused on our educational mission, and to do so in more effective, efficient ways. We set out to identify the positions needed to do that work, including new positions we need but don’t have today. A great many of you have been involved in this process, and I am deeply grateful to you all. I have been personally inspired by your stories of creativity and impressed by your engagement in thinking differently about our work. I am excited by the overall result of a new landscape for work at Middlebury. We’ll be sharing that picture with you later this spring.

We also did this creative work with the awareness that we must address a large deficit and build long-term financial sustainability. In discussions with the Board of Trustees, we set a target to reduce staff compensation by 10 percent—or about $8 million annually. Because we knew we could not and should not balance our budget on staff reductions alone, we extended the incentive separation program to faculty at the Middlebury Institute and introduced a faculty retirement incentive program at the College.

Today, I believe we are moving toward a successful conclusion to this process. Twenty-three tenured faculty at the College have submitted their retirement paperwork, leading to an annual savings of $1.2 million. Tomorrow, David Provost and Karen Miller will write to you with details, including a timeline that begins this week, for the staff and Institute faculty incentive separation plan. Based on the work we have done to date, we believe we will achieve the sought-after $8 million in staff savings and a more than $1 million reduction in faculty compensation at the Institute.

This process has been difficult and anxiety-producing for many. Because we have wanted to minimize this impact as much as possible, we have been engaged in careful planning and kept close watch on hiring over the past year. Our current situation shows encouraging progress: Of the 150 positions identified for elimination, the large majority of them, approximately 100, are already vacant. As a result, there are approximately 50 occupied staff positions identified for reduction. Furthermore, department leaders have started conversations with most of the people occupying those positions, and many of those have also been involved in conversations about next steps. And, significantly, workforce planning has identified about 60 new positions that we will create and fill over the next two years. This would result in a net reduction of approximately 90 positions over time.

Most of these new positions will be posted this week in a private portal where individuals whose current positions are eliminated by workforce planning can have the first opportunity to review them and, if they want, to apply. Later, if those positions are not filled, they will be posted more widely.

In many ways, this process was more difficult than it might be at other institutions because we are such tight-knit communities in Middlebury and Monterey. We knew that every decision would have an impact on a colleague, a friend, a neighbor. Through the exemplary leadership of Karen Miller and her team, we will remain committed to the transparency and fairness that has guided us to this point and will continue to guide us in the next stages of workforce planning. Staff and faculty councils have been extraordinarily helpful in giving us feedback when the process is not working as it should.

Importantly, we must ensure that the work we have identified as unnecessary actually goes away and we do not simply ask staff to do the same work with fewer people. We need to hear from you if that is not the case. We ask that you hold us accountable to these values and commitments, and to share your thoughts and constructive suggestions if we fall short. And we will continue to partner in thinking strategically about the work we do and elect not to do.

I thank you again for your creativity, care, and responsiveness in imagining a future Middlebury.

Sincerely,

Laurie Patton

President

February 2, 2019: Feb Celebration 2019

Greetings, Middlebury Class of February 2018.5. I want to congratulate you with a poem written by the late American poet Mary Oliver. It is a poem about the great outlines of winter and the great inspiration in a time of freezing temperatures and colder sunlight and long hours of reflection in the dark. And I will read it twice because you need to hear me say it at least twice. This poem reminded me of you—the winter graduates, February 2019.

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

As you gather here with your families, your friends, your professors, your advisors as witnesses to all your hard work over the past four years, I want to tell you: there isn’t a line in this poem that doesn’t remind me of all the things that you are. You were in college in one of the most tumultuous times in American history, and in higher education. In these times, you’ve built bridges. You’ve protested. You’ve created. You’ve traveled to make the world better. You’ve stayed at home to make the world better.

What I remember most: You came to us in winter. You began like the starlings to fly in winter. You are 100 graduates: 53 women and 47 men. You flew in from 27 states and 16 countries. And I can describe to you how you flew—how you have been acrobats in the freezing wind. Twenty-two of you completed a joint major or a double major. Seven of you majored in a foreign language, and 94 of you studied at least one foreign language at Middlebury. Twenty-two of you took on the rigors of the Middlebury Language Schools, and almost 70 of you studied abroad.

You have been stars dipping and rising across the arc of your Middlebury career, and as a result you have made Middlebury better for all of us. You played on club teams and varsity teams. You competed in NCAA championships, set school records, and helped lead your team to national and NESCAC titles. One of you directed last fall’s Middlebury Classic Quidditch Festival, which brought more than 700 muggles to campus. Another helped launch NER Out Loud, the podcast that features the work of the New England Review, our literary quarterly, read aloud by your fellow students.

You have done things that people thought were impossible. You have done things that you yourself have thought were impossible. Many of us, watching you, have simply not been able to imagine how you have done it: One of you, without a strong athletic background, started mountain biking as a sophomore and within two years competed at the National Collegiate Mountain Bike Championships. And this wasn’t just for personal ambition. Your goal is to become the first Afghan to race in the Olympics in cross-country mountain biking—and empower Afghan youth with the joy of riding and competing on mountain bikes, and connecting people across borders and cultures through their shared love of the sport and the outdoors.

And what lessons you all have prepared for us, even in the leafless winter: You were Middlebury College Access Mentors, changing the lives of young people in Addison County. You were Privilege and Poverty interns, helping to strengthen distressed communities both locally and nationally. You helped build an accessible network of local food systems to help feed area children. Through your work in Vermont and in the world, you have created examples for all of us to follow.

And here is the part that is much harder sometimes for the world to see: you have fragmented, come apart, and then become whole again. You wouldn’t be here with us, flying in leafless winter, if you had not struggled—if you had not come apart and then become whole again. Don’t ever forget those moments even though they might be difficult to remember. Don’t ever forget that, even though we marvel at you, you should marvel at yourselves. Because you have done what you thought you could never do. You overcame your own self-doubt, your own sense that you were not perfect at something.

And as you struggled with this, you became resilient. You understood something powerful about your own staying power and ability to pursue a vision even if you yourself, much less the world, didn’t believe it—at least not at first. And then slowly, through one small act after another, you became whole again. And you enacted your vision on behalf of all of us. You were making all of us better. You have risen and spun and started all over again, full of gorgeous life.

So now you fly one more time away from us in the leafless winter. May you rise and spin and start all over again, full of gorgeous life. We marvel at you now, and we will marvel when you come back to see us at Middlebury. We know that you will be gloriously spinning, taking your place in the world. And creating horizons filled with visions and patterns and inspiration. You are improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing. As though you had wings.

Let me remind you of who you are again.

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly

they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch

and you try

but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.

January 29, 2019: Energy2028

To the Middlebury Community,

In the early winter of 2017, after Middlebury had achieved carbon neutrality, I challenged our Environmental Council to envision the next steps in our sustainable future. The process that followed was a demonstration of Middlebury at its very best. Faculty, staff, and students proposed and debated dozens of ideas. Gradually a vision began to emerge. This past weekend, the Middlebury Board of Trustees unanimously endorsed that vision in the form of Energy2028—a 10-year plan conceived to transform our community’s commitment to living sustainably. We are announcing the plan today.

Middlebury’s new mission statement begins with the commitment to “educate students to lead engaged, consequential, and creative lives, contribute to their communities, and address the world’s most challenging problems.” Middlebury’s board noted prominently in its statement last fall that climate change is one of the most profound challenges facing our world and is therefore an educational and institutional priority of the highest order. Energy2028 will fulfill Middlebury’s educational mission at its deepest level; through its programs and projects, students will learn how to engage their communities, think consequentially, and act creatively at this crucial time for our environment. 

There are four interdependent components to Energy2028:

• First, Middlebury commits to powering its core campus with 100 percent renewable energy by 2028. We plan to do this through a combination of new solar, hydro, and renewable natural gas initiatives. Wherever possible, we will make those investments in Vermont.
• Second, Middlebury commits to reducing its energy consumption by 25 percent by 2028, and to retrofit its buildings to measure energy consumption more accurately. We are also exploring the design of an internal carbon tax to contribute to this effort.
• Third, by June 2019, Middlebury’s endowment manager, Investure, will cease all new direct fossil fuel investments in the endowment. Middlebury further commits to phasing out all direct investments in fossil fuels on a schedule designed to protect the value of our endowment: a 25 percent reduction in 3 years, 50 percent in 8 years, and 100 percent in 15 years. Investure will also continue to increase Middlebury’s holdings in sustainable investments over time.
• Fourth, Middlebury commits to building a robust educational plan at the core of Energy2028, where faculty, staff, and students develop immersive and experiential teaching and research opportunities that will influence the plan’s evolution and will significantly expand current offerings in environmental education at Middlebury.

Energy2028 has been a journey of extraordinary collaboration and committed, long-term conversations. These conversations have taken place across towns, states, countries, and continents over many years. They have not always been easy; they have traversed real differences of opinion, experience, and expertise.But throughout they have been inspired by our hopes for a better future for our planet. I also want to acknowledge here the work and leadership of our students—both current and past—throughout this process. At the heart of education is intergenerational responsibility. Energy2028 hopes to fulfill that responsibility, one educational project at a time.

Yours cordially,

Laurie Patton

President