Inauguration Address

Inauguration Address

Ian B. Baucom, November 2, 2025

Laurie, Ted, members of the Board of Trustees, thank you. Jim, for those amazing words, thank you. Damascus, Amy, Mae, LeRoy, and all the members of the inauguration planning committee, my deep and profound gratitude for your months of work pulling this weekend together. To all our students, faculty, and staff, and to all the colleagues, friends, and guests who are here from the town of Middlebury, around Vermont, and the world beyond, I’m so grateful to you for joining this ceremony. I can’t tell you what joy it gives me to be with you and what an honor it is to serve as Middlebury’s 18th president. 

I also want to thank my immediate family. 

Before I do, I want to pause to remember a member of our greater Middlebury family who is not with us in person but is with us in our hearts, our sorrow, and our love. Lia Smith. Could we hold still for a moment in remembrance of her?

Thank you.

Thank you for your care and compassion for Lia and all her family. Thank you for having taught me so swiftly that at Middlebury, family is not a metaphor. It is a lived reality. On the sweetest of days and the most aching of days. Thank you for inviting me, Wendy, and all our kids into this family.

To you: Gabriel, Leah, Psalms, Kiran, Ellie, Camden, Tristan—thank you for being our kids, thank you for being the greatest joy of our lives, thank you for teaching us what love is, in all its splendid ways. And, Wendy, sweetheart, you know who you are: eternal delight, my North Star. I love you. Thank you for embarking on this new adventure together.

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So here we are, November 2, 2025. Inauguration Day. I’ve been looking forward to it. And not just because it’s Inauguration Day, but because it’s also—just about—our founding day; because—as it turns out—Middlebury College was founded 225 years ago yesterday, on November 1, 1800. 

When Damascus, Amy, the inauguration planning committee, and I first started talking about this weekend, we agreed that above all else we wanted it to be a celebration of Middlebury: a celebration of who we have been; who we are; who we can become; what we are for. So, I want to start my comments there, on our founding day, at our beginning, November 1, 1800.

At the beginning it wasn’t at all clear that we’d be here 225 years later, or that we’d even get off the ground. Together with a group of other local leaders, Gamaliel Painter and residents in and around the town of Middlebury had subscribed $4,150 to build a grammar school for Addison County. But they were dreaming of more. They also wanted to open a college for the good of the civic and economic life of the town. But to do that, they needed a charter from the state’s legislature. 

There were doubters. With the University of Vermont established but not yet enrolling students, there was skepticism that the young and small Green Mountain State could sustain both a university and a college. Painter, the town, and its leaders had presented their petition for a charter twice before—without success. The 1800 meeting of the legislature was their third try. But all along they had a vision, they believed in it, and they kept arguing the case for the College. By 1800 the state was finally ready to act. The University of Vermont was set to begin enrolling its first class. It had become clear that the two institutions could jointly strengthen Vermont. On October 31, 1800, the Vermont legislature voted 117 to 51 to establish the College. The governor gave his agreement the next day, and on November 1, 1800, Middlebury College was chartered. We adopted as our formal motto Scientia et Virtus (Knowledge and Virtue). Informally, but equally importantly, we called ourselves “the town’s college.” Our first students enrolled a year later. There were 27 of them. Their studies focused on Greek, Latin, astronomy, geography, philosophy, and the history of law. Tuition was four dollars a quarter.

Two hundred and twenty-five years later, here we are, for our 18th inauguration of our 18th president: me it turns out–born in the Hudson Valley, just south of Lake George, in Suffern, New York; raised in Namibia and South Africa as a missionary kid but somehow ending up at Middlebury via Wake Forest, Yale, Duke, and UVA; more fully arriving here by way of that unending experiment in democracy through which America’s colleges and universities keep opening their doors to students who get invited in from anywhere and everywhere, as unlikely as it may seem. 

When I think about it, my path here is unlikely. My dad was from a small town in North Carolina. Along with all his siblings, he was the first in his generation to go to college. My mom was a German-speaking Mennonite from Saskatchewan, Canada. They ended up in Namibia and South Africa during the apartheid years, running adult literacy programs for Black mine workers, raising me, my older sister Christie and our brother Latta, who later served as an officer in the U.S. Army and a high school principal before dying way too young of cancer. I loved my mom and dad and got my belief and call to education from them. They gave their lives to what they believed in. They’d be proud to see me here, and I miss them. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

How I arrived as president of Middlebury from a town of several hundred people in deeply rural, 1970s apartheid South Africa is one of those American stories that just doesn’t happen without colleges and universities opening their doors to students from everywhere. If you remember one thing from these remarks, this is it: I am, profoundly, a beneficiary of the American project of democratic education. It changed my parents’ lives. It changed my life. I believe in it, and as president I will fight for it and for every student whose lives we can help open.

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That’s not just my story, it’s Middlebury’s story. A 225-year-old story of change, of opening and evolving, as the world too has evolved and shifted around us, even as much has held constant. 

Those first 27 students were, like me, all men and all White. Twenty years later, in 1823, nearly four decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, Alexander Twilight became the first African American student to graduate from Middlebury. Women entered Middlebury in 1883. May Belle Chellis was the first to graduate—in 1886, as valedictorian. Thirteen years later, in 1899, Mary Annette Anderson became our first Black alumna—graduating Phi Beta Kappa and going on to a distinguished career as a professor at Howard. 

The student body was changing, and history continued to change. Middlebury survived the Civil War, despite the fact that many of our students left to fight for the Union. We persisted in our mission through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Red Scares of the nineteen teens, and the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. The civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, and movements for LGBTQ rights opened us further still. We entered partnerships with Posse, the United World Colleges, and other great organizations. Through them we have deep ties to Chicago, New York, LA, and students coming not just from those cities but countries around the world: from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. In 2014, Laurie Patton became our first female president.

Still we evolved. Across that time there was the Greek system, the end of the Greek system, and John McCardell’s bold experiment of the Commons. We embarked on athletics. Winning athletics. Super-winning women’s athletics. We launched the Language Schools, the Bread Loaf School of English, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 20 years of the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, the Starr Schools Abroad, spreading Middlebury from Paris to Rabat, Madrid to Yaoundé, Beijing to Santiago. 

Still more. Skiing at the Snowbowl, creemees, Winter Carnival, Nocturne, more creemees, the freshman class passing Painter’s cane at Convocation, winter sunbathing on Battell Beach, Noonie’s, Demolition Derby, Saturday Night Dance Parties, OG buns at Haymaker’s, Sunday brunch at Taste of India, Feb graduates skiing down the slope to receive their degrees, the Ross challenge, the J-term scavenger hunt, the languages and cultures of the world gathering every summer in Middlebury and making us the most cosmopolitan small town on the planet.  

And the beauty of the place. The sheer magical beauty of the place. Summer and fall. Winter and spring. The first buds of green burgeoning on springtime trees. Summer willows brushing Otter Creek. Fall bursts of orange and red and gold with colors seen nowhere else and startling Robert Frost into poetry. The first snow. The long middle-winter snows. The last snow. All around, every time, the tumble and fall of flakes and the gather of hush and awe around them. 

Moments of silence as all the world stills, here, in Middlebury.

Moments of quiet joy in the presence of the beauty of the world.

Moments of sorrow. Moments of loss. Moments of this community coming together in compassion and grace and care. As we did this past week in aching grief for Lia and her family.

Moments of change in our courses of study as we have taken on the full richness and variety of the world. Gender studies. Black studies. Global politics. Global health. Japanese. Chinese. Arabic. Abenaki. And still classics. Still the study of religion. Still the History of Law with Professor Murray Dry. And neuroscience. Data science. The nation’s first Department of Environmental Science. The Sunday Night Energy Group. Energy2028. Putting ourselves at the forefront of renewable energy and care for the future of our planet. Building community day care, affordable housing, solar farms.

And all along ever new names to add to the founding names of Gamaliel Painter and Jeremiah Atwater (our first president): Mary Annette Anderson, Martin Henry Freeman, Alexander Twilight, May Belle Chellis, Peter Kohn, Laurie Patton, Ted Truscott, Kelly Brush, Damascus Kafumbe, Ata Anzali, Amy Carlin, Julia Alvarez, Dima Ayoub, Danielle Stillman, Stephanie Neil, Bill McKibben, Lia Smith. 

New England names. Ugandan names. Dominican names. Iranian names. Jewish names. Palestinian names. Women’s names. Men’s names. Trans names. Faculty names. Student names. Athletes’ names. Coaches’ names. Staff names. Middlebury names. Our family’s names. Names of who we have been, who we are, who we can become, who we are for: as the town’s college became Vermont’s college, and a college for our nation, world, and planet. 

Middlebury: 1800 to 2025. 

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That returns us to what has not changed in the midst of all that has; what has remained constant in who we are and what we are for.

From our founding, we have held a belief. What started as a county grammar school became a singular world institution of higher education because, however good the first idea, we have always dreamed of more. We have had a vision, believed in it, made the case for it, never given up on it, and dreamed and delivered it into life. We’ve been able to do so because from our beginning we have had more than ambition. We have had ambition with an end in mind. We’ve had something to hold to. Something to inspire us and call us to a greater purpose. We have known who we are—even as we have become more various, multiple, open—and we have known what we are for.

What is that thing? We put it in our motto: Scientia et Virtus, knowledge and virtue. This, for over two centuries, is what we have said we are for.

What does that mean? To be clear, it does not mean that we are here to order personal virtue, personal morality. That is a freedom, and an act of conscience, held by all. 

It means, instead, that we believe—have always believed—that knowledge is both a good in itself and that the shared collegiate pursuit of knowledge is something virtuous, something ethically significant; something that contributes to a greater good. Not in a generic sense, but in the particular sense that attaches to the word virtu in the history of political thought inspiring America’s revolutionary thinkers. Key to that tradition of thought is the conviction that a healthy republic depends on the virtu of its people, their civic-mindedness; and the further sense that civic virtue depends on and springs from education and knowledge. Or, in Jefferson’s terms, the proposition that a healthy democracy cannot exist without a free and educated citizenry; and, correspondingly, that our institutions of higher education are intimately tied to the fate and future of democracy; that democracy itself can only be as strong as its colleges and universities are vibrant and free. 

It is no wonder that on his tombstone Jefferson included, as two of the three things for which he wanted to be remembered, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia. The Declaration and the University. The dream of a democracy which begins with the idea of a people—a “we”—held together by the pursuit of truth; and the establishment of colleges and universities to help secure that Declaration ideal. We failed that idea at our beginning, by who we excluded. But across generations we have constantly strived to make it ever more true. The Declaration and the University. Knowledge and civic virtu. The College and Democracy. 

That, to my understanding, is what our motto calls us to, what we have always been for. If you want to see American democracy lived in practice, come to any freshman convocation or college graduation in America and look around. You will see “we the people” gathered, pursuing truth together, in all the glorious variety of their young lives. 

Middlebury’s founders put that idea in our motto, and they put it another way also. From our earliest days, as I’ve said, we’ve had another non-Latin, vernacular, and very Vermont way of putting it. We’re the town’s college. Not a college on the hill. But a college for our town and the wider worlds our town represents: a college with a civic purpose and a civic responsibility. At the University of Virginia, Jim Ryan argued something very similar when, from the start of his presidency, he said that our call was to be both great and good. That call invigorated UVA. It gave us an orientation toward the world. It made our work feel more like a vocation than a job: a call to serve the public and serve our democracy through teaching, research, the arts, and the advance of knowledge. Laurie Patton argued something equal when, under her leadership, we adopted as our mission statement a commitment to educating students who would lead “engaged, consequential, and creative lives … contribute to their communities, and address the world’s most challenging problems.”

To be great and good. To be excellent with a purpose. To pursue knowledge with common, public virtues in mind. The virtues of democracy. I’ve learned that from Middlebury’s history. I learned that from Jim at UVA. I learned it from my parents in South Africa, and from the many, many South Africans whose struggle for democracy was inextricably tied to the struggle for education. This is what I believe in; what we have said from our beginning we believe in; what throughout our history we have known ourselves to be for. Middlebury, for democracy.

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And now we come into a moment when we again have the responsibility to make the case for college; the case for the liberal arts; the case for Middlebury. We come into a moment in which that case has been questioned, actively assaulted, or undermined; a moment not just of American history but of global transformations and technological revolutions; a moment when the outcome of the case for college sometimes seems in doubt. 

But its outcome is not in doubt, and we will not give up on it. Because we know that our first idea was a good idea, and we have always dreamed of more. Across a Civil War, World Wars, the Cold War, Depression, recessions, Red Scares, all history’s turbulence, we have endured and emerged stronger, more vibrant, more open to the future. However complex our moment, we will not fear it. We know that we will meet it. How can we not, if we know what we are for?

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Let me move to an end there. As you know, I’ve taken that as the theme of my inauguration, inspired by the work of the South African historian Premesh Lalu. As I announced a few days ago, we will also be taking it as the theme of a new strategic planning process over the coming year, debating and responding together to that question: what is Middlebury for? Not just higher education or the liberal arts in general, but Middlebury in particular. What are we for? Enduringly, now, for the future to come. Let me close then with a few preliminary responses I have as we begin this round of thinking together. 

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What are we for? Many things. The life-transforming power of the liberal arts, the advance of knowledge, and the flourishing of young lives first among them. 

Here—particularly as we say that in being for Middlebury we are for democracy—are a few more. We are for freedom of expression and academic freedom: across all our fields of study; all our fields of research; in all our classrooms; no matter how contentious the thought or intellectual pursuit. Times change, values do not. This is core value, and we will be a values-driven institution in all times and always home to that free pursuit of truth that is at the heart of the liber of the liberal arts.

As we pursue truth, we are and always will be for the power of reason, evidence, science, and art: the power of persuading and being persuaded. We are and always will be for the truth that knowledge matters, and not just as a general idea. We are for the truth that poetry matters, and philosophy matters, and dance matters, and computational biology matters. We are for the truth that it’s worth dedicating our lives to the study of chemistry, artificial intelligence, and economics, international studies, condensed matter physics, world languages, and ancient literature, medieval history, Black studies, data science, and gender studies. 

We are for the truth that all those pursuits add up to something essential—without which our public life cannot thrive. We are for the conviction that the unlimited freedom of students and faculty to pursue knowledge across all these domains is key to the living possibility and unfinished business of democratic life.

We are for the realization that democracy needs colleges and universities if it is to thrive. We are for the understanding that as we model and advance that democratic project we will not always agree with one another, and we will not demand agreement. We are for the determination, instead, that we will argue, debate, and seek to persuade; that we will return to the conversation after its hardest—a day or a week or a month later—to pick it up again; to listen to one another again; and learn from one another again: choosing grace over judgment, friendship over partisanship. I might change my mind, you might change yours. Let’s hang in together because we all belong to this place, and we’re in it together for the long haul.

We are for the long haul. 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 the time of education—the time of Middlebury—is more enduring, more resilient, more filled with possibility than the time of politics and the time of the news. It always has been, and it always will be. 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.

We are for all these truths, everywhere. 

Here, at Middlebury, we are for some others that have made me fall in love with you. We are for this town where we were founded 225 years ago; for the multiple communities from which we hail. We are for the vibrant hum of the world’s languages. We are for the cosmopolitanism of the globe, brought together in a small New England town and our Schools Abroad. We are for the world-making power of writing and all the arts. We are for the music of the globe, for the sounding and resounding of chapel bells and the lift of Afropop.

We are for the green hills, rivers, lakes, snow valleys, and all the places that have shaped and held us. We are for the science and the truth that the fate of these places and our climate-changed planet pivots everywhere; that it pivots where you and I stand; and that we can and should be part of that pivot and do everything in our power to bend our planet’s climate arc, across political divides, drawing on all our capacities. 

We are for the conviction that in a time in which too much of our culture and too much of our public discourse defines itself by what it is against, that we will define ourselves by what we are for: that we are for being “for”; for the opening of life, knowledge, and horizons the liberal arts live to make possible.

We are for the expansion of inclusion; for being ever more diverse, and open, and plural in who we are. We are for the truth that diversity is strength; and difference is energy; and energy—in the words of the poet William Blake—delight. We are for the delight that our Middlebury family is Black and White, Hispanic and Asian, Indigenous, and more. We are for the delight that we are trans and straight and queer; first-gen and multi-gen; conservative and liberal; moderate and radical; religious and agnostic; and filled with a capacity to listen to and love one another through our differences, as all families do. We are for “we.” And we are for “you.”

Let me end with that: with “we” and with “you” and with one last thing that I am for. I am for the commitment that I have not come to Middlebury to be the president. I have come to be your president. I am here to be your president on sweet days and hard days; days of snow and days of spring; days of leaves falling and days of meadows flowering; days of celebration and days of grief; days of summer nights settling on the hills of New England; days of waves lapping the shores of Middlebury in Morocco and Middlebury in Puerto Rico; days of Middlebury’s calendar spread over these hills, across those coasts, and around the globe as the town’s college becomes ever more the world’s college, and the planet’s college, and the college of every student, faculty, and staff member coming to join us, and reinvent us, animated at our core by our free pursuit of knowledge together.

On all those days, Wendy and I and all our family have come to join this family and join our lives with you. Which takes me back to gratitude. Thank you for welcoming us. Thank you for allowing us to share this place. Thank you for the gift of this new home and this new family. Thank you for Middlebury.