Ian Baucom, Higher Education Leader, Enterprising Administrator, and Prolific Scholar, Named President of Middlebury
Baucom will begin his new post on July 1, 2025.
Ian Baucom, Higher Education Leader, Enterprising Administrator, and Prolific Scholar, Named President of Middlebury
Middlebury College has appointed Dr. Ian Baucom, PhD, as its 18th president. Baucom, executive vice president and provost of the University of Virginia and the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English, is a widely regarded leader in higher education who has long championed the role of colleges and universities as civic institutions. He has empowered teaching, research, and learning to engage the urgent challenges of our time by building partnerships across a broad spectrum of disciplines: neuroscience and biotech, the humanities, environmental resilience, global Black studies, the visual and performing arts, digital technology, and artificial intelligence. As a scholar, teacher, mentor, administrator, and colleague whose work has influenced individuals and organizations here and around the world, he has been a steadfast advocate for the work of education in changing lives and advancing the promise of democracy.
In Conversation with Ian Baucom
As Middlebury anticipates the arrival of its 18th president, who will take office July 1, 2025, we offer this glimpse into his person, his values, and his perspectives—on Middlebury, on higher education and the liberal arts, on our shared responsibilities to the wider world. We sat down with Ian in his office on the campus of the University of Virginia and covered this ground:
A Defining Institution | 00:00
The Liberal Arts | 01:48
Environmental Stewardship | 04:34
Education and Human Dignity | 06:27
Middlebury and Middlebury People | 09:05
Headwinds and Opportunities | 10:01
“I Can’t Wait” | 15:37
Transcript
A Defining Institution
How do I feel? Do I feel weightier? Do I feel lighter? I think I feel both. The presidency is a defining role for an institution. And to accept the position as president means that you have the responsibility to serve a community that is present to you, community that has preceded you, in this case by centuries. And you’re also serving a future to come.
And that’s a, that’s a weighty responsibility. And, and I feel it. I’ve had the opportunity to lead before I’ve led a college. I’ve been provost, I’ve been a department chair. And with all of those, it’s a similar thing. But the president holds that responsibility of stewarding the university, stewarding the college. for the time they’re honored to hold it and for time to come.
And I feel light. I feel this amazing sense of joy. The liberal arts are at the core of who I am. And to have the opportunity to come to a college, to work with the institute, to work with the schools, to work with our students and faculty and staff, to be bound together by that richness and rigor and complexity of liberal arts education, living together, thinking together, being Middlebury in the world, seeing the world come to Middlebury, there is this lightness and joy that comes with it. Middlebury’s a defining institution in the history of American life.
The Liberal Arts
It’s not an accident that the liberal arts begin with liber, to be free. And the liberal arts at their core, to my mind, are the art and the possibility of what it means to be a free human being. And to take on the opportunity and the responsibility of freedom, to think what the greater freedom of the world could be. Not abstractly, but by the pursuit of knowledge and not knowledge in the abstract, but in the particular, through poetry, through biology, through the quantitative sciences, through understanding of the physical nature of our universe, through dance. Liberal arts begin there. They begin with each person who is touched and shaped and changed by them. And then they have gathered over centuries, into this opportunity to collect, young lives, young women, young men, young non-binary students, who for four years, can be surrounded by the possibility of all that we’ve known and all that we don’t yet know.
And by faculty who know that it is worth dedicating your full life to that purpose. And then the institutions of a college, that each year have the opportunity to see a class of first-year students unpacking their bags, walking into a dorm, signing up for classes, had the gift of that gathering of life. And also know that the possibility of the gift of freedom through knowledge that the liberal arts offers, is not only for those students, but for the communities in which the colleges sit, the town of Middlebury, the state of Vermont, our nation, our world. That what happens in Middlebury, what happens in Monterey, what happens in the summer, what happens in the language schools, what happens in France, and in Morocco, is part of our commitment to the world that liberal arts have been shaped by and, and shaped. The liberal arts are in many ways the art of democratic life.
Environmental Stewardship
One of the things that has most attracted me to Middlebury is the profound commitment, enduring over generations, and renewed most recently under President Patton’s leadership and by the faculty and staff, to the future of our planet. The care for environment, the incredible challenge of taking on the realities of what climate change is producing. As we sit in my office today, we know that Los Angeles is burning. And we know that around the world, there are people in communities, large and small, whose lives will be thrown often into mortal peril by the reality of climate change. To understand climate is to understand climate science, but it’s to understand economics and policy. It’s to have a deep understanding of how we wrestle with our ethical commitments, our commitments to one another, our commitments to future generations. It takes philosophy. To understand climate change means that we need to be thrown out of ourselves and out of what is comfortable, and that so deeply is the work of the arts. Liberal arts are all of those.
There are politics and economics and sociology and law, the data sciences, the quantitative sciences, the humanities and the arts, for their own sake. And because drawn together, they allow us to inhabit that world, and to try to take on our responsibility to it.
Education and Human Dignity
As a child, I grew up in South Africa during the Apartheid years. My mom and dad ran adult literacy programs for mine workers. When I was a little boy, I was just a little boy. And my childhood was just a childhood, but it was a childhood in a place that was marked by a profound violence and a profound injustice, and an order of racial exclusion. And as I got older, into my early teens, there was nothing remarkable about this coming into awareness, but I came into awareness that I was surrounded by a deep wrong. And I was surrounded by people—Black South Africans, Indian South Africans, South Asian South Africans—who didn’t enjoy the rights that I did, and yet held them within the dignity of their person. But the law did not recognize that. Where the passage into the fullness of rights began was in many places. Civic organizations, unions, churches, literary gatherings, neighborhood meetings, people of profound courage and in schools, and in universities. And I began to see, because of the work of others, my parents among them, but not my parents alone, that education could not only change individual lives, one by one by one, but that the collective and common work of education could open a society. And so that connection between the dignity of the person, the rights that we should all enjoy, and the unfinished business of democracy coming together through the pursuit of the education of all, was marked from that moment.
Middlebury and Middlebury People
What did I learn about the character of Middlebury people from the process of the interview? So, a couple things. One was, Kirtley Cameron, who worked with Ted and the whole committee on the search, she opened the interview process, and the very first thing she said was, we go by first names here. Is that okay? And, by the way, I’m Ian. It was a very simple thing, but you can tell when people are speaking authentically to you. And what that told me was Middlebury is a place where not only do people’s names matter, but just the individual life behind that name matters. And I try to pay attention to that.
Headwinds and Opportunities
We are at a moment that has been building for some time, in which what had been part of an American social contract and the place of higher education in an American social contract is, I wouldn’t say, unraveled. But it’s in the process of maybe unraveling. The way that I think about that is that we, so this we, the college is broader than the American we. The college is a global we, but for the moment, just want to think about an American we. An American we, really from the middle of the 20th Century onwards has been built beginning with something like the signing of the GI Bill, by the opening of the door of opportunity and privilege that was located for centuries in our institutions of higher education, which had slowly and gradually begun to open their doors, but truly not dramatically and not comprehensively. And something happens with the signing of the GI Bill. There’s a recognition of the service—and this is still men at this point primarily—but the service of those men who fought in the second World War, and a recognition that the nation needed to do something to recognize that service. And the GI Bill is signed, and with the signing of the GI Bill, I see that as this marked moment in the history of American democracy and with higher education playing the role of saying, we are going to widen the door of opportunity, and we’re going to take this notion that’s been at the heart of the idea of the republic since our founding, the idea of we, we the people, the people who hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal. And to begin to live the truth of that promise, and to say that it is higher education that will do so. And you get from that moment on through the courageous struggle and conviction of generations of people, a gradual widening and opening of this, the GI Bill, the Civil Rights movements, the women’s rights movements, the movements for LGBTQ+ rights, this constant opening, and the opening is often contested, but the reason that it’s contested is that there’s an understanding that key to the possibility of full participation in the life of our democracy is access to higher education. And that becomes part of our social contract.
If I see a challenge, it is that there is no longer a consensus that access to the full freedom and possibility of higher education is necessary to the flourishing of our democracy. This receives valences through particular political campaigns, it receives valences through particular movements. There are principled people who will disagree about particulars. But if I see a challenge, that’s the core challenge. The opportunity is that when something around which there has been a consensus is questioned, those of us who’ve shared the consensus understand that we need to argue again. And we should seek the good in that, because it means that if we have become in any way not as crisp, not as dedicated, not as clear in our thinking about the value of what it is that we do, then we must find a way to name that again. And so, when I say that I don’t think that it is unraveled, I don’t think, I don’t have a sense of loss. I grew up, and we’ve talked about this, I grew up in Apartheid South Africa, and I saw history change. And that childhood experience has left me with a profound sense of optimism, of historical optimism, a real sense of optimism because it cost people their lives. But history can change. I have the good fortune to be at a university where Dr. King came to speak. And while he did not say these words at the University of Virginia when he spoke, at this campus, among Dr. King’s words that I hold most powerfully, is that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. The arc of American higher education is long, and it bends toward the promise of democracy. And we have the opportunity to participate in the bending of the arc of history.
“I Can’t Wait”
How do I feel? Uh, exhilarated. I cannot wait to get going. And I feel humbled. And I’ve learned something about humility, which is that it’s not a statement about yourself, it’s a statement about being in the presence of something that is greater than yourself. And I have that, I have a sense of what a treasure Middlebury is, and I just feel humbled and excited, incredibly grateful. And I just cannot wait to get started. I’m not coming to Middlebury to be president.
I’m coming to be your president.
Updates
Read All CommunicationsPresidential Search Update, December 2024
| by Kirtley H. Cameron
As the fall term draws to a close, I’m writing to provide a brief update on Middlebury’s presidential search.
Presidential Search Update, September 18, 2024
| by Kirtley H. Cameron
Over the summer and early fall, our search consultants at Isaacson, Miller met with faculty, staff, students, trustees, alumni, and the presidential search committee to gain a deep understanding of Middlebury, the opportunities and challenges facing our next president, and the qualities and experience we are seeking in candidates for the position.