A Conversation with President Baucom and CNN’s John Berman P’29.5, ’29.5

The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.

John Berman: As a parent of six children, including five adults, do you have any tips for parents attending Fall Family Weekend?

Ian Baucom: For some of you, this might be the first time you are seeing your child since you dropped them off. I remember the first time I saw one of my daughters after she went off to college in New England. I was living in Virginia and had a business trip to New York, so I asked if she wanted to come spend the weekend with me. I took her out to dinner and at a certain point said, “How’s it going? Is it great? Tell me how it’s going. Is it great?” I was expecting a particular answer, and answering for her. But she said, “Dad, actually, it’s not going great. Don’t make me make it great for you.” I wanted it to be great so badly, and I wanted it to land so quickly that I wasn’t really asking her how it was going.

College ended up being absolutely incredible for her. She found her people. She found the love of her life—literally, the love of her life. She found the things she’s passionate about. Everything that you hope will happen in college happened for her. But it doesn’t always happen right away. So one tip, as you are with your kids, particularly the first-years, would be to just give them some space. The second is to let them surprise you. They are here to be educated. They’re here to explore the fullness of the possibilities of their minds. It’s entirely possible that something has happened since you last saw them that might have changed their opinion. Or maybe they’ve long held a different opinion but just haven’t expressed it.

There’s this great line by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Your kids contain multitudes, and part of our job is to help them find the multitude of possibilities within themselves. And just give them a good hug and a nice meal.

Middlebury’s strategic plan that you initiated is Excellence. Purpose. Joy. I am going to ask a multipart question: Excellence in what? When do you need to know your purpose? And joy—how much are we talking about?

Excellence means excellence in everything we do—it’s what we owe our students, but it’s also what we want them to strive for. That doesn’t mean they’re going to succeed at everything. Excellence depends upon having the courage to do something really difficult. There shouldn’t be an expectation that you’re going to get it right out of the gate. Also, I don’t think of excellence as something that is an end in itself. I don’t think that it is its own goal—it’s directed toward an end of some sort, and that’s where the purpose part comes in.

Originally, the plan was going to just be called Excellence with Purpose. We asked a question last year that came from the work of the South African historian Premesh Lalu—a friend and someone important to me—who wrote an essay called, “What Is the University For?” Last year, as we were building the plan, we used that as our primary question: ‘What is Middlebury for?’ The answer we came up with is simple but crucial: We are for our students and we are for the world they live in. We’re for the unfolding of their lives. That’s got to drive every decision we make: Does this help our students? But this comes with the understanding that our students want and have a sense of obligation to the world they are entering. So we’re not just a precious place on the hill; we’re a place for the public good. We want our students to find their purpose during their time here. I want them to find jobs. I want them to find careers, but I want them to find a vocation—from the Latin vocare, meaning “to call”—work with dignity and purpose.

So it was ‘excellence with purpose,’ but that also seemed a little too heavy and didn’t quite capture the spirit of the place. I did find my purpose in college, but I don’t know that I went there thinking I was trying to find my purpose. I went there because I was young and was with other young people. Joy and foolishness aren’t the same thing, but there’s some foolishness in joy. Joy and fun aren’t the same thing either, although there’s a lot of fun in joy. Joy comes with striving. Joy comes with difficulty. Joy comes with learning and discovery. Joy comes with being in the company of each other. I want that spirit of youthful vitality, vigor, engagement, and a community around that. You’ll see a lot of it throughout the course of the day. There’s a lot of joy out there, and we want our students soaked in it.

We keep reading about colleges and universities struggling financially. How is Middlebury positioned in this challenging environment for higher education?

We’re positioned very strongly, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the real pressures. For decades, the financial model underpinning higher education in the United States has been unsustainable. The model has been off. Middlebury acknowledged that a couple of years ago and had to make some really hard financial decisions. But we now have our first balanced budget in more than a decade. We have a structurally balanced budget, and we’re years ahead of many of our peers. We do multiyear financial projections, and those projections indicate that we’re going to begin generating surpluses that we can invest in our educational mission. So we’re in a very good position from that perspective. But the most important thing is that we have great faculty, great staff, and great students. That’s really how I measure the strength of this place. 

Is it true that the first concert you went to was Prince during the Purple Rain tour?

Yes. Greensboro, North Carolina. The concert was cool, but I wasn’t. There were two fellow first-year students at Wake Forest who saw me and took pity on my general social awkwardness. They were on a date, and they were going to the Prince concert, and they asked if I wanted to come along. I said, “I’d love to go,” not really understanding that you don’t go with people on their dates. But I liked Prince, so I went. They are good friends. So yes, that was my first concert. Third wheel. Prince.

What’s Middlebury’s superpower, but likewise, what do you think is the kryptonite?

Our superpower is the power of a small place. And I mean a very particular small place—not a generic one, but this small place. That includes the physical environment, the beauty of this place, the way it calls you to be both indoors and outdoors, even in winter. The way that this place imprints on everyone who is here the urgency of the future of our environment and climate. But it’s also about the smallness itself. Students who come here are choosing to be in a small place, maybe for the last time in their life. Our superpower is that. We know each other. You can’t hide. If you’re unkind, that unkindness radiates. And if you’re kind, the kindness radiates. This is the kindest place I’ve ever been. It’s decent, it’s sweet, and it’s rigorous, but those things can live together.

The kryptonite is that it’s a small place. There aren’t seven night clubs; there’s one on Thursday night. Our antidote to the kryptonite is that we’ve also made Middlebury the most global small college in America. It’s because of the faculty and staff who teach and work here, the courses they teach, the students who are here. If you’ve never been here in the summer when the Language Pledge® is in operation and the Language Schools are running, and you walk this campus, you’re unmistakably in Vermont, but if you close your eyes and just listen, you hear French, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Italian, German, Russian. You could be anywhere.

Middlebury is literally a college on a hill. What do you see as the College’s relationship with the greater community?

We’ve been really deliberate about this from our founding. Middlebury has always called itself the town’s college—not the college’s town. That’s because there wasn’t one major mega donor who said, “Let’s build a college.” The people of the town raised the money for the College. That’s been an anchor for us. We are a private institution with a public purpose. So that shapes the answer to “What are we for?”—we’re for our students and for our world. Where does that world begin? Right here in Middlebury. Then Addison County, the state of Vermont, the nation, the world, and finally the planet itself. We really try to think about all those things. If you walk around downtown, you’ll see a newly renovated public library. That was a collective project involving the town, College, and donors. You can watch a play at Town Hall Theater. That’s another collective project. We’re involved in building 250 new units of affordable housing, a partnership between the town, College, and state and public partners. There’s a newly expanded childcare facility. These are projects that involve the town and College working together. 

I want to make sure that we are also thinking about two other key things: Bringing the knowledge capital that we possess to towns and the state to help generate policy solutions that deal with real issues that Vermont is facing; and secondly, how do we contribute to economic development? We’re planning an innovation park on a 300-acre property adjacent to town. We want to work with businesses to bring more economic activity to this area. So town, state, nation, world, planet, which means the future of our planet. Being not just a global college but a college for the planet, thinking about sustainability, climate solutions, climate adaptability, energy, and environmental education. Our public purpose begins here—in our town—but it doesn’t end here.

Artificial intelligence is such a giant issue. What are the biggest challenges that you face as a college because of AI?

The biggest challenge is the prospective one. How does a liberal arts education and liberal arts learning prepare students to thrive and succeed in an age of machine learning? More simply put, are we meeting our responsibility to get students ready? We have four precious years with them. We need to do that without losing our soul. We’re a liberal arts college. We’re not a school of engineering. We’re not a school of technology. We’ve got to get students ready by asking ourselves whether we really do believe that the study of history, philosophy, biology, sociology, and race and gender, and the capacity to think with complexity and nuance, and to make intelligent, critical, civic judgments are crucial to that. We do. That’s what we believe. We need to act on it.

The framework we’ve used is to ask, “What are the fundamental and vital forms of human intelligence that we need to be cultivating in our students in an age of artificial intelligence?” Not in opposition to technology, but to say, “What are those modes of human intelligence that are good for our students and their personhood, that are good for them in their commitments to their civic communities, that will make them utterly irreplaceable?” What can the human mind do that a machine cannot?

You came here from UVA, which I think has been feeling a lot of pressure from the government, the shifts in attitudes from the federal government toward higher education. How insulated is Middlebury from that, if at all?

We’re not a specific target, but we’re not insulated. There are a range of forces that we have to contend with. And I’ll name a couple. One is, will we defend academic freedom and the freedom to speak? And the answer is simple: Yes. One hundred percent. We absolutely will. We will defend the academic freedom of all of our students, all our faculty, all our community—we will defend their freedom to speak. We’ll defend the freedom to speak regardless of their political perspective. There are also important questions that colleges and universities need to answer in terms of whether we are meeting our obligations in the social contract of American life. And that begins with affordability. I think that many of you know that we’ve just made a major commitment to being more affordable to low- and middle-income families. We’ve been highly affordable to low-income families for some time. Middle-income families often get squeezed out. We’re committed to expanding our affordability to more and more families

I’ll finish with this. Our youngest of six children is a high school senior. This is Early Decision 1 weekend. Today is the day. Early Decision 1 is today. So I was up with him until about ten o’clock last night as he was pulling everything together. He’s a sweet kid, and I love him. And this is the culmination of weeks of making a metaphor real—of literally sitting around a kitchen table at night with him and Wendy as he’s been looking at his list of where he’s going to apply. I want that conversation to unfold all across America, and all across the world. I want it to happen with low- and middle-income families—all families—but not saying, “Don’t apply to Middlebury. We can’t afford it.” I just don’t want that to be the case. I want it to be the case that there’s an amazing young person who wants to come here, and the question is whether this is a good fit? Can I realize my imagination and my dreams at Middlebury? Have I worked hard? Then apply. Yes, it’s affordable. Dream, and apply. 

That’s not about politics. That’s about meeting our responsibility.