Our People

“At the core of our core is the wonder of faculty and undergraduate students studying, living, and discovering together.”

Initiative One: Our People

We are going to:

1. Determine goals for our student-body size and associated student-faculty ratio. Middlebury will preserve the close-knit community and personalized attention that distinguishes it among the world’s finest liberal arts colleges and universities. Clarifying the right student-body size and student-faculty ratio will ensure that every student feels connected, challenged, and supported.
    
2. Make Middlebury tuition-free for families with incomes below $150,000 (with typical assets) and seek to do so for families with incomes below $175,000. These income thresholds will make Middlebury accessible to more students from low- and middle-income families, reflecting our core belief that talent and potential, not financial means, should determine who receives a Middlebury education.
    
3. Undertake a comprehensive review of our admissions policies and practices, including an evaluation of our current test-optional approach to standardized testing. A thorough evaluation of our admissions processes, including the place of standardized testing in admissions, will help ensure that Middlebury continues to attract and enroll extraordinary students across backgrounds and fields of interest.
    
4. Develop a world-class advising and mentoring system, blending academic advising, career advising, and life advising with robust support for students’ physical and mental health. Middlebury is committed to supporting students as whole people and preparing them for meaningful lives by providing the advice and mentoring relationships they need, in and out of the classroom, at every stage of their undergraduate experience. Our goal is to empower students to thrive during their time at Middlebury and in their worlds of work life and civic engagement ahead.
    
5. Uphold academic integrity and rigor by reinforcing a culture of honesty and trust. Modernize policies to address emerging technologies. Support faculty in implementing assessments and grades that promote critical thinking, originality, and deep learning. At a time when generative AI and other new technologies are transforming higher education, Middlebury will clearly articulate standards for intellectual honesty and secure faculty-led frameworks for robust academic assessment.
    
6. Recruit and support outstanding teacher-scholars and staff with competitive, merit-based compensation. Middlebury’s mission and ambitions for the future depend on its exceptional employees. Providing competitive compensation and rewarding outstanding performance will help attract and retain passionate, talented faculty and staff at every level. This includes providing competitive, merit-based faculty compensation and working to ensure a similarly ambitious staff compensation model. In addition, we will advance efforts toward establishing a living wage for employees with the lowest income.
    
7. Strengthen support for innovative teaching and a culture of research, scholarship, and artistic creation, while also enhancing opportunities for staff professional development. Middlebury seeks to promote the conditions—including resources, funding, mentorship, and collaborative networks—that will allow faculty to pursue the innovative research, scholarship, and creative work that help shape their academic disciplines. We will also strengthen pathways and incentives for staff to continue to grow as professionals and leaders.
    
8. Welcome and support faculty, staff, and students from all walks of life. We will advance teaching and research on the world’s rich diversity of histories, cultures, and traditions and celebrate members of the Middlebury community who are making a difference here and in the world. We will foster a pluralistic community in which all students, faculty, and staff belong and thrive.
    
9. Explore opportunities for postdoctoral and cluster hires to engage with the rich diversity of the world’s history, cultures, and ideas. By hiring faculty and postdoctoral scholars in interdisciplinary clusters, Middlebury can build on its existing strengths and strategically develop new ones in fields that cut across multiple academic disciplines.
    
10. Align budgeting, long-term planning, governance, staffing, and institutional infrastructure with our priorities. In an era of complexity and rapid change, Middlebury must ensure that its processes and infrastructure align with its mission and strategic ambitions and provide the best possible experience for students, faculty, staff, and the broader community. Where programs or structures no longer advance our goals or are unsustainable, we will pursue redesign, consolidation, or sunsetting, while improving effectiveness and reducing silos. Good stewardship of our resources will allow us to invest in the people and priorities that will sustain Middlebury for generations to come.
     
11. Highlight Middlebury’s distinctiveness and ambition and enhance our ability to attract extraordinary students, faculty, and staff through bold, creative, and mission-driven storytelling about who we are and what we are for. The ability to communicate the Middlebury story—to our community, future students and their families, prospective faculty and staff, alumni, and broad audiences affected by the future of liberal arts education locally and around the world—is crucial to our ability to share and realize our mission and goals. To that end, we will invest in innovative storytelling and effective communications strategies.