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Strategic Planning

Aerial view of campus looking toward the Green Mountains

Message from Middlebury President Ian Baucom 

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Dear Middlebury Community,

It’s been good to connect with so many of you during my first few months at Middlebury—meeting faculty, students, and staff, sharing meals, dropping in on classes and rehearsals, cheering our student athletes, joining gatherings with alumni and parents and thinking together about our future, even as we walk through the hardest of days together, as we have this past week. 

Across all those moments I’ve come to experience that at Middlebury family is not a metaphor. It’s a lived reality, in sweet days and aching days. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for that.

Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Working Groups, and Community Input

As I continue to meet and learn from you, I’ve shared that one of my key goals is to launch a new Middlebury-wide process of strategic planning—a shared opportunity to rearticulate our mission, purpose, and aspirations for our next decade and more as we collectively consider who we are and what, together, we are for.

With this in mind, I am delighted to announce that Jessica Holmes, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Global Health, and AJ Vasiliou, associate professor of chemistry, have agreed to co-chair a Strategic Planning Steering Committee that will lead us in this work over the coming year. LeRoy Graham, associate provost, will serve as project manager. 

The steering committee comprises 13 members, including our two co-chairs and other faculty, staff, students, and trustees from a range of Middlebury backgrounds. They will convene in the fall and work intensively during winter term, with the goal of developing recommendations this spring for a new strategic plan that I will bring to the Board of Trustees for its discussion, review, and approval in May 2026. Once this planning phase is complete, we will move forward with executing the plan.

I’ve charged the steering committee with facilitating a widely collaborative and transparent process in consultation with our trustees, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and administrative team. In the coming months, the steering committee will invite all of you to participate in this process in a variety of ways, from small group lunches to community gatherings.  

In addition to the steering committee, we will be establishing 12 working groups—with representatives from across Middlebury—focused on three overarching themes: Strengthen the Core, Connect the Whole, and Meet the Moment. We will be inviting individuals from across our community to participate in these working groups over the coming days and will share their names soon. Each of those groups will be charged with engaging broadly and deliberatively across our community—including with standing faculty, board, staff, and other committees–with the goal of developing a set of priorities and recommendations that are at once bold and feasible: dreams with deliverables. The steering committee will work to consider those recommendations, seeking to identify which ones should animate our long-term strategic priorities and then synthesizing those highest priorities in a comprehensive plan to recommend to me to bring to the board this coming May. 

The working groups will each focus on a series of questions and will be organized as follows: 

Strengthen the Core

As I said in my first message to you in July, Middlebury is many remarkable things, springing from a core: our teaching, research, and creative mission and the special bond between faculty and students that defines a residential liberal arts college. As we resolve to strengthen that core, we will engage a set of key questions:

  • How can we build on Middlebury’s strong liberal arts mission as we envision the future of teaching and our curriculum?
  • How can we expand student access to a Middlebury education and work to support student success?
  • How can we attract and support outstanding faculty and work to ensure faculty success?
  • How can we attract and support outstanding staff and work to ensure staff success?
  • How can we design and enhance physical spaces on campus to make us a more vibrant and engaged learning community?

Connect the Whole

As we strengthen our core, how can we also better connect the whole of Middlebury? Locally and globally, how can we create deeper connections among Middlebury College, the Language Schools, the Bread Loaf School of English and Writers’ Conferences, and our C.V. Starr Schools Abroad? How can we reaffirm and reimagine our global mission even as we wind down our programs in Monterey? How can we more deeply advance our civic commitments to our surrounding worlds: our town, state, nation, globe, and planet? 

With this framing, we will work to map out our response to these challenges: 

  • How should we articulate our global mission and strategy?
  • How should we define our future role in advanced professional education for the public good?
  • How can we strengthen our partnerships with our local, state, national, and global communities while further building on the planetary commitments in our Energy2028 plan?

Meet the Moment

What does it mean for us to meet this moment, as a liberal arts institution, not only in this time in American history but in an age of artificial intelligence, climate change, and other major currents of global transformation? As we resolve to meet and help lead our moment, we will focus on the following:

  • How can we advance and make Middlebury a beacon of academic freedom?
  • How can we articulate our diversity, equity, and inclusion values and strategy in a deliberate and nonreactive way?
  • How can we situate Middlebury at the forefront of higher education’s deep and thoughtful engagements with the transformative impacts of AI and other innovations in technology?
  • How can we position Middlebury to address and become a leader on urgent global and planetary issues of our times?

The working groups will organize gatherings for stakeholder feedback and discussion in the coming weeks, and we will share news on those opportunities soon. If you are interested in joining a lunch discussion on one or more of the topic areas, please let us know by completing this form. 

We are also working on a website to outline the process and gather feedback and updates on our progress.

What Is Middlebury For?

Middlebury will mark its 225th anniversary on the first of November. As we reach this historic milestone and reflect on our past and present while planning for our future, I’d like us to collectively engage a question inspired by the historian Premesh Lalu: What is Middlebury for? Our strategic planning process allows us to explore this question—not just for the next decade, but, if we do this wisely, for Middlebury’s larger future ahead. As we launch that work, I invite us to take that question as the framework for our shared work and thought. What is Middlebury for? What are we for enduringly? What are we for currently and urgently? What are we for in this moment and for the future we have this opportunity to shape? As we embark on this project, I urge us to be bold. We are at a time when the place of the liberal arts in the life of our democracy is under sharp questioning. We are also at a time when our mission and purpose has never been more urgent: a time when we have the chance to make our case anew; to say what we are for anew, to imagine our future anew; to make a distinctively Middlebury case for higher education anew. I look forward to embarking on this project together, and to all that will come from it in this pivotal time in the life and history of the Middlebury that—like you—I have swiftly and overwhelmingly come to love. 

At the end of this process I believe our ambition should be nothing less than establishing Middlebury as the leading liberal arts college and institution in the world. We can. Together we will.

Sincerely,

Ian B. Baucom
President
Professor of English