Strengthen Our Core

That core is grounded in our campus in Vermont, extended by our Schools Abroad, and enlivened each summer by the Language Schools, the Bread Loaf School of English, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. To achieve our ambitions, we must strengthen our core.

Initiative One: Our People

Our college mission begins with our people—students, faculty, and staff on our Vermont campus. 

We must resolve the question of our long-term goals for our student body size and associated student-faculty ratio. As we do so, we must open our doors to extraordinary students, faculty, and staff from all backgrounds, invest in our students and those who teach and support them, commit to supporting and rewarding a shared culture of excellence, and align our resources accordingly. 

To do so, we will:

1. Determine goals for our student-body size and associated student-faculty ratio.
2. Enhance affordability for low- and middle-income families by making Middlebury tuition-free for families with incomes below $150,000 in the near future, and seek to do so for families with incomes below $175,000 as soon as possible thereafter. 
3. Undertake a comprehensive review of our admissions policies and practices to ensure that we are attracting and enrolling extraordinary students across backgrounds and fields of interest, including an evaluation of our current test-optional approach to standardized testing.
4. Develop a world-class advising and mentoring system, blending academic advising, career advising, and life advising with robust support for physical and mental health.
5. Uphold academic integrity and rigor by reinforcing a culture of honesty and trust; modernize policies to address emerging technologies; and support faculty in implementing assessments and grades that promote critical thinking, originality, and deep learning.
6. Recruit and support outstanding teacher-scholars and staff; reward excellence with competitive, merit-based faculty compensation; review and, as needed, amend the current compensation system for staff to ensure a similarly ambitious staff compensation model; and advance efforts toward establishing a living wage for lowest-income employees.
7. Strengthen support for innovative teaching and a culture of research, scholarship, and artistic creation, while also enhancing opportunities for staff professional development.
8. Welcome and support faculty, staff, and students from all walks of life through intentional outreach, structured onboarding, and mentorship; advance teaching and scholarship on the world’s rich diversity of histories, cultures, and traditions; and celebrate Middlebury’s difference makers.
9. Explore opportunities for postdoctoral and cluster hires that enhance institutional capacity to engage with the rich diversity of the world’s history, cultures, and ideas.
10. Align budgeting, long-term planning, governance, staffing, and institutional infrastructure with our priorities. 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.
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 on who we are and what we are for.

Initiative Two: Community and Connection

A Middlebury education is inseparable from life on our campus and in Vermont. We will invest in the spaces, traditions, activities, and just plain fun that make college life vivid and memorable. 

To do so, we will:

1. Foster a vibrant and joyful campus life by creating gathering spaces across campus—food trucks, a campus pub, firepits, an outdoor skating rink, volleyball courts, and expanded venues for live music, club sports, and the arts—while establishing shared times for celebration and revitalizing fun traditions that strengthen our residential community.
2. Broaden access for faculty, students, and staff to the beauty and power of our Vermont setting—from the Green Mountains to the Snowbowl, Rikert Outdoor Center, and our garden Knoll—while promoting year-round recreation and supporting physical and mental well-being.
3. Sustain our people and our mission by examining how our structures, calendar, and schedules shape our experiences, to create time and space for joy, meaningful engagement, and long-term well-being.
4. Celebrate the vibrancy of athletics by investing in coaching, facilities, and student-athlete support to sustain and advance our position at the forefront of Division III athletics; make Middlebury Saturdays, across sports and seasons, fun occasions for our shared gatherings and joyful time together.
5. Invest in physical spaces that bring us together, including a new student and community center designed to foster connection, shared experience, and a strong sense of place.
6. Explore additional spaces to support learning and community, including expanded teaching and research facilities and a health, wellness, and recreation center.

Initiative Three: Human Intelligence in the 21st Century

We must fashion a distinctive 21st-century liberal arts curriculum dedicated to strengthening the forms of human intelligence—across the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and languages—crucial to living and working in a rapidly evolving and ever more cosmopolitan world: creative intelligence, entrepreneurial intelligence, civic intelligence, global intelligence, critical intelligence, and more. 

We will build the campus infrastructure and outreach to support that reinvigorated liberal arts curriculum. 

To do so, we will:

1. Complete the faculty-led review of our general education core curriculum, comprehensively reimagining it for the first time in decades, and articulating the foundational principles, core competencies, and general education requirements of a 21st-century curriculum; explore how credit is defined and awarded; and support faculty-led efforts to implement curricular change.
2. Reimagine the first-year student experience by exploring place-based orientation, peer mentoring, “big question” first-year seminars, and the creation of a “Fall Febmester” program that blends international and immersive experiential learning opportunities in startups, nonprofits, arts organizations, and other professional settings.
3. Support faculty in creating new and nimble clusters of cross-disciplinary study and team-teaching opportunities.
4. Seek to ensure that every Middlebury student has access to a funded global experience to equip them for the historical understanding, sophisticated judgment, and cultural fluency they need for leadership in the diverse and changing world they are entering.
5. Seek to ensure that every Middlebury student has access to a funded internship or other research or experiential learning opportunity that connects what happens in the classroom to the lab, the community, and the world beyond our campus.
6. Establish the Middlebury AI Studio—a secure, institution-hosted platform providing guided, creative, and responsible access to leading AI tools, enabling new forms of teaching and discovery.
7. Explore a “Middlebury Plus One” year, providing graduating seniors competitive access to support for founding and startup ventures; the completion of a first arts or writing project; entry into public service; or the opportunity to begin exploring an advanced degree in partnership with other institutions of higher education.