Trustees approve carbon neutrality initiative

Author: Derek Schlickeisen

The College's Board of Trustees formally announced a five-year, $500 million fundraising initiative at its meeting this weekend, immediately vaunting $221 million already pledged in a pre-campaign "silent phase." The Board also approved a plan first proposed by members of the Sunday Night Group, for the College to achieve carbon neutrality by 2016.

If successful, the $500 million Middlebury Initiative will represent the largest capital campaign in the history of liberal arts colleges, topping a 2005 record of $470 million set by Wellesley College. Comparable efforts now underway at peer institutions within the NESCAC include $400 million initiatives at Williams and Amherst Colleges.

"We are confident we will reach the $500 million goal," said President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, "but we also recognize that this is a huge and exciting task ahead of us."

The success of the silent phase comes on the heels of a year in which the College out-fundraised every other liberal arts institution, finishing with a $61.5 million total that exceeded expectations by nearly $10 million.

Liebowitz and his staff stressed that funds raised by the initiative will be necessary to support two primary goals outlined in the Strategic Plan approved by the Board last May: improved student aid packages to replace loans with grants and the addition to the College's faculty of 25 new professorships.

The Initiative "is unusual in that it will not emphasize infrastructure and capital projects," wrote Secretary of the College John Emerson in an e-mail. "Instead, it will focus on strengthening Middlebury's student financial aid programs and on supporting the expansion of the faculty in order to further enhance student-faculty contact."

The College's focus on building student-faculty relationships has recently earned the plaudits of national critics like the Princeton Review, which rated Middlebury the highest among NESCAC schools for undergraduates' overall academic experience and the quality of its professors.

Even a successful $500 million initiative will leave the College's endowment, now at $887 million, lagging behind those of several perennial competitors with which it shares a "top five" ranking from U.S. News & World Report. Not only do Williams at $1.5 billion and Amherst at $1.3 billion enjoy greater total endowments but, with smaller student bodies, their endowments on a per-student basis more than double the College's.

As part of the Middlebury Initiative, the Board considered setting aside a Green Fund of roughly $50 million to finance the College's future environmental initiatives. Though no firm total has been set, the fund will also benefit from a seed gift of $2 million from former Board Chairman Churchill Franklin '71 as well as the support of this year's Senior Class Gift.

"The Franklin family... has been inspired by the College's commitment to environmental stewardship and leadership," said Liebowitz. "They understand how important the environment is not only to the College's mission, but also to the future beyond the College, and they wanted to help us in all we do in this area."

The Board took a more concrete step, however, in officially adopting the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) into College policy. The final product of a working group comprised of students and administrators, the Initiative represents a victory for the Sunday Night Group, the student climate change organization whose members decided in May 2006 to push for carbon neutrality on campus.

"By adopting carbon neutrality, the College is not only living up to its environmental mission, but its academic mission as well," said Jamie Henn '07, one of the initiative's organizers. "Middlebury prides itself on equipping its students with the skills they need to become leaders, whether it be in business, art, politics or academics. In a world where global warming is increasingly defining all of these fields, environmental literacy is just as important as knowing a foreign language."

The CNI will draw on the Green Fund to finance its programs, which range from changes in campus infrastructure aimed at reducing carbon emissions to education programs designed to foster climate-friendly behavior among members of the College community.

"One could say that Middlebury College's carbon footprint is trivial when looking at global climate change," said organizer Dave Dolginow '09. "But where do you start? By not only reducing our footprint but also educating our community about the environment as we go, we will have a big impact."

The CNI comes amidst a broader movement at the College in favor of climate change action. This April saw the much-publicized success of Scholar-in-Residence in Environmental Studies Bill McKibben's "Step it Up 2007" demonstrations, and in January the Sunday Night Group hosted a regional summit for college students working towards carbon neutrality on their own campuses.

"It's important to see Middlebury's commitment in the context of a national movement lead by students to make campuses carbon neutral," said Henn. "Someone said recently that Middlebury is becoming for the climate movement what Berkeley was for the student movement in the 1960s."