On Sept. 4, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz announced a proposal for a new Middlebury identity system. The proposal was detailed in an email Liebowitz sent to all students, staff and faculty.
If approved, the identity system will formally incorporate the Middlebury name into the official title of each school outside of the core undergraduate program. For example, the Bread Loaf School of English will subsequently be referred to as the “Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English.”
The term “Middlebury College” will then refer exclusively to the undergraduate school, whereas the general “Middlebury” will be used to collectively describe the College and its graduate schools and programs.
“Middlebury has evolved into an institution that transcends the traditional bounds of a residential liberal arts college,” Liebowitz said in the announcement. “While best known for our preeminent undergraduate college, Middlebury each year educates as many graduate and summer students as undergraduates.”
He added, “The new system would create a common linkage across all our schools while ensuring that each retains and strengthens its unique identity and mission.”
Work on the proposal began after the decennial Reaccreditation Review’s recommendation that the missions of Middlebury’s programs and their relationships to each other be clarified.
“Middlebury was somewhat of a surprise to the visiting team as they were not quite aware that we have been awarding 200+ M.A. degrees through the Language Schools and Bread Loaf School of English for decades, or that we had become such a complex organization over time,” said Liebowitz in an email interview with The Middlebury Campus.
Though Liebowitz initiated the proposal for the identity system, day-to-day project management has been the responsibility of Vice President for Communications Bill Burger.
“We think that the identity system will help raise Middlebury’s visibility because a lot of really interesting things are happening at [the other schools], but people don’t understand that it’s Middlebury that is running them,” Burger said.
Liebowitz and Burger have both incorporated the community in the process as much as possible. Thus far, they have received suggestions, comments and feedback from over 300 faculty, staff, students and alumni in the Middlebury and Monterey communities.
For Burger, efforts have been especially strong in Monterey. Founded in 1955 as the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, the institute was later renamed the “Monterey Institute of International Studies” and signed an affiliation agreement with the College in 2005. In 2010, it formally became the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a Graduate School of Middlebury College.
If the proposal for the identity system is approved, the institute will be renamed the “Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.”
“There’s no question this is a more significant change for the Monterey Institute than is for the other schools,” said Burger. “We’ve tried to be very respectful of that by bringing as many people into the conversation as we can.”
“One reason we have taken so long, gone through so much process, and shown [the proposal] to so many people is that we wanted to make sure this would work. And that’s why we’re really being as inclusive as possible,” Burger said.
Town hall meetings will be taking place in Middlebury and Monterey. A presentation will be held for the Board of Trustees on Sept. 19, and a formal vote will take place on Sept. 20. If approved, rollout will take place over the next few months.
Burger said, “It’s been a fascinating and interesting project. So many people care about these things — which is great, because it shows how much they care about Middlebury. We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback, and we’ve made a lot of adjustments based on that feedback.”
In the conclusion to his email, Liebowitz said, “We have entered a period of great change in higher education. It is more important than ever for us to create clarity in describing and administering our rich and varied academic programs. The newly proposed identity system will help us achieve that clarity to the benefit of our individual programs and to the larger institution.”
