On Monday, Mar. 2, College President Ronald D. Liebowitz announced the creation of the new Fund for Innovation in a schoolwide email. The fund, established by a group of donors looking to inspire innovative programs and initiatives throughout the college, will be accepting applications from students, faculty and staff beginning
Sunday, Mar. 15.
While faculty and students have had the ability to pursue innovative ideas with the help of the presidential discretionary funds, this new Fund for Innovation will provide even more donor-endowed resources falling outside the College’s operating budget. It will be up to Liebowitz and starting on July 1, President-elect Laurie Patton, to appoint faculty, staff, students and supporters from across the institution to the new Fund Advisory Committee, or FAC. The FAC will then, in turn, be responsible for considering proposals and allocating funding.
The fund stems from more than nine years of discussion, according to Liebowitz, who saw the idea taking form in an alumni speaker tour during his first year as President. Many alumni were taken by his presentation on how this new generation of students, back in 2004-2005, was very much accomplished academically but at the same time, very risk adverse.
“There was something greater about grades, and about success and about fear of failure than what I had experienced for 20 years at Middlebury as a faculty member,” Liebowitz said.
These conversations led to alumni reaching out and proposing solutions. Liebowitz said: “So those conversations led to some alums, especially one, reaching out and saying I’m on the board of a foundation which deals with innovation and maybe the way around this is to really think through how innovation occurs on campus and how students are encouraged to be creative beyond feeling safe, because sometimes when people want to do the safe thing and get the best grades and so forth, they stay away from taking risks and being creative.”
Several programs grew out of a year-long alumnus-funded investigational period delving into what inspires students academically and what creativity and innovation look like in the College.
The Old Stone Mill was a product of this initiative to encourage students to pursue creative projects without the fear of grades. While this program offers mentoring support from alumni and parents, Liebowitz noted that there was not much financial support. In addition, while many programs have grown out of the Programs for Creative Innovation, such as the Ted X event and Projects for Peace, such projects have struggled with inconsistent funding.
The Fund for Innovation thus grew out of the need for available funding that falls outside of the College’s operating budget, as not to appear as if the money is taking away from the core mission of the academic program.
According to Jim Ralph, the Dean of Faculty Development and Research, during a department listening tour he partook in, faculty members proposed a wide array of promising proposals that could merit funding through the Fund for Innovation. Among many examples, Ralph mentioned a proposal outlining a prison education system.
“We’ve heard from a number of faculty interested in developing more of a public dimension to their academic work, so have proposed developing a prison education program,” said Ralph. “This might bring undergraduates together with those who are incarcerated in the Vermont penal system.”
After considering proposals such as this one, Ralph and the Vice President for Academic Development, Tim Spears, hope to now determine which proposals will be good candidates for the FFI or perhaps other avenues through College Advancement.
“Each one of the proposals has been fairly bounded, and I think that’s good, because it means they are of limited scope, but could very well be nice enhancements for what we do here at Middlebury College,” Ralph said.
According to Liebowitz’s email, the Fund for Innovation will cover proposals of any scale. Projects can have a maximum of four years of funding, dependant on a conditional renewal process. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis with the exception of those directly related to the academic program such as proposals for new classes for credit. Such academic program proposals can be submitted Mar. 15 and Oct. 15.
“We realized what goes on outside the classroom influences what goes on inside the classroom,” Liebowitz said. “Everyone should own innovation and the way to do that, in my view after being here for 31 years, and after seeing some of the challenges of trying to be innovative, you need to get everybody involved. And I think that this fund will allow those who truly want to try their hands in innovation to be supported and to involve more than the president in the decision making.”
