Board of trustees passes six resolutions

Six resolutions were successfully passed at last weekend’s board of trustees meeting. At their Oct. 23 board meeting, the trustees moved to accept the College’s financial statement for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010; approve a $1.5 million upgrade to Kohn Field, to begin June 1, 2011; and approve $2.5 million in renovations to the Music Library and Davis Family Library, to begin June 1, 2011.

This last decision will result in the relocation of the History of Art and Architecture Department (HARC) to the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts  (CFA) along with the relocation of the Music Library to the Davis Family Library.

Aside from the usual Saturday morning full board meeting and Friday committee meetings, last weekend also included the annual trustees’ retreat, on Oct. 21 at the Bread Loaf Mountain Campus. While on campus, many trustees also attended a climate film screening and talk by Scholar-in-Residence Bill McKibben on Wednesday and Commons dinners with faculty heads and students on Friday night.

Board chair Frederick Fritz ’68 described the overall meeting as “incredibly productive.”
President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz concurred, adding that “many trustees, including emeriti” — trustees who have served 15 years as sitting board members and are then invited to participate in later meetings — “commented that this might have been one of the very best trustee meetings they’ve been to.”

The Bread Loaf retreat in particular proved one of the more memorable aspects of the meeting. Faculty and administration panels presented on the professional “life-cycle” of a faculty member, from the creation of a position through tenure. Students were also invited to participate.

“I think the trustees learned how things work inside the academy, and they contrasted that with their own experiences and career tracks,” wrote Associate Professor of Anthropology Michael Sheridan in an e-mail. “I think they had a classic cross-cultural experience, in that they learned about the strange social organization of the academic tribe.  It was like they were going backstage to see how the mechanics of the big institutional performance, and seeing how much work it really is to produce and direct the show.”

Fritz expressed enthusiasm for the panels’ presentations, calling them “first-class.”
“All of us came away with a much more comprehensive understanding for that process [the faculty life-cycle] and for subjects like scholarship, resources and other aspects of the experience along the way,” he said.

Also on Thursday, Liebowitz and Fritz held a two-hour orientation for four new trustees, reviewing expectations, rules of governance and details of residential and academic life.
Unless committee members had elected to meet earlier, electronically or in a different city, Friday was devoted to meetings of the 14 standing committees and three ad-hoc committees, two of which — the Education in Action Committee, which oversees internships and career placement, and the For-Profit Committee, which oversees the College’s for-profit economic ventures, such as Middlebury Interactive Languages — are new this year.

At the full board meeting on Saturday morning each committee reported on and presented its motions, which were then passed. Fritz portrayed the decision to move the HARC department and the Music Library as a sensible streamlining of programs.

“First, we are trying to accommodate academic program space needs without constructing new buildings, so the move of the Music Library permits that by freeing up space in Johnson eventually for more studio space,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Also, much of the CFA space and materials are used less than when the building was planned in the 1980s, e.g., digital availability of materials. Finally, moving art history to be with the museum for our fifth largest major [HARC] is better programically for art historians and will increase the number of students and related activities at the CFA.”

Fritz also placed particular emphasis on the reports from the Budget and Finance Committee and the Investment Committee. The Budget and Finance Committee reported on its recently completed bond refinancing, which fixed an interest rate on the College’s bonds for the rest of their life, setting a known cost of borrowing for the next 20 or 30 years. The committee also reported that the College had once again received a long-term credit rating of AA, “confirming our financial stability,” according to Fritz.

The Investment Committee has delegated its day-to-day activities to the endowment and foundation management firm Investure LLC, based in Virginia.

“The transition and performance have been superb,” Fritz said. “We get the TLC as if we had these people on campus, even though they’re not.”

The committee reported a 17.7 percent endowment return for the fiscal year ending June 2010, which according to Fritz places Middlebury in the top five percent of institutions nationally.

However, Fritz stressed the board meeting’s overall decreased focus, “by intention,” on financial issues, which have dominated trustee meetings over the past two years.

“We feel the financial model is now set for the next five years, borrowing an unpleasant externality,” he said. “Now the board has time to push back and look at other aspects of the College a little closer to the ground, rather than spend so much time on the financial model.”