Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Logo of The Middlebury Campus
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Harvard, Yale, Middlebury?

What pops into someone’s head when you tell them you go to Middlebury College? Languages? 350.org? The price tag? Or have they never even heard of it?

This past week Bill Burger, vice president of communications, pondered these questions when soliciting feedback from students, faculty and the board of trustees on the direction of the college’s brand. Though there was copious talk about a new logo, a website overhaul and renaming, the current lack of diversity is still the biggest issue the College faces as it reevaluates its brand.

Whether socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, first-generation or simply geographic, diversity is an essential aspect of the liberal arts experience and is a part of what signifies an elite institution. Despite the college’s best efforts, our applicant pool is still primarily white students from the Northeast whose families went to college and can afford full tuition. The desire to shift this paradigm is perhaps more than anything what should be driving the rebranding process. The ability to attract applicants from a variety of backgrounds is what marks a prestigious institution. Middlebury needs a brand that will make it a household name across a range of backgrounds.

In a video circulated in Dean Shirley Collado’s recent all-school email on our branding process, consultant Mark Neustadt presented some of his findings after a yearlong study of the College. His research showed that emphasizing Middlebury as a globally-oriented liberal arts school tipped the balance in the College’s favor among non-white students from across the country, while emphasizing that something like sustainability often had no effect and even was a deterrent for some in the study.

This doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning our environmental focus, but it does show that framing the college with a larger global perspective could put us in the right direction. With that in mind, it is little surprise that we are talking about connecting the dots within our growing Middlebury empire by incorporating our name into the schools abroad and emphasizing our Monterey graduate opportunities in international studies. We need an outward, global orientation to bring in applicants outside of the college’s typical pool.

The question is, how will this shift in branding change life at Middlebury? There can be no question that diversity will enhance academic and social life on campus, but what do we lose by expanding our offerings around the globe and emphasizing graduate programs to attract that diversity?

Thus far, elite institutions like Harvard or Yale have become household names both nationally and to some degree internationally by expanding their graduate programs and research opportunities, while also diversifying their academic specialties and increasing their global focus. They have garnered prestige, but at the cost of their undergraduate experience, which was inevitably sidelined as more advanced opportunities came about.

This level of prestige is what Middlebury wants for its brand, but we need to do it without shooting ourselves in the foot by sacrificing our emphasis on teacher-student relationships, tight knit community and undergraduate opportunities. We do need to address diversity on this campus, but we should not go about it by diverting our focus to schools abroad and graduate programs.

We call on the college to continue this important dialogue throughout the spring and think critically about how we can attract diversity without changing our current investment in undergraduate life. It is time for a change, but it needs to be done thoughtfully and deliberately.


Comments