In an April 2 email to students, faculty and staff explaining Middlebury’s budget conundrum and laying out proposed changes to cut costs, Interim President Steve Synder, Provost Michelle McCauley and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration David Provost wrote, “The student experience will only be strengthened by these moves.”
Respectfully, “Our Way Forward” will do the opposite of what the college promised. While we recognize the need to solve budget deficits and appreciate the sentiment of supporting the student experience, attributing a strengthened student experience to maintaining high enrollment while reducing the size of the college workforce and simultaneously ignoring the uncertainty of adequately addressing challenges posed by major sources of Middlebury’s deficit, such as the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), is misleading.
We appreciate the intricacies of the budget and the pressures facing the Board of Trustees, but we disagree that budget cuts will strengthen the student experience. As Lily Buren ’26 noted in a recent op-ed, the budget cuts will have serious ramifications for faculty and staff at Middlebury that will ultimately impact students.
With these challenges to the student experience in mind, we encourage students to think critically about how the college can address the budget deficit while speaking up for ourselves, faculty and staff. As students, we have the power to express how these changes affect us and ask questions to those who have the answers and decision-making power. So, speak with your friends about this topic. Check in with your professors about their perspectives. Think about how the potential of increased enrollment and decreased staffing will affect your experience.
We find serious issues with the administration’s view that maintaining high enrollment to 2,600–2,650 students without increasing staff or faculty will strengthen the student experience. Our first gripe is with the fact that current enrollment is and continues to be elevated far beyond the range the administration has suggested. The classes of 2028 and 2028.5 enrolled 700 total students. At this rate, which is consistent with the proposed enrollment increase to 700–720 students per class, total enrollment would permanently stabilize at 2,800 students in the next four years. If courses were overenrolled and students were forced to live at the Bread Loaf campus and Inn on the Green during the Covid-19 period with enrollment this high, how can we not expect the same blows to the student experience going forward?
One of the hallmarks of the small liberal arts college experience is the personal connection that professors build with their students. These connections will continue to be made more challenging by a refusal to increase faculty count as student enrollment remains elevated.
While the plan to close the budget gap does not explicitly call for faculty and staff layoffs or cuts to their main salaries, the inclusion of a retirement incentive for Vermont-based staff signals an intent to reduce the workforce by 40 to 50 employees overall. Such a proposal means that dining services staff, librarians, academic coordinators and facilities staff who support the day-to-day lives of students will leave and not be replaced, further burdening the staff that continue in their roles, reducing the quality of services critical to the student experience offered by Middlebury.
If the college plans to reduce the workforce whilst also intending to increase student enrollment at a time in which understaffing existed and contributed negatively to student life at current enrollment levels, how can they pretend to say that the student experience will be strengthened further?
The uncertainty posed by entities external to Middlebury’s Vermont campus makes the focus on maintaining high enrollment and reducing the workforce of the Vermont campus even more alarming. While the Language Schools contribute positive revenue to the college, $8.7 million of the $14.1 deficit is attributable to a lack of enrollment at MIIS. While Middlebury faces budgetary pressure from the Vermont campus in addition to the pressure from MIIS, the Monterey campus has continuously posed challenges since its inception. Why should students, faculty and staff on the Vermont campus, the core institution of Middlebury College, pay the price for an institution that does not turn a profit?
We simply cannot rely on a four-year plan to save MIIS twenty years after the college first attempted to save Monterey from its already existing financial hardship. Middlebury’s relationship to its graduate school is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy the two of us were taught in our introductory microeconomics coursework. Frankly, it’s insulting to attempt to funnel Middlebury undergraduates into graduate programs at MIIS while admitting that the institute is in financial shambles.
The hypocrisy of claiming that these measures will strengthen the student experience proves there is a better way forward. If Middlebury’s mission is to inspire its students to “grapple with challenging questions,” the institution itself must prove it can grapple with its own challenging questions. Is putting MIIS on life support with the uncertain goal of reversing years of financial misfortune the best way forward? Or should the college consider cutting MIIS loose in an effort to focus on the budget challenges facing the Vermont campus?
Middlebury needs to be honest about the impact that decreasing the staff workforce will have on student life. If the college’s mission statement promises “a strong foundation in the liberal arts,” Middlebury must focus on supporting faculty, staff and students at its liberal arts institution in Vermont. Such a foundation is built around a learning community that is tight-knit, fostering relationships between faculty, staff and students, rather than a larger student body, which furthers the community crisis of increasingly burdened faculty and staff.
If Middlebury promises “an inclusive, residential environment,” the college must acknowledge that an increase in enrollment coupled with a reduction in the workforce will hamper the ability to prove such an experience to students. The college must respect its promises to students and be honest about the impacts of future promises it makes.
