On Wednesday April 2, the college announced that it is planning to cut at least $10 million from its annual budget by reducing faculty and staff retirement benefits and increasing student enrollment. In their statement, they laid out three guiding principles: minimizing disruption to the workforce, simplifying organizational structures and strengthening the student experience.
It is difficult not to see the irony here. The email’s guiding principles are a farcical contradiction when faculty and staff are the key component of our experiences as students.
Actions speak louder than emails, and Middlebury needs to act to correct its financial deficits and to restore the promised benefits to its long-term faculty and staff members. In our brief survey of the college’s finances, we found ourselves hard-pressed to even guess at why Middlebury continues pouring its resources into the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at the expense of its Vermont employees.
It’s time for the Board of Trustees to admit an unpleasant truth: Purchasing Monterey in 2005 was a mistake. With its perennial deficits and ever-extended financial plans, the institute is an anchor on our undergraduate college that threatens to drag down the Vermont campus. It’s simple: Let’s ditch MIIS.
Middlebury must immediately take steps to divest from its Monterey graduate program. The satellite campus in California only burdens the college’s finances and distracts our leaders from focusing on the undergraduate liberal arts experience — the whole reason we’re even attending this college.
As the op-eds we have published over the past two weeks have reiterated, the budget cuts targeting Vermont faculty and staff are a slap in the face to the people who have never been to Monterey and never supported its acquisition in the first place. The college’s inability to make a pivot toward financial stability by admitting defeat on its California campus contradicts the open-minded, liberal arts attitude it preaches to us as students.
We need to confront the fundamental issue of what Middlebury College should be: Is it a small, residential liberal arts college nestled into the Green Mountains or a large, globe-spanning institution that prioritizes money over Middlebury undergraduates?
The Board of Trustees and prior Middlebury presidents have had their say on Monterey and the college’s identity. Now it's time for the rest of us to take a turn. A collective call from the faculty, staff and students of the undergraduate college may be the only way to pressure our leaders into admitting past mistakes and getting rid of MIIS. The recent Student Government Association (SGA) presidential election was unexpectedly dominated by conversations about Monterey and a potential referendum; students have begun to show that they are outraged and unwilling to make the sacrifices in their education for Monterey. Now is the time to build on that raw emotion.
After all, why should we be expected to give anything up for Monterey? None of our current student body had a say in acquiring the poorly performing graduate school, and faculty and staff who remember the acquisition 20 years ago didn’t have much sway over the decision either. Only a few Middlebury students study away at MIIS each semester, which hardly justifies the $8.7 million deficit Monterey contributed this year. Based on the school’s consistent under-enrollment and difficulty attracting students, it seems that not even prospective graduate school students want to attend Monterey.
Students in Vermont aren’t the only ones suffering in the name of a second-rate graduate program thousands of miles away. The college’s decision has betrayed faculty and staff, cutting the retirement benefits and likely their healthcare plans that they have earned through decades of work on our main campus. Worst of all, in cutting benefits and offering buyouts, our community members have essentially been told that they are the driving force behind the college’s deficit.
Of course, the real financial liability at the college isn’t the people who teach overcrowded chemistry lectures or who bake zucchini bread in Proctor every week. Monterey is the reason our student-faculty ratio will go up, why over-enrollment is here to stay and how the administration will likely justify future spending cuts.
The college’s plan to pump its student body for cash by raising enrollment projections exposes institutional hypocrisy on multiple fronts. Admitting more students to classes without increasing the number of faculty and staff — aiming to decrease their numbers, in fact — creates more labor for the people who facilitate our highly-regarded liberal arts education. By incentivizing many Vermont-based staff who are at least 55 years of age to retire early, there will be less support for the increasing number of students. This places a larger burden on staff and faculty, and it goes without saying that this will certainly not improve the student experience.
Middlebury has already taken extreme measures in the past to alleviate housing shortages on campus while maintaining a high enrollment, even offering first year students to spend their first semester in Copenhagen in fall 2023 and offering a $10,000 stipend for upperclassmen to take a semester off. Looking ahead at an even higher enrollment count, we question the future of housing on our campus while the college plows ahead with higher and higher enrollment goals.
The college’s leadership and the Board of Trustees are abdicating their responsibility to students, faculty and staff, and the future of this institution by harming the daily student experience and long-term composition of our faculty and staff communities. The college’s decision to drop $50 million on an unpopular and unnecessary museum to replace Battell Hall — on top of $10 million renovating Johnson Memorial Museum and other large-scale investments in random campus buildings — now looks especially dubious given the financial headwinds we face.
It is true that Middlebury is in a deficit that needs to be addressed. But our school should not be willing to take stab after stab at its home campus before it addresses the simple truth that Monterey may never get its act together. There is a fundamental disconnect between Middlebury as an institution and Middlebury as a community of undergraduate students, faculty and staff.
It is time the college retreats from the coasts of California to hear our voices right here in Vermont.
