Middlebury Chose Expansion. Its People Paid the Price.

On April 4, 2005  former Middlebury College President Ronald Liebowitz called to order a monthly faculty board meeting focused on buying the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. He argued that if Middlebury was to remain dynamic, the school needed to expand. Faculty raised serious concerns — Monterrey was $23 million in debt and 250 students under-enrolled — but Liebowitz promised not to mingle the two schools’ finances. The meeting ended with a vote. Twenty-one faculty supported the acquisition; 80 opposed it. Liebowitz went ahead anyway.

Twenty-one years later, we are closing Monterey: In Aug. 2025, the board of trustees voted to end its residential graduate programs by June 2027. It's tempting to treat the whole episode as old news. But we shouldn't bury Monterey before we've learned from it.

As part of a journalism class last spring, Dylan Meyer ’28.5 and I interviewed dozens of current and former staff, professors, and administrators about the Monterey acquisition and its consequences — including $300 million in cumulative deficits. Liebowitz’s unbridled optimism at that April meeting captures what went wrong with it: The board of trustees and administrators fixated on a campus almost 3,000 miles away, with staff and faculty at home relegated to an afterthought. Many of the professors and staff with whom we talked with were of this treatment — at least one professor factored it into their decision to leave the college. If our culture stands to change, Middlebury’s next chapter needs to prioritize the wellbeing of the people who carry out the mission of the college. 

Back in 2005, Middlebury took a gamble with Monterey, a school home to internationally renowned language and translation programs that sent graduates to work at the United Nations and other prestigious institutions. The problem wasn’t just that Middlebury rolled the dice. It was that in 2015 we doubled down on Monterey — even though Monterey was still running deficits. We leased a new building on its campus during COVID — even though enrollment had collapsed to 400 students. We ploughed more money into Monterey, even though support for it had dwindled further at the campus in Vermont. 

We paid for this unchecked spending by taking money out of the pockets of staff and faculty. Over the course of a decade, the board of trustees cut staff and faculty retirement benefits multiple times — after having promised not to. They eliminated approximately 50 staff positions, so in many areas, where there used to be two people doing a job, there was now one. The added hours working bled into staff’s personal lives. “I hear from staff that while they’re aware of campus events they can attend, they have no time to take an afternoon off and go to the snowbowl or to a concert on campus,” said 2025-2026 President of Staff Council Caroline Crawford, who lamented the loss of morale. “They're just like: this is just my job, I need to get away from here when I’m not working.”

For the board of trustees — most of whom are executives heading successful companies — it might just seem like numbers on a spreadsheet. However, for some staff members, every dollar counts. Crawford saw this firsthand on the Staff Council. After the 2025 announcement about the reduction in retirement benefits, messages from concerned staff members’ emails flooded her inbox. One came from a staff member in her district — a single-income earner who had worked at Middlebury for roughly two decades. They had planned to retire in two or three years based on their projected retirement savings with the school’s 15% match. But with the cut to 11%, they told Crawford she was not going to hit the number they needed. “I'm well past the age I wanted to be when I retire,” they wrote to Crawford. “And I'm going to need to keep working.”

Decisionmakers in Old Chapel framed the cuts as a bitter but necessary pill. That's the rationale offered for why 29.5% of staff can't be paid $25 an hour — Vermont's living wage — and why professors' salaries have lagged 15% behind inflation since 2017. It made sense to me until I read a 2018 article in The Campus by Professor of Physics Noah Graham. He revealed that Middlebury's salaries for its executives ran 14% above the NESCAC average (about $50,000 overpaid per executive) with some administrators earning over $1 million. If the college could afford to overpay its executives by that much, it's hard to accept that it couldn't afford a living wage for the rest of its staff.

Middlebury employees are worn out. A working group last February found that a profound deficit of trust between staff and the administration continues. Many staff members feel less willing to go the extra mile, like staying late after work or pioneering new programs. Most of these employees have been with the college through thick and thin, choosing the small town of Middlebury over cities with better opportunities. Instead of treating them like the valuable assets they are, we’ve taken their dedication for granted. “A community that cannot trust its leadership to honor its promises is a broken one,” David Miranda Hardy, professor of film and media culture, said at a protest last spring. “And an institution that treats its commitments to workers like a piggy bank for a rainy day undermines its own mission.” 

In fairness, it's a tough job to manage Middlebury’s budget. The past 20 years have strained small colleges around the U.S., from the financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic, to fewer students heading to college than in decades past. In this environment, you can’t avoid tough decisions. But you can choose how to navigate them. In 2017, when Oberlin had a smaller-than-expected freshman class, the board asked the administration, faculty, and staff for their help in identifying ways to shrink the deficit. Middlebury did the opposite. In 2024, for instance, most faculty and staff found out about budget cuts from an email out-of-the-blue; not even the Faculty Resources Committee or Staff Resources Committee was aware of the final plan.

What's the lesson? Middlebury should choose people over expansion. That means embracing shared governance, because consultation and deliberation almost always lead to a healthier environment. That means the next time an important decision rolls around, members of our community should be partners in the outcome, not just recipients of it. I'm not the first one to make this argument. Eighty faculty made the same case in 2005, and students, professors and staff have been making it ever since.

The good news is that President Baucom — who has spent the last year listening to the community and emphasizing transparency — hears the need for change. His strategic plan includes mention of, “advancing efforts toward establishing a living wage for employees with the lowest income,” and introduces a number of community events to campus, like Midd Saturdays. Yet the college is also planning to build a new art museum. I know donors are paying for it, and I know money given for a building can't be spent on wages. But donors usually give to causes we ask them to support. The college just finished a campaign that raised more than $600 million. We asked for a museum, and we got one. We haven't asked nearly as hard to provide for the people who work here. If we really want to learn from the past 20 years, I hope we pay all our staff a living wage before we build a $50 million art museum.