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(10/24/12 5:48pm)
On Friday Oct. 12 and Saturday Oct. 13, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama addressed the College and members of the Middlebury community in two lectures in which he discussed themes of morality in education and the importance of faith, peace and cooperation on a global scale.
The two-day event was the third time that the Dalai Lama has visited the College; his previous visits were in 1984 and 1990.
Friday’s lecture, titled “Educating the Heart,” marked the first in the spiritual leader’s two-day visit to the College. The Dalai Lama spoke again on Saturday morning in a lecture titled “Finding Common Ground: Ethics for a Whole World.”
In Friday’s lecture, the religious leader tailored his spiritual wisdom to his collegiate audience, criticizing the modern education system for its increasingly materialistic nature, and called on the largely student-filled auditorium to remedy the violence and suffering of the 21st century.
“You are the people who will shape the new world,” he said, addressing the younger members of the audience. “This century should be the century of the peace.”
While the Dalai Lama’s lecture imparted ethical and spiritual wisdom to his audience, he maintained a lighthearted sense of humor throughout. Jokes about his old age and an anecdote about his gall bladder surgery elicited laughter from the audience, as did his decision to wear a Middlebury visor throughout the lecture.
On Saturday Oct. 13, the Dalai Lama spoke to the College community on the topic of global ethics. After his opening remarks the Tibetan leader spoke of “oneness” and the similarities between all people before expressing his belief that the level of violence of the 21st century was “on a different scale,” than the century prior. He called for a reduction of military forces and for a greater emphasis on dialogue.
After his lecture on Saturday, the Campus was granted an exclusive interview with the Dalai Lama, during which the spiritual leader shared his views on cultivating mindfulness in a college community and spirituality in education. He called on college students as the next generation of global citizens to embody qualities of open-mindedness and open-heartedness.
“I think college students — perhaps I think, when they enter the area, perhaps they may feel, this is my home, this is safe,” said the Dalai Lama. “I think that kind of spirit you can extend. I think we can do it. I may not see, in my lifetime, in the next 20 years, perhaps, 30 years, but you, this young student, you have the responsibility and you have the opportunity to see this happy world. So think this way. So make effort, tirelessly.”
(09/26/12 9:38pm)
The College is seeking to diversify its traditional revenue sources in the wake of a drop in the endowment growth rate during the 2012 fiscal year. The return on the College’s endowment for fiscal year 2012 was only 2.7 percent, falling short of the five percent target rate and dramatically lower than the 17 percent return in 2010 and 18 percent in 2011. The endowment, the size of which is determined by its growth, spending and amount of gifts, finances 18 percent of the College’s operating budget.
The College spent approximately 5.6 percent of the endowment in fiscal year 2012, as the College continues to pay off the debt and the incremental operating cost of infrastructure projects implemented over a decade ago, such as Ross Commons, Atwater Dining Hall and other facilities on campus.
“Between 1990 and 2004, the College took somewhat of a risk by investing just shy of $300 million in our campus infrastructure,” said President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz in an interview. “It was a ‘Field of Dreams’ kind of thing — if you build it, they will come. But our facilities needed modernization in order to attract the best students and faculty.”
Liebowitz defended these projects despite the incurred overhead costs.
“The flip side is that we borrowed $200 million to finance the upgrade (and reserves that we fund annually for infrastructure to cover the rest), and we need to pay off that debt for a number of years,” said Liebowitz.
“Some people say, ‘What a risky move that was!’ But the bigger picture is that the College achieved its goals of attracting great students and faculty and providing excellent facilities in which to teach and learn. And, applications increased from less than 3,800 to 8,900 between 1995 and 2011 and we have among the best facilities of all liberal arts colleges,” added Liebowitz.
The below-expected performance of the endowment, combined with these costs, amounted to a change in value of approximately $25 million for fiscal year 2012, a decrease from $908 million in 2011 to $883 million in 2012.
The College’s endowment is managed by Investure LLC, an investment management firm that also invests the endowments of other private liberal arts colleges such as Dickinson College, Smith College and Trinity College. Investure — which is responsible for managing a combined portfolio of $9.1 billion pooled from 13 institutions — does not release to the public specific information about where it invests its money, making it difficult to determine which investments may have yielded the lower-than-expected return.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer’s Office Patrick Norton pointed to the larger economic situation as an explanation for the change in return value.
“[It was a] tough year for the global markets,” wrote Norton in an email. “We have a $280 million allocation to global equities and while we beat the benchmark (MSCI All Country World Index was -6.0 percent) [this allocation] returned -1.6 percent for the year.”
Despite the change in the endowment’s value, Liebowitz maintains that the below-expected return will not have quite as dramatic of an impact as one might anticipate because the College uses a three-year moving average to determine allocations from the endowment.
“The 2.7 percent return this past fiscal year is not a huge hit to our budget,” said Liebowitz. “The prior two years exceeded the expected five percent return significantly, and so we are in good shape. But if below-five percent returns continue, we will feel it and will need to do some unplanned budget tightening.”
In addition to the endowment and the comprehensive fee, the College’s budget is also funded in part by donations to the College. In fiscal year 2012, the College received $9.65 million in unrestricted gifts, which, unlike restricted gifts and gifts to the endowment, can be channeled, in full, directly to the College’s operating budget.
“Donors have continued to be generous, although we have seen a reduction in long term pledges due to economic uncertainty and desire to re-assess commitments annually,” explained Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations and Annual Giving Meg Groves in an email. “During the downturn we began to emphasize the impact of total giving (current year use and longer term endowment-type gifts) more and also allowed and encouraged our donors to direct their gifts where they thought [they] could do the most good.”
Despite the pressure on the endowment, Liebowitz remains adamant that this cost will not be transferred to the students through a disproportionately large increase in the price of tuition.
Two years ago, the College implemented a “CPI + 1” ceiling on tuition hikes, which limits the annual increase in the comprehensive fee to one percentage point above the inflation rate.
The “CPI +1” ceiling illustrates a response in the College’s financial model to the recent economic downturn and to the growing national debate over the affordability of higher education.
From 1980 through 2010, the College increased the comprehensive fee by an average of 6.2 percent per year, a growth rate consistent with peer institutions’ increases. While tuition currently accounts for approximately 66 percent of the College’s revenue, Liebowitz argued that increasing the comprehensive fee is no longer the answer to financing the College’s operating budget.
“It would be easy to believe, with nearly 9,000 applicants to the College this past year, the demand for a Middlebury education is strong, highly ineleastic, and insulates the College … ” wrote Liebowitz in a memo to the faculty over the summer. “It would be foolish, however, to ignore these criticisms and the wide range of student choices within higher education; both suggest a far greater elasticity of demand.”
The decision to tie tuition to the CPI has come under criticism, but Liebowitz defends the policy.
“There were many, including a number of my faculty colleagues, who pointed out that CPI+1 ‘leaves money on the table’ — that if we can charge more, we should,” said Liebowitz in an interview. “But we need to take the long view. We need to think about our families and students and those who will turn away from even applying to Middlebury if the costs keep increasing as much as they have.”
The CPI + 1 ceiling on the comprehensive fee and the recent decline in the endowment growth rate have renewed the importance of pursuing other sources of income to finance the College’s operations.
“The Language Schools, the Bread Loaf programs, the Schools Abroad and Monterey diversify our sources of revenue beyond the undergraduate college’s traditional revenue generators,” wrote Liebowitz in the memo. “[This leaves] us less dependent on any one source of income, and less vulnerable to economic volatility than would otherwise be the case.”
The income from the College’s outside operations, all of which registered operating surpluses for the 2012 fiscal year, has helped the College stay competitive with peer institutions that benefit from much larger endowments.
Recently, the College undertook a for-profit venture in response to the need to subsidize the cost of providing an ever more expensive education. Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL) is the College’s for-profit online language education venture, and is expected to become profitable in fiscal year 2013 after a three-year start up period.
While Liebowitz expressed confidence in the College’s financial health, he also warned in his memo that the current model of higher education may not be a sustainable one.
“It behooves us to think collectively and creatively about how best to preserve what it is we do and value most, while understanding too, the need to think about the future and the consequences — both intended and unintended — of whatever choices we make in amending what has become an unsustainable cost structure.”
(09/19/12 11:32pm)
Over the summer, the Library and Information Services (LIS) launched Middlebury History Online, a digital archive of documents specifically related to the history of the College.
The online archive has been over six years in the making. The project originated in 2005 as a proposal by Judith Tichenor Fulkerson '56, who made a donation to underwrite the digitization of key materials related to the history of the College from its founding in 1800. The donation was Fulkerson's 50th reunion gift to the College.
The documents in the online archive include manuscript letters, journals and diaries, as well as books, journals and photographs that pertain to the College's founders, presidents, alumni and students. The records chronicle the formulation of the College's educational vision over the years, the construction of the campus, the lives of some of the key figures in the College's history and the College's relationship with town and state entities.
The process of building this online resource has involved the digitization of primary source materials currently in the possession of Special Collections, as well as actively reaching out to other people and institutions and trying to bring back some of the materials that have been carried away from the College over time through the digitization process.
Andy Wentink, curator of Special Collections & Archives in Library and Information Services, has been spearheading this project since Fulkerson approached the College in 2005.
"The donor was extremely visionary, I believe, in seeing that we shouldn't just be restricted to what the College was fortunate to have, but to reach out through a collaborative process and work with other institutions," said Wentink. "I think [the College's] archive will really stand out because of how aggressively proactive we are being in gathering materials."
Special Collections has particularly made an effort in this project to digitize documents that other institutions physically own so that people within the college community may avail themselves to these resources. Some of these other institutions are local "“ such as the University of Vermont, the Vermont Historical Society and the Shelburne Museum "“ while some materials physically reside in locations as far-flung as the University of Michigan.
While the development of Middlebury History Online has been ongoing since 2005, the project has seen a push within LIS over the past year.
"In the last year, we've had a big burst of activity that finally brought it to this stage where we can finally unveil it, and that is primarily due to the appointment of our new collections librarian, Rebekah Irwin," said Wentink. "She basically brought in all of the collection management staff "“ cataloguers, acquisition people "“ to support Middlebury History Online and to help us move forward to the point where it is now. I would say that was the burst of energy that we needed."
In addition to the LIS staff, student labor has contributed to much of the archiving.
"If you ever wanted to trace the development of the College, if you wanted to know how Middlebury came to be Middlebury, this would be a very good place to start," said William Guida '12.5, one of the student research associates in LIS, of the new resource.
(09/19/12 11:18pm)
Penn State Task Force To Allocate $60 Million Fine (Huffington Post)
A 10-member task forced has been appointed to come up with guidelines for how to distribute the record $60 million fine that Penn State will pay in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, reported the NCAA on Tuesday. Penn State will pay $12 million a year over five years into an endowment that will fund programs for the prevention, detection and treatment of child abuse. This $60 million fine is part of a punishment imposed by the NCAA, which also included a 4-year postseason ban and scholarship cuts, to punish the school for its failure to report Sandusky, the university's former football coach and a serial child predator, to authorities. The endowment will be managed by a 10-person committee that will set policy and select a third-party administrator to choose the nonprofit groups that will receive the money each year.
Historically Black Colleges Receive $228 Million from U.S. Government (Huffington Post)
The Department of Education is granting $228 million to 97 historically black colleges and universities across the country. The five-year grants will go to schools in 19 different states, and are intended to help the recipients strengthen their academic resources, financial management systems, endowment-building capacities and expand their physical campuses. In addition, funds may be used for the purchase, rental, or lease of scientific or laboratory equipment and the development of academic instruction in disciplines in which African Americans are underrepresented. The largest grants will go to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee; Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, La.; Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss.; and St. Philip's College in San Antonio. Those schools will receive more than $5 million each.
Vandalism at UMass (Huffington Post)
A University of Massachusetts student was arrested this weekend after police say he broke into buildings on Amherst College's campus and allegedly stole two computers and spray-painted swastikas on the walls of the campus health center. Bradley Keigwin, 20, of North Falmouth, Mass., was charged with breaking and entering during the nighttime, larceny from a building and defacing property. Keigwin had been observed in the bushes outside the Keefe Health Center building at 12:12 a.m. after setting off an intrusion alarm and ran when spotted by police, Hanna said. He was apprehended in downtown Amherst a short time later after a foot pursuit by college police officers. In a letter addressed to the UMass community, Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy addressed the incident, saying, "While the break-in and theft are reprehensible, it is the painting of the swastikas that is most distressing. A swastika, which symbolizes anti-Semitism and other forms of extreme intolerance and hatred, has no place in any society that values and celebrates the many diverse forms of humanity."