As I write this column, the first month of the new academic year is drawing to an end. Despite the well-publicized financial challenges so many colleges and universities will face this coming year, there is remarkable energy on campus and so many good things happening.

During the month, I enjoyed 10 lunches with students: 5 in Proctor, 3 in Ross, and 2 at the president’s house. The lunches at Proctor and Ross are unplanned in that I simply show up, get my food, and roam the dining hall until I make eye contact with a group that looks at least mildly interested in having me join their conversation…or at least doesn’t look away and hope I move to the next table.

The lunches at 3 South Street are something my wife Jessica and I enjoy immensely.  We invite a group of students who share a common experience at Middlebury and then engage them over lunch, trying to learn more about what they do, what have been the best things about their education, and what the College should try to change or improve. We have learned much from these lunches, and appreciated the students’ candor and deep appreciation for their Middlebury education.

I want to focus on one of the South Street lunches we hosted early this semester, as it represents an important, but often overlooked, aspect of a liberal arts education: the importance for students to explore their interests and passions on their own terms and their own clock, outside the formalities of the academic program. The lunch was with those who make up the student board of the Old Stone Mill (OSM), the home base for the College’s donor-supported project on creativity and innovation (the PCI).

The PCI was started because, over the past five years, students have voiced concerns about their inability to find space to pursue creative endeavors outside their course work. I have heard this from a number of students during my office hours and at several lunches in the dining halls, where students have sought me out to engage this particular issue. As part of their commentary, they also reported feeling stifled in their attempt to break through the College’s formidable bureaucracy when seeking to secure space that goes often unused, but somehow is unavailable to them. They have come to believe that, intended or not, the College is unsupportive of their desire to learn outside the academic program.

I am sure you are asking yourself: how can space be an issue when the College added almost one million square feet to its infrastructure since 1990 (an increase of 68 percent in overall square footage)?  Much of that space—the center for the arts, the new science center, the new library, and the renovated Starr Library, which now houses the Axinn Center—was added to meet the needs of an academic program whose physical facilities lagged behind many peer institutions, and had aspirations to become the best among liberal arts colleges. The results have been striking: our academic program has flourished as a result of the new facilities.

But while the remainder of the increase in the campus footprint was to meet the demands of the new Commons residential system and our excellent athletics program, none of the new space, students point out today, was created “just to let individual students, or groups of students, pursue creative endeavors spontaneously.” And the impact is now being felt. Academic departments and other College offices tend to oversee spaces in ways that make it either very difficult to schedule their use, or the bureaucracy involved in reserving space has become so time-consuming for students that many simply give up and forego carrying out their hoped-for activities, since many of those activities come as impulses and can’t easily be planned months, weeks, or even days in advance.

Until this year, there was no space on campus in which students could do ceramics work, painting, or photography, or secure space with any regularity for the purposes of writing and performing a play, choreographing a dance performance, or practicing and performing music, unless the student was a studio art major, a theater major, a dance major, or music major. Official student organizations have an easier time of securing space, but it is still a bureaucratic process, and many students take issue with being forced to become “institutionalized,” given all that is required by the Student Government Association and College policies, which many students see as unnecessary “red tape.” They ask why they can’t gain access to space in a more spontaneous way.

Part of the reason that some facilities have become harder for students to use is due to the success of the very programs we were trying to improve. Several of our academic programs in the arts have become so vibrant that, even with the increase in spaces and renovation of others, the number of students who are majoring in those programs requires the full use of those spaces. Another reason is that the new and often sophisticated facilities require a kind of monitoring that the older, less specialized spaces did not.

When I first arrived at Middlebury in 1984, buildings were rarely locked. It was routine to come into Warner Science (where my first office was located) to find that students had been there during the night and into the early morning, leaving behind props from rehearsal sessions, videos they had just finished editing in the basement of Sunderland, or even mats that helped classrooms serve as temporary rehearsal space for dance groups. Today, many of our academic buildings are locked, and a formidable bureaucracy has grown up around the management of those spaces. As a result of the changes, we are failing to deliver on a major tenet of a liberal arts education.

In discussing this issue with some faculty, I was struck by what alumnus Peter Hamlin ’73, now the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music, said about his time as a student (from 1969-73). Peter recalled how there were few, if any, barriers to the use of spaces across campus. The infrastructure was much smaller, and less modern, but it was also available to students after hours, and, according to Peter, provided the outlet to experimentation in creative endeavors that he now sees being more difficult for current students to secure.

But what students now see as the difficult quest for space appears to have become part of a culture whose underlying premises must be challenged. When the College acquired the Old Stone Mill, the historic, four-story building located along the Otter Creek in town, it was obvious the College now had the place students had been looking for. It provided different-sized work areas in which a wide array of activities and projects could go on simultaneously.

It was the place students might finally be able to do ceramics…or photography…or any other creative endeavor that happened to be of interest to students outside their academic program.

The reactions to the OSM were both predictable and surprising. Students were at once interested in the space and 35 of them became tenants during the first semester that the building was available for their use. But several faculty colleagues expressed disappointment that the College would allocate such space outside the purview of the academic program. “Surely the OSM should be overseen by one or more academic departments,” colleagues told me. Other colleagues expressed disdain over what they saw as the College “encouraging” students to do what they called “bad art”—meaning art that did not benefit from first learning the fundamentals of what we teach in the academic program: drawing, painting, sculpting, (musical) composition, and creative writing.

What seemed to be missing from these initial faculty reactions is the crucial point that providing these kinds of independent creative pursuits redounds to the classroom—any and all classrooms—and should be celebrated and supported by our faculty. Students might not wish to major in art or music or theater or creative writing; however, by engaging in these pursuits as a physics, psychology, economics, or any major for that matter, students develop as individuals in ways that no doubt make them more interesting, more engaged, and more complete students.

Students shouldn’t have to major in any particular academic area to be given the opportunity to pursue a passion related to that major, even if they are beginners in the activity. In fact, as a faculty member in the performing arts who supports our students’ work at the OSM recently observed: unfettered student engagement with “big ideas” will lead those students to take formal in-class instruction much more seriously.

In times of financial challenge, when we are forced to revisit what among all we do is “core“ and “less core,” we must remind ourselves that the support of intellectual and creative pursuits beyond the academic program is something an exceptional liberal arts education must offer its students. Ensuring the opportunity and space to explore and pursue one’s passions, individually defined with self-imposed rigor and discipline, is essential if our students are to get the most out of their Middlebury education, and live a rich and rewarding life.

This was confirmed when several volunteers came up to the podium after my address and told me to transcribe what I had just said and “send it out to everyone” because “this is not well understood; yet, when one gets it, it makes great sense.” The main question for many was, “How can we go global and still have the liberal arts college in the Champlain Valley we love so much and wish to support?” Of course, this kind of misunderstanding has repercussions on a number of levels, including the ability of those very volunteers to explain today’s Middlebury as they engage classmates and others on behalf of the College. With this in mind, I’d like to explain the “Middlebury Model”—along with the exciting opportunities it presents to our students and the entire institution.

Middlebury is and always will be a residential liberal arts college, forever aspiring to do even better what it has been doing so well for 209 years. This was affirmed in the College’s latest strategic plan and is central to our thinking as we contemplate any new programs or changes to existing ones. Throughout much of our history, Middlebury has been more than a residential liberal arts college. For almost a century, the College has developed a number of graduate and nondegree programs that serve distinct cohorts of students, and many of those programs also serve our undergraduates in significant ways. None of these programs operates on our campus during the regular academic year, and therefore none of them takes away from our mission and the experience of our 2,400 undergraduates. Rather, these programs enhance our undergraduates’ education and serve to position the College in a unique and enviable standing among its peers and within higher education at a most opportune time. It is this unique combination that we are now calling the Middlebury Model.

So, what is the Middlebury Model, and what are those things that build upon and around our undergraduate liberal arts core? There are our 10 world-renowned, intensive summer Language Schools; our 8 Schools Abroad, which now operate through partnerships with universities in 34 cities on four continents; the Bread Loaf School of English, which is the largest graduate program in English literature in the country; the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the first (founded in 1926) and most prestigious conference of its kind; and now the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a graduate school of 750 students that offers professional MA degree programs in international policy and management, nonproliferation studies, translation and interpretation, linguistics, and language education.

The combination of these programs, with the undergraduate college at the core, represents a unique institutional model that should not be mistaken for a university. The size, nature, and feel of the College remains small, intimate, and caring, focused on the undergraduate student with a definitive spirit that runs through our 209-year history. At universities, undergraduate students compete with graduate students for the faculty’s time and attention—and usually lose. This is not surprising: graduate students provide important professional support to university faculty in both the time they spend with undergraduates and the work they do as research assistants.

Though the College has developed a number of graduate and nondegree special programs since 1915, it has done so in a way that preserves the centrality of undergraduate education and ensures that our undergraduate students remain at the center of attention. That is, none of the nonundergraduate programs alters the special environment we have created for our students over two centuries: the Language Schools, the Schools Abroad, and the Bread Loaf School of English, all of which award graduate degrees, operate either during the summer months, or far away from campus, either in Monterey, California, or at 34 sites around the world. There is no time when our undergraduate students are in session and must compete with graduate students for our faculty’s attention or campus facilities.

The Middlebury Model is also unique in the way in which our undergraduates can enrich their education by taking advantage of the College’s graduate and special programs. Our 10 intensive summer Language Schools enroll 1,450 students each summer; approximately 10 percent are Middlebury undergraduates, most of them rising juniors who are preparing to study abroad during their junior year. The intensive immersion summer program covers a full year of college course work in seven or nine weeks, and prepares our students well for learning a new language and culture.

Our Schools Abroad enroll about 550 students each year. Approximately 450 of those students are undergraduates. (The rest are graduate students pursuing MA degrees in French, German, Italian, Russian, or Spanish.) Among the undergraduates, 58 percent are from Middlebury and 42 percent are from other leading American colleges and universities. The non-Middlebury students say they choose Middlebury programs because of their rigor, the intensive immersion approach to learning, and their proven effectiveness.

Our Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE) enrolls nearly 500 students each summer. Currently, no undergraduates study at BLSE, though there are routinely 25–30 recent Middlebury (BA) graduates enrolled at the School of English each year. In addition, many of the 2,100 MA degree holders teach in secondary schools across the country. Many are doing groundbreaking work in inner-city and poor, rural high schools, and often send their very best students to Middlebury, serving as incredibly valuable, unofficial admissions officers. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference awards approximately 20 fellowships each summer to Middlebury rising seniors who have shown great promise in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writing so they can attend the 11-day conference.

And finally, there is Monterey, which will become a legal part of the College on June 30, 2010. Come next year, Monterey will, first and foremost, serve a population of approximately 750 graduate students from around the world, but, because it operates 2,600 miles away, it will not interfere with our undergraduate program in Vermont. It will, however, offer our undergraduates a range of opportunities that will enhance their undergraduate academic experiences at Middlebury, something no other liberal arts college can offer its students.

Within the next two to three years, we expect to offer several “4+1” dual-degree programs that will allow Middlebury undergraduates to complete their BA and MA degrees in five years in a number of international policy related areas. In addition, a number of Middlebury juniors will be able to spend a semester in Monterey to take graduate-level courses in areas that complement their undergraduate studies—for example, students who major in international politics and economics, international studies, and environmental studies will be able to take courses in the School of International Policy and Management. Similarly, students who are majoring in a foreign language, or those who are interested in linguistics, might very well spend a semester at Monterey and take courses in linguistics, language education, and, for the truly advanced students, translation and interpretation. And students from a wide range of majors who are interested in the scientific or policy aspects of biological, chemical, and nuclear nonproliferation will be able to study at the Institute’s renowned James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

What we will not see following the integration of Monterey into Middlebury is a change in our focus on undergraduate education. Our model is designed to encourage the development of outstanding graduate and nondegree programs that can serve their respective student populations without sacrificing the focus of our core enterprise—the undergraduate, liberal arts college in Vermont. In fact, the model allows us to reinforce that focus while creating new opportunities for our undergraduate students’ four-year experience.

In addition to the increased curricular opportunities for our students, we will also see the benefits of a larger and more interconnected global alumni network. If we view our alumni network as the graduates of all our programs, it would grow from the 28,000 who currently make up our living alumni of the undergraduate college, to more than 45,000. This larger number includes the 8,500 advanced degree holders from the Language Schools; the nearly 2,100 MA degree recipients from the Bread Loaf School of English; and Monterey’s 8,400 alumni. In addition, more than 25,000 individuals have attended the Language Schools as nondegree students, and many, including myself—I attended the School of Russian for two summers prior to joining the Middlebury faculty in 1984—feel great loyalty to the College for the opportunities the Language School experience made possible.

The expanded alumni network is another example of how Middlebury differs from all of its peers: The College remains committed to providing the personalized, undergraduate experience one expects at the very best liberal arts colleges in the country, while, at the same time, providing some of the benefits one usually sees only at a much larger institution—benefits that redound significantly to our students academically, professionally, and socially.

The Middlebury Model, then, is very different from the traditional university model. It allows the College to become the global liberal arts college for the 21st century—to prepare our students for the century’s big challenges—while, at the same time, preserving and strengthening its core, the undergraduate liberal arts program, in ways that no other liberal arts college can match.