Laurie Patton is no longer a new president. That designation came to a symbolic end on July 1, the beginning of her second year occupying the chief executive’s office on the third floor of Old Chapel. But she stopped seeming like a new president well before that. Was it when she presided over Middlebury’s 215th Commencement in May? Or when she welcomed alumni to campus in June? Or did her newness gradually fade over the course of her first year as she stepped into the classroom to guest lecture for colleagues? As she expertly presided over community conversations, large and small? As she crisscrossed the country and the oceans getting to know alumni who, in her words, are “responsible for building this place that I love so much”?
Honestly, it doesn’t matter when Patton ceased to be a new president. What matters is that she now has the perspective to discuss what it means to be president of this institution, and the experience to understand how it is shaping her and she it.
Over two long interviews in her Old Chapel office—the first in July and the second in September—supplemented with shorter conversations and through email exchanges in the intervening months, Patton spoke with Middlebury Magazine about the challenges of the job, the evolution of higher education and liberal learning, and what a future Middlebury may look like. This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.
Middlebury is a very different institution today from the one many alumni experienced as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. How has our growth changed the nature of what it means to be
Middlebury’s president?
A new insight I’ve developed over the past year is that a president has to decide in any given moment—of conversation, of decision making—whether we’re big or we’re small, and whether the value is to be big or small. So when it comes to efficiency of systems, we need to think like a more complex institution, and we are getting there. The “small” has to do with the values that we share—how we make decisions, how we communicate. I don’t mean the systems of communication—they need to assume complexity—but rather the tone of communication, so I think those are all more village-type values that also make a difference.
What challenges does this present?
We need to be careful that we don’t undergo mission creep, which is a difficult thing for a complex institution. It’s one of our biggest challenges—that everything will be relevant to us. We also have to stay confident about the fact that we don’t look like a traditional liberal arts college and we don’t look like a traditional university. We are neither. Most people, even traditional folks and Middlebury folks from 50 years ago, really like the idea of Middlebury as a newly complex institution. I think even in the DNA from 50 years ago—having spent time last summer with the Class of ’66—there’s a real excitement about that. There’s real engagement and there’s an expectation that new complexity will yield positive results. However, there’s also some anxiety about it, and as a president, you have to manage that as well.
I’m curious to know your opinion on why issues of race and inclusivity blossomed across the higher ed landscape last year?
I believe that Ferguson and other events around police profiling and police treatment of people of color sparked it. A lot of the events on the national scale heightened what was already there on campuses, and it allowed students to push on certain kinds of agendas of inclusion that they may not have been so activist around in the past. I think that’s number one. Number two, I believe it was a tipping point for things that had been building on campuses, and what we are seeing in higher education is a place where we created numerical inclusivity but were not as aware of the systems of support that we needed to put into place to really manage that, and there are any number of models.
I think one of the hardest things about this issue is that there’s no quick fix . . .
I agree, I don’t think there’s one single answer to how you build inclusivity on campus. You just can’t be competitive around every single metric. I believe that would be an ill-advised way to move forward. I do think that it would be incredibly important to make sure that each campus’s approach to inclusivity is true to its character and true to its values. So with Middlebury, we are of course far more diverse than we were even 20 years ago, and certainly 30 years ago. We continue to be more diverse partly because that’s a value for me. However, I’ve said on a number of different occasions I don’t think that fixating on numbers is the right thing. What I am going to fixate on is making sure that we have the support systems in place for the folks that are here, including building on things we’re doing right now.
This fall, you’ve spoken about teaching students to become resilient in the public sphere, even giving this skill a name: rhetorical resilience . . .
It’s both a skill and a disposition, and if we are to live up to our educational mission, it’s incumbent upon us to cultivate this ethic. To do so, we need to figure out how to make our public spaces more inclusive of everyone and to have these spaces be the place for rigorous, constructive, free speech.
How do you move from saying you want to do this to putting it into action?
Well, as long as I’m here, I want to have arguers come together. I want a team of arguers who are committed to each other, who love to argue, who are colleagues, to show students how to engage in typical conversations across difference. It’s an important value for us, and I want to become the place where students really learn how to have those tough conversations. I think we will be able to do that. I’m pushing for constructive debate. I don’t even care if it’s civil, as long as it’s constructive.
I firmly believe that we have the DNA to make this happen. Many Middlebury students are already there, but can we be even more like that? Can we make it an explicit value? That’s where I really want to take it.
Well, from one hard topic to another to another: financial sustainability. What are our challenges as an institution and what are we doing to meet these challenges?
The simple answer is that we’re spending more than we’re taking in. And so, over the next five years we are committed to achieving a new level of financial sustainability. It’s a big project, it’s a hard project, and we have to execute on it. It’s our number one challenge right now, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not a crisis. So how do you create an ethos of fiscal efficiency and discipline when it’s not a crisis? How do you create that discipline that we simply need for the future?
The plan we’ve created, with the support of the Board of Trustees, uses several different levers to both hold costs flat in a number of different areas while making sure that our focus on income generation and fundraising remains as aggressive as it can possibly be.
And I must state the obvious: we must do this in a way that is consistent with our values.
On the fundraising front, you identified three top priorities for your first year: financial aid, annual giving, and the president’s discretionary fund. How did you settle on those and what is our outlook for fundraising?
Well, to begin with, financial aid—or what I prefer to call student funding with purpose—represents a core value for Middlebury and for me personally. Annual giving directly supports the essential operations of the institution. And the president’s discretionary fund supports the innovation we must pursue as an institution to continue to thrive.
That strict focus on three priorities has created some difficult conversations on campus about other priorities, but we agreed to stay focused, and I’m pleased to say that we surpassed our goals in all three fundraising areas last year.
I believe that people have seen that the discipline of sticking to those three things and continuing to do so over the next couple of years is important.
Shifting gears a bit, could you describe the working relationship you’ve developed with the undergraduate faculty over the past year?
I think the Middlebury faculty is extraordinary. It wasn’t a surprise in any way, but some things stand out. I have experienced them as ready to work, ready to engage, ready to think in new and innovative ways.
I find them all very much aware of the changes that are happening in higher education. Of course they have different opinions about it. As one example, we had a tough discussion around how to change our civilization requirement this year. We had really good, open debate, we had a vote, and we went forward with a significant change. I’ve seen that same attitude on a couple of smaller initiatives as well.
So I’ve been impressed with the way faculty have responded to our new governance system, the way they’ve responded to me as a president, as well as to the style that I’m trying to create for leadership. I can’t say enough good things about our faculty.
You bring up the changes that are happening in higher education. The liberal arts have always evolved, in some way, with the times. How do you see a liberal arts education evolving during the next decade?
You know, I think there are three key concepts at play when talking about the evolution of the liberal arts: integration, adaptation, and innovation. Integration speaks to a student’s capacity to find a place for her knowledge in the world; adaptation is the ability to “turn on a dime” in response to a new environment; and innovation is understanding when to ask a new question and how to implement the answer in an effective way. All three of these areas are both skills and dispositions and require a certain kind of creativity and humility as well as courage.
I think the creative questions that Middlebury students have always been trained to ask will be at the front and center of our next decade, but with a twist. The students of the future will need to operate in the digital world where interactive databases and artificial intelligence—the likes of which we’ve never seen—will be facets of everyday life. And they will also need to comprehend urgent environmental challenges, challenges that already are altering life on this planet. And I think they will be comfortable working in collaborative environments. Students of the future are going to need to tackle these challenges in groups, not alone.
OK, so, getting more granular, if we’re projecting 10 years out, for students entering the marketplace—both of ideas and employment—in 2026, what skills will they need to succeed?
Well, this era can no longer be defined simply as postindustrial. We’re entering a cognitive age, where knowledge and the service economy are at the center of what we do. So students will need digital skills, communication skills, and team skills. If they’re going to thrive in this environment, they’re going to need to be familiar with complexity, with neuroscience, with data analytics. But—and this is important—that doesn’t mean that disciplines such as history or philosophy or the traditional sciences become less relevant. They become more relevant because we need to look at the past in order to study the future; we need ethics and epistemology even more than before if we care to remain curious and creative in this new era.
You made a face when you said the word “relevant.”
[Laughs] I’ve never liked that word, because ultimately it’s not adaptive. If a conference in Delhi on early-Indian history now requires bodyguards because that moment in history has become so essential to a nation’s identity, does that mean that same scholarship was irrelevant during times when such security was not needed? Knowledge is always relevant; when we lock on to a restrictive idea of relevance, then we’re unable to adapt when we need to do so.
And this comes back to the notion of integration that you talked about before.
Exactly. These new methods of learning and these new areas of discovery can be integrated into traditional liberal arts education in some wonderful ways. I’ve never really thought of liberal arts as “traditional” in the sense that they should always focus on “what we’ve always done.” Rather, liberal learning should make all of us permanently and joyfully uncomfortable, and permanently and joyfully restless. That’s because we’ve become curious for the rest of our lives.
So how do we, as an institution, plan for this? Envisioning Middlebury—this year of conversation we’re having about the future of the institution—obviously seems like the first step.
I think that the Envisioning Middlebury process continues to be at its core a strategic planning process, but I think what’s exciting about it is that for the first time everybody’s voice will matter and everybody’s voice includes the undergraduate college, Monterey, the Language Schools, Schools Abroad, School of the Environment, and Bread Loaf. There’s a lot of energy in the Schools Abroad, too, in all of those arenas, and I think that people are beginning to interact more and see how they could work with each other while maintaining their separate identities. And so we have the good groundwork for this kind of highly consultative strategic planning process.
The other thing that was a wonderful pivot that we made about six months ago is that we’re not going to be creating a long list of to-dos for our strategic plan. We’re going to have six or seven strategic directions that people can then envision themselves in and propose their own strategic planning underneath those directions.
I really want those directions not to be business as usual. I want us to frame them in a way that wakes everybody up, and I’m very committed to that; what that looks like, we don’t know yet. I have my own idea of where we want to go, but I am articulating that through questions so that the process is not simply performative. My role is more like a head coach of this project, and I think that Susan Baldridge, our provost, has done a really wonderful job of keeping it on track and keeping people excited and engaged.
Middlebury just hired a new dean for spiritual and religious life. With data showing that college students are becoming increasingly secular, what is his role on campus?
I think the two biggest trends that religious life professionals face in higher education today are the students who self-identify as having no religious ties and students who are interested in interfaith work.
The so-called “Nones” cover a wide range of experiences—some have left a childhood tradition, others have never had one, and then there are those who are actively committed to a secular humanist perspective. Our team at Middlebury is prepared to address both those who come from traditional backgrounds as well as those who don’t have affiliation but who are seekers, who are interested in a spiritual grounding to their lives without necessarily building that grounding through a traditional structure of religious authority.
And the interfaith work . . .
We’ve already seen it at Middlebury with groups such as MOSAIC (Middlebury Organization Supporting All Identities and Cultures), and I expect we’ll see even more in the years ahead. And it’s happening on campuses across the country. I run a national workshop for liberal arts college professors in this area with the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago, and it’s phenomenal to watch the dynamism in these new interfaith models emerging.
When I think of interfaith work, I think of people of different faiths coming together for the greater good of a community . . .
I think that’s perhaps the most common application, this service-and-conversation model that campus religious professionals use to facilitate both greater understanding of different cultures and shared purposes.
And this ties in, again, to the idea of knowledge; I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t believe that more knowledge should make you a better person. Being literate in religious traditions is important if one is to have a comprehensive understanding of how the world works. But let’s take this further. What’s the ethical element of religious literacy? Does our understanding of different religious faiths contribute to character building? Could one channel this understanding toward the creation of a civic space where people would not be deterred by differences but would find a sense of common purpose? You may never agree with someone else on certain topics, but could you still come together in this space to create something for the greater good?
On this and other topics, I’m wondering about our location in rural Vermont. It seems like we’re seeing a youth culture that is increasingly urbanized and a society that is focused on urban areas for innovation and creative thinking. What are the challenges and advantages of a four-year residential experience in a small town in northern New England?
I think that Middlebury’s commitment to the environment and its spectacular setting will always make it a place that people are drawn to. But we also need to think differently about college towns like Middlebury, which is both a rural community and a cosmopolitan one. I think interactions between town and gown are even more important than ever, because we are interlocked and interdependent in so many important ways. I have focused in the last year on the ways in which the town and college can collaborate on a common education purpose—funding internships in arts organizations, for example.
I also think that the urban/suburban/rural divides are a great way to frame the conversations across difference that all colleges are challenged by these days. We just had a vibrant orientation for first-generation students—and what I loved about it is that you had students from Brooklyn, South Side Chicago, Los Angeles, intermingling with students from suburban Connecticut and farm communities in Iowa and Wisconsin. It was tremendous to be a part of, and the conversations were partly about differences of race and ethnicity, but they were also about the rural/urban/suburban experience. That’s inspiring.
Speaking of culture change, when you moved to Vermont, you joined a new community. But joining the community wasn’t your only new
experience. As a college president, you are experiencing a community in a way that is very different than one experienced by a dean or a professor. What has that change been like?
That’s a great question. The community of alumni and trustees are the biggest constituents that a president has that are different than a professor or a dean. I did have a lot of contact with alumni as a dean, but it wasn’t as the chief executive, so I didn’t have the same sense of obligation to them. I think about alumni as the people to whom I should be grateful for building the Middlebury I have already come to love.
I think of the trustees as deeply accomplished and insightful friends of the community who have chosen to give their time and energy to Middlebury when they could be doing a thousand other things. I count on them for advice, almost every day. And because I am also a trustee, I think about the way we can be a collegial and diverse group whose fiduciary responsibilities are carried out with joy and inspiration. And I’ve found the response has been phenomenal.
Last question: Speaking frankly, how do you deal with everyone in town knowing who you are? With everyone seeing you through the
filter of “president”?
I love this question. For the most part, I find it fun. I don’t think of myself as an intimidating person, so there are times when I laugh because people are nervous when they come to the office or meet me for coffee. I tell them they can be nervous around the role, but not the person. Middlebury faculty, staff, and students have been responsive to a more informal everyday leadership style. And then when we move into a formal occasion such as Convocation, we can be more connected because we know each other on an everyday basis. I find that inspiring.
The only downside is what I call “the cauliflower effect.” On a rare day when I don’t have anything scheduled, and I feel like going to the store to buy ingredients to make my favorite cauliflower dish, it’s never a simple anonymous trip to the store. In addition to the warm greetings of hello, which I love, occasionally folks feel like they have the president’s ear in the checkout line and will bend it. Sometimes they’ll even be surprised that I am doing my own shopping and comment on my choice of cauliflower. But because I love the town of Middlebury, and love interacting with local businesses, I generally find it fun!
I’m making a note that if I ever see you in the grocery store, I will simply say, “Hi.”
[Laughs]