Just a final reminder that the chair and one member of the NEASC re-accreditation team for Middlebury will visit the Monterey Institute Sunday night (September 18) through Tuesday morning (September 20).

In addtion to a number of individual and small group meetings with people responsible for specific NEASC standards, we have scheduled open meetings for the following groups on Monday, September 18:

Staff – 1:45-2:30 – McCone Board Room

Students – 3:15-4 – McCone Board Room

Faculty – 4:45-6 – McGowan 100 (The last portion of the meeting will be an informal reception in McGowan lobby)

Our visitors are:

Lawrence S. Bacow, President Emeritus, Tufts University — served as the twelfth President of Tufts University from September 2001 through July 2011. During his ten years as President, he advanced the university’s role as a leader in teaching, research, and public service. Within Tufts, he championed academic excellence and placed a premium on open communication and close engagement with students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Nationally, he became well known as an advocate of broader access to higher education and the importance of need-based financial aid. Internationally, he played an important role in efforts to strengthen universities’ commitment to civic engagement.

Under Dr. Bacow’s leadership, Tufts built on its historic strengths to enhance the undergraduate experience, deepen graduate and professional education and research in critical fields, broaden international engagement, and foster active citizenship among members of the university community. He emphasized increased collaboration among Tufts’ eight schools and generated creativity and enthusiasm for interdisciplinary study.

As President, Dr. Bacow was also committed to strengthening Tufts through effective outreach to alumni, parents, and friends, speaking to them with welcome candor about pressing priorities. During his tenure, Tufts benefited from unprecedented donor generosity and completed its historic Beyond Boundaries campaign, which raised $1.2 billion to support the university’s highest academic priorities. He strengthened relations between Tufts and its host communities, and the annual President’s Marathon Challenge he established in 2003 brought members of the Tufts community together to run and volunteer at the Boston Marathon.

A lawyer and economist whose research focuses on environmental policy, Dr. Bacow is an internationally recognized expert on non-adjudicatory approaches to the resolution of environmental disputes and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his S.B. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his M.P.P. and Ph.D. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Having stepped down as President as Tufts after ten years of service, during the academic year 2011-12 Dr. Bacow is serving as President-in-Residence in the Higher Education Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He is also working with colleagues on a study of barriers to the adoption of online learning systems in large public universities and colleges. A member of the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, he joined the Harvard Corporation in July 2011.

David L. Smith, John W. Chandler Professor of English at Williams College —  was born in Mount Meigs, Alabama, and attended Sidney Lanier High School in nearby Montgomery. He received his B.A. degree from New College in Sarasota, FL, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Since 1980, Smith has taught at Williams College, where he has served as Dean of Faculty and as Chair of African-American Studies. As a visiting professor, he has taught at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and New College of Florida. Smith has received many awards and fellowships for his scholarly work, and he has served as a consultant and on the boards of various scholarly organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Southern Humanities Media Fund, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and The Mark Twain House in Hartford.

David Smith’s scholarly interests include Mark Twain, Southern Literature, Nature Writing, and the Black Arts Movement. He has published many essays in these areas. He is editor, with Jack Salzman and Cornel West, of The Encylopedia of African American Culture and History, a 5-volume work from Macmillan. As the poet D. L. Crockett-Smith, Smith has published Cowboy Amok and Civil Rites, both from The Black Scholar Press. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry. He translates the works of Spanish and Latin American poets, specializing in Federico Garcia-Lorca and Pablo Neruda. In 2008-2009 he translated five volumes of poems by García-Lorca. He is currently working on “What Is Black Culture?”, a rumination on the expressive traditions of African Americans.

David Smith has also been active in the musical culture of the Berkshires. From 2000 to 2005, he was Director of the W. Ford Schumann Performing Arts Endowment at Williams College. Since 1981, he has hosted “Let the Music Speak,” a weekly radio program on WCFM at 91.9 FM. The show explores jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, and various other genres, from folk and country to classical. He has served on the advisory committee for the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance since its inception in 2006. He lives in Berkshire, MA, with his wife, Vivian.