Company Profile
Company Overview
Middlebury is one of the country's top liberal arts colleges. It offers its students a broad curriculum embracing the arts, humanities, literature, foreign languages, social sciences, and natural sciences. Middlebury is an institution with a long-standing international focus, a place where education reflects a sense of looking outward, and a realization that the traditional insularity of the United States is something of the past. We seek to bring to Middlebury those who wish not only to learn about themselves and their own traditions, but also to see beyond the bounds of class, culture, region, or nation. Indeed, the central purpose of a Middlebury education is precisely to transcend oneself and one's own concerns. This transcendence may come for some through the study of other cultures; for some through the study of the environment; for others it will come through inquiry into such fields as physics or philosophy, mathematics or music.
Middlebury's undergraduate college is enriched by its other programs. Every summer, the main campus in Vermont is transformed into an institution single-mindedly devoted to the study of nine foreign languages and cultures, and the use of English is virtually banned for the participants, among whom are many Middlebury undergraduates. In the Green Mountains lies Middlebury's Bread Loaf campus, where for six weeks each summer the Bread Loaf School of English is in session. This is followed by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which brings together 200 authors and aspiring authors for 11 days of intensive exchange about the art of writing. The Bread Loaf School of English is in session each summer not only in Middlebury but also at Lincoln College, Oxford, in the United Kingdom; at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at the University of North Carolina at Asheville
There is also an overseas dimension to Middlebury College. The C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad are located in Alexandria, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Buenos Aires, Concepción, Córdoba, Ferrara, Florence, Florianópolis, Getafe, Guadalajara, Hangzhou, Irkutsk, La Serena, Logroño, Madrid, Mainz, Montevideo, Moscow, Niterói, Paris, Poitiers, Santiago, Temuco, Tucumán, Valdivia, Valparaíso, Xalapa, and Yaroslavl. These schools enroll more than 300 undergraduate and graduate students who seek to further their foreign language skills and immerse themselves as fully as possible in the host culture through academic study as well as direct experience.
The facilities at Middlebury—academic, residential, artistic, and athletic—are among the very best in the country. Over the past two decades, the College has engaged in an ambitious building program and continued to maintain its facilities to a high standard, with little deferred maintenance. Almost all of Middlebury's residence halls have been renovated or newly constructed since the mid-1980s. The Center for the Arts is a 100,000-square-foot building that opened in 1992 and provides offices and performance spaces for the music, dance, and theatre programs, in addition to housing the Museum of Art. McCardell Bicentennial Hall, a 220,000-square-foot building completed in 1999, houses seven departments in the natural and social sciences and has won several awards for both energy and environmental efficiency and technological sophistication. A new library and technology center was completed in the summer of 2004, a 135,000-square-foot building that brings together the College's print, media, and electronic information resources and services in a single accessible and user-friendly facility.
In addition to the main campus located in close proximity to the village of Middlebury, the College maintains extensive athletic and recreational space, including a golf course, at the periphery of the campus. The College also includes the Bread Loaf Mountain campus, located in the middle of 30,000 acres of forested land in Ripton, Vermont, 12 miles east of Middlebury. The Bread Loaf campus contains residential and academic buildings that accommodate about 350 participants in the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. During the winter, the Bread Loaf campus serves as a ski touring center. The Middlebury College Snow Bowl, located adjacent to Bread Loaf in Hancock, Vermont, 14 miles from the main campus, provides facilities for recreational and intercollegiate skiing that are very popular with members of the local community as well as the student body.
Please visit http://www.middlebury.edu/ for more information about Middlebury College.
Company History
Middlebury is a liberal arts college of the first rank, an achievement that is the result of a process of growth and change that began in 1800, when a few men of the town of Middlebury took upon themselves the challenge of building a college in a small New England town, on what was then the American frontier. Over the more than two centuries since it was established, Middlebury has developed from "the town's college" into an institution of international renown.
Middlebury's original purpose was to train young men from Vermont and neighboring states for the ministry and other learned professions of the early 19th century. The College began modestly, with seven students enrolling in November 1800. These first students were expected "to read, translate, and parse Tully, Virgil, and the Greek Testament, and to write true Latin in prose, and shall have also learned the rules of Vulgar Arithmetic." The entire course of study was taught by the College's founding president, Jeremiah Atwater, who had come to Middlebury from Yale.
Gamaliel Painter, one of the citizens of Middlebury to whom the College charter had been granted, left most of his estate to the College. Mr. Painter's gift was an early example of the philanthropic support for Middlebury College that has enabled the institution to prosper. In recognition of his gift, West College, a new building completed a few years prior to Painter's death in 1819, was renamed Painter Hall. Painter Hall is the oldest college building extant in Vermont.
Vermont was the first state in the United States to abolish slavery in its constitution. In 1823, Alexander Twilight graduated from Middlebury College, the first African American citizen to earn a baccalaureate degree at an American college.
Middlebury College continued to grow during the 19th century. The growth was not steady, however, as the College was not immune to the social and political movements that were affecting northern New England generally. Rocked by evangelical upheaval and religious revival in the 1830s and the Civil War in the 1860s, Middlebury managed to keep its doors open during a period when many small colleges in America were forced to close. In large part, the College was sustained by the support of its many friends, both in the town of Middlebury and in the neighboring region.
In 1883, the trustees voted to accept women as students in the College, making Middlebury one of the first formerly all-male liberal arts colleges in New England to become a coeducational institution. In the following years, Middlebury College began to change from an institution primarily oriented toward its community and its state to a college with larger regional aspirations. President Ezra Brainerd (who held that office from 1885 to 1908) prepared the College for this transformation, and spectacular change occurred under the administration of President John Thomas (1908 to 1921). The Language Schools and the Bread Loaf School of English were established during the Thomas presidency. During the second decade of the 20th century, the College's enrollment more than doubled, and the number of buildings, the size of the faculty, and the value of the endowment tripled. At the same time, the College's curriculum was adapted to the needs of the new century.
During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Middlebury continued its development toward a position of prominence among liberal arts colleges in the United States. Continued growth in the faculty meant the addition of new subjects to the curriculum and an increased academic reputation for the College. New residence halls, academic buildings, and library facilities were added to the physical plant. Middlebury's expansion was coupled with increases in financial resources and the establishment of a tradition of prudent financial administration, including the cultivation of resources for the long term.
During the next three decades, under the leadership of presidents James Armstrong (1963 to 1975) and Olin Robison (1975 to 1990), Middlebury attained a new level of excellence. The student body grew, not only in numbers but in diversity and in breadth of academic and extracurricular interests. Teacher-scholars of the highest quality joined the ranks of the Middlebury faculty and brought to their classrooms and other contacts with students a sense of intellectual excitement coupled with a concern for the personal development of their students. The introduction of new subjects into the curriculum and the creation of additional Language Schools strengthened the international dimension of Middlebury.
In 1992, John M. McCardell, Jr., was elected by the Board of Trustees as the 15th president of Middlebury College. President McCardell, a professor of history, was the first member of the College's faculty to serve as president since Ezra Brainerd more than a century ago. During McCardell's term as president (1992 to 2004), the size of the student body and the faculty was expanded, many new buildings were added to the campus—including a new science center, new library, new Commons residential complexes, and new athletic facilities—and special emphasis was placed on developing curricular and co-curricular programs in the areas of international affairs, environmental affairs, literature, language study, and real-world experience beyond the classroom, all resting on a strong base of general excellence in the liberal arts.
Ronald D. Liebowitz was elected by the Board of Trustees as the 16th president of Middlebury College, taking office in July 2004. He is also a professor of geography and served as executive vice president and provost prior to becoming president. Under his leadership, the College pursued and finalized an affiliation with the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California that reinforces its position as a leader in global education. In the fall of 2004, President Liebowitz launched a wide-ranging strategic planning process that involved all members of the Middlebury community—students, faculty, staff, and thousands of alumni who answered surveys and sent comments—in the effort to chart a course for the College over the next decade. Using the theme "Knowledge Without Boundaries" to express the College's innovative, interdisciplinary, and international approach to educating students, the plan emphasizes close interaction between motivated students and committed faculty as the core of a Middlebury education, and makes a number of recommendations designed to preserve and enhance this central aspect of the Middlebury experience.
Benefits
The College seeks to provide its employees with job satisfaction and opportunities for personal and professional growth.
In addition to the usual group benefits, such as medical, life, and disability insurance, the College offers other benefits, such as the use of the athletic facilities, including the swimming pool, tennis courts, fitness center, and free or reduced admission to athletic events, concerts, and various campus events.
Please visit http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/hr/Benefits/ to learn more about Middlebury College's Health and Welfare Benefit Plan.