We have been largely insulated from the buffeting effects of change. Every instinct is to wait to see what happens next or how some other institution chooses to act. We laugh at the absurdity. Yet we hear its echoes. Significant change requires, in addition to a compelling rationale, both dollars and will.
Few institutions have both in sufficient measure.
Middlebury is among those few. Reactive, tactical decisions made in a time of rapid change may, by accretion, achieve strategic results. More often they simply enlarge the status quo, often to the point of dysfunctionality. As we move from talk to action in the coming months and make significant decisions, which will define the experience that is Middlebury long after all of us are gone, let us do all that we can to disenthrall ourselves from the concerns of the present, from the comfort of our own limited experience, and from the nostalgia for a selectively remembered past, and look as best we can to a future of greater possibility. I am more confident than ever that we have set ourselves on the right course, and I look forward eagerly to the progress we shall surely make in the months ahead.