New Middlebury College president to be installed Sunday
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By Claude R. Marx Vermont Press Bureau - Published: October 6, 2004
MIDDLEBURY – When Ronald Liebowitz is inaugurated on Oct. 10 as Middlebury College's 16th president, he will participate in a tradition-laden ceremony and then begin the task of shaping the school's future.
Board of Trustees Chairman Frederick M. Fritz will give Liebowitz an ivory-topped, brass-bottomed hickory walking stick donated to the school by one of its founders, Gamaliel Painter, in 1813, 13 years after the school opened.
The old-fashioned stick, which was once standard equipment for upper class 19th Century gentleman, is usually stored in a glass-enclosed case in the president's office and brought out only on special occasions.
"Ceremonial things are important in the academy. They take us back to our roots and remind us who we are today," Liebowitz said in an interview in his third-floor office overlooking the campus.
At the event, in addition to an academic processional, there will be welcoming speeches by students, faculty members, alumni and visitors. Williams College President Morton Schapiro will speak on behalf of representatives of 60 colleges and universities.
The leaders of each of Middlebury's highly regarded nine language schools will offer greetings in the order in which they were founded. The German school began in 1915 and the Portuguese one began last year. Middlebury also has schools for Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
"Students are taking their place in a very long line of Middlebury students. Ceremonies like this serve to remind them that the world didn't start when they were born and the college didn't start when they began studying here," said John McCardell, who retired as president in June, after 12 years in office.
McCardell, a historian, restored several traditions and started new ones, including giving each new graduate and all returning alumni replicas of the cane.
"It binds each person who has one to the institution," he explained.
While Middlebury celebrates its past, Liebowitz wants to ensure that its future is equally noteworthy.
He plans an extensive discussion among faculty, students and staff about what it means to be a liberally educated person in the 21st century.
"You can't take a principled position that a liberal arts education can't change to meet the times. We have to constantly be thinking both about what we learn and how we learn," said Liebowitz, a political geographer who has written extensively about the former Soviet Union. The 46-year-old former competitive swimmer has been on Middlebury's faculty since 1984.
Given the increasing importance of science and technology, he wants the faculty to consider requiring each student to take a laboratory science course before graduating.
The college has a four-year-old science building and is working to expand opportunities for students to work on research projects with professors.
Liebowitz also wants to raise money for the school's scholarship fund so students have less debt when they graduate and to expand the faculty to foster closer interaction between students and professors.
Middlebury's current faculty-student ratio is 11-1, compared with 8-1 at similar institutions, such as Amherst and Williams colleges.
Liebowitz estimates that the school would have to add 69 people to its 210-member faculty. The college has 2,350 students and an endowment of $700 million.
It was recently ranked the 11th best private liberal arts college in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.
Middlebury has not always been a top-tier school.
"For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries it was a poor man's college. Around World War II there was a concentrated effort to make the place a better academic school and attract people from around the country," said David Stameshkin, a former Middlebury administrator who has written a two-volume history of the college and will speak at Liebowitz's inaugural.
The school has served as a training ground for prominent Vermonters in a range of professions, including author Julia Alvarez, Gov. James Douglas, Associated Press bureau chief Christopher Graff, and U.S. District Judge William Sessions.
Contact Claude R. Marx at claude.marx@rutlandherald.com or claude.marx@timesargus.com.
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