Middlebury College

Imagine yourself at Middlebury College, with four years to try new ideas and explore the subjects and pursuits you feel passionate about. Four years to explore a liberal arts curriculum so diverse and interdisciplinary that it would take over a century to experience it all. Four years to act in a student production, do research with faculty scientists, join a relief mission to a country halfway around the world, hike the Long Trail, or play left wing on the hockey team. Where would you start? No matter where you choose to begin, Middlebury offers abundant opportunities for learning and growth—and opens doors to the future you envision.

Middlebury College is committed to educating students in the tradition of the liberal arts. This tradition embodies a method of discourse as well as a group of disciplines; in our scientifically and mathematically oriented majors, just as in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the languages, we emphasize reflection, discussion, and intensive interactions between students and faculty members. Our vibrant residential community, remarkable facilities, and the diversity of our co-curricular activities and support services all exist primarily to serve these educational purposes.

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.

The Middlebury College faculty is composed of outstanding, dedicated teachers who are also accomplished scholars. Students have many opportunities to work closely with their teachers, and intellectual exchange with the faculty goes on outside the classroom as well as during class. The liberal arts education offered by the College is designed to enable students to lead rewarding lives of ongoing intellectual and spiritual growth and to prepare them to meet the challenges of responsible citizenship in a complex, changing world.

The College curriculum is designed to ensure that each student's education includes a certain breadth of experience, as well as in-depth study in one area defined by the major. Curricular breadth is achieved through a set of distribution requirements that encompass seven academic categories and four courses in different cultures and civilizations. There are also other general requirements—which Middlebury sees as opportunities—providing the chance to explore new areas of inquiry. In all of these areas students have a broad range of choices.

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.

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