Context

After more than two years of working during a pandemic, there is no doubt that the Middlebury community is in a challenging state. However the Faculty Strategy Committee survey from Spring 2022 suggests that it is not just due to the pandemic that morale is suffering and our shared sense of engagement is lacking. The goal of these breakout meetings is to look forward to how we can rebuild—or in some cases, build for the first time—a sense of community, shared engagement, and positive morale toward our institution.

In embarking on this conversation, we want to bracket off two topics that we would like to avoid being the focus of our discussion. First, the COVID-19 pandemic situation and resulting mitigation measures—we hope this will be a more short-term situation than some of the longer-term challenges that we face as a faculty, and thus wish to look beyond the pandemic to focus on ideas that will hopefully outlast COVID as a structuring part of our lives. Second, employee compensation—while there are many legitimate concerns about compensation that Faculty Council, Resources Committee, and other elected committees will be advocating for this year and beyond, we want this conversation to focus on other facets of community-building and morale.

We encourage faculty to think about these questions and bring notes and ideas to launch a productive conversation at the start of the 2022-23 academic year.

Specific questions for breakout sessions:

1. What does a “stronger community” at Middlebury look like to you? How might that relate to the institution’s mission and values?
2. What specific actions (such events, dialogues, structures, things, etc.) might Middlebury (administration, staff, and/or faculty) take to help build a stronger community on campus?  Are there ideas from peer institutions that we might try to adopt and adapt?
3. Are there any lessons-learned from the disrupted years of 2020-2022 that might help us adjust how we do our work to strengthen our community and morale? This might include realizations of what was lost during the pandemic that we need to reclaim, and/or new practices that might be incorporated into how we operate in an ongoing fashion.