Middlebury College has appointed Dr. Ian Baucom, PhD, as its 18th president. Baucom, currently executive vice president and provost of the University of Virginia and the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English, is a widely regarded leader in higher education who has long championed the role of colleges and universities as civic institutions. He has empowered teaching, research, and learning to engage the urgent challenges of our time by building partnerships across a broad spectrum of disciplines: neuroscience and biotech, the humanities, environmental resilience, global Black studies, the visual and performing arts, digital technology, and artificial intelligence. As a scholar, teacher, mentor, administrator, and colleague whose work has influenced individuals and organizations here and around the world, he has been a steadfast advocate for the work of education in changing lives and advancing the promise of democracy.

There are a handful of defining colleges and universities across the globe. Middlebury is one of them. 

The Board of Trustees made the appointment late yesterday at a special meeting to receive the unanimous recommendation of the Presidential Search Committee, comprising student, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustee representatives who have been at work since last summer. Baucom was also granted the position of tenured professor in the Department of English on the recommendation of the interim president following consultation with the provost and the Promotions Committee. He will take office on July 1.

Baucom will succeed Laurie L. Patton, who stepped down last month to become president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences after nearly a decade at Middlebury. Interim President Steve Snyder, formerly dean of the Language Schools, will continue to lead the institution until June 30.

Baucom has been provost of UVA since 2022 and was dean of its College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences for the preceding eight years. He arrived at UVA following a distinguished career at Duke, where he was a professor of English, chair of the English department, and director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. He also served as president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international body for scholarship at 200 research organizations in 30 countries around the world. Baucom taught English at Yale after earning his doctoral and master’s degrees there in English and African Studies, respectively. His bachelor’s degree, in political science, is from Wake Forest.

Baucom’s wife, Wendy, also attended Wake Forest and has a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a writer. They have five adult children and a teenage son.

On Middlebury

“There are a handful of defining colleges and universities across the globe,” Baucom says. “Middlebury is one of them.”

He describes Middlebury’s particular place in the higher education landscape as “a liberal arts college with a bicoastal presence and global reach—through the Institute of international Studies, Language Schools, and Schools Abroad; a seedbed of the literary arts with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and School of English; an emerging leader in conflict studies and conflict transformation in a time of intensifying social and political fracturing; and home to a community of faculty, students, and staff animated by a profound commitment to environmental study in an era of climate change.”

Baucom was raised in South Africa through his early teens, as his parents ran adult literacy programs for mine workers during the Apartheid era. In a 2022 podcast, he said his upbringing showed him how basic education, then higher education, were powerful forces for change, equality, and flourishing societies. “In the long history of civic institutions, few surpass colleges and universities in their twin importance to the transformation of individual lives and the possibility of democratic life,” he says. “Middlebury embodies the world-gathering capacity of collegiate life at its finest.”

From Board Chair Ted Truscott

“In Ian we have an inspired choice for a new president who will lead this extraordinary community through the next chapter in the life of the institution we love. It was clear from our first conversation that we share values around what’s most important at a place like Middlebury—immersive education, developing global awareness while living and contributing on a local scale, and respecting the experiences of others. I speak for the entire Board when I say we can’t wait to get started. The leadership of Laurie Patton has brought us to this moment, and Steve Snyder, whom we owe a great debt, is already ensuring stability and continuity as we anticipate the months ahead. They have our deepest gratitude.”

From Presidential Search Committee Chair Kirtley Cameron

“Ian’s appointment is the culmination of a rigorous, thorough, and inclusive search and we’re thrilled with both the process and the outcome. It’s a credit to the commitment, insights, and open-mindedness of each of our 18 committee members. From every angle—the depth of our discussions, the respect for all viewpoints, and working long days over several months—this was one of the best examples of committee work I’ve been part of. I’d say that’s a tribute, as well, to Middlebury. I extend appreciation and thanks to my colleagues, and to Kate Barry and her team at Isaacson, Miller, our search consultant, who brought us a talented and diverse pool and led us through a flawless process.”

Baucom’s scholarship is broadly in the field of Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Studies and, more recently, in humanities and climate change. He has authored three scholarly books, edited or coedited four collections, and written dozens of essays, reviews, and entries for journals dealing in modern languages, history, literary criticism, and the visual arts. (He actually has a fourth book to his credit, a children’s novel. “I was teaching in Venice, and Wendy and I ran out of books to read to our kids, who were young at the time. When we couldn’t find an English-language bookstore, I decided I would write a novel that we could read to them at night. It featured our children as the characters.”)

Baucom has been principal investigator on a half dozen academic initiatives in the humanities and democracy funded by major grants from national foundations. He was a guest lecturer at scores of colleges, universities, and funding agencies across the United States and globally—Johannesburg, Leiden, Stellenbosch, London, Stuttgart, Glasgow, Oslo—and a tenure reviewer at top schools nationwide. He received the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, excellence in teaching awards from his days at Yale and Duke, and a number of academic fellowships. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021.

On the Liberal Arts

“It’s not an accident that the liberal arts begin with liber, to be free,” Baucom says. “The liberal arts at their core are the art and the possibility of what it means to be a free human being, and to take on the responsibility to think what the greater freedom of the world could be. That comes from the pursuit of knowledge—through poetry, biology, the quantitative sciences, through understanding the physical nature of our universe, through dance. The liberal arts begin there, with each person who is touched and shaped and changed by them. Young lives—young women, young men, young nonbinary students—who for four years can be surrounded by the possibility of all that we’ve known and all that we don’t yet know. And by faculty who know that it is worth dedicating their full life to that purpose. And to know that the gift of freedom through knowledge is not only for those students but for the communities in which those students sit, and for our nation and our world.”

Academic Enterprise

As UVA’s dean of Arts & Sciences, Baucom worked with faculty, staff, and students on the university’s first comprehensive revision of its undergraduate curriculum in 40 years. He sought student, alumni, and parent perspectives to share with faculty as they redesigned the curriculum, whose new centerpiece is a set of courses for first-year students taught by faculty across the liberal arts disciplines. As UVA provost, he helped establish pan-university Grand Challenges initiatives across the disciplines of neuroscience, democracy, environmental resilience and climate change, digital technology and society, and precision medicine and health. With UVA’s president, the head of the UVA Health System, the university’s COO, generous donors, and the Commonwealth of Virginia, he helped launch a joint-venture biotechnology institute—for research, manufacturing, clinical trials, and industry partnerships. Over the course of his entire career, he has had deep engagement in the intellectual and cultural life of his institutions. He, Wendy, and their family lived for five years in a house on UVA’s central Lawn, opening their home and sharing their lives with hundreds of students. At Duke he served on dozens of committees and boards, including those that drafted the university’s global strategy, advised on its Africa Initiative, Human Rights Center, Press, and Nasher Museum of Art. For three years at Duke, he, Wendy, and their kids lived in a first-year dormitory to enmesh themselves in the student experience.

Leadership Style

“The president’s job is enormously complex,” he says, “demanding the ability to make decisions across a remarkable range of issues and in dialogue with multiple constituents. Those decisions can only be made well if they are made collaboratively and anchored by shared values. In my experience, that requires a curiosity to listen; a willingness to articulate a collective vision and to hold yourself and others responsible for realizing it; a resolve to be guided by the best arguments and not the most entrenched positions; a deep understanding of the financial position of the institution coupled with a commitment that mission and strategy must drive financial planning rather than the other way around; and a determination that when a decision needs to be made, to make it and take accountability for its outcome.”

Grants and Fundraising

Baucom and his colleagues have helped raise and steward substantial investments to support the people and programs at his various schools. At UVA, Baucom was a key partner and collaborative architect in helping define and shape the University’s $5 billion Honor the Future campaign, which has surpassed $5.6 billion in total commitments with six months left in the campaign. Several of the many individual gifts where Baucom played a critical role have included more than $100 million to support UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and surrounding democracy initiatives; a $30 million gift for neuroscience research at the University’s Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology; eight-figure commitments to support the new curriculum when he was dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; many seven- and eight-figure commitments to support financial aid, endowed professorships, and department-specific initiatives; and a series of multimillion-dollar foundation grants for a range of new academic initiatives. Sponsored research awards increased by more than 20 percent during his three years as UVA provost, with total research expenditures at the University exceeding $700 million in 2024, a record amount. As dean, he increased philanthropic support for all aspects of the institution’s mission, raising more than $500 million during his tenure.

A Future of Promise

Baucom asks, “How do we and all institutions articulate our mission as we address the profound fracturing of democratic life in the United States and around the globe; the unending realities of racial, gendered, and economic exclusion structuring our social worlds; the future of research and teaching as we seek to balance the vitality of enduring disciplines and emerging inter-disciplines; the need to sustain our absolute commitment to the full diversity of our student bodies in light of the Supreme Court decision; the need to think the ethics and possibilities of teaching, learning, and research in an age of artificial intelligence?”

“I have been lucky to be at an institution,” he says, “like Middlebury, filled with energetic faculty, staff, and students in the midst of articulating itself for the second half of the 21st century as it commits to becoming ever more diverse, ever more inclusive, ever more committed to the intellectual and artistic ferment that comes when research and teaching spill over institutional divisions and disciplinary bounds and we devote ourselves to setting the institution at the heart of the most urgent challenges of history and of our times.”

“In higher education,” he says, “there is no more important work.”

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The Baucoms will visit the Vermont and Monterey campuses in the near future and will have opportunities as well to meet alumni and members of the wider community. Details forthcoming.