Welcome to the DB2.0 Conference, January 2007

I thank Michael Claudon for conveying to all of you my words of welcome and greetings, as I am not able to be with you today for what promises to be an exciting and important conference. My congratulations to the students in the Winter Term class that worked so hard to make this conference a possibility; I would extend those congratulations as well to Michael, but I know he would quickly say, “don’t congratulate me; the students did the work, which is much of what this is all about.” But thank you, Michael, anyway, for making it possible for the students to do all the work.

I am not with you, but instead, am in Monterey, California, where the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ Board of Trustees is meeting to discuss, among other things, our College’s developing relationship with this Institute. Incidentally, it has been 65 degrees and sunny here the past few days, but I am sure that is of no interest to any of you in Middlebury today.

One of the things I will report on at these board meetings is the recent proposal I received from a Middlebury student, David Hopkins, to create a “4+1” dual degree B.A./M.A. program between Middlebury and Monterey in social entrepreneurship. David presented this idea at Middlebury last Monday, and I have heard from several students, including one from the DigitalBridges2.0 Winter Term class responsible for today’s conference, claiming it represents what a liberal arts education should entail: a broad-based education across many disciplines, combined with the learning of critical skills that will be of use in whatever and however many careers one pursues, plus, most importantly, the means to encourage one to exercise his or her creativity and to take intellectual risks to advance an idea, process, or new way look at ordinary things…in short, to innovate.

I mention this proposal in particular here, and will mention it concretely today (Saturday) at the full Monterey board meeting, because I see it as a natural extension of what a liberal arts college like Middlebury ought to be offering its students today to meet the challenges of this 21st century. I mention it, too, because I believe it reflects what the DigitalBridges2.0 program that spawned your conference today has established as its goals several years ago and continues to convey to students: encouraging intellectual risk-taking by a generation that is largely averse to risk; viewing innovation as an extension of one’s creativity that needs to be constantly exercised and tested; learning how to work collaboratively; and knowing how to exercise one’s knowledge and creativity nimbly in an ever-increasing complex and competitive global economy.

In fact, I believe that sometime soon colleges like Middlebury will need to generalize to its entire curriculum what DigitalBridges2.0 has done in the area of applied business-related entrepreneurship. That is, the kind of creative thinking one finds at the annual DigitalBridges2.0 conferences, needs to be extended across the entire liberal arts curriculum, so that, for example, even our students’ approach to reading Shakespeare will have as equal a dose of creativity and risk-laden challenges to their professor’s conventional reading of the great bard’s works as the students who apply their knowledge, skills, and creativity in the Middlebury Solutions Group.

I applaud Michael Claudon’s efforts to help students identify and then develop a set of skills that has not traditionally been part of the liberal arts education at Middlebury or anywhere else. My hope is that the success he has had in what I view as only a slice of the College’s academic program can and will be generalized across our entire curriculum, so that intellectual risk-taking, the frequent—and even constant—exercising of one’s creativity, and the desire to innovate becomes part of the Middlebury student culture, linked to no single academic program. If we could do that, we would indeed have for our students a curriculum best suited for the 21st century.

Welcome to the conference, and I wish you a productive meeting.