The Initiative that President Liebowitz announced this week represents a critical first step towards building a culture of innovation, risk-taking and risk management that truly embraces and can be integrated in the liberal arts tradition. Most important, the Initiative recognizes that we are not engaged in a zero sum game within which gains made toward building innovation, risk-taking and risk management into the culture implies a commensurate shrinking of the adaptive culture that now dominates the liberal arts. In taking this step, Middlebury College is once again taking risk and innovation, and defining a new set of rules in the proces. That the initiative is perfectly timed is evidenced by last Monday's editorial in the Wall St. Journal. DigitalBridges2.0 is delighted to serve as a model for what might become a norm across Middlebury's community. With Liz Robinson '84 at the helm and Rory Riggs '74 so generously funding the Initiative, we expect to soon be learning about and celebrating a whole set of pathbreaking innovative initiatives at the Collge on the Hill.

Following is President Liebowitz' announcement:
I am delighted to announce both a new donor-funded, multi-year initiative to support creativity and innovation in the liberal arts here at the College, and the hiring of a project director for this initiative. The goal of the project is to develop the most conducive environment in which students can exercise their creativity, pursue innovation, and become more comfortable with intellectual risk-taking during their four years at Middlebury.

This student-centered project on creativity and innovation began eighteen months ago, with a year-long external review of the relatively small number of undergraduate programs that focus on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial studies at colleges and universities across the country. That first phase was followed by a number of interviews with Middlebury faculty conducted by an outside consultant, intended to gain a sense of the Middlebury student body: to understand how faculty view what students do outside the class, how what they do relates to the work they do with faculty, and to gauge student culture in terms of the willingness to experiment and take risks in areas unfamiliar to them.

The project will now shift to its second phase, focusing primarily on providing opportunities for students to hone their creative skills and try their hand at problem solving outside of a strictly academic, graded environment. At other colleges and universities, innovation and creativity programs reside within the academic program of the undergraduate curriculum. Our program will be distinctive: while it will naturally draw from, and build upon, the excellence of our academic program, it will be developed outside of it with the support, primarily, of interested faculty. All faculty members, regardless of their academic specializations, will be invited to play a role as mentors and advisers to students who participate in this initiative. The initiative is likely to take shape, first, as a series of campus-wide competitions for which students will compete, through self-assembled teams, to solve specific challenges for tangible rewards.

Elizabeth Robinson ’84 has agreed to serve as the project director for this initiative. Elizabeth is a familiar face at the College. She was a dynamic director of our Alumni and Parent Programs from 1994 through the College’s Bicentennial Celebration in 2000, and was the director of programs for DigitalBridges2.0 from 2002 to 2004. Elizabeth has a master’s degree in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania and eight years of leadership experience in the non-profit and private sectors.

In supporting this program designed to help create a more visible and supportive culture of creativity, innovation, and intellectual risk-taking within our student body, Rory Riggs ’75 speaks to a set of skills that will be essential to the success of our students: “Building upon the lifelong value of a liberal arts education, this program seeks to supplement what our students learn in class with opportunities to enrich their out-of-class experience, specifically for the sake of getting students to act on their creativity—to make the process of innovation second nature and part of their lifetime critical skills portfolio.”

Many of our students engage in significant and educational co-curricular endeavors already, of course. They participate in programs doing community service through the Alliance for Civic Engagement, they complete service-learning projects, they consult in programs associated with the DigitalBridges2.0 program, they complete internships and externships through our Career Services Offices, and they fulfill key components of academic research projects with faculty mentors. We are proud of these students and of those who have created new institutions and programs, such as the organic garden, the eco-bus, Midd8, Bright Card, the carbon neutrality initiative, plus other projects that have come out of the Sunday Night Group discussions. This project seeks to make that kind of engagement more widespread and a more deeply ingrained part of the student culture. It strives to make the process of creating new things and of innovation commonplace, fun, and part of the Middlebury experience.

In the coming weeks, Elizabeth and I will be communicating with faculty, staff, and students to explain in some detail the next steps in the project, how individuals who are interested can be involved, what support will be available for those who wish to participate, and to answer any questions one might have about the program.

Ronald D. Liebowitz