In Conversation

In July, Ian Baucom  began his tenure as the 18th president of Middlebury,  assuming the post six months after his appointment in January. Previously the executive vice president, provost, and Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Baucom succeeded Laurie Patton, who left Middlebury at the end of 2024 to become the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On a late-September afternoon, Baucom sat down in his sun-dappled Old Chapel office for an extended conversation with magazine editor Matt Jennings. The two discussed Baucom’s childhood in South Africa, poetry, the place of higher education in civic life, his professional path to Middlebury, and more. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

May I start with a rather banal, yet important, question: How do you pronounce your last name?
[Chuckles]

Because when we were filming a video the other day, I heard you say your name, and my first thought was, “He pronounced his name incorrectly.”
[Laughs] BAW-kum.

I feel like everyone says BOW-kum, bow like bowing one’s head.
No bowing . . . seriously. It’s an unusual name, no one really knows how to say it. Honestly, I just prefer “Ian.”

Much of your professional career has been spent at institutions larger than Middlebury—Yale, Duke, the University of Virginia—yet I heard you say recently that you realized that as you thought about being a president, you would want to be at a residential liberal arts institution. Why is that?
Yes, that’s right. I have nothing but the highest admiration for those universities; they will always be a part of me, part of who I am, and they benefited me tremendously—as a student, as a teacher, as a scholar, as an administrator. To lead a university of that scale, however, you have at least four jobs: you’re likely involved in running a major health system, which is hugely important work involving medical discovery and patient care. Second, you are likely to oversee a complex athletic enterprise that is extremely expensive, is going through challenging times, and demands a great deal of attention. Third, you are responsible for overseeing a major research enterprise, with half a billion dollars or more at stake in sponsored research; that landscape of discovery, innovation demands even more time and attention.

[Chuckles]

And then you’ve got responsibility for the work of education, liberal arts education, medical education, law students, engineering students.

You chuckled there before that fourth part.
There’s a risk that the first thing becomes last.

And, likely, the aspect of higher education that got you started in the profession to begin with.
Exactly. What changed my life was being an undergraduate student, at Wake Forest, with a professor who cared about me. Now, it’s very important to note—we do pursue research, excellently, at Middlebury. We do compete, fiercely, in intercollegiate athletics. We contribute to medical discovery and have influence on public policy. We do all of these things extremely well. But we do them at an institution where we know what comes first. I wanted that. I wanted to be part of that again. I wanted to be part of what comes first.

There are a number of terrific schools that are just what you described. So, what was it about Middlebury, specifically?
A blend of things. When I began my teaching career in the English department at Yale, some of my faculty colleagues would go off each summer to teach at Bread Loaf, and they would always come back speaking of this magical place; that was my first impression. And then there was Middlebury’s reputation for a commitment to language education, and the depth involved. What that said to me was that Middlebury was a place that believes not just in developing, say, a repertoire of knowledge, but really embedding oneself in a world that’s new to you, a world of language, a world of art, a world of understanding the nature of economies or politics. That made an impression.

Not just what you’re studying, but how you’re studying.
There’s a Middlebury sense of what it means to help students really learn deeply. I kept meeting Middlebury alums who I’ve worked with or in other situations, who would talk about their professors. That happens everywhere. But for these Middlebury people I would meet, it seemed so constant—there was a professor who had changed their life. That meant an enormous amount. Probably that more than anything. I just kept hearing that. There’s an ethos here that’s really special.

I’d love to delve into something now, which I’ve heard you speak about quite a bit, and that’s your experience growing up in apartheid South Africa. Your parents were missionaries and ran adult literacy programs for Black mine workers, and you’ve said that this experience shaped your understanding of both the power of education to lift people and the necessity of education in building a democracy. Can we talk about that a little bit?
Yes, absolutely. You’ve named the two things. It’s the power of education to open up individual lives. From a first perspective, every moment of education is the education of the individual. Seeing what can become possible for that one person. The second part is that you simply cannot have a democracy without open access to education and without a citizenry that both individually and collectively have been given the ability to realize the promise of their lives, such as the promise of who they are, the capacities that are in all of us. You just can’t have a democratic culture without people being given the opportunity to understand the histories that produced them, the technologies around them, the crucial issues at the heart of any debate of public policy or understanding principle disagreements about constitutional law. There’s just no democracy without it. Then, in South Africa, that wasn’t abstract.

And you didn’t learn this in theory . . .
It was very real. The struggle for democracy and the struggle for the end of apartheid began in many places. It began with Black civic leaders. It began in churches, and temples, and synagogues. It began on the streets. It began in unions. It began with lawyers. And, so powerfully, it began with students and educators. It began with universities and high schools, with teachers, professors, and students working alongside community leaders, and many others. That was so really clear and powerful. Those two things, seeing people committing their lives to that work, including one of my parents whose work was not in higher education but in adult education, it framed my understanding of the common public good and the individual life-changing good.

In those years, how aware were you of the work they were doing? Was it something you all talked about a lot, or was it later that you came to appreciate it?
It was both. I was aware of what they were doing, but also I was six, seven, eight—when you’re a kid, your parents are both the most fascinating figures in your life and they are also . . . adults. [Laughs] Yet even at that age, I was aware that it was highly unusual that we would have Black guests to dinner. I knew that they were doing work that had some kind of significance, but I’m not sure I was highly reflective on it, certainly, at that age.

Of course.
That came later, gradually through adolescence as I understood more deeply what an aberration, an evil, apartheid was.

Which comes with growing and understanding. The puzzle pieces start to form and connect.
Exactly.

I’d like to read a quote of yours back to you: “There is an almost unspoken but strong social contract on the place of higher education within our common civic life. It’s become unraveled.”
You’ve done your homework.

[Laughs] My cinematic reveal is that you said this not this month or this year, but 10 years ago. And you were referencing the decade prior!
Yes—

Before you say more, I’d like to ask, first, where does this contract come from?
Great question. I would point to two moments, fairly far apart, though I’d argue that they are connected to each other. First, a tie between education and civic life is made very early on in American history in the founding documents. Just look at the Declaration ideal, that the nature of the American people is that we are a “we the people” held together by the pursuit of truth. We hold these truths.” The founders understood that the revolution and the establishment of the American republic depended on several things: self-determination, the rule of law, self-governance among them. Yet Jefferson and Franklin had a common idea (which led to the founding of the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania, respectfully), and that was the role of universities in public life. They were both convinced that universities should have a public mission, which was quite different from the German models, the British models. Yet . . .

I see where you are going with this.
This truth was powerful. It was powerfully articulated. But it wasn’t lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .”

It was the great contradiction of the man and the document.
That’s right. You get that moment. The truth was spoken at an early moment, and it was denied by the same people who spoke it.

Which brings us to the second moment you referenced . . .
Yes, and it is gradual, painfully slow, but that is the eventual opening of higher education. And I think it appears in the mid-20th century with the next crucial moment to me, where the social contract becomes something on which a broad consensus is achieved, and that is the signing of the GI Bill.

That generation of soldiers comes home, and there’s a sense of a need to honor their service. There was a recognition that we were a nation coming out of the Second World War in a different place in the world, and we owed it to those who hadn’t had access before. That, to me, is the second moment in the modern writing of the social contract. We also have to recognize that it was primarily white men who benefited at first, but then it keeps expanding, through the civil rights movements, the women’s rights movements, LGBTQ movements.

Right.
You get to a point where the American dream and higher education become synonymous. Public universities, private universities, governmental actors at the state level, at the federal level, private philanthropies, business leaders, and entrepreneurs all agreed you can’t have a healthy economy or society without higher education. You can’t have the advance of scientific knowledge without education. You can’t have the arts.

The social contract was written. And then it started to fray.

What caused this?
Over the decades from the late ’90s and early 2000s on, there have been real questions about the relationship between the cost of education and the increasing economic instability of lower-income and middle-income Americans. The idea that knowledge is a public good or education is a public good comes under stress, especially when state governments cut back on direct support. And then, ultimately, the value of education gets mainly economized. We start thinking about it almost only as “Is this a good investment?”

I think some of the broader cultural fracturing that we are seeing across our society comes from that moment. One of the dilemmas is that, because colleges and universities are in a slightly defensive posture, in making the economic argument for the utility of the investment, the “return on the investment,” we became too shy about talking about the democratic value proposition in addition to the economic value.

I think those forces begin to collide and strain. There’s more focus on the economic return. There’s less investment by state governments because they’re under financial pressure. There’s a loss, I think, in forgetting that we’re part of a project for the future of our democracy, which is neither a Republican nor a Democratic thing, neither a liberal nor a conservative thing.

We were charged and collectively inherited the task of this democratic experiment. If you lose some of that deep purpose of what we do, then it’s hard to hold a social contract together because the reasons that guide you through tough times can get obscured.

I realize I’m quoting you back to you quite a bit, but this leads me to something else you said when we first met. We were filming your Day One message to the community, and you said, “If we are to enter our future, not just with optimism, but with clear eyes, we’ll need the cleareyed wisdom that comes from the full diversity of who we are and the call of a common purpose. It’s that call of a common purpose that speaks to the consequence of who we are.”

What is our common purpose, or are we still discovering it?
The common purpose to me—and I’ll be repeating myself because it’s what I believe—is the unfinished experiment of democracy. That is both a collective purpose and the idea that a healthy democracy is a healthy democracy for each individual. It’s our common good, but it’s both. A democracy is one in which any person, regardless of where they began, can truly and firmly believe that they can go anywhere and that the depth and range of their human potential can be realized.

There is no obstacle.
There should be no obstacle. We individually have a civic life that we’re constantly trying to build together, and that’s the beauty, again, to me, of the Declaration ideal. That’s the beauty of the constitutional ideal. It’s why that language, “we, we, we,” is so resonant. Then you can, again, get non-abstract and really practical about it.

In what way?
Look around. We’re talking in the fall semester at Middlebury. On September 1, we welcomed young people from suburbs, small rural towns, cities. We welcomed students who were the first in their families to go to college. We welcomed students whose families have been at Middlebury for generations. We welcomed students from Arkansas and Alaska. We welcomed students from West Africa and Indonesia and France.

If you want to see the American idea embodied at Middlebury, there are two days a year where you can just show up and see the idea of America being brought into life. It’s move-in day on campus and it’s graduation.

Bookends of possibility . . .
The promise of possibility. And what excites me is what happens in between. Students all thrown into dorms together and going to the same dining halls together and going to class together. In four short years, the world will open up for them and change their lives forever.

We are speaking here in mid-fall, very early in your first year, but you’ve already made a very big decision, a difficult decision, to recommend that Middlebury conclude residential graduate programs at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey. Can you give me some insight on how one approaches such a big decision?
I was talking with a friend about this—Peter Lange—so let me just attribute this framing to him: be deliberate and decisive. Since I took this job, I have been thinking deeply about the financial challenge in Monterey. I, and my team, studied the challenge from every conceivable angle, we weighed arguments, we studied data, evidence. We were thoughtful and deliberative. And then I had to make a decision, a recommendation to the board. Be deliberate, then be decisive.

The two.
Yes. Sometimes you can be decisive without thinking things through—because you want to look like a “decision maker”— and sometimes you can get so locked into deliberation that you never make a decision. It’s a simple construct, but it’s not easy. Inside every institutional decision are individual lives. In making the best decisions for an institution, even as they become clear, I have to constantly remember their real impact on individual human lives. Every president will face hard decisions; I want to do so deliberatively, decisively, and humanly, with compassion for every individual and the long-term good of the institution in mind.

This leads me to a question about Middlebury, writ large. For some time, we’ve wrestled with the creative tension in defining who we are. What does that examination look like to you?
The first thing is that you need to know who you are at your core. We are all more than our core, of course, and the sum of who we are should be greater than any individual part. Yet your strength should emanate from your core. Our core is the College— the undergraduate program.

There’s no Middlebury if you remove the College.
Our core is the College. Then, what makes us truly distinctive are all the other aspects of Middlebury that not only exist, but are connected—by an ethos, a way of living and learning, a pursuit of global understanding.

We need to be deliberate about these connections. How we connect who we are at our core, in our fall and spring semesters with our undergraduates in Vermont to the students who study at our sites around the world; to those graduate students and language learners who occupy these same Vermont classrooms and dining and residence halls in the summer in our amazing language schools; to those studying English at Bread Loaf.

The core is about clarity, but it’s also understanding where your culture thrives. We thrive on innovation and have since our founding. It should all coalesce.

I’ve been around long enough that this sounds like the making of a strategic planning process to chart Middlebury’s direction in the coming years.
[Chuckles] I think it’s safe to say we will be engaging in strategic planning this year. [Editor’s note: About a month after this conversation took place, Baucom announced the beginning of a strategic planning process at Middlebury.]

I would love to talk a little bit about your family. I know we’ve talked about your parents and how important they were in your life and to your outlook on life. You have a large, beautiful family today, and you speak about them often. Tell me the role family plays in your life.
The most important thing about me is that I have the experience of someone who has been loved. The most important thing about my family is both that I love them and that I experience the love they give me. My sister sometimes says that we are an unlikely family.

In what way?
We are a blend of biology and adoption. We are a blend of race and ethnicity. We are across your standard political spectrums. Across the family, we are a blend of straight and gay, and born in many different continents. Maybe every family is unlikely in a way.

Again, it strikes me that your lived experience embodies how you think.
It does. I think of the world as this place, a place where long histories and trajectories come together and intersect and something new happens. There’s my wife Wendy’s story and the story of a Lutheran family in Richmond, Virginia. There’s my story, my parents’ story, which is a story of a Mennonite German- speaking mother from Canada and a first-generation college-educated boy from North Carolina—meeting and falling in love.

There’s the story of two of our children where the subcontinental Indian diaspora comes to South Africa. Because my mom and dad happened to have taken me there when I was a child, and Wendy and I got married, and we had the chance of adoption, then that diaspora intersects with our lives in the amazingness of our first two children. There’s the story of one of our children who became part of the family late in life, of Puerto Rico coming to Virginia, and then we became family. There’s the story of a daughter who went to college and met her soulmate, her partner, and she’s part of our family and we adore her too. There’s a story of a child who is studying in Washington, D.C., and reveling in what it means to be interested in computer science and politics and also falling in love. There’s a story of our youngest, 16 years old, who when told, “We’re going to take you to Vermont,” said, “Okay!”

Each of those is a long arc, and I believe in those. Then you bring them together and something new happens.

I know family is family and work is work, but does this impact how you approach your job?
Absolutely. I sometimes say to parents, “When I see your kids, I see my kids. When I see my kids, I see your kids.”