www.montereycountynow.com DECEMBER 11-17, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 tic,” she said. Several speakers emphasized the shared role everyone plays—faculty, students, alumni—in recruiting new students into the pipeline. And Middlebury’s interim president at the time, Stephen Snyder, said he was encouraged by the incoming president, Ian Baucom, despite the challenges facing MIIS, Middlebury and higher education more broadly. “I think we are in good hands,” Snyder said. “He is deeply human and he has already understood Middlebury and all of its parts and has mentioned a number of times how important the institute was to his thinking about where we’re headed.” Five months later, on July 1, his first day on the job as president of Middlebury, Baucom shared a video message with the campus community that included his thinking about where they were headed. He spoke about the students, the faculty, the magic of a residential liberal arts college, founded in 1800, and his responsibility in assuming leadership at a 225-year-old institution. “You’ve helped me see a Middlebury whose history and whose values have prepared us to meet the shifting currents and possibilities of this complex moment,” he said. “That fills me with optimism for our future.” Baucom committed to quickly addressing the future, specifically Middlebury’s other institutions, including MIIS. “That question has been left open for too long. It is time to answer it, and we will, within my first year as president if not sooner.” Six weeks later, on Aug. 18, he and McCauley visited MIIS. In meetings with administrators, they laid out several options for how to answer the question of MIIS in light of financial challenges. One option was to keep working on a four-year improvement plan that had launched a year earlier, in 2024, with the goal of boosting enrollment and, therefore, revenue. (That plan had been the main subject of the January town hall meeting.) Option two was to merge certain programs. The third was the nuclear option: shut it all down. On Aug. 25, students began arriving on campus in Monterey for welcome week, with classes set to begin on Sept. 2. Meanwhile, back in Vermont, the Middlebury board met on Aug. 27 and Baucom recommended option three. The board agreed that the incoming class at MIIS would be its last, and the institute would close in 2027. The next day, Aug. 28, Baucom flew to Monterey, and announced the plan. The day after that, the first round of layoffs were announced. By then, Baucom was back in Vermont. MIIS faculty and staff already knew the school was in trouble. Enrollment had been declining for years, and the pandemic didn’t help. But most people did not expect the nuclear option. “I am surprised it was one of Ian Baucom’s first decisions,” says a senior administrator (and MIIS alum). “I thought there might have been attempts to really truly integrate us.” In a series of interviews with faculty and staff—many of whom spoke to the Weekly on the condition of anonymity with layoffs coming and job prospects uncertain—they describe frustration building in the 20 years since Middlebury took over MIIS that the two institutions were doomed never to mesh or worse, that they were set up to fail, with unreachable enrollment targets and lacking the support that would have enabled them to meet them. When it started, the merger with Middlebury saved MIIS from financial trouble. Now that MIIS is in existential crisis mode, some faculty are pursuing negotiations in hopes that another institution takes over where Middlebury leaves off. “We would like to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,” says Stephanie Cooper, a professor of French translation and interpretation. “We would like to find an institution that is not private, that is not seeing the school as a way to make a profit—a public higher education institution that has a different philosophy and strategy.” Like many MIIS employees, Cooper is also a MIIS alum, who graduated in 1999. And like many of her colleagues, she is also an active practitioner; last year, the French native was one of 64 interpreters hired to work at the Olympics in Paris. (She saw one of her MIIS classmates there interpreting in Spanish, after he worked for years at the White House.) Graduates have gone on to achieve great careers and interpret for highstakes diplomatic assignments, including for agencies such as the United Nations, Department of Defense and the World Bank. For Cooper, the value of the program is obvious, but getting enough students to enroll has been an ongoing challenge. “Sadly, over the last 10 to 15 years, because the classrooms were not full enough, we were gradually but very surely defunded in different ways,” she says. Many translation and interpretation faculty, like Cooper, have a business interpreting in addition to teaching. “We were very involved in recruiting by default, because we know our market so well,” she says. “Then we were told there’s no more budget for that, even a little visit somewhere.” Cooper says program faculty also Middlebury converted a 1971 office building into a dormitory for up to 88 students, one of its recruitment efforts. It opened in 2021, the first residences in MIIS history. International students usually account for 25 to 40 percent of the MIIS student body, and have increased proportionately as domestic enrollment has gone down (they are 40 percent in fall 2025). Flags (left) represent every country of origin for international students, changing every semester; the newest addition was the Cuban flag. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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