22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY DECEMBER 11-17, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com advocated for lowering tuition—perhaps a counter-intuitive strategy when the problem is insufficient revenue—but they thought it would motivate more students to enroll, including students from overseas. (Tuition per semester this academic year is $24,935.) There was a suggestion from some faculty about charging higher tuition for a business degree. The MBA program started strong, drawing almost 200 students in a cohort in the 1990s, then dwindled and was canceled at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. When MIIS announced in 2017 that the MBA program would end, a press release noted a decline in enrollment, “a phenomenon experienced at a number of business schools nationally.” (Some at MIIS argue that Middlebury had failed to promote the program effectively.) The press release struck an optimistic tone for other programs, including translation and interpretation: “The Middlebury Institute will see its third consecutive year of enrollment growth when students arrive next fall.” That optimism did not hold up, part of a broader trend across institutions of higher education. “Schools are failing, schools are merging, schools are closing,” says Jeff Dayton-Johnson, vice president of academic affairs and dean of MIIS. “Students and parents are questioning whether a degree is worth what it used to be worth.” The industry chatter is about an impending demographic cliff, when instead of long-sustained growth in prospective college students year after year, there will be fewer high school graduates than there were the year before. Some right-sizing in that landscape, he says, is inevitable. Still, MIIS leadership, under pressure to increase enrollment, were getting closer to meeting their goals. Then the Covid-19 pandemic came, and the institute never recovered. “We were close to closing the gap,” Dayton-Johnson says, “but we never got back in the black. The growing pressure on Middlebury College to balance its budget just put more pressure on us.” How and why Middlebury College, a residential undergraduate school in Vermont, ever came to own a professional graduate program in Monterey, is an earlier story of financial failure. MIIS was grappling with insurmountable debt, and back in the early 2000s, went looking for another institution to take it over. One prospect, according to a retired administrator who spoke to the Weekly on background, was UC Santa Cruz. Talks advanced, but a belt-tightening directive from the UC Chancellor’s Office put that plan on the shelf. Stockton-based University of Pacific, which had experience with acquiring a dental school, expressed interest. There was a pitch to make MIIS into a Chinese institution, but the board decided that was the wrong path. In various tellings, it’s a series of pretty random coincidences that led MIIS and Midd, as it’s known, to begin talking. A Middlebury alum living in Pebble Beach had served on the boards of both institutions, and knew that MIIS was looking for a savior. He made an introduction. Administrators began flying back and forth between Monterey and Vermont, sharing a passion for languages and global consciousness. “Quickly there was a sense that wow, our cultures gelled, this is really a good fit,” says the retired administrator. “It just seemed like it made sense.” Part of the negotiations focused on whether Midd would take on MIIS’ $10 million debt—for MIIS, a deal-breaker. Middlebury agreed, and they inked a deal in 2005. In 2010, they formally became one entity. But any sign of a real merger was slow. Middlebury made some needed infrastructure improvements—new roofs, painting—and there was an institutional sigh of relief that somebody else had taken on the debt. “Five years in, the honeymoon had been really good,” the former administrator says. But budgetary realities started to catch up. In June 2024, Middlebury Provost McCauley wrote to MIIS staff about “our specific, attainable goals” for 2028. They included increasing student enrollment from 446 at the time to 680 four years later, and reducing the cost of instruction to 40 percent of net tuition—down significantly from 77 percent in 2024. In May 2025, just before Baucom began, the Middlebury board of trustees wrote an open letter announcing they had just borrowed $45 million to finance current operating deficits. “We cannot do so again, and we must realize a structurally balanced budget,” they wrote. Cuts were coming. Middlebury administrators announced $10 million in budget cuts. Eligible employees got an offer for early retirement. The retirement match for Vermont staff went from 15 to 11 percent, which was already the highest match at MIIS. That did not go over well in Vermont, even though the college had its own deficit of roughly $12 million. MIIS, a much smaller institution, was facing an $8.7 million projected deficit. (As a nonprofit, the institution’s finances are reported publicly only in aggregate to the IRS.) According to reporting by college newspaper The Middlebury Campus, a group of 300 faculty and students walked out of classrooms to protest the cuts in May. Signs included messages like “Sell Monterey, Midd Profs Deserve Fair Pay.” A group of economics faculty (a dozen of them, dubbed the “Econ 12”) urged the administration to ease budget pressure in Vermont by divesting MIIS. That message took on new urgency in the face of budget cuts, but it was not new. There had been opposition to Middlebury’s acquisition of MIIS from the very beginning, with faculty in Vermont voting 80-22 to object before the board pursued the deal in 2010, even if that vote was just symbolic. “There’s no tuition point that would have saved us,” says Scott Webb, associate director of the Center for Advising and Career Services, who is also an alum. “We couldn’t recruit our way out.” He imagined layoffs or some other dramatic austerity measures would’ve been needed, but he expected some such approach, not all-out closure. “It would have been nice to have some solidarity from Middlebury to weather this storm together, but their internal politics out there made it impossible,” Webb says. One senior MIIS administrator explored the tension between the two institutions in a dissertation for a doctorate of education at Johns Hopkins University in 2021. “In response to economic pressures, colleges and universities may The dean of MIIS, Jeff Dayton-Johnson, is known by the campus community as “JDJ.” Even as layoffs begin, he is encouraging the public to attend events and participate in campus offerings as much as possible. “I want to make sure we embrace this community we have while we still have it.” The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies is one of the few programs that is financially self-sustaining and therefore not scheduled to close in 2027. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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