Despite all the douchebags on campus, and how hard the social life sucks, the academics at Middlebury are truly exceptional. I went to a rigorously intellectual private school in Boston, where 16 year old students read Hobbes, Eliot, Donne, and Hardy. I wanted more than anything to go to a college that lived up to my standards for its academic merit. And Middlebury met those standards.
Everyone at Midd works pretty damn hard. There are a couple breezy classes, like "Earthquakes and Volcanoes" or "Physical Reality and Human Thought." But overall, no one's getting off the hook. Most of the classes I've taken require a lot of commitment and hard work. There are high expectations that everyone come to class, and sincerely invest themselves in the curriculum. Merely doing the required work isn't going to get you an A. You have to go the extra mile.
My biggest beef with Midd is this: there's an irritating trend where the (usually tenured) professors get by on their personality alone. And the students EAT IT UP. They're like, Oh Professor Quirky McGee is so funny! He told us this story about Middlebury in the '80s, and also this story about his pet turtle, that were SO hilarious, we hardly even mentioned Chaucer once the whole semester! And I'm like, Dude, my parents are paying 40G a year, can we fucking LEARN SOMETHING PLEASE?!
My second biggest beef in the academic arena at Middlebury College is the "discussion sections." Every class seems to be based on discussion. Even the big lectures have discussions at the end of the week - a good thing, in this case. But for the smaller classes, which comprise the vast majority of Middlebury's curriculum, discussion is much too highly valued.
For example: this past fall semester, I took a class called "History of the Middle East: 1450 - present." Now that's a lot of material to cover in eleven or twelve weeks. This professor, who everyone thinks is the bomb, ran classes like this: she'd say, Okay, it's debate time! Half the class sit on this side of the room - you guys are gonna argue why it's important for women to wear traditional veils. Half the class sit on THIS side, and argue the disadvantages of requiring women to cover themselves in public.
We hadn't learned anything about veils, or the legislature surrounding the contentious issue. So the debate was like, one kid with long hair would say, "I think it's unfair to make women wear a veil, because they should be free to dress how they like. I think freedom of expression is really important, like, when my parents told me to cut my hair, I was really offended...." And again, I'm thinking, Why am I listening to 19 year olds airing their pompous and uninformed opinions instead of reading something critical? Are the arbitrary opinions of my fellow students worthy of taking up this amount of class time?