Middlebury College has named University of Virginia vice president, provost and English professor Ian Baucom as its 18th president. Baucom was named late Tuesday after a months-long search, and he takes office July 1. Baucom is succeeding Laurie Patton, who served nearly a decade in the role before she left Middlebury last month to become president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Former Language Schools dean Steve Snyder is serving as interim president. Baucom, who has been UVA’s provost since 2022, previously spent 17 years at Duke University, where he was an English professor, department chair and director of  the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. In a 15-minute interview that Middlebury published on its website as part other its press release, Baucom  said he was raised through his early teens in South Africa, where his parents ran adult literacy programs for mine workers during the Apartheid era. He said the experience shaped him and showed him how education can help right historic wrongs. "I began to see because of the work of others, my parents among them ... that education could not only change individual lives one by one by one, but that the collective and common work of education could open a society," he said. Baucom earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wake Forest University, and a master’s in African Studies and a doctorate in English from Yale University. [content-1] Baucom said in the interview that he was drawn to the college's commitment to understanding climate science.  Baucom is a scholar in the field of Black Atlantic and postcolonial studies and, more recently, humanities and climate change. He's the author of three scholarly books and several essays, reviews and journal entries in the fields of modern languages, history, literary criticism and visual arts. “It was clear from our first conversation that we share values around what’s most important at a place like Middlebury — immersive education, developing global awareness while living and contributing on a local scale, and respecting the experiences of others,” college trustee Ted Truscott said in the prepared statement. [content-2] The very selective Middlebury College has 2,800 students from dozens of countries. The school owns about 6,000 acres of land in Vermont, including a ski area, the Middlebury Snow Bowl, in Hancock, according to the college newspaper, the Middlebury Campus. The college's holdings include a 350-acre main campus in the town…