Editor’s note: This commentary is by Richard Moye, of St. Johnsbury, a professor emeritus of Humanities at Lyndon State College, where he was chair of the English department.
Open Letter to the Board of Trustees of the Vermont State Colleges and to the Chancellor, Jeb Spaulding:
I cannot help but wonder how it feels to preside over the demise of an institution that not only has been around for 108 years, but also has been central to the community of which it has been a part for all those years.
The institution that is now Northern Vermont University-Lyndon has, since its founding in 1911, survived the 1918 flu pandemic, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Great Recession, just to cite the most obvious obstacles to the survival of an educational institution. And it has done so while providing educational and economic opportunity and value with consistent good faith and integrity, as well as providing one firm foundation for the newly instituted Vermont State Colleges System some 60 years ago.
Are you seriously telling us that the current situation is truly more calamitous and overwhelming than the list above? Are you seriously telling us that there is nothing that can be done short of eliminating the institution that has survived all these other difficult times?
Granted, the board of trustees allowed, despite all the markers of the current demographic trends, a former president of Lyndon State College to build two buildings and renovate a third all by borrowing money without any real plan to increase the enrollments sufficiently to support those capital investments and to use the new space provided. Granted, “if you build it they will come” is a strategy that works only in the movies. Nonetheless, the buildings exist, and simply closing them solves nothing, since they do, in fact, exist. The solution, obviously, is to find ways of filling the empty space, and to do so without increasing investment in residence halls (since no one apparently ever thought that would be necessary). So we need to bring in more commuter and local students to continue to serve the educational needs of Vermont and Vermonters.
You really can’t continue to fulfill the mission of making education accessible to Vermonters without educational institutions; online education will not suffice by itself, and you can’t compete with the already well-established players, especially without significant investment in technological infrastructure both for the institution and for the state as a whole to allow for online access for those who do not currently have it.
So here is a suggestion for your consideration, because I really don’t see that you have thought long and hard enough about the situation and certainly not about the long-term consequences:
First, eliminate the central office and subsume the Vermont State Colleges (not “universities”) under the umbrella of UVM, making each of the campuses a satellite of the main campus (as is done in most state college systems in the country). That would eliminate the overhead of a central office that has simply failed to function effectively, with or without a pandemic. Certainly, such a merger would no doubt capitalize on the larger applicant pool of students who wish to come to or stay in Vermont for higher education but do not have the good fortune of attending UVM, for whatever reason including expense. Vermont needs not only to keep Vermonters here for education and beyond, but also to draw students to the state to learn and, likely, to stay. Before we lose a lot more strong Vermont kids to other states by crippling their educational opportunities here, we need to turn things around and bring more young people to physically attend college here, to stay here, and to contribute to a stronger, healthier community. It is certainly no secret that students often stay to live and work where they went to college. We can’t educate our own young people and draw kids “from away” without offering a solid education and good reasons for them to physically come to Vermont for a valuable college experience. Online education serves a purpose, but it won’t do anything like what the real thing will do. And the notion that we will successfully compete with established online institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University is sheer folly and as misguided a strategy as the consolidation of Lyndon State College and Johnson State College.
Second, site Community College of Vermont at each of the campuses in order to increase the number of commuter and local students using the existing space. There is clearly a pedagogical advantage to on-campus education, preserving the college experience that goes well beyond simply attending information-distribution sessions that occur online. Moreover, siting CCV at each of the campuses provides a tangible and immediate pathway from a two-year degree to a four-year degree, allowing students so inclined to continue their education even to the graduate level. Whatever your perspective on the current political situation and climate, several things are clear: Every economic downturn increases the numbers of young and older people heading to colleges, and there is almost certainly going to be a substantial effort to reduce or eliminate costs at least for community college tuition. If the VSC fails to capitalize on those circumstances — and fails to use the opportunity to increase enrollments at the campuses — it will be not merely shortsighted but tragic.
Even without eliminating the central office and merging with UVM, this second strategy would provide a perfectly reasonable alternative to campus closures and would allow for, at the very least, an intermediate stage before the radical “solution” of closing the college campuses. The capital investment in the current campuses would be preserved (as opposed to abandoned), and capitalizing on a projected increase in community college students would supply a stop-gap measure if not ultimately an opportunity to continue providing, “for the benefit of Vermont …. affordable, high quality, student-centered, and accessible education, fully integrating professional, liberal, and career study, consistent with student aspirations and regional and state needs,” as the VSC mission states.
I have to say that one of most distressing aspects of the prospect of closing these colleges and specifically Lyndon is entirely personal. As a retired faculty member (and professor emeritus of Humanities for the VSC), I will not be personally damaged economically, though I will share in the social and cultural harm to my community. Rather, what upsets me most is that I came to LSC for a very specific reason. I left a position at Columbia University where I was teaching half the teaching load for twice the salary of the position at Lyndon. Obviously, I didn’t do it for the money or the “prestige” or even the “quality of life,” though I was happy to return to Vermont, where I had done my undergraduate work at Middlebury. I came to LSC because I believed that there was more value and meaning in my working here, at a small, underfunded public college, where I could help deliver the kind of first-rate education I’d had as a privilege to an area and an audience that didn’t otherwise have access for whatever reason. And that is exactly how Peggy Williams, the president at the time, and Jim Doyle and the rest of the English Department articulated the purpose of LSC. I shaped my entire working life around the idea that every kid deserves the best education we can give them, not some half-baked nonsense that we pass off as what we can “afford.” If these colleges, Lyndon in particular, are closed through some misguided, contradictory strategy to make education accessible by eliminating campuses to deliver it, you will not only be destroying opportunity for Vermont citizens and value for Vermont communities, but you will be telling me that my career-long sacrifice (of income and, frankly, of working conditions) to deliver that opportunity has been literally a waste of time. The VSC’s award to me of emeritus status (that is, “out-of-merit”) becomes not only vacuous, but an outright lie.
Public institutions such as NVU-Lyndon (as well as Johnson and VTC in Randolph) are central to the economic and cultural well-being of the communities of which they are a part, and they are vital for the future of those communities and Vermont. To close them is to undermine, if not decimate, those communities and to rob future students of the opportunities that so many have benefitted from and treasured. It is hardly, as the opening of the VSC mission says, “for the benefit of Vermont.”
