Jon Margolis is a VTDigger political columnist.
In their hour of need, Vermont’s two major educational institutions performed their basic service: they taught a lesson.
Maybe not exactly the one they wanted to teach or the way they wanted to teach it. But in both cases not without value. If nothing else, the lessons included the wisdom that life is complicated.
Last Wednesday, University of Vermont President Suresh Garimella wrote a letter to Gov. Phil Scott asking for another $25 million to deal with additional costs stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Garimella’s timing may not have been optimal. As he received the letter, Scott was dealing with the tens of thousands of Vermonters who had just been thrown out of work thanks to that very same pandemic and who were unable to contact the state agency that handles unemployment compensation. The governor may have found their predicament the higher priority.
Not that Garimella wanted the $25 million from the state’s own revenue, diminishing almost by the moment. He wanted some of the state’s share of the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES) funds.
But you know what they say about money: it’s fungible. Every dollar the state sends to UVM is a dollar it can’t use elsewhere. And thanks to the pandemic, there are lots of elsewheres clamoring for every penny they can get.
As Garimella seems to know, it’s awkward for UVM to ask for money. Not because it gets much from the state, which kicks in only 11% of the university’s budget, one of the chintziest state contributions in the country. But starting with Garimella himself (total annual compensation $630,000) some of its top officials and faculty earn a great deal of money, and there seem to be a lot of them.
The evidence that Garimella knows this is that, to his credit, he asked the university to divert his April salary payment to a special fund set up to help UVM deal with the pandemic. All the extra money he sought may be needed, but legislators and administration officials are likely to press him to find ways to cut UVM spending before they cough up more.
If Garimella’s timing was awkward, Jeb Spaulding’s was downright disastrous. On Friday, Spaulding, the chancellor of the state college system, announced that its trustees would vote on Monday on his plan that would all but decimate the entire system.
What? In three days? Close three campuses, one of them a state school since 1828 and two of them in the economically stressed rural north? Just as Vermont is trying to keep its young people from fleeing, and maybe even attract young people from elsewhere?
Talk about counterproductive.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, said she was “taken aback by the magnitude of the proposal,” and who wasn’t? The governor, the lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, the president pro tem of the Senate and almost everyone with access to a microphone assailed the plan. Demonstrators (safely from their cars) paraded past the Statehouse, calling at least for delay and even for Spaulding’s resignation.
It worked, sort of. The vote on Spaulding’s plan was put off until at least next Monday. But the problem has not gone away, and while on its face Spaulding’s recommendation was a political blunder of epic proportions, it may have served the purpose – here’s that valuable lesson about complexity – of forcing the state to consider the possibility that he’s right.
It isn’t just that the whole system might be endangered because of a cash shortfall of as much as $25 million. Somebody can always find patch-up money somewhere. And while it is true that the state has been underfunding the colleges for decades, the basic problem here is not that there isn’t enough money.
It’s that there aren’t enough students. And no, there are not likely to be enough even if the state ponied up so much more that the colleges could reduce tuition. It’s what Spaulding calls “the demographics,” a bloodless way of saying that throughout the northeastern United States, people haven’t been having many babies for the last few decades.
On top of that, even before the pandemic, colleges were doing more of their teaching online, less of it on campus. “The higher education world is moving away from bricks and mortar,” Spaulding said.
So maybe Vermont doesn’t need three general-purpose state college campuses, each with its own sports teams, theaters and well-stocked libraries. Maybe consolidating it all at Castleton University is an idea that should at least be considered.
Even if, as Spaulding acknowledges, the impact on the areas left behind (Johnson, Lyndon, Randolph) would be “huge.” And it wouldn’t be just the economic impact, either. The campuses in Johnson and Lyndon (separate state colleges until two years ago) are vital to the societies and one might even say the psychology of Lamoille County and the Northeast Kingdom. Both areas have been losing population, farms, stores, confidence, maybe even hope.
But as it turns out, nobody knows how “huge” the impact would be because nobody has run the numbers. Closing those three campuses might eliminate 500 jobs. That’s a small percentage of the jobs in the state or even in the three affected counties. It might be somewhat cavalier of Spaulding to say he hopes that “over time creative minds and grit will produce new models” for the prosperity of these areas. Maybe he should have already run those numbers.
But maybe so should the Legislature and/or the Scott administration. It isn’t as though Spaulding hasn’t been trying to call attention to the problem. Almost a year ago he issued a “white paper” outlining the challenges faced by the college system.
Nor does anyone seem to have tried to figure out what can or should be done with the abandoned resources – 24 buildings on 211 acres at Lyndon, 14 buildings on 350 acres at Johnson, 25 buildings on 544 acres in Randolph Center.
The college trustees could still vote on Spaulding’s plan next week, but something close to a consensus seemed to be forming around finding a way to plug the immediate financial hole (perhaps with federal money) to allow time for some entity to do the numbers-crunching and analysis for “right-sizing,” (as Sen. Kitchel said) the college system.
Isn’t higher education wonderful?
