This commentary is by Annaliese Holden, a sophomore at the University of Vermont who has a double major in ancient Greek and classical civilizations, and a minor in psychological sciences.
I am writing this account as a response to recent commentaries by current and former UVM student trustees in support of the current administration.
I am glad to read that students from some of UVM’s not-yet-threatened programs, like business, feel comfortable with the leadership exhibited by university administration in the past year.
The same cannot be said for my peers and me. We have been repeatedly disappointed by the administration and are forced to watch as our programs of study become reduced to skeletons or eliminated entirely. I do not feel heard by the leaders of UVM.
Not all of us can be student trustees (selected by the board), but we would certainly appreciate having the opportunity to converse with UVM’s trustees if they were accessible to us.
I agree that each student here at UVM has a unique view of their “ideal student experience.” However, when I applied to UVM, I certainly wasn’t idealizing sitting in my English class with a heavy heart, knowing that my professor would no longer be teaching after this semester because of a “roll of the dice” decision by College of Arts and Sciences Dean Bill Falls to terminate him after 31 years.
I was not idealizing spending time during finals week (also in the middle of remote learning) to write a letter to the dean, provost, and president begging them to spare the Classics department. As of now, I know that the College of Arts and Sciences has arranged to preserve the classical civilizations major but will proceed with eliminating the majors in Greek and Latin.
Watching the department I am passionate about become torn apart is not the ideal experience for any student. The lack of leadership that has been exhibited here has certainly not been a load off of my stress from school, the pandemic, and concerns for my health; it has only added to it.
As a student, I am deeply concerned about the opaque nature of UVM’s finances, especially the obscured truth of how much money UVM has in its possession. In particular, I am worried that my tuition dollars are not going toward supporting my department and professors, but toward the salaries of top administrators and deans, whose spending on themselves and their nonacademic priorities have increased sharply since Suresh Garimella has become president. That is not leadership that cares about my education.
The College of Arts and Sciences at UVM is in the black, its programs generating more revenue for the university than they cost. But instead of supporting my areas of study and my professors, my tuition dollars are being drained out of the college to support administrative bloat.
As for the vision of UVM in the future, I have seen it. It’s called “Reimagining a UVM 2050,” and it was sent out to students by Provost Patricia Prelock in winter 2020. UVM 2050 proposes a School of the Arts, Letters, & the Human Experience as well as a School of Societal Health.
As I expressed at UVM’s Academic Reorganization Group forum on Feb. 24, I am dumbfounded as to exactly which aspect of human experience and healthy societies UVM hopes to communicate to its future students. Classics, religion and language departments that are being endangered teach the core materials of these topics. It’s difficult for me to see any logic or practicality in these choices.
It would help us if President Garimella and Provost Prelock agreed to speak at a public forum where students and faculty could directly express their concerns and receive answers as to why this academic reorganization, in the midst of a pandemic that has exhausted the campus, should not be a cause for alarm.
Instead, Garimella and Prelock have rejected an invitation from the internationally celebrated Lawrence Debate Union to participate in a public and civil debate about our conflicting visions.
I am grateful for my experiences at UVM with my professors and peers in the Classics department. I am opposing the administration’s actions and writing this commentary because I feel there was a serious injustice taking place at the university.
When I visit the University of Vermont as an alumna I hope to return to an institution I can say that I am proud to have graduated from. I have a creeping sense of dread, however, that this will not be the case.