Trustees of the Vermont State Colleges System have appointed John W. Mills to be the interim president of Northern Vermont University, effective in August. NVU’s current president, Elaine Collins, announced Monday she was stepping down.
Mills spent 10 years as president of Paul Smith’s College, a small private school in the Adirondack region of New York, according to a statement issued by the chancellor’s office. He was also president for two years at Mount Aloysius College, a small private Catholic college in Pennsylvania.
He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rhode Island and a Ph.D. from Brown University, according to state college officials, and has held faculty appointments at MIT, Harvard Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School and Clarkson University.
Mills’s contract runs through June 30, 2022, and is subject to renewal, according to Katherine Levasseur, director of external and governmental affairs for the chancellor’s office. Trustees conducted an informal search process to find an interim replacement for Collins, Levasseur said, and worked with a consulting firm to find him. He was interviewed by the chancellor’s office, NVU’s senior leadership team, and the board of trustees prior to his appointment, she added.
The state college system is embarking on an overhaul that will ultimately consolidate NVU, Castleton University and Vermont Technical College into a single entity. The newly unified school — which will still maintain the system’s existing, separate campuses — will have one president, and is expected to debut in time for the 2023-24 school year.
The system will conduct a national search to find a president for the new merged school, Levasseur said.
“The opportunity to lead Northern Vermont University, especially as it engages with the entire Vermont State Colleges System in system-wide transformation, is incredibly exciting,” Mills said in a statement. “Across the nation, state systems are struggling with many of the same issues as the VSCS. Vermont’s commitment to higher education and workforce opportunities, especially in rural communities, and the state’s willingness to directly address the tremendous challenges confronting higher education are remarkable.”
Collins’s salary is $185,000 a year, plus benefits, according to Levasseur. Mills will be paid through the consulting firm that recruited him, which the Vermont State Colleges System will pay $252,000 a year, “roughly the equivalent cost to VSCS when you account for benefits, employer taxes, etc.” Levasseur said.
