This commentary is by Kate Gold of Lyndon Center, who has worked at NVU-Lyndon (formerly Lyndon State College) since 2005. She was president of the VSC-United Professionals union from 2018 to 2020, and is now both the longtime chair of the Lyndon chapter and the recently elected AFT-Vermont vice president of political action.
On Tuesday, Feb. 7, the Vermont State Colleges administration announced that it intended to remove physical access to books and diminish student and community access to collegiate athletics.
The current leadership is grossly out of touch with our students and the communities. Nothing in President Parwinder Grewal’s apology letter, issued to the college community on Friday, Feb. 10, indicates otherwise — and it very much had the victim-blaming flavor of criticizing the response to his failure of leadership.
If he wants us to trust him, he needs to be trustworthy. If he wants people to speak well of the institutions, he needs to provide the vision and leadership that makes folks think well of the institution. We cannot cover for his failures with nods and smiles.
To be clear, we’re not going anywhere. The people of Vermont spoke on that matter back in 2020, and while we’ve all allowed our focus to shift elsewhere as we manage other pressing needs, the basic fact that the state colleges are an integral resource and asset for our state has not changed.
But the faculty and staff at the colleges are exhausted from trying to carry our share of the load in transforming the state colleges into an institution that can better serve our students and the state of Vermont.
When our leadership works at cross purposes to those efforts, when they shape data to suit their intention by cherry-picking responses or asking limited questions, when they make decisions behind closed doors and then make high-impact announcements with partial information at the end of the day, when they don’t give adequate notice to employees directly impacted, or even to their own leadership teams, they are damaging the very thing they claim to be working to save.
Actions like these force students, staff, and faculty to drop the critical work we are all doing in order to avert the crisis.
Perhaps some of these changes to library services and athletics are necessary. We don’t know because the decisions were not made transparently. The information we have been able to access does not appear to clearly support the announcement issued on Feb. 7, nor has the administration yet offered more than verbal reassurances that they did base their decision on research and data.
Regardless, we believe that decisions of this magnitude should never come as a shock to the people most directly affected. Dropping a metaphorical bomb into the room leads to actual fear and anxiety, rumors and outrage, anger and disillusionment — all of which are incredibly hard to dispel once they gain momentum.
Now, instead of focusing on the innovative changes within our academic programs and expansions to our student-focused supports, we must once again pivot to mitigating the harm done by our own administration.
We firmly believe that the Vermont State Colleges are essential resources for our state, and that we provide topnotch educational opportunities for our students and communities. The changes we are enacting to become Vermont State University will not alter this.
Despite this misstep from the administration, we are hopeful that we can continue to work together openly, to make sure that we are serving our students and communities in the way they trust us to continue doing.
We acknowledge that the details of how we serve and meet student and community needs may adapt and change and potentially look much different in the coming years. We are not afraid of change. Anyone still working for the state colleges at this point has wholeheartedly embraced change.
What we need is for the administration to fully embrace the idea that the students, faculty and staff may know a few things about what we need in order to achieve our shared goals, and to include us in the process in a more authentic and representative way.
