This commentary is by Joseph Romano, a graduate of Montpelier High School and Lyndon State College who retired in 2017 after serving, most recently, as vice president for administration at Wagner College in New York City. He now lives in Kenilworth, England.
It’s deja vu all over again. On April 25, Interim President Michael Smith of the nascent Vermont State University sent an email to members of its community to announce that recent plans to close libraries and to end athletic affiliations have been paused, sort of. At least for now.
His message was meant to reassure, it seems, but there are as many questions now about the future of the system as when his shortlived predecessor, Parwinder Grewal, was in post.
Smith, who has a reputation as something of a “fixer,” now has the unenviable task of heading up the transformation of what once were the Vermont State Colleges into something that will be called Vermont State University. In his email to the community, he reported that layoff notices to the librarians who would have been affected by the plan to streamline and digitize the system’s libraries have been rescinded. But, in the same breath, he also said: “We will continue our work to streamline our library collections consistent with normal and progressive library best practices.”
So, it appears that the plan to digitize the libraries remains very much in play, and Smith and his colleagues are using essentially the same language that Grewal did when he was justifying this plan. At a hastily assembled forum in February meant to respond to backlash, Grewal emphasized that digitial libraries are “the future,” and therefore inevitable.
In his email, Interim President Smith echoed that very same language by saying “we know that digital academic materials are the way of the future, and we will continue to evaluate how they fit into our libraries.”
Smith’s spokesperson, Katharine Levasseur, was reported to have reinforced that language, saying, “We are changing how we are approaching this work while also acknowledging that digital is in our present and in our future.”
The one thing that is perfectly clear is that this is all about the future, then, but what will the future of the Vermont State University actually be? Is it just another name change? Vermont State Colleges to Northern Vermont University to Vermont State University?
News reports have said that Interim President Smith believes the library issue and the athletics plan are distractions. He is exactly right; they are distractions because they have drawn attention away from the real issue at hand: the actual future of the Vermont State Colleges system.
What will that be? How will Smith engage the wider community and create a “transformed” (as they are fond of saying) system or university?
Information about what that new institution will look like, how it will serve its communities, seems pretty scarce save for a brief mission statement on its website. Much of the detail remains to be filled in, and the announcements of the library and athletic “plans” seemed a rather ad hoc and not particularly systematic or thoughtful approach to an actual transformation.
What all Vermonters need to know is how this newly transformed university will provide the quality, accessible education that the state’s young people need and deserve. No less.
In that spirit, I would urge Mr. Smith to publish a comprehensive proposal and organize forums around the state to both explain his plan and gather feedback on what is needed and what is expected. It’s time to put some type of careful, deliberate and deliberative framework around this so-far-chaotic episode.
I wish this new president and his team good luck, as there are few missions more important than the education of Vermont’s younger generations.
