Daniel Mark Fogel took office in July 2002 as the 25th President of the University of Vermont, also assuming a tenured appointment as Professor of English. Just seven months after Fogel's arrival on campus, his administration marked a major milestone with the release and public discussion of the president’s 10-year vision for the University. The invest-and-grow strategy detailed in the vision called for increases in undergraduate and graduate enrollments, significant new facilities, and expansion of the research enterprise among the initiatives to strengthen the academic and financial foundations of the University.
After creating a strategic financial plan to undergird the University’s heightened level of aspiration, the Fogel administration, Board of Trustees, and UVM community put the vision into action. In 2008, five years into implementation of the plan, signs of transformation and progress are evident throughout the University. The new University-wide Honors College, key to attracting the nation’s very best students to UVM, will graduate its first full cohort in May. The Honors College is housed in the newly constructed 800-bed University Heights Residential Learning Complex, a facility that has received LEED Gold Certification. So has the new Dudley H. Davis Student Center, the nation’s first student union to be certified at the Gold level by the U.S. Green Building Council. In 2007, UVM successfully completed The Campaign for the University of Vermont, coming in $28 million above the $250 million goal, which was focused on funding for student scholarships and endowed faculty positions. The University has increased its grant and contract awards dramatically over the course of the Fogel era, has created new interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and boasts a Medical College ranked 7th nationally by U.S. News World Report in Primary Care.
Increasing undergraduate enrollment is a key component of the long-term strategy for the University of Vermont. Since embarking on the plan, enrollment numbers have annually met or exceeded targets while also increasing the quality and diversity of the pools of applicants and those who ultimately enroll at the University. Applications received in spring 2008 from students hoping to join UVM’s Class of 2012 number 21,000, nearly triple the number received at the beginning of the decade. Applications from prospective students who are African American, Asian American, Latino, or Native American have grown from just over 400 to 1,800 since 2004 alone.
President Fogel’s years at the University of Vermont have also been marked by a reaffirmation of UVM’s connection to the state and the Burlington community. On January 1, 2008, a Burlington Free Press editorial named Fogel the “Vermonter of the Year” for his leadership in promoting reconciliation of the sometimes conflicting agendas of environmental preservation and economic development by positioning Vermont as a center of green technologies and sustainable enterprise. “Under Fogel, UVM has moved to bridge the gap between the energy of the grassroots global warming movement and the resources to make change happen,” according to the Free Press: “That's the kind of collaboration that gets things done, yet has been happening too rarely lately in Vermont.”
Beyond Vermont, Fogel has been a key voice on higher education issues over the past six years. He has been interviewed for media outlets such as National Public Radio and the PBS NewsHour and has published commentaries in publications that include the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and Presidency Magazine. He is currently Chair of the Council of Presidents of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges and President-Elect of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
Before coming to the University of Vermont, Fogel was executive vice chancellor and provost at Louisiana State University, where he spent twenty-six years, rising steadily through the academic and administrative ranks. At LSU, Fogel led an extensive strategic planning effort that entailed identification of priority programs and allocations to those programs of some $20 million between 1999 and 2001. He also spearheaded diversity initiatives that have led to LSU’s leading the nation in production of African-American Ph.D.s in chemistry and in English language and literature.
Fogel has had an active career as a scholar and teacher in English and American literature and in creative writing (poetry). The founding editor of the Henry James Review, he has produced four authored and three edited books, has published dozens of articles and reviews, and is an authority on Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. He earned a B.A. degree magna cum laude in English in 1969, an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1974, and a Ph.D. in English in 1976, all from Cornell University. Since joining the UVM faculty, President Fogel has continued to teach.
Daniel Mark Fogel is married to the painter Rachel Kahn (as a couple, they are the Kahn-Fogels. They have two children: Nicholas Alden Kahn-Fogel, who is teaching law at the University of Zambia, and Rosemary Kahn-Fogel Luttrell (husband Corey and Mother of Mary Alden), who is working on her graduate studies at the University of Georgia.
Last modified March 09 2008 02:20 PM
