Trustees approved a 2.9 percent increase in tuition, the lowest since 1977. The increase brings in-state tuition to $13,728 and out-of-state tuition to $34,656 for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Further lowering the real cost of tuition for Vermonters, UVM president Tom Sullivan announced that all of this year's $1.2 million increase over last year’s state appropriation will be used to create scholarships for in-state students, fully offsetting the rise in their tuition.

Trustees also approved a 2.9 percent increase in room rates, an average 4.2 percent increase in meals, and 2.6 percent increase in student fees, bringing an increase of 3 percent in the overall cost of attendance. 

A vote to approve the general fund budget of approximately $300 million was deferred until early June, when more up-to-date data is available on the incoming class and how much financial aid will be needed by the approximately 2,400 first-year students.

A milestone for Gen Ed

Major progress on UVM's General Education initiative was announced in the Educational Policy and Institutional Resources (EPIR) committee, leading to a resolution passed by the full board to approve a three-credit foundational writing and informational literacy requirement for all first-year, first-time students, beginning in fall 2014.

A writing and information literacy framework that was successfully piloted in eight courses last year served as the basis for the new requirement, the first of six proposed learning outcomes in the Faculty Senate’s Gen Ed initiative to be implemented. The General Education committee believes the process used can serve as a model for the development of proposals for the other learning outcomes and will facilitate and speed their implementation. 

While writing requirements for first-year students are not unusual, UVM is distinctive and innovative in linking writing to information literacy and in teaching students to access, critically evaluate and ethically use print and digital research sources.

A pilot is underway to develop and assess writing and information literacy skills throughout the remaining undergraduate years. Faculty development workshops are underway to help incorporate and evaluate writing within  the academic disciplines.

A revised debt ratio and a new STEM complex

UVM’s debt ratio – the proportion of the university’s annual debt service payments relative to annual expenses – also came up for discussion. Because of earlier board action, the current ratio of 6 percent was scheduled to be reduced to 5 percent in 2017. Administrators proposed lowering the current ratio to 5.75 percent and rescheduling the reduction to 5 percent for 2023.

The change, which the board passed on Saturday, gives the university the flexibility to borrow as much as $125 million for the bonding of future capital projects, if funds are made available to pay the additional debt service.    

In anticipation of the debt ratio discussion, the board had asked for an example of how the university would use its extra debt capacity.

President Sullivan and Robert Vaughan, director of capital planning and management, presented a conceptual plan for a $100 million phased overhaul of the university’s current STEM facilities, one of the top priorities in the Strategic Action Plan the president issued in November 2012.               

In Phase I of the plan, the Angell Lecture Hall would be demolished and replaced with a 112,000 square foot, $53 million building that would house laboratories for chemistry, physics, and psychology, as well as general purpose classrooms and utility space.

Phase II would focus on the Cook Physical Science Building. Once the Phase I building was completed, all the occupants of Cook would be moved into it, and Cook would be totally renovated at a cost of $37 million. The renovated Cook would serve the non-laboratory needs of the STEM program, housing classrooms and administrative offices. Once both phases were complete, faculty and staff would be redistributed between the two buildings. 

Phase III would be a $9 million renovation of Votey Hall that would address both deferred maintenance and incorporate upgrades. The new building would house teaching and research labs and general purpose classrooms.

The overall plan would also consolidate the Department of Mathematics, now housed in three buildings on Colchester Avenue.

Vaughan estimated that the project would take five years to complete. The university will present more detailed programming for each building, which could include conceptual diagrams, at the October board meeting.

In other developments

Vice President for Student and Campus Life Tom Gustafson initiated an engaged discussion in the Educational Policy and Institutional Resources committee on the new Career Success Action Plan, noting that President Sullivan “raised expectations for less talking and more action.” Abu Rizvi, dean of the Honors College, spearheaded the development of the plan, working closely with Pamela Gardner, director of Career Services, and constituencies from the SGA and graduate student senate to alumni and parents. He and his colleagues also visited a number of universities to review best practices.

Rizvi identified five key components of the plan for EPIR committee members:

• Internships, employment and other experiential learning opportunities are critical;
• Employers, alumni, parents and other stakeholders are needed to build a culture of career success;
• Students must be engaged in career preparation throughout their college education;
• A centralized physical location is important for student engagement (a careers hub is under renovation in the Davis Center and will open in the fall of 2013 );
• Progress must be tracked to ensure accountability and inform any necessary mid-course corrections.

Much of the plan will be implemented in the coming academic year.

President Sullivan and Shane Jacobson, vice president and chief operating officer of the UVM Foundation provided the full board with an update and status report on the comprehensive campaign. The provisional goal of the campaign is $500 million, double the last campaign’s goal, Jacobson said, an objective the university is on track to achieve. Jacobson cited four reasons why the campaign will be successful. The campaign is:

• Strategic, aligned with the university mission and vision;
• Inclusive, offering an opportunity for donors at every level to participate;
• Comprehensive, incorporating a wide range of campus priorities; and
• Meaningful, with every gift valued and celebrated.

The comprehensive campaign is “absolutely essential and transformative,” Sullivan said. “Our success -- and we will be successful -- is going to enhance quality and will build the very thing we all cherish:  the reputation of this great university.”

Sullivan is an “outstanding fundraiser,” Jacobson said. “Individually and in small and large groups, he hits home run after home run.”  Sullivan has visited all 14 counties in Vermont and has made more than 25 fund-raising trips outside the state. The Foundation expects to announce the public phase of the campaign in October 2015. 

The Socially Responsible Investing Advisory Council informed committee members of the Budget, Finance and Investment committee that a group led by graduate student Elizabeth Palchek is researching the Student Climate Culture’s proposal to divest from fossil fuel companies. The Council will present a report to Richard Cate, vice president for finance and administration, by June 1, 2013, summarizing the research and providing recommendations for strategic investments in the energy sector. The board also voted to reaffirm divesture from Sudan, acting on BFI’s recommendation.

Read a PDF of the consent agenda, itemizing all action items approved by the board.

The evening of “art, music and drinks” was attended by more than 300 people and showcased the partnerships established with local artists, non-profits and businesses by Andreasen and his fellow students Todd Kinneston, Ben Weigher, Michael Massa and Eric Laine. On hand were seven local artists who painted or created graphic imagery on snowboards that were auctioned off for charity; Zachary Nigro, brand coordinator for Burton who agreed to donate the snowboards; senior Brandon Sauer, who works in marketing at The Sticky Brand, a local printshop and vinyl die cuttery that prepared the surfaces of the snowboards for artists to work on; Hot Wax who played music; and members of the UVM Snowboard Team, which donated funds to print promotional flyers for the event.

“We have a lot of friends who are artists and musicians, and we wanted to showcase their work for a good cause,” says Andreasen, who along with his father constructed wooden-stained stands to display the snowboards from a fallen tree in his parents’ back yard. “It started out as just an idea, but turned into a really cool collaborative project that involved a lot of people at UVM and in the local community.” 

By the end of night, the event raised more than $500 for the BCA Scholarship Fund and Burton Chill Program, a youth development program that uses snowboarding to teach life skills and increase self-esteem in at-risk and underserved youth. Pre-event promotions such as posters, flyers, word of mouth and a Facebook page helped draw attention to the fundraiser.

Entrepreneurial efforts with a community focus

The eleven teams that completed “Make a Difference” projects for the “Entrepreneurial Leadership” course created by Pramodita Sharma, Sanders Professor for Family Business, will present them on Friday, April 26 in the main lobby of Kalkin Hall from 1:15 to 2:15 p.m. Projects focus on topics students have a passion for such as music, sports and art, but also include fundraising elements to support causes they care about, such as mentoring local youth, supporting the local emergency food shelf and the Ronald McDonald House.

For Kane Tobin and Sarah Gardner, creating UVMentors, a student-run organization committed to promoting the importance of education through one-on-one relationships between college students and local youth, is a personal passion. “I had a mentor when I was growing up, and she provided me with a stable role model and positive reinforcement, so I wanted to do something similar with this project,” says Gardner. Tobin, who spent seven years in the military, including tours of Afghanistan and Iraq, before coming to UVM, says he could have used a mentor as a teenager and believes proper training of UVMentors is critical to successfully mentoring youth at the Boys & Girls Club in Burlington. “Education is the key to ending the cycle of poverty that exists today,” says Tobin, who asks UVMentors to commit one hour per week in a one-on-one setting with their mentees. “A UVM student could really make a difference in the life of a child by being a role model and showing them how to achieve their dreams. They could turn an at-risk youth into a future UVM student who could later give back to the community.”

Another team used a marketing strategy to collect 620 pounds of groceries for the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf that involved daily postings around campus with cryptic messages like “have you heard about it?” to create intrigue leading to later posters with Quick Response Codes (QR bar codes) linking to their Facebook page. For each food item donated, they  offered raffle tickets for a Webbook, SpringFest tickets and other items. “We really wanted to help families in need, so we worked hard to understand what it would take organizationally to make something monumental happen in a short amount of time that would really have an impact,” said Ryan Little, a former U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan and is president of UVM’s Student Veteran Organization.  

Every dog has its day

Some of the projects focused more on helping UVM students. The “Every Dog Has its Day” club brought six teams of dogs from Therapy Dogs of Vermont to Marsh Lounge in Billings to help students relive stress before final exams. 802unes creates mini-documentary style videos with rented library equipment to promote aspiring UVM and other local musicians like the Heisenbuells and Suz Friedman. “Vermont is all about the local scene, and we really wanted to support local musicians who needed an opportunity to have their voice heard,” said Stephanie Siegart.

Other groups organized a basketball tournament and barbecue to raise money for Boys & Girls Club; partnered with University Chemistry Cats to collect beverage can tabs to sell the aluminum to recycling centers to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House and Vermont Children’s Hospital; and raised money to help the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program and other local non-profits.

“Students were asked to clearly define their selected community, understand its needs, envision and deliver a project that addresses those needs, and have a legacy plan so that the project can continue after the course,” says Sharma, whose course enrollment increased from 15 last year to 50 this spring. “The fundamentals of ideation, CreAction (action-oriented creation) and cognitive ambidexterity that balances analytical-based prediction and creation are put to test in these projects. I am very pleased with the outcome. They are diverse indicating the diversity of interests in our student body, and yet, each makes a difference in our community, while enriching their experiences at UVM.”

University of Vermont medical student Luke Neill, who also received his undergraduate degree from UVM in 2011, is working with his long-time friend, Sam Meyer, on software that will do just that – give pharmacists and other healthcare providers a way to reach patients on a device they use all of the time – their cell phones. This low-cost idea could empower patients to take charge of their health, help to avoid additional problems or potentially life-threatening complications, and reduce the public health cost of medical non-compliance, which is estimated to total about $100 to $300 billion annually in the U.S. alone.

Although smartphone and computer applications for inputting personal medication information already exist, this software allows doctors and pharmacists to set up the messages and track compliance data. Meyer is working on the programming; Neill is developing the specific functions that will be useful for providers and patients. As a service that’s free to patients, this system is meant to reach populations that might not otherwise have access to such support.

“There’s a large problem in the U.S. with medication adherence,” Neill says. “We want to address that in a way that’s cost-effective.”

The pair presented their project at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, April 5 to 7. Social activists, celebrities, political leaders, and experts in technology, business, and other fields – including former President Bill Clinton himself – came to the meeting to learn and support innovative ideas from students.

For the annual conference, invitees create a “Commitment to Action” that is specific and measureable, and geared to help on any scale – from the local to the global.

“Access to basic health information and instruction is one of the primary obstacles to improving healthcare globally,” Neill states in his Commitment to Action. “By leveraging the simplicity and ubiquity of text messages, I will be able to provide patients who lack the typical healthcare infrastructure with relevant and specific instruction and support.”

Neill’s and Meyer’s HIPAA-compliant software program allows patients to enroll at the pharmacy and then begin receiving text messages that help them understand their medications and implications for their health. The messages are not simply reminders, Neill says; they are designed to monitor behavior patterns and change habits as well.

“The best part is that we can contextualize the feedback,” Neill says, citing the software's ability to provide statistics on the average rate of adherence for a particular med. When that information is delivered to patients and they can see where they fall on the spectrum, there's an opportunity to harness competitive instincts to raise adherence overall. Providers benefit from aggregate data on compliance, as well. Eventually, the goal is to make the software available in developing countries where access to other technology is limited, but cell phone use is widespread.

Neill set up a pilot to test the software with first-year students at the College of Medicine and help work out any bugs prior to the Clinton conference; next he plans to network with local pharmacists for a trial. All of these efforts come with a price tag – ultimately Neill and Meyer will be faced with applying for FDA approval, which can be a costly legal process. Neill says he’s been in contact with some foundations and non-profits interested in helping support the cause.

At Clinton Global Initiative University, Neill’s commitment was selected for recognition prior to a panel discussion on "Ensuring Medication Safety" as an exemplary approach to addressing a global public health challenge. Actor Matthew Perry welcomed Neill and Meyer to the stage for the honor. Following the session, the pair met with Michael Botticelli, the deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who expressed his congratulations.

The conference provided the networking opportunities Neill had hoped for, and he's now in contact with three groups interested in collaboration, including five medical students from St. Louis University School of Medicine who would like to use the software to educate type 2 diabetics patients at a health clinic in North St. Louis; a group working on a Rural India Social and Health Improvement project at Northwestern University; and a startup company in Poland, working on medication validation and tracking.

But perhaps the most exciting introduction came when Neill and Meyer met President Clinton and Chelsea the first evening. "Both were extremely friendly and reinforced my drive to continue on my commitment to make a positive global change," Neill says.

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

“At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do,” says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, “to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities.”

Restored roles

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations “particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity,” the scientists write.

“We have seen remarkable recoveries of some populations of marine mammals, such as gray seals in New England and sea lions and elephant seals along the Pacific coast,” says Read.

“U.S. waters are pretty compromised with lots of ship traffic and ship strikes, big fisheries, pollution, boat noise, “ Joe Roman says. “And yet it’s safer to be a marine mammal in U.S. waters than elsewhere,” he says, due to the Act’s strong protections against commercial and accidental killing — what the law calls “take” — and its aim to maintain sustainable populations of mammals and their ecological roles in oceans.

“It’s important to evaluate such broad legislation,” says Caitlin Campbell ’12, an Environmental Sciences graduate from UVM’s College of Arts & Sciences, and a co-author on the paper.

“A lot of people think that the hard part was getting it passed through Congress, but in reality you have to make sure that big protective measures like this actually are effective,” she says. “This paper shows that this act is doing its job.”

The research team — Campbell; Joe Roman in UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; Irit Altman from Boston University; Meagan Dunphy-Daly and Andrew Read from Duke University; and Michael Jasny from the Natural Resources Defense Council — gathered hundreds of data sets from around the world, including from NOAA, Canadian agencies, and the IUCN. Their goal was to get an accurate picture of population levels and trends of more than two hundred stocks of marine mammals from the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin to the West Indian Manatee.

The team concluded that for many of these animals there simply aren't enough data. For seventy-one percent of the stocks they identified, they couldn’t say which way the population was heading, up or down. “There isn’t enough research,” Roman says.

But for the ones they could evaluate, they found that nineteen percent of stocks were increasing, while five percent were stable and only five percent were declining.

Another fundamental conclusion of this research: “stopping harvesting these mammals, stop fisheries bycatch, stop killing them — and many populations bounce back,” says Roman. Marine mammals are long-lived “so it’s going to take decades, maybe longer for populations to rebound,” he says, “but it seems the trends are increasing.”

Beyond whale oil

In 1934, trends were definitely not increasing for right whales, when an international treaty banned hunting these nearly extinguished creatures. But other protections lagged, and by the 1960s many whales and other marine mammals — including some dolphins and seals — faced plummeting populations and the risk of extinction.

Yet in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense resisted legislation to protect whales and other marine mammals: they relied on sperm whale oil for use as a lubricant in submarines and other military engines, Roman’s team writes.

In one curious part of the complex negotiations at the White House, Lee Talbot, a canny scientist working for Richard Nixon, produced an affidavit from the DuPont Corporation stating that they could produce an artificial lubricant that could do the same job as the whale oil. This helped make the Pentagon more receptive toward whale-protecting legislation. In October 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. This victory was also a key step toward the passage of the more forceful (though less ecologically oriented) Endangered Species Act that passed the next year.

Under these two laws, “countless tens of thousands of individual whales, seals, and manatees have been protected from harm since 1972,” the scientists write, “exactly as intended by those who crafted the legislation.”

In 1994, major amendments to the MMPA established a new framework for dealing with interactions between marine mammals and commercial fisheries, “which remains perhaps the most important conservation issue facing these iconic animals," says Andrew Read.

This new framework, relies on “a negotiated rule-making process,” Read says, looking for solutions to the incidental death of mammals in commercial fisheries. One of the strengths of the new process is that it “requires the direct involvement of fishermen, conservationists and scientists in the management process,” Read says.

Still, some deeply depleted species, like right whales, may never recover, and additional threats beyond direct killing remain. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has generally been ineffective in dealing with problems like increasing underwater noise from naval operations and other ships, new diseases, and depleted prey species in fraying food webs. “Existing conservation measures have not protected large whales from fisheries interactions or ship strikes in the northwestern Atlantic,” the team writes.

And this points to a new generation of challenges such as moving shipping lanes in whale feeding territory, slowing speed boats in manatee habitat, changing lobster fishing technologies and other fishing gear modifications, and continuing to improve ecosystem-based fisheries management. “That’s going to be hard and require real political will,” Joe Roman says.

But Di Ruocco, a native of Capri, Italy, endured. He credits it to three things: Giving up smoking, excellent medical intervention, and the helpful and supporting care of his mother-in-law and his ex-wife, Tish. “Even though we are divorced, Tish is the love of my life,” he says.

After all he’d been through, the question was what was next for an aging chef-owner with a southern Italian accent in northern Vermont? Become a line cook? A sous chef? A waiter? All extremely physically demanding.

Then, in March 2009, a friend spotted an ad on Craigslist — Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity at UVM looking for a cook. Di Ruocco applied and was deemed overqualified. Seriously overqualified. Somebody else got the position, but didn’t work out. In September, the ad went in again. Di Ruocco applied again. “This time they called me for an interview. I brought two desserts, a Torta Caprese (a flourless chocolate cake), and a lemon Tiramisu.”

So it is that Di Ruocco is alive and well and cooking in an unlikely place for a man with his chops—the kitchen of AGR fraternity on South Prospect Street. There's little doubt, the brothers now enjoy the best food on campus — perhaps on any campus. Alumni regularly drop by at lunch or dinnertime. Students have gone from fast-foodies to real foodies, with palates to match. The fraternity hosts special events, seasonal events, charity events. (See details on an April 12 fundraiser dinner at the end of this article.)

After cooking lunch for the house earlier in the day, dinner prep typically starts around 3 p.m., Di Ruocco says. By six o’clock, he rings the dinner bell over the sink. If he has extra money in his budget, he’ll do something special. On a recent week that meant a large pan of clams and mussels for linguini in clam sauce… to augment the roast pork in mushroom sauce. He’ll also cook up favorites from recipes the fraternity brothers bring from home — chicken pot pie, Mexican food, he even succumbed to a request for boxed macaroni and cheese garnished with Spam. “Never again,” he says.

Dinner done, the brothers take care of the dishes and cleaning the kitchen as Di Ruocco heads home. They’ve officially made him a fraternity brother and he sits down with them for their wide-ranging Monday house meetings. The chef brings both fine food and wise counsel to AGR.

Di Ruocco recalls a favorite moment. “Two years ago, a Russian boy, Dimitri, comes down to the kitchen and says, “Tony I've lost ten pounds.”

“Oh no,” I say. “Is there something wrong with the food?”

“No,” he tells me. “Before you came, we ate out and ate junk food. Now, because your food is so healthy and so natural, I'm in better shape.”

Here’s Joe Pappas, a sophomore from Bolton, Massachusetts: “Tony's food is the best we've ever had. He teaches us about good food through his cooking. And he also strives for us to be better at what we do—he's an influence in that way too.”

Alumni advisor Ron Paquette ’83 echoes Pappas. “Tony continues to cook incredible meals and instills the values of caring, friendship and responsibility. The brothers are so fortunate and blessed to have him.”

The community can get a taste of what the Alpha Gamma Rho brothers are enjoying when the fraternity hosts an April 12 benefit dinner for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. There will be two seatings, at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., for the five-course dinner. Cost is $60 per person. To make a reservation, email jwatkin1@uvm.edu or call (603) 498-7448.

A web article about Mosco caught our attention at Vermont Quarterly, leading to hiring her to create “A Catamount Chronology” for the back page Extra Credit feature in this issue (extracreditcatcartoon). The piece is typical of her work, marked by a quirky, quiet humor and considerable scientific knowledge packed into five panels of comic. “I get so excited about all of these facts that I learn that I try to squeeze in as many as possible,” Mosco says. By the end of this particular project, she says, there were many field guides and “tons and tons of pieces of paper with little bits of cougar drawn on them” scattered across the floor of her Cambridge, Massachussetts apartment.

A native of Canada, Mosco has long possessed the dual sensibility of artist and scientist, and says she’s always been attracted to cartoons as a way to share what she’s learned. She grew up reading strips like Bloom County and The Far Side, kindred spirit Gary Larson’s off-beat single-panels that were as likely to feature spiders, or polar bears, or amoeba, as humans. After earning her bachelor’s in anthropology at McGill University, Mosco came south to Vermont drawn by the opportunity the Field Naturalist Program gave her “to be creative and learn really solid science.” Some of those lessons appear in “A Catamount Chronology,” Mosco notes. “We were taught that history is incredibly important. You can’t show up at a landscape and not think about what has happened to it before.”

Post-UVM, Mosco completed an internship at the National Park Service’s Center for Urban Ecology in Washington, D.C., where her focus was on supervising a team of interns as they created climate change outreach/public education products—videos, podcasts, fact sheets, and web pages. She’s also brought her cartoonist’s perspective to the Big Issue of climate change. “It is so heart-breaking,” she says. “Those cartoons are really difficult because I really want to just yell and raise my arms… and that is not a good tactic. What I try to do whenever I feel like I’m making something that would be alienating to people, I kind of relax and think about what I’m truly feeling. If I just put really solid emotions in there, I find it works.”

Fighting the good fight for the natural world with cartoons includes taking on those large battles and celebrating the small victories. Case in point: a cartoon Mosco created about pigeons for the Torontoist website. True, pigeons are an invasive species. True, they are not just invasive but pervasive in cities, where some view them as rats with wings. But Mosco came out of her research process believing in the bird and created a strip that celebrated some of the species’ more charming and little-known characteristics, such as that they mate for life.

Triumph came with a reader’s comment, Mosco recalls: “He let me know, ‘Hey, I used to chase after pigeons, and now I don’t.”

Rosemarymosco.com

This article originally appeared as an online extra for the spring 2013 issue of Vermont Quarterly magazine

His findings, based on a statistical analysis of campaign contributions by U.S. electric utilities from 1998-2006, were recently published in the Strategic Management Journal in the article “Integrated Market and Non-Market Strategies: Political Campaign Contributions Around Merger and Acquisition Events in the Energy Sector.” Vanden Bergh and Guy L. F. Holburn, associate professor of business at the University of Western Ontario, found that utilities increased contributions in the year prior to announcing a merger in hopes of preventing state level regulatory agencies from imposing costly merger conditions such as consumer rate reductions, which negatively affect shareholder gains.  

The study specifically targets utilities’ financial contributions to campaign funds of state politicians because, in certain political contexts, they have an incentive to exert indirect influence on legislative committees and state governors who oversee agency decision-making, appointments and budgets. The study’s general thesis and methodological approach has broader implications, however, because it can be applied to other regulated industries such as telecommunications, pharmaceutical or banking.

“When mergers are announced, utilities evaluate the conditions imposed by regulators before making a decision to complete the merger,” says Vanden Bergh, who estimates that about 30 percent of proposed mergers from 1998-2006 didn’t go through. “The politicians get involved and they want to know what the savings are going to be and how they can capture some of them for rate payers by reducing rates instead of benefitting investors. Almost always there’s a sharing of the savings between rate payers and investors. The question (for utilities) is how much savings for the rate payer is too much before a merger is no longer justifiable. This paper isn’t about whether this is good or a bad thing. We don’t make any sort of normative claims about what they should or shouldn’t be doing.”

Immersed in 50-state data

The sheer amount of data Vanden Bergh and Holburn culled over after purchasing it from the Institute for Money in State Politics, a non-profit, non-partisan data warehouse of sorts that gathers campaign contributions at the state level, is mindboggling. It included one million observations and required connecting each campaign contribution by an individual or Political Action Committee (PAC) to a politician, and then tying it to the specific electric utility.

“A lot of my research looks across 50 states, which makes data gathering quite intense,” says Vanden Bergh. “We had to put it in a form we could analyze, so we could say, ‘Here are contributions made by those affiliated with a single utility to all the legislators in that state,' and take it to a more aggregated level. Every state has basically the same regulatory approval process with governors, legislators and public utility commissions, but some are controlled by democrats and republicans and different degrees of competition for power. Our model allows us to sort of isolate these features of the political environment to see if they have an effect on campaign contributions.”

Even in Vermont, where Vanden Bergh says there are very few campaign contributions, tensions ran high when Vermont State utility regulators approved a merger in 2012 between Green Mountain Power, which doesn't make political contributions, and Central Vermont Public Service – the state’s two largest utilities. The Public Service Board assured customers they would share in millions of dollars of savings from improved operational efficiencies, despite rejecting a proposal that would have given customers a direct refund of $21 million.

“There was a big fight over the conditions of the merger; it was very controversial,” says Vanden Bergh. “The uncertainty around these types of conditions creates a lot of political risk. There’s also market risk with mergers because utilities like GMP and CVPS think they’re going to be able to consolidate costs and other reductions. If they don’t realize cost savings but are still required to meet the regulatory approval conditions, they will take a loss. This is why it’s such an interesting phenomenon and why so many utility deals don’t go through. Sometimes the regulatory conditions are so high and so expensive that it makes it untenable to bear the market risk of realizing the benefits.”

Vanden Bergh’s paper also makes a contribution to political strategy research by providing fresh evidence that firms integrate market and nonmarket strategies, defined in this case as interest groups trying to influence the public policy process and the tactics and strategies they use to bring about favorable policy. Vanden Bergh says he and Holburn brought together a market investment with a non-market strategy scientifically to see if utilities were successful at creating the merger simultaneously with the policy process.

“Our research on non-market strategy provides new evidence on how firms proactively manage their external political environment to protect their resources from dissipation by agency regulation.” says Vanden Bergh, who teaches a course on the political environment of business. “The types of models we try to develop would apply to any interest group, not just business. I tell my students that whether you are going to work in business or for a non-profit or an advocacy group, what we’re developing in the course is useful for designing political strategy.”

The intrigue of business and politics

Vanden Bergh’s current research builds on a frequently cited 2006 paper in the Academy of Management Journal that examined whether requested rate increases during more friendly political environments by utilities across 50 states from 1982-1992 translated into differential allowed rates of return. It’s also an outgrowth of a study about accounting firms trying to influence regulation coming out of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC was concerned that accounting firms were not producing objective financial statements for companies where they were also providing consulting services, which is far more lucrative than the auditing business.

The next phase of research will require even more detailed data analysis and could make some executives a little nervous.

“We’ve expanded the data set so we can look specifically at the executives,” he says. “Since we have all the merger events, we can look at the patterns of their contributions around these mergers and can compare them to both when they weren’t executives, as well as any patterns of contributions for executives who aren’t involved in merger events. The campaign contribution literature has struggled to identify whether contributions are investments or consumption goods, so that’s one area where we hope to make a contribution."

UVM Today: Tell about the process of writing your book.

Bercaw: My father, a neurologist, died of Alzheimer's Disease last year. Throughout his illness, I wrote about my memories of him. By doing so, I kept myself sane and his memory alive. I also penned two pieces for the New York Times about my father's fantastic life and his work fighting Alzheimer's in his patients and eventually in himself. One day I realized that it was more than a series of random recollections -- it was a book.

What's behind the title, Brain in a Jar?

Do you worry that your father's obsession will become yours?

I think by writing this book, it's already has! I won't actually have a brain in a jar on my desk at work, but I'll have a book by the same title. Inadvertently, I have become him to some degree. 

What kind of reaction have you received to the story?

“My son really looks forward to working with Mitch,” says Ted, who prefers to keep his son’s name confidential. “It’s a good opportunity for younger children like my son, who has ADHD, to spend time with a highly functioning college student for mentoring and instructional purposes. He needs a good male role model to help with his development, and he really connected with Mitch. I think it’s a win-win for both of them.”

Snowe agrees.

“He’s almost always excited to go skiing, and although he is sometimes a bit timid to try new trails, he seems to really enjoy them once he gets going,” says Snowe. “I have learned a lot this season from him as well as other skiers with disabilities, who despite their added challenges, love to be out there on the mountain tearing it up just like the rest of us. I've had a lot of fun this year volunteering and have met some truly amazing people in the process.”

Relationships like these have become more common in recent years thanks to a resurgent UVM Adaptive Sports club – a student-run volunteer organization that partners with Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports to provide outdoor and athletic opportunities for clients with physical, cognitive and emotional disabilities. UVM students ski with individuals at Killington Resort and Pico Mountain in Killington, Sugarbush Resort, and Bolton Valley, and also work with children and adults with disabilities at kayaking, canoeing, sailing, cycling, hiking, rock climbing, tennis, horseback riding and other activities.

Under the leadership of program coordinator Harrison Keyes, UVM Adaptive Sports, which operates along with 15 other volunteer clubs under the umbrella of Volunteers in Action, has experienced a recent surge in membership and fundraising. Keyes spearheaded a grant application to the Newman’s Foundation, resulting in a $10,000 award used to purchase three Mountain Man bi-skis and other equipment. Keyes, who has worked with similar organizations since middle school, was awarded the Jim Hutchinson Volunteer of the Year Award from Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports in 2012 for showing exemplary volunteer efforts.

“The UVM club is super motivated and we love the commitment and support they lend to the program,” says Erin Fernandez, executive director of Vermont Adaptive, who estimates that college students account for about 25 percent of her organization's 400 volunteers. “Harrison has tirelessly offered his time and talent to the organization throughout the year and has not only moved the program further along, but has fostered leadership and training among younger members he recruited to carry on the tradition after he graduates.”

From class to slopes

The approximately 35 members of UVM Adaptive Sports, which has been around in various incarnations since the 1970s when it focused on Special Olympics, initially joined for a variety of reasons. Some volunteers are admittedly enticed by the free ski passes, but end up finding the experience of working with children and adults with disabilities truly meaningful. “The ski passes are a great way to get people interested, but it turns into something much more for those who keep coming back,” says Keyes.

Sophomore Sam Fairchild, who volunteered at a similar program in high school, didn’t need much coaxing by Keyes to join the club when he arrived on campus two years ago. “I’d worked with a sit-down skier who went through a tough transition when he was about 10 years old with other kids treating him differently because he had a disability,” says Fairchild. “Skiing was a real release for him, and he ended up being a better skier than most of the other kids. It was really rewarding being able to see him progress and work through that tough time.”    

Some students like junior Jesse Groom, an exercise and movement science major, have managed to tie the experience of working with individuals with disabilities to their coursework. Students are required to take two days of training at a ski resort and another day of orientation before they start working with athletes with a broad range of disabilities including spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, visual impairments, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, autism, ADHD and other impairments.

“Working with students with disabilities who ski and play sled hockey has allowed me to make some connections with what I’ve learned in class,” says Groom, adding that Susan Kasser, exercise and movement science program director and associate professor of rehabilitation and movement science, encourages student to join UVM Adaptive Sports to make these connections. “It gives meaning to what we learn in class.”

Diving in

For senior Peter Grunawalt, who conducted field research in India's Himalayan region through the Brattleboro, Vt.-based School for International Training (SIT), one uncomfortable moment came when setting out on a research excursion to a village with no pre-arranged shelter. Eventually, housing was secured with the help of his translator, and Grunawalt was able to spend time in the area, speaking with residents about the factors affecting youth migration. His presentation, "Why are Cities the Only Place for Dreams? Rural to Urban Migration in India," delved into the farming practices and educational structures, among other considerations, contributing to the growing influx of youth to urban areas in the northern Indian region.

Senior Sarah Gallalee, who also studied abroad through SIT, spoke on "Analyzing the Barriers that Prevent Access to Diagnosis and Treatment for Tuberculosis in Dehradun, India." Tuberculosis, a treatable and curable disease, is still among the deadliest agents in the country. Gallalee conducted interviews with patients, officials and health workers and pursued spatial analysis research using geographic information systems to look at reasons why tuberculosis persists as a public health problem even when India has taken measures to improve its policies regarding treatment and reporting. One barrier became apparent to Gallalee when speaking with young women who reported the stigma surrounding the illness -- one that "could destroy chances of a proper marriage." This factor and others, such as religious misconceptions and loss of working time, she said, are among the barriers that still exist to both diagnosis and treatment.

Sophomore Benjamin Ryan discussed two independent trips he's taken to Bangladesh, one during high school and one during a gap year prior to enrolling at UVM. Ryan discussed the fledgling research he conducted in slums that sparked his decision to found a non-governmental organization, the Foundation for Climate Change Refugees. Conducting surveys among residents of slums, Ryan learned that many of its inhabitants had been displaced due to the effects of global climate change. Bangladesh, with its sea-level elevation and geography that makes it prone to typhoons, is considered "ground zero" of global warming, and its people, Ryan said, all already feeling the effects. "Climate change is not something we have to be concerned about in the future," Ryan said. "It's something that impacts people every day. It's a contemporary issue."

Reflection

The four students had met last fall about their mutual interest in contemporary issues in South Asia. Rosenblum organized the research forum, with support from the Anthropology Department, as a way to share their work with a broader audience as well as with each other. After their presentations, they answered questions from Steinberg as well as attendees, and spoke with each other on issues ranging from their personal health and safety while traveling to areas of common findings among their work.

Rosenblum's research on street children focused on agricultural antecedents to childhood migration, so his work, although dealing with a different region of India, had strong overlap with Grunawalt's. He was also particularly interested in Ryan's findings regarding climate change as a cause for migration since their areas of focus share a river system, similar weather patterns, and increased occurrence of natural disasters, Rosenblum explained.

Rosenblum has plans to pull his notes and interviews together into a research paper and hopes to one day return to India. "I definitely think I'll go back," he says. "I have a lot of connections and ties there now."   

In the meantime, he'll continue his global research on this side of the hemisphere: he departs this week with SIT for a semester abroad in Buenos Ares, Argentina.

UVM faces a period of fiscal challenge for at least the next two years, President Tom Sullivan told trustees, which the university must address if it is to survive and thrive in the competitive and evolving higher education marketplace. 

The budget challenges are driven by a series of factors. To promote access and affordability, one of the president’s key strategic goals, the university will restrain tuition increases (this year’s plan calls for rise of no more than 2.9 percent) and maximize scholarships and financial aid. To enhance academic quality, another major goal, the university will limit undergraduate enrollment to 9,800 from a high of 10,500 in 2011.  A smaller undergraduate student body will reduce class sizes and improve student-faculty ratios.   

UVM will need to cut about $5 million from its budget this year due to inflationary pressures and a lower projected recovery of financial and administrative costs from grants, said Richard Cate, vice president for finance and administration.

To make certain that academic quality doesn’t suffer, academic units will be less impacted than administrative ones.

“We simply have to do that to protect the academic core,” Sullivan said. “Over time (the restructuring) will help us achieve our strategic goals, which will help us move through this time of economic shortfalls,” he said. “It will get easier as things smooth out in (FY) ‘16/’17.”

Without investing in academic quality -- in students, faculty and infrastructure – “UVM won’t be the university you know it as, or the one you attended,” Sullivan told trustees. 

Housing vision

Trustees also learned of an extensive draft housing master plan for the university, created to take the place of an earlier plan, developed in 2001, which has been fully implemented.Tom Gustafson, vice president for university relations and campus life, explained how the plan could go forward despite a challenging financial climate.

“The plan does not include a financial model; that needs to be done later,” he said. “It assumes all new construction would be done through a private developer,” with UVM bearing little of the cost, an arrangement that is common at other schools.

One of the key questions asked by the consultants who developed the plan -- Biddison Hier of Washington, D.C. and KSQ Architects of New York – was whether to renovate or raze and replace existing residence halls on the UVM campus.

The recommendation was to replace buildings that were not only obsolete but in line for costly repair and whose design didn’t easily accommodate creative student programming. Four residence halls fit that description and would be demolished: the three buildings in the Chittenden Buckham Wills complex on central campus and Coolidge Hall on Redstone campus. New residence halls would be built on their footprints. All the other halls would undergo renovation.

The consultants also recommended taking a strategic approach to on-campus housing, creating communities of same-year students, who are in roughly similar developmental stages. On-campus residence halls currently house a 50-50 mix of first-year students and sophomores. The new strategy, the consultants said, would help improve retention, another of the president’s strategic goals.

The plan calls for central campus, with classrooms and services nearby, to become a community of first-year students, anchored by the new housing complex that would replace Chittenden Buckham Wills. The Redstone campus, already favored by returning students, would become a  community of sophomores, with a suite-style residence hall for second-year students replacing Coolidge.

In addition, the consultants recommended working with a third party to develop new housing for third- and fourth-year students in Burlington’s downtown core. The new buildings would include programming to keep students connected with the university and would free up housing for non-students in Burlington’s student neighborhoods, one of the city’s goals.

The plan calls for the Trinity campus to house graduate students, after some renovations to the housing facilities there.

The consultants also reintroduced an idea first proposed more than a decade ago in the Campus Master Plan: a walkway connecting and integrating all of UVM’s grounds, from the Trinity to the Redstone campuses. The landscaped Green Mountain Walkway would traverse the campus, creating student gathering places at new and existing eating and entertainment venues.   

International progress

In the Educational Policy and Institutional Resources committee, Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, shared the important news that the university had a newly signed contract in hand with Study Group, a company that will provide international recruitment services and help build a strong brand abroad for UVM. With plans to enroll the first cohort of students in January 2014, Lucier said he expects to begin receiving applications by April 1.

Gayle Nunley, associate provost for academic affairs and internationalization, presented an overview of the pathway program students will enter, designed to prepare nonnative English speakers to successfully matriculate at UVM. Outlining the three major goals for a strong pathway, Nunley said the program would be designed to focus on English for academic purposes, acquaint students with the philosophy and expectations of higher education in the U.S. and prepare them for the unique culture of the institution/major they are entering.

Read more about the new internationalization partnership.

The Committee of the Whole also heard a presentation by the consulting firm Sightlines on the university’s building maintenance costs deferred maintenance backlog.

According to industry guidelines, UVM should be spending three percent annually of the $1.9 billion it would take to replace every building on campus. But by targeting buildings whose life cycles have come due or been exceeded, the consultant said, an annual investment of $25 million would be enough to keep the campus in relatively good shape, a figure not far off from what the university currently spends on regular and deferred maintenance combined. 

In other developments

Committee of the Whole

• The board passed a resolution meeting naming 438 College Street, the administrative home of the College of Arts and Sciences, for one of UVM’s longest serving and most successful presidents, Lattie F. Coor. Trustees plan a formal dedication for the Lattie Coor House, as the building will be called, when the board reconvenes in May over Commencement Weekend. Coor served as UVM president from 1976 to 1989 and oversaw the university’s rise to prominence in American higher education, culminating in its inclusion in Richard Moll’s well regarded book of the time, The Public Ivies.
• The following trustees, each of whom will complete their term of service at the end of the month, were recognized by the board: Harry Chen, vice chair, Donna Sweaney, secretary, Jeff Davis, Kyle DeVivo and Jeanette White. The processes for appointment and election of the incoming class of trustees will be concluded later this month. All terms begin on March 1.  Additionally, new university officers were elected: Debbie McAneny to vice chair and Joan Lenes to secretary. Current chair Rob Cioffi was nominated for re-election. In accordance with the university charter, the chair election will occur at the first meeting following the election of new trustees on March 11.

Budget, Finance and Investment Committee

• Committee members engaged in a lengthy discussion about the university’s debt ratio policy, which states that it currently cannot exceed six percent. Discussion focused on whether to rescind a 2007 vote calling for the debt ratio to be lowered to five percent by 2017. The ratio is currently at 5.22 percent and would fall below five percent by 2017 if no additional debt were incurred. The university’s Strategic Action Plan and Capital Priorities Plan, however, call for new construction projects and renovations of old buildings that would be difficult to implement without retracting the 2007 vote, allowing for additional borrowing of up to $45 million.  The committee deferred taking action on the recommendation to the May meeting to allow time to engage in discussions with external debt advisors regarding the questions that arose at the meeting. 
• Sam Bain, chair of the Investment Subcommittee, gave a brief update on the university’s long-term investment pool allocations and performance through Dec. 31, 2012. He informed committee members that the endowment had reached $354.3 million and that market value in the endowment is back to its pre-fall 2008 value. He reported that the endowment had increased more than 13 percent in calendar year 2012, exceeding benchmark goals.
• An annual review of the university’s net assets showed a total of $175.5 million at the end of FY 2012. The cumulative balance of reserves of academic units is $23.2 million.

Education Policy and Institutional Resources Committee

• In his report to the committee, interim Provost Robert Low discussed the establishment of a full academic summer session by 2015.
• In an update on General Education, Associate Provost Brian Reed said the pilot program for the initial learning outcome in writing had been well received and would expand for the next academic year with the expectation that it would be implemented university-wide in four years. Reed noted that work on other outcomes has begun and that these should progress faster based on the time and care invested in the original model.
• The committee heard a presentation on assessment of academic quality, focusing on how to best measure students’ critical thinking abilities. A research study sponsored by the Provost’s Office is currently underway to test a sampling of first-year students across five colleges. The goals are to understand what the know when they come in, to consider what pedagogy best supports learning critical thinking skills and then to compare results against an equivalent sample of seniors tested this spring. Substantial work has gone into finding the most effective exam design, though, as Reed noted, “The ultimate metric is the success of our alumni.”
• Given that the nursing profession nationwide is raising its standards and that the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, the accrediting body for nursing, has mandated that existing master's of nursing practice programs be transitioned to doctoral programs by 2015, the faculty senate recommended -- and the board approved -- the creation of a doctorate of nursing practice degree and the creation of a master of science degree in clinical nurse leadership. Cathy Paris, faculty senate curricular affairs committee chair, noted that the doctoral program would be unique in northern New England.
• The board approved a resolution terminating the Canadian studies major (at the request of the department). A Canadian studies minor is still being offered.      

View a PDF of the consent agenda, itemizing all action items approved by the board.

The name change may have sounded technical, or even trivial, but it marked a significant shift in the world of socially responsible investing, or SRI, at UVM. 

The old work group was mandated by its charter to wait passively for community members to present it with detailed, fully researched SRI proposals, which it often needed several semesters to deliberate on before it could act. The new, more agile advisory council will actively solicit ideas from the community, then move on them with relative dispatch, thanks to a more streamlined process and enhanced staff and resources. In addition to divestiture, the group will also have two more tools in its SRI toolbox – shareholder initiatives and proxy voting – to prod companies to act in a more socially responsible manner. 

UVM Today had a chance to sit down with Claire Burlingham, UVM controller, who spearheaded the evolution in UVM’s SRI approach, just weeks before the advisory council holds its first town meeting, a signature element of the new SRI order. The town meeting will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 20 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.in the Davis Center's Silver Maple Ballroom.     

SRI has a long history at UVM. Tell us about it.

SRI is not a new concept at UVM. It started in 1978, when the board of trustees established an ad hoc committee. Not much happened until 1985, when the apartheid and South Africa issue came up. Then in 1988, there was a resolution to Phillip Morris calling for the end of all advertising and promotion of tobacco products. The 1990s were slow from an SRI perspective. In the 2000s, things picked up again when the Darfur group STAND (for Students Take Action Darfur Now) made a strong proposal for divestment, which the university acted on. Shortly after that, SAW (for Students Against War) effectively argued for divestment from companies making cluster munitions and depleted uranium.

In all these cases, there was strong community support for the actions taken. But the next proposal wasn’t so clear cut. 

Yes, the real challenge came with the Israeli-Palestinian divestments (which called for UVM to divest from companies that supported Israeli activities in Palestinian lands). Until that point, for all of the proposals that were brought forward, it was easy to build consensus and to recognize community and university support. The Palestinian-Israeli proposal was the first one where there wasn’t consensus on either side of the issue. When there was a split in the community, our charge said we needed to come up with some way to find if there was consensus. We decided to hold a public hearing to solicit that input from the campus community at large. Not surprisingly, the university was divided straight down the middle. We recognized that we hadn’t really articulated our evaluation criteria for situations like this.

What happened? 

We tabled the proposal. And based on that experience, we recognized we had a kind of identity crisis and needed to come up with better operational guidelines -- to understand who we were, the role we needed to play, and what we could and could not do. In the fall of 2010, the trustees authorized a hiatus for us on the call for proposal process. They charged us with really looking at how SRI is handled and organized at other public and private institutions. So we embarked on that over an 18-month period and presented the board with our proposal in August, 2012. 

I think you focused on six public peer institutions and 12 private peers and aspirants, and visited a number of them. What did you learn?

Most of the publics had some sort of advisory committee structure, which was made up of representatives of constituency groups, who either advised the president or the VP. Upon request of the investment committee or administration, the advisory committee could research a particular interest or company. None of the public institutions we looked at solicited proposals from the university community.

What about the private institutions?

Most had an advisory committee structure. The issues usually arose from the administration or the investment subcommittee and were not a product of a campus-wide call for proposals. There were two cases, Stanford and Columbia, that did consider proposals from the university community.

So what did you recommend for UVM?

We recommended the SRI workgroup of the Board of Trustees be dissolved and that a new advisory counsel to the vice president for finance and administration, Richard Cate, be established with the same membership. We would make our recommendation to Richard, and he would decide whether or not to bring them to the Investment Subcommittee. 

How did you decide to handle community input? 

Unlike most of the other schools, we wanted to build our program around ideas that came from the community. But we decided to move away from having a call-for-proposal process and to have a town hall meeting twice a year instead, during each of the major semesters.  At the town hall meeting, the university community would be invited to bring forward issues of social, moral, and ethical concern that they wanted the SRI Counsel to review and hoped would be taken to the Investment Subcommittee for action.   

And if you learn that the community is divided on an issue?

We have a set of criteria, based on Our Common Ground, that allow us to narrow the ideas down to one or two per semester. One of the factors is that there has to be strong university consensus for us to take it up.

Were there other problems with the old process you tried to address?

Yes. Given our process, the way we were structured and the lack of resources we needed to do our own research, it was very difficult for us to move forward very quickly to make a recommendation. We often needed three or four semesters to be able fully vet the proposals and get organized enough to make a recommendation.

How does the new process help? 

The group felt very strongly that, in order to make a thoughtful and informed decision, we needed to employ the assistance of a graduate fellow to do the research our volunteer group wasn’t able to do. So, we were able to secure the financing for a graduate fellow in the Office of Sustainability to work with us full time.   

How many proposals to you think you’ll be able to move forward in this new arrangement?

We’re hoping that the new process and the resources of the graduate fellow will enable us to take action on at least one of the issues per semester, and perhaps two, depending on the complexity of the issue.

You’re hoping the new process will allow more opportunity for the community input than the old process did, right?   

Correct. In the old structure, the onus to do the research was really on the group making the proposal; the work group was looking for a very well thought out, vetted research proposal to come forward. And that was challenging for some people, and consequently a number of them decided not to pursue their proposal. Now, through the town meeting process and the research capability we have, we just want people to tell us what’s on their mind – to tell us what they believe we should be looking at or things that are important. So I think people will be more willing to come forward.

Are you confident that the one or two you choose will be representative of the community’s priorities?

Yes. The advisory council is meant to mirror the UVM community, with representation from the faculty, staff, undergraduates and graduate students. Each of the members serves a two-year term. For continuity’s sake, the membership stayed the same in the change from the work group to the advisory council. 

While divestment will still be a tool in your toolbox, you’re looking at making much more use of shareholder initiatives and proxy voting. What are those?

Any shareholder can submit a proposal to a corporation, and the company is required to put it on the agenda for a vote at their annual meeting. Ninety-nine percent of stockholders aren’t going to show up, but they still have the right to vote on the issue. So proxy voting ballots go out to all shareholders before the annual meeting. The ballots might ask shareholder to vote for directors or to approve an auditing firm, but proposals from institutions like UVM -- so called “shareholder initiatives” -- also get on the ballot and can gather significant support. Conversely, we can vote by proxy -- that’s “proxy voting” -- if we see a shareholder initiative on the ballot that the UVM community, with the approval of the board, has given us the ability to vote on.

Our research shows that shareholder initiatives and proxy voting seem to be what corporate America pays attention to, more so than just divestment. 

You have the first town meeting coming up on Feb. 20. What are your hopes for it? 

It’s our hope that the town meeting is inclusive, with as many individuals and groups university-wide participating as possible. We hope that it brings forth to the advisory council issues that are on the minds of the university community, whatever those issue may be that are of social, ethical, or moral concern and that relate to our investment policies.

“My preceptor was Dr. Mark Peluso at the Middlebury College Health Center,” says Schloff. Though she grew up in the Addison County college town, Schloff had never met Dr. Peluso before. “Though when I saw pictures of his kids, I did realize I knew them from my days as a lifeguard at the town pool.” All Doctoring in Vermont (DIV) students spend a minimum of four afternoon sessions at their assigned practice in their first spring, and another four the following fall. About 60 Vermont primary care, pediatric, and internal medicine physicians located within an hour’s drive of main campus serve as preceptors to the 113 members of the Class of 2015. “These volunteer faculty members are an incredible resource for us,” says Paula Tracy, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and director of the Foundations Level, the 18-month initial stage of the Vermont Integrated Curriculum. “They introduce the students to so much of what it means to be a practicing physician.”

“This is the students’ first experience of taking a real history from a real patient,” explains course director Dennis Beatty, M.D., An assistant professor of medicine and a primary care physician at Aesculapius Medical Center in South Burlington, Vt., Beatty has directed the course for the last eight years, having been recruited to the position by the “founding spirit” of DIV, former associate dean for primary care Mildred Reardon, M.D.’67, who first structured the course in something like its current form more than 20 years ago.

“They’ll work with preceptors in taking patient histories and performing physical examinations, and they’ll review their encounters outside the room,” Beatty says. “Students learn about the kinds of things patients present within a given practice, and how the doctor manages multiple patients at the same time. They’ll start to hear some terms and medications they may not yet be familiar with. And I think these things are more meaningful and purposeful when they’re coming up during treatment of a real patient.” Students have worked with standardized patients here on campus beforehand, Beatty notes, referring to the highly trained corps of teachers who simulate patients on-campus in the Clinical Simulation Laboratory. “But this is where, on a regular basis, the students will first start to listen to and put their stethoscopes on real patients.”

For Emily Schloff, as for most other DIV students, that experience started soon after she walked in the door of the Middlebury health center for the first time.

“From day one Dr. Peluso let me go in on my own to see some patients first. He’d say, ‘Go take a few minutes and find out why they’re here.’ Of course, he’d already know why they were here, but I’d have a chance to take a history from the patient on my own, and then go back to the doctor and report — so I learned on my feet to present a patient summary. Then we would go back in together and he would ask some more questions, and then together we would do the physical examination of the patient.”

“It was a little nerve-wracking at first,” admits Joshua Price, who experienced DIV in the office of Joseph Nasca, M.D.’88 in Georgia, Vt. “Halfway through the first day Dr. Nasca handed me a chart and said ‘go into this room and figure out what’s wrong with this person and then come back and brief me.’ That’s pretty nerve-inducing, at first. It’s undeniably different from even the great simulations we have beforehand. You’re not working on an individual skill; you have to start head-to-toe and narrow it down. It’s a challenge and, ultimately, it’s fun.” Price is no stranger to a doctor’s office: he grew up in St. Johnsbury, Vt., where his father, Mark, is a pediatrician.

For medical student Bruno Cardoso, interacting with patients was not a new experience, but acting as a diagnostician was. “I was an Intensive Care Unit nurse for six years before I came to med school,” he explains. “So I’d interacted with many, many patients before. But it was different. I wasn’t asking the kind of questions a physician asks, or looking at the situation the same way.” Cardoso’s DIV preceptor was Emanuele Chiappinelli, M.D.’75, in St. Albans, Vt. Cardoso found that he shared with his preceptor a deep respect for the art of the patient history, and the physical exam. “And I was in awe of the body of knowledge he has from decades of treating patients,” he says “He’d come into the room after I’d taken my history and he’d ask similar questions, but in a much more efficient manner, and he’d get right down to the information he needed to get to, and that I hadn’t elicited from the patient even though I thought I was asking the right questions. It was amazing to watch, and encouraging to think that, with any luck, I’ll gain that kind of experience and ability too.”

After the spring DIV sessions, every student is required to take part in a Clinical Correlation session, where they each pick a case that they have seen clinically, research the case and the condition, and do a full presentation to their classmates. “They’ll talk, for instance, about a patient they saw who had diabetes, and they’ll fully explain the case, and go into the medications that patient takes, and the follow the physiology of how those meds work on the molecular level,” says Beatty.

“I loved taking a patient I’d seen and, for the first time, doing a presentation for my peers. I think it’s valuable to be able to learn that early on,” says Price.

The medical preceptors, in their many practices throughout northern Vermont, see the mentoring experience as a way to contribute to the future of their profession, and an experience that can reaffirm their medical knowledge. “The students really keep me on my toes,” says Peluso, who precepted Emily Schloff. “When you’re teaching something while doing it, you think it through just a bit more, and I find that to teach something that’s complicated allows me to understand it even better. And I have a patient population here at Middlebury that’s mostly college students. They really seem to enjoy having the medical students there, especially the pre-med students. They can connect on a whole different level. I find that UVM med students are very empathetic and ask really bright questions, which is an indicator of how they’ve been prepared.”

“I always start out by telling the student who’s beginning at my practice to read the physician’s oath,” says Joseph Nasca, who precepted Joshua Price. Nasca has mentored DIV students since the early 1990s. “I feel that my patients appreciate having medical students at the practice. I think any chance you have to put these bright young people in front of patients adds validity to what you’re doing,” he says. “I’ll often preface a visit by telling my patient ‘I’d like you to help teach this student with me.’ I believe that’s what they’re doing. And I tell the student, above all, to listen while they’re taking a history or doing a physical exam. I always think that, for a patient, one of the most important things you can hope for when you come to a doctor’s office is that you’ll find someone truly listening to you when you show up.”

At the beginning of the second semester of DIV, students are assessed at the College of Medicine by doing a full history and physical exam with a standardized patient. They receive detailed feedback on this exercise. Near the end of the second semester, they do another such history and exam, and this time they are graded on their performance. Both times they fully document their experience on an electronic health record. “They’ll soon be heading into hospitals to do their clinical clerkships, and they’ll have to use these electronic systems, “ says Beatty. “So it’s better for them to be ahead of the game instead of having to learn how to document while they have all the new knowledge of clerkships to take in too.”

Some medical students return to their DIV practices for extra sessions after the course, or come back for a rotation during their fourth year of studies. And sometimes, for a preceptor, that relationship has even more significance, as is true especially for Joseph Nasca. “Josh’s dad, Mark Price, helped train me 25 years ago, in Burlington, when I was doing my acting internship in neonatal care,” he says. “Mark was a real role model for me, so being able to help train the next generation of that family feels like a real closure of the loop for me.”

Researchers at the University of Vermont have been developing technologies that detect disease-causing bacteria in the lung by simply measuring what’s in the breath. The research has potential for creating a fast and easy breath test to detect common infections like tuberculosis.

Traditional tests to diagnose bacterial infections in the lungs can take days or weeks, says Jane Hill, a professor in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences who co-led the new study, “but we can measure breath in one minute."

The new technique profiles volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — gases swirling in the air exhaled from the lungs — to generate a distinctive chemical signature for differing types of infectious bacteria.

Led by UVM graduate student Jiangjiang Zhu, the team successfully distinguished between species of bacteria, as well as strains of the same bacteria, in the lungs of infected laboratory mice.

Their results were presented in the Journal of Breath Research, published online by the Institute of Physics, on January 11, 2013.

Disease detection

Clinicians see breath-testing as an attractive method for diagnosing disease; it’s easy to use, not invasive, and potentially inexpensive. Scientists have already investigated breath-based diagnostics for multiple cancers, asthma, and diabetes.

In this study, the researchers analyzed the VOCs given off by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, both of which are common in lung infections associated with pneumonia and other diseases including cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The scientists first infected mice with the two bacteria and sampled their breath after 24 hours. Then they ionized the samples and sprayed them through a mass spectrometer to analyze the presence and concentrations of various VOCs.

The technique is called secondary electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, or SESI-MS, which is capable of detecting VOCs down to parts-per-trillion.

The UVM team — with members from the School of Engineering, the College of Medicine's Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and the Vermont Lung Center — found that there was a significant difference between the breath profiles of mice infected with the bacteria and mice that were uninfected. The two different species of bacteria could also be distinguished, as could the two different strains of the P. aeruginosa that were used.

The researchers hypothesize that bacteria in the lungs produce unique VOCs that are not found in regular human breath due to their differing metabolism.

“Bacteria, when they get in your lung, are eating the body as their source of nutrients,” says Hill, “this releases byproducts — a particular suite of volatiles, which are unique to the bacterium. And that’s the basis for this research. Every bacterium has its own set of metabolic enzymes and its own interaction with the host which allows us to distinguish between one bacterium and another during infection.”

And this real-world, real-body aspect of the research is important, since the VOC profile of bacteria grown in laboratory dishes can look dramatically different than those living in host organisms. The new study reported only a 25-34 percent overlap in the VOC profile of the same bacteria strains grown in a lab culture versus when grown in mice.

Next steps

The UVM team—which, in addition to Hill and Zhu, includes pulmonology physician Laurie Leclair, microbiologist Matthew Wargo, and engineering researcher Heather Bean—is moving the laboratory research toward human clinical trials, including an upcoming study in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital.

“I suspect that we will also be able to distinguish between bacterial, viral and fungal infections of the lung,” Hill says.

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world’s population carries tuberculosis and that this lung disease causes more than a million deaths each year.

“TB takes about six weeks to diagnose,” says Hill, allowing an infected person to spread it unwittingly. “Faster diagnosis of the disease would allow for faster treatment decisions and would also decrease disease transmission.”

She anticipates a time when patients could visit a physician, breathe into an instrument and know within minutes, “what you’re infected with,” she says, and, perhaps, “whether your antibiotic regime is effective, whether you need different antibiotics, and whether you have more then one bug causing your problem.”

The new research has drawn the attention of international media including the BBC and Scientific American.

This research was supported by the UVM College of Medicine's Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (grant 8 P20 GM103496-07) within the National Institutes of Health; the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation; and NASA EPSCoR.

Portions of this story were written by Michael Bishop, Institute of Physics, michael.bishop@iop.org

UVM Today: In the The Fictional Christopher Nolan, you write, "...for Nolan's cinema, the link between the truth and fiction always remains clear: if one wants to discover truth, one must first succumb to the fiction that seems to obscure it." This crystallizes one of your main arguments in the book. What does this mean?

McGowan: I was mostly constructing the argument of the book against a certain idea that truth and fiction are totally distinct, and that we have to try to not be duped -- we have to avoid succumbing to lies or fictions. It is actually only in succumbing to them that we can see how the truth of our existence is not something separate from the different identities that we construct. It's not equal to the identities that we construct for ourselves -- I wouldn't say that. But by tracing them out and seeing how they fall apart or don't work out, that's what I would say truth is.

That's why there's this intimate link between fiction and truth because truth is not what fiction obscures, it's what the fiction reveals through the way that it works itself out and comes to a certain end point or obstruction or failure. I would say that's truth.

Can you give an example or two of how Nolan's characters "submit to deception?"

I don't know if characters in the films do it so much as the films do it to the spectator. What comes to mind first is a character who doesn't do it. There's this movie Following, which is Nolan's first movie. That character believes in truth so much that he gets framed for murder he didn't commit at the end because of it. So it's an indictment of his failure to submit to fiction.

I think that it's more that Nolan's films do that to us. They force us to submit to some kind of fiction in order to discover a truth. Memento would be a great example. You think that the fiction of the film is hiding some truth which is what happened when the main character's wife was raped and murdered. And you think that the film's moving backwards back to that point. But instead you get that he tells a lie to himself, and he even avows that he's telling a lie. So I think that's an example where you think that the fiction that Nolan creates will lead back to a lie that's separate from it. But actually, the truth is him telling a lie, which is inherent within the fiction. It's the end point of the fiction.

You also talk about the ethics of deceit. How can a lie be ethical?

Most often we think of lies as obviously unethical and immoral. For Kant, a lie is worse than murder because it destroys the bedrock of the bond that holds us together. I see that, and I think most lies probably count as that. But my idea of the ethical lie would be a lie like "All men are created equal." Clearly that's not true, but it's used to advance a kind of political idea of equality. The unethical lie would be an attempt to advance your own interest in a certain way or avoid conflict (most of my unethical lies are trying to avoid conflict!). But the ethical lie would, I think, have a clear political drive within it. It's trying to shift the ground of the social situation in some kind of fundamental way. Whereas an unethical lie is trying to keep things the same. It's trying to say, "Let's not have a disturbance or try to keep everything the way it is." So a lie -- ok, my spouse doesn't know that last night instead of teaching my class, I snuck out to the ice cream store (that would be my infidelity) -- that would be unethical because you're just trying to keep things, keep your relationship conflict-free.

Do you have a favorite among the films?

I think Prestige is the one that's most Nolan-like. I think most people would say Memento because that was the one that made him Christopher Nolan, but I think it's Prestige because it's all about the deception. It's all about the way the magicians have to deceive. He shows how if you know the trick, it's ruined, so you have to invest yourself in the fiction. There's also a great moment in that film where Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are talking, and they see magician who does a trick where he makes a big fish bowl appear from beneath his garb. In order to do it, he has to walk around all the time as if he can't really walk. Christian Bale says something like, "That's the trick." The trick is in totally sacrificing everything for the sake of your art. That also means making your whole life into a fiction or lie.

So is that an ethical lie?

I think it's ethical. You know what they say? And I think this is true is about art. Christian Bale's character says something like, "Without this, the world is solid straight through." So something is created. Is the fiction trying to create something? Then it's ethical. Is the fiction trying to preserve something? Then it's immoral. Someone asked me, "What's the difference between fiction and lie? Isn't there a huge difference?" But I don't think there is. Even novelists: liars, I would say. But not in a bad way. In a really good way.

Another filmmaker you mention in the book as a point of comparison is M. Night Shyamalan, who also plays around with truth and deception.

People feel like Shyamalan's structure has become a cliché. I think the reason it's not in Nolan's case, although maybe it will become one and that will be unfortunate, is that you can even know that the deception is working, and the film still works. You kind of know you're in a Nolan film when you realize, "Oh, there's something I'm not privy to, and I'm being deceived." Take The Prestige. To me, that's his masterpiece. A lot of people were like, "Oh, I hated that film because I figured it out that they were twins 10 minutes into it." And so what? If a Nolan film is successful that should't matter at all. In a Nolan film, you feel deceived, but even if you know what the end point is, it doesn't ruin the film for you. That would be the difference between Shyamalan and Nolan. In Sixth Sense, all you have to say is "He sees dead people," and the whole film is ruined for you. A friend of mine calls these spoiler films because you can say one sentence and destroy the effect, but I don't think Nolan makes spoiler films. You can know there's a lie or fiction, and it still works.

You haven't heard anything from Nolan, have you?

I've never heard from him. I actually would not like to. It would bother me, and I would especially hate it if he read the book and said, "I like it. I'm really going to try to really follow those ideas." That would be the worst thing! Wouldn't that be terrible? I'd be responsible if he was a good filmmaker and now he's terrible, and it's all because of me. That would be just crushing.

What are you working on next?

I have another book that's about to come out called Rupture. It's a book that I co-wrote with my longtime friend Paul Eisenstein. It's sort of related to Nolan because it's about the way values are created through violent (not necessarily physical violence, but maybe) ruptures -- like the French Revolution -- that shift the ground. That's how values like freedom, equality, humanity are created. The whole book tries to trace certain values. Chapters are called Freedom, Equality, Solidarity, Singularity -- things like that. So it traces those values to their moments of rupture. There's discussions of films in there too, like a discussion of Fight Club, (which I think is one of the greatest films ever made), The Wrestler, Little Children.

That's sort of my direction, more toward the theoretical and away from the filmic. The only thing that could -- you know like in Godfather, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" -- the only thing that could pull me back in to books about films is maybe the idea of a Welles book. I love Orson Welles so much, and there's a surprising paucity of things written about Welles.

What recent movies have you enjoyed?

I think Lincoln is stunningly good. It's gotten a lot of criticism for preaching compromise, but I don't think it does that. The trajectory in Steven Spielberg's films usually is impure or inadequate father figure who then becomes great. Like, he can not only save his family, he can save the Jews, too. Totally offensive, I think. Lincoln is the opposite. He begins as this pure figure, above politics, and he realizes that in order to get the 13th amendment passed, he has to dirty his hands, give bribes. I love that.

Heading up the stairs at the Brooklyn headquarters, he met another man, about his age, coming down. He gave Heyward a friendly hello and a hearty handshake. Heyward walked away with that nagging, “I should know who that is, but I can’t quite place him,” sense. But there were flood plans to activate — sweeping streets, clearing catch basins of debris, moving equipment to low-lying areas. Heyward put the mystery of who that guy was in the back of his mind.

That guy, Trevor Jackson ’83, also got down to business a few work-stations away from Heyward. A National Guardsman since his days as a UVM undergraduate, Jackson is commander of the 53rd Army Liaison Team, a Manhattan-based unit of the Guard. A third UVM alum, Nancy Barthold ’83, was focused on her own Sandy issues, representing the city’s Parks Department in the emergency management operation.

Heyward, long active in leadership roles with the UVM Alumni Association, knew Barthold from university events in the city. Though he hadn’t realized it yet, he also shared an alumni bond with the man who had greeted him on the stairs. A day later, when things quieted a bit on Sunday evening, it dawned on him. “I put together that he was in uniform… Jackson… then I said to myself, ‘No way!’” I went over and asked him his first name. Trevor.”

They’d known each other as UVM undergrads, but hadn’t crossed paths since. “I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you,” Heyward said.

Jackson joked, “I thought maybe I owed you money or something.” Weeks later, Heyward laughs at the memory, an unlikely college reunion in the relative calm before a colossal storm.

Trees, streets, troops 

Heyward and Barthold are both NYC natives and current residents; Jackson was born in Jamaica, but came to New York as a child and now lives north of the city. They all care deeply about the place and its people and have served through times of crisis before, most notably the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Barthold is assistant commissioner for recreation and programming with the New York City Parks Department. She currently oversees 35 public recreation centers and programs, but most of her career has been focused on maintenance operations and forestry. That experience led to her role with the city’s Emergency Management Operation.

Pulling shifts from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. became the norm from the days leading up to Sandy until Thanksgiving for Barthold, much the same for Jackson and Heyward. Working from the office in Brooklyn and in the field, Barthold coordinated the myriad teams dealing with downed trees. The task was greatly aided, she notes, by a recently developed GIS/tablet-based system that seamlessly coordinated complaint calls and tree inspections on the streets. 

Trevor Jackson is a claims manager for the state insurance fund in New York, but as Sandy approached he left his desk job at the office in White Plains, called into active duty with the National Guard. His initial mission was to act as a liaison officer, but for the first three days of the storm, Jackson stepped into the role of ground commander for several units involved with search and rescue efforts. Work in the field took him to the Guard’s staging area at Fort Bennett Field, Brighton Beach, the Rockaways, and Staten Island.

“It was painful to see all the destruction,” Jackson says. “These are our fellow citizens, and looking out and seeing the water at eye-level, just very daunting to see all the sand barriers being washed away.”

Even on the sunniest of days, Leon Heyward’s job sounds rather intimidating when you consider that New York City has 13,000 miles of sidewalks and overseeing their maintenance is just one aspect of his work. Post-storm, he set to work helping to lead and coordinate efforts to inspect and identify blocked roads and flooded tunnels and begin restoring traffic flow in one of the world’s busiest cities.

On top of the storm recovery effort, Heyward and his staff were immediately on the ground from Tuesday to Friday assessing sidewalk damage and what would need to be done before the weekend’s New York City Marathon. Ultimately, Mayor Michael Bloomberg reversed his call to run the race as planned and cancelled this year’s event.

After the flood

All three of the UVM alumni are grateful to have escaped damage to their own property. Jackson, who lives in Rockland County north of the city, lost power at home for a few days. Heyward, who lives in the Bronx, lost power for a week and had some downed trees in his yard, one across a fence that he’ll have to get fixed when things slow down. And Barthold, who lives in a Queens neighborhood that sustained significant damage to large, old trees, was fortunate not to lose any in her own yard.

All are united by their impressions of the storm’s impact and the fact that they, like so many, had not seen such fury coming. “It was unbelievable,” Heyward says. “There’s the old saying that TV and the newspapers can’t do justice to what you see out there. That was so true. The houses in different stages of devastation — chunks taken out of them, pushed off their foundations, or swept away. And with no power, once it got dark it was very ominous being out there.”

A triathlete and open-water swimmer, Barthold has long told friends that the best views of Manhattan are to be had while swimming in the Hudson River. She’ll always love the water and the city’s waterfront, but has an even deeper respect now for its power. “I’m definitely humbled,” she says. “The water by Staten Island is now so calm and bay-like. It’s hard to believe it came in and took people’s lives.”

Barthold, Jackson, and Heyward, all express gratitude to have had roles that put them in positions to help immediately and tangibly during the storm and in its wake. It’s an emotion they mutually connect to their experience after 9/11.

Though they’re keenly aware of the loss of life and property and the challenges ahead — put in stark numbers by NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent request for $42 billion in federal support for relief and preparation for the next storm — all of the alumni trio were heartened by the cooperation of diverse agencies and individuals that was critical to the emergency efforts. And they are impressed by the strength of New Yorkers, something that Barthold suggests can be as difficult for the media to convey as the devastation of a neighborhood.

Jackson agrees. “No one’s spirit was dampened,” he says. “That’s what was so awesome about the resiliency of everyone out there — even in the Rockaways — everyone was peaceful, grateful for the support, with an attitude of, ‘OK, it happened. We’ll pick ourselves up and move on.’”

When Kingsley left Wall Street and moved to Vermont to begin her career as an assistant professor of management in the School of Business Administration, she noticed some eerily similar business conditions in Vermont to the ones she observed in emerging markets like Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Argentina. Wanting to investigate further, Kinglsey applied some of the tools and methodologies cited in a paper she wrote with Rick Vanden Bergh, associate professor of management in School of Business Administration, that appeared in the August issue of the Academy of Management Perspectives titled “Political Markets and Regulatory Uncertainty: Insights and Implications for Integrated Strategy.”

Kingsley found that Vermont is as politically risky to conduct business in as many emerging markets, based on a variety of measures, including the Political Constraints Index – a non-partisan tool that measures the level of political competition and feasibility of change in policy based on elected officials. Vermont scored poorly and on par with such emerging markets as Sri Lanka and Burundi and is moving in a direction that will “exacerbate risk” for businesses, she says. Other factors taken into account in Kinglsey’s assessment included Vermont’s high corporate income tax rate (12th nationally) and state and local property taxes (sixth); high energy rates; heavy business regulation; and reputation for ideological politics and lack of political competition, which creates uncertainty for private businesses.

“My fundamental argument is that Vermont lacks meaningful competition in its political institutions, making arbitrary policy change more likely,” says Kingsley. “This, in combination with the fact that businesses typically confront vocal, ideology-motivated interest groups increases political risk. Such risk is pronounced in places like Vermont that already have costly policies.”

Research evokes intense response

Kingsley recently shared her findings in a “Creative Corner” article “Is Vermont Politically Risky as an Emerging Market?” in the Sept. 27 issue of the Burlington Free Press. It evoked intense debate and a flood of responses. Her detractors – whom she says were the minority – are in two camps. One argued (hostilely in some cases) that constraining business is a core Vermont value. “In saying so,” says Kinglsey, “they concede by example that there is a significant opposition to business.” The other camp has a more nuanced argument, claiming that there are business success stories in Vermont that disprove Kingley’s argument, offering detailed evidence of businesses that have excelled or capital that has flowed into Vermont.

“In fact, I agree that business can be successful in Vermont or in any politically risky environment,” says Kingsley. “My investment track record shows this. The story is really in how those businesses have been successful. This brings me to the heart of my work with Rick and others. What we have found in the U.S. and emerging markets is that when a business confronts a political environment that is uncompetitive and populated with ideological opposition, it often chooses not to invest. When a business does move forward, simultaneously investing in a costly political strategy to manage the risk is prudent, particularly if that business is on the political radar screen.”

Kingsley also thinks that many of the people who wrote critical responses “have a horse in the game” or are raising capital for companies or are running an organization. “I don’t sit on any Vermont boards. I have no partisan affiliation. I’m not involved in any interest group or involved in any businesses or raising capital. I don’t actually have a conflict of interest.”

Kingsley admits it was difficult to make some of the complex theory in the “Academy of Management Perspectives” article approachable for general consumption in the Free Press. That article concludes that properly assessing a firm’s exposure to regulatory uncertainty helps managers craft an appropriate integrated strategy, and suggests two primary drivers of regulatory uncertainty for firms: ideology-motivated interests opposed to the firm and a lack of competition for power among political actors such as executives and legislators. The latter is confusing to some who would assume that because places like Vermont, for example, are predictably left leaning, that its policies would be easy to predict.

“What government should practice is constrained optimization,” says Kingsley. “It should be optimizing social welfare, which isn’t just a product of social policy, but also a product of economic policy. Vermont does some really good things about constraining business like not allowing billboards. Perhaps that’s anti-business, but its pro-something else that’s meaningful in Vermont. Like any other state, Vermont is entitled to make decisions about what its values are, but there also needs to be an honest discussion about the cost-benefit analysis of those choices.”

As an example of an unpredictable regulatory decision, Kingsley uses the changing of the contractual terms with Vermont Yankee. Although such changes might produce a good outcome from a social welfare perspective, from a policy stability perspective, it shows no resistance on any level of government until other judiciary or institutions at higher levels are forced to challenge the decision, she says.

“What I’d like to see from Vermont is that we’re really thoughtful about what the constraints are that we want on business here, so by virtue of being transparent about our values and constraints and how we’re going to govern, we let the businesses we want to thrive, and that we don’t divert resources to crony capitalism,” she says. “It’s amazing to me that that isn’t the conversation we’re having.”         

Cioffi could have been referring to the uncertain state of higher education in 2012, with every week bringing a new magazine or newspaper cover story on the challenges facing colleges and universities, or to a series of forward-looking planning initiatives UVM has undertaken over the past few years.

But much of the vigor behind the statement had to do with the new employee seated to Cioffi’s right, UVM president Tom Sullivan, who was presiding over his first board meeting.

Sullivan has been on a self-described listening tour since arriving at UVM in mid-July, meeting with hundreds of academic and administrative leaders on campus  and hundreds more constituents in and out of the state.

On Wednesday he was ready to deliver a plan of action distilled from all that listening and attendant reading, informed by 34 years in the academy and the analysis of an attorney-president, one of whose legal specialties is “complex litigation,” the sifting through and sorting out of prodigious amounts of data.

The action-oriented results took a number of forms throughout the two-day meeting but crystalized most dramatically in a Strategic Action Plan Sullivan spent much of the Committee of the Whole taking the board through.

Its high points included:

• A firm resolve to rein in tuition increases and ramp up financial aid. Sullivan said he will recommend a tuition increase of less than 3 percent next year and will make scholarships and financial aid a priority in the upcoming comprehensive campaign.

• Finding the right balance between tuition prices and scholarships/financial aid that works both for students – attracting them to UVM, encouraging them to persist through graduation and minimizing the debt they accrue – and for the financial sustainability of the university.  

• Implementing a Strategic Enrollment Plan that will reduce undergraduate enrollment to 9,800 from a high of 10,300 in 2011, boost international enrollment from 1.5 percent to 5 to 7 percent, continue to enhance domestic diversity and give closer attention to the recruitment and success of transfer students.

• Enhancing the student experience across a range of fronts, from the cultural to the academic, with the goal of increasing first year retention from 85 to 90 percent and four year graduation from 65 to 70 percent.

• Increasing the number of tenure-track faculty in high quality programs aligned with UVM’s strategic priorities where there have been substantial enrollment increases over targets.

• Developing graduate programs that ensure the optimal size, scale and scope of the Graduate College, consistent with the university’s vision. 

• Identifying strategic investments, in facilities, infrastructure and information technologies, essential to the university’s continued advance. In the facilities area, Sullivan described his top four priorities: the Billings Library restoration; restoration of existing laboratories and/or the construction of new ones for engineering, chemistry, physics, and health-related sciences; completion of the privately funded Alumni House restoration; and the design and construction of a privately funded multi-purpose center.

“I think the plan is realistic,” Sullivan said. “But it will require careful balancing between competing and often worthy resource demands.  It won’t be easy.”

Provost Jane Knodell and Vice President for Enrollment Management Chris Lucier revealed more details of the Strategic Enrollment Plan in a presentation to the Committee of the Whole on Thursday. 

The university plans to reduce the percentage of applicants who are offered admission from 77 percent for the class that just entered UVM to 65 percent in three years, a development that will not negatively impact the selectivity rate for Vermont students, which will remain at the 70-72 percent level, where it has been for several years, administrators stressed. In addition, UVM will continue to boost domestic diversity and use a variety of strategies to increase international enrollment.

To accomplish its goals in the domestic market, the admissions office will add staff and expand its recruitment effort in new markets outside UVM’s traditional cachement area of the Northeast, Lucier said. To fund the new enrollment management initiatives, the board passed a resolution allocating $2 million from the fiscal year 2012 general fund operating budget to be used for financial aid and $500,000 to pay for additional recruitment staff and costs in the admissions office for fiscal year 2013. The funds are a one-time allocation with ongoing needs to be built into the base of future operating budgets.

Educational Policy and Institutional Resources Committee

During the EPIR meeting, administrators elaborated on UVM’s proposed international enrollment strategy. The university will identify a strong external company to help support both direct international student recruitment and recruitment through a pathway program. The former includes students who can both meet the academic requirements for acceptance to the university and have the necessary written and verbal English language skills to perform well in a university classroom. The latter is targeted to students who are strong academically and have reasonable competency in English, but who enroll in a two-semester “pathway” before matriculating to boost their academic English skills and acculturate to life at an American university. Enrollment goals are on a fast track, with a plan to start 50 pathway program students in January 2014 and another 70 the following summer.

Widely supported among EPIR members was a proposal to enhance UVM’s career development program, which UVM administrators view as a key strategy for recruiting successful students and preparing them to be accountable leaders after they graduate. Knodell has charged Abu Rizvi, dean of the Honors College, with developing a proposal for a distinctive and exemplary program, which he said could have an immediate effect on recruitment and retention even as improved career outcomes would serve as a powerful marketing tool in the future.

Wanda Heading-Grant, chief diversity officer and special assistant to the president for multicultural initiatives, reported to EPIR on the progress of recommendations following the results of the Spring 2011 Campus Climate Survey. Follow-up focus groups have been conducted with faculty, staff and students to better understand survey results. Heading-Grant is developing a plan to continue assessing campus climate in the future and is working on a proposal for a comprehensive professional development program for the entire campus community. Read a PDF of the full Campus Climate Survey Update.

The committee engaged in a wide-ranging discussion on the assessment of learning outcomes and student success, with broad agreement about their importance. Reports on the assessment of learning outcomes at course, program and university levels will be included in future EPIR agendas. 

Budget,  Finance and Investment Committee

BFI committee members approved three deferred maintenance capital projects totaling $7.3 million: improvements to Living Learning Building C using unrestricted plant funds budgeted by University Relations and Campus Life ($3.5 million); renovations to the Stafford Research Lab using a combination of general funds from the College of Medicine and University Medical Education Association ($2.8 million); and improvements to the Given Atrium Dining Complex using funds budgeted by University Relations and Campus Life ($1 million).       

As part of a broader plan to increase the use of university courses and facilities during the summer, committee members limited the summer 2013 tuition increase to 3.5 percent per credit. The increase will allow the university to keep summer rates 15 percent lower than per-credit-hour costs during the fall and spring semesters. The increase translates to $16 more per credit hour for in-state students bringing the total per-credit-hour cost to $472; and $40 more for out-of-state students for a total per-credit cost of $1,191.

Trustee Sam Bain informed committee members that the university’s endowment had grown at a rate of 10.4 percent for the year and had reached a total of $347.6 million. Committee members passed a resolution to dissolve the Socially Responsible Investing Work Group started in 2008 and replace it with the Socially Responsible Investing Advisory Council. The new council will serve as an advisory body to the vice president for finance and administration and no longer include trustees as sitting members. The charge to consider specific investment policy proposals based on “moral, ethical social criteria” remains the same. 

The first task of the new advisory council will come in late November, when a student-led group advocating that UVM divest from fossil fuel companies will present its case before the body. Sophomore Daniel Cmejla, a spokesman for the Student Climate Culture group, gave a preview of the argument to the full board on Thursday during the public comment period.

Read a PDF of the consent agenda, itemizing all action items approved by the board.

See debate video.

For all of his commitment to history and tradition, Snider has also shaped the way forward for a newer style of competitive debate known as the worlds format, an approach that he believes better develops students’ ability to improvise than the traditional policy format, where they debate the same issue all year. It prepares them for more “real-life” situations.

In worlds, teams learn the topic only fifteen minutes prior to the start of the debate. After that they can talk only to their partner, no coaches, and have no access to the internet, though written materials are permitted. It requires that debaters be broadly informed and able to think fast on their feet to develop a convincing argument they will deliver in a seven-minute speech.

Topics run the spectrum including economics, ecology, the military, technology, social policy, criminal justice, sports. “You want some of everything,” says Snider, who helped create the “holy secret” of motions for the final debate last season in Oregon. But he notes that it would be a foolish debater who went in without a solid understanding of unfolding events in Syria and the Eurozone.

“You need to read the news constantly,” he says. The occasional curve ball can come — a favorite Snider recalls is a motion granting independence to Abkhazia, which could be a bit troublesome if you’ve never heard of it.

One thing that’s noted universally: everyone remembers stumbling through that first speech which was maybe only a few minutes long, if that. No one is judgmental. New people want to come to practices and just watch but the goal is to push them into the fray. “And once we get them to a debate tournament,” Snider says, “they’re ours.” Because it’s really fun.

“Like any competitive activity, it’s extremely addicting,” says last year’s LDU co-president Paul Gross ’12, who was named sixth of the top ten worlds format debaters in the U.S. National Championship in April. Even in practice debates (of which there are three or more a week all year), the adrenaline is palpable.

Debaters crowd in the long, narrow Huber House meeting room with trophy-lined walls and a portrait of the legendary coach, their backpacks slung to the floor. The debates are styled after the British Parliamentary system; so, on one spring evening, a motion reads, “This house would not allow those wrongly accused of being gay to sue for defamation.” The teams, two pairs on each side, half arguing for the government, half for the opposition, separate and move into action for fifteen minutes of formulating their best cases, lobbing ideas and arguments for the best means of attack: “Your right to free speech ends where my reputation begins”… “The goal of government is not to change society but to protect citizens.”

The time passes in a flash, and the first speaker begins, addressing the adjudicator and “the house” at large with established formality, but the room is rowdy. Between the first and sixth minutes of a rapid-fire, impassioned speech anyone on the opposing side can stand up to offer a Point of Information, essentially a question or attack on the speaker’s argument — but at the risk of being waved into silence.

In both worlds and policy formats, during some point in a tournament every debater will be arguing for both the affirmative and the negative. Asked whats it’s like to take a side you personally oppose, Gross, a political science and philosophy major from the Washington, D.C. area, says he finds that almost more fun, recalling a conversation with an attorney who told him being in court was like boxing with your brain.

“It’s like you get to embody this person that you wouldn’t otherwise be and it’s just purely an intellectual exercise. It’s just a game at that point. It’s who can make the best argument, and I find that really engaging.” But he allows that it not only helps him evaluate his own positions more critically in his private life, he is also more likely to be thoughtful in taking others’ opinions into account.

Someone once suggested that “every debater is Tuna Snider’s debater.” That estimate gives the man a laugh. “I do feel that way. I want to help them all — even from Cornell,” Snider says. He jokes about the Ivy because the Cornell debate director was once his assistant coach. “I taught him what he knows.” But Snider’s service is no joke. He says he’s done debate training now in thirty-eight countries, not charging except for help with travel expenses. He spends more than a hundred days a year traveling, with much of it dedicated to promoting debate in places such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and China.

“We’re not getting everywhere but we’re just about,” says Snider. “Amazing countries have vibrant debate scenes now. Bangladesh — one of the poorest, most crowded countries in the world with almost no natural resources, and debate is solid there. They are serious because everybody sees it as a way to get ahead. (They think) ‘I need not just to speak English, I need to speak English well and be able to persuade people.’ And the other thing is, it doesn’t cost any money. I could go out under a tree and have a debate. So they teach each other.”

Different countries have different reasons for seeking out debate. For South Koreans, according to Snider, it’s a means to get in top English or American schools. In Latin America, it’s people who are concerned about the future of democracy. In former communist countries, it’s about trying to get critical discourse accepted. In China, he says, there were initial problems. “The party was very suspicious about debating and now it’s growing explosively there,” says Snider. “I think the University of Vermont did a lot of the groundwork.”

But much of Snider’s time on the road is spent with UVM students — again with a nod to old Mr. Lawrence — who get to be a part of that international experience with the advent of the new worlds debate format. “I’ve gotten to travel the world for free. I’ve been to Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, the Philippines, Botswana…,” says Jessica Bullock ’12, the other LDU co-president who was seventh of the top ten American debaters (Drew Adamczyk, now a junior, was ninth, making UVM the only school to have three students in the top ten).

Bullock has also been coaching Spanish debate here for the last two years, with at least two teams, some novice, debating in both English and Spanish. Cornell hosted the first Spanish language tournament ever in the Northeast last year, Bullock says, and UVM made it to the semifinals against teams from Colombia and Venezuela. “For us to make it to the semifinals against native speakers,” she says, “I was very proud.”

All of it, including the way international debate cuts across cultures — the influence of machismo in Latin America when debating women’s rights or political history debating capitalism versus socialism with someone from Eastern Europe — “It’s eye-opening for a girl who came from rural Vermont,” Bullock says.

An English major, Bullock has taken a position with Teach for America in Baltimore for the next two years with an eye toward educational policy and maybe law school. Meanwhile she’ll be teaching elementary school, with hopes of introducing the youngest students to debate, something fun like, “This house believes cats should be on leashes.”

She’ll be sticking by her coach’s credo: “I think we’re about promoting debate everywhere for everyone,” Snider says. “Close to home, far away — that’s what we do.”

This article appears in the fall 2012 issue of Vermont Quarterly magazine. To request a print copy, email: newserv@uvm.edu.

In hopes of reducing the more than 1,000 suicides that occur each year nationwide in non-psychiatric units in hospitals across the country, The Joint Commission is calling for hospitals to screen all in-patients and every patient treated in the emergency room, seen for an outpatient procedure or who has been admitted to the hospital for their likelihood to commit suicide in the hospital.

In order to deal with the massive mandate, Desjardins, associate professor of psychiatry and medical director of inpatient psychiatry, called on longtime collaborator Willy Cats-Baril, associate professor of business, who develops predictive risk models for the medical community and specializes in health care management, to figure out how to create an effective suicide risk assessment tool. With $20,000 from the Fletcher Allen Foundation, they brought four of the most highly recognized suicidologists in the country to Fletcher Allen and the School of Business Administration on Oct. 8 and 9 to help develop an electronic algorithm designed to simulate the thinking of an experienced psychiatrists in the evaluation of imminent suicide risk.

The algorithm, which will eventually be an electronic questionnaire on a tablet, will allow for the assessment of a large volume of patients in an efficient manner, and provide short-term guidance to clinicians in identifying high-risk patients that require expert attention from psychiatrists.

“When Isabelle told me about the new requirement, I said, ‘Let’s try to replicate what psychiatrists would do,’” says Cats-Baril, who points out that if hospitals were to fulfill the regulatory mandate by hiring more psychiatrists they would require such a large number as to make it financially infeasible. “The panelists commended us for our innovative approach to address a regulatory requirement in a clinically meaningful way and suggested that if we are able to implement our model, we could have a significant national impact on public health.”

Putting the tool into practice

The charge of the panel over the two-day meeting was to create an assessment tool that incorporates suicide risk factors in a weighted manner; is clinically-relevant and informed by suicide risk data; creates uniformity of suicide risk assessment among the medical, surgical and intensive care units, the emergency department and in-patient psychiatric units; is user-friendly and can be efficiently administered by all health professionals. The idea is that the assessment tool will optimize resource utilization by focusing psychiatric expertise where it is most needed and by using the existing electronic medical record infrastructure; and will improve quality assurance by systematically documenting suicide risk of every patient.

Cats-Baril says the panel of experts assembled at UVM brought expertise in each of the key areas necessary to develop an effective and efficient tool. They include Dr. Jan Fawcett, professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, member of the APA Guidelines on Suicide Work Group, and chairperson of the DSM-V Mood Disorders Work Group; Peter D. Mills, adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth, director of the VA National Center for Patient Safety Field Office and member of  the Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert Panel; Dr. Morton Silverman, clinical associate professor at the University of Chicago and senior advisor at the National Suicide Prevention Technical Resource Center; and David A. Jobes, professor of psychology at The Catholic University of America. Dr. Robert Althoff, assistant professor of psychiatry, psychology, and pediatrics at UVM was also a member of the panel.

“From a business perspective, I was thinking in terms of how to meet a regulatory demand with scarce human resources while trying to maintain quality of care and spend the least amount of money,” says Cats-Baril. “I thought we could develop an effective solution by leveraging the expertise of experienced psychiatrists with information technology.”

In practice, the evaluation process would start when a patient arrives at the hospital for registration. After a medical record number is assigned, key demographic and hospitalization information would automatically populate the tool. For example, in the case of a patient coming through the Emergency Room, the triage nurse would ask initial screening questions, and depending on the answers, would assign the patient to a specific room and level of observation. The remaining questions would be administered by emergency medicine research associates, prompting the tool to generate a "risk suicide score" and associated stratification for the patient. This information would then be reviewed by an emergency medicine provider to determine if further psychiatric evaluation is required.

Addressing a growing concern

Since 1995, suicide has ranked among the top five most frequently reported events to The Joint Commission, an organization responsible for accrediting and certifying more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States, and it's the eleventh leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 33,300 fatalities in 2006. Although some suggested actions have been offered by The Joint Commission, like educating staff about the risk factors for suicide, few guidelines for developing an assessment tool were offered. Desjardins anticipates some hospitals addressing the regulation by simply asking patients if they feel suicidal. That won’t suffice when patients come to the hospital with a minor injury and find out they have a much more serious illness like cancer, causing them to fall into a deep depression that could lead to suicidal thoughts, she says.

“We have so many regulatory bodies today that regulations are becoming burdensome and causing low satisfaction for employees and patients,” Desjardins says. “We have a lot of opportunities to just check a box to meet a regulation or we can try to make it clinically relevant and show a positive outcome that makes the work meaningful.”

Cats-Baril hopes to extend the results of the project by conducting a multi-center testing of the tool to measure its usability and usefulness by tracking quality of patient care, time spent, staff satisfaction and resource utilization. Desjardins, Althoff and Maruti and Cats-Baril will seek funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health, which has outlined the importance of the development of clinical risk assessment instruments that encompass multiple domains as one of the areas of strategic research priority.

“The panelists unanimously thought the meeting was a breakthrough, asked us to keep them involved, encouraged us to go for funding at the national level and said that they would support us in that quest. It's exciting," Cats-Baril says.

“Burlington has changed a lot since 1976, but with the help of local agencies and UVM’s early childhood program we’ve been able to adapt to the changing needs of our children and families,” says Danielczyk, director of Trinity Children’s Center (TCC) for more than 25 years. "This is a unique place because we integrate children with special needs with children from refugee families, homeless children, and children of UVM faculty and staff. It's a pretty special place."

The growing diversity of TCC, a non-profit early childhood facility located on UVM’s Trinity Campus, has created an ideal learning lab for students in UVM’s Early Childhood Special Education Program. By the time students graduate they will have interacted with professionals from a wide range of local agenices including Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), Head Start, and the Burlington School District’s Essential Early Education Program. Other local agencies that collaborate with TCC include the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program; Association for Africans Living in Vermont; Visiting Nurses Association; Easter Seals; and the Department of Children and Families/State Services.

The 37-year relationship between Trinity and the Burlington’s Essential Early Education Program, located in the same building, is especially beneficial because it allows students to observe how the school district identifies children with significant developmental challenges and administers family-centered early childhood special education services. TCC has 15 children on individualized education programs (IEPs) who are integrated into a diverse overall student population of 70 children, including at least three children with special needs in each classroom.

Grant to pay tuition of seniors in Early Childhood Special Education Program

Jennifer Hurley, assistant professor of education and program coordinator for the Early Shildhood Special Education Program, recently landed a $1.25 million grant from Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs that will be used to pay for the tuition for seniors in the program who are interning at TCC. Susan Ryan, director of the Center on Disability and Community Inclusion, was also an author on the grant.

“There’s no way we would have gotten this grant without the strong relationship we have with Trinity Children’s Center and the agencies they work with,” says Hurley, adding that TCC earned the rare National Association for the Education of Young Children accreditation and was awarded the highest possible five-star rating by the State of Vermont. “It’s an ideal setting to prepare scholars to work with all of Vermont’s children, including children with disabilities experiencing the additional challenges of being English language learners, and experiencing poverty or homelessness. Many of the teachers at TCC are graduates of the program and come in well prepared.”

In her application, Hurley outlined plans for preparing students to meet the needs of children with disabilities and the shockingly high number of homeless children. “Families with young children are one of the most rapidly increasing groups with homelessness nationwide,” Hurley says. “Nearly one-quarter of all homeless people are under the age of six, so there's a real need for intentional collaboration between agencies that provide services for families experiencing homelessness, including Early Intervention and Early Childhood Special Ed agencies. Scholars in teacher preparation programs must be made aware of the need for research-based methods for serving homeless families and children with disabilities and have pre-service experiences in family shelters.”

Rita Markley, executive director of COTS, the largest organization for the homeless in Vermont, explains in her letter of support for the grant application that the number of Vermont children under the age of five living in emergency shelters and overflow motels has tripled since 2008.

“We have tried to cobble together educational and enrichment programs but have no real expertise in this field,” writes Markley, who is working with Hurley to plan a practicum experience that will benefit UVM students and children with disabilities in area shelters. “There is a dire need in our community for early childhood educators who have appropriate training and preparation to work with families and children who are homeless. We are thrilled to be forming a partnership with the Early Childhood Special Education Program at UVM.”

Paying back loans by helping children in need

Over the last decade the demand for early childhood special education teachers has increased from about 13,000 to more than 27,000, while the number of graduates in such programs remains inadequate to satisfy the needs of the approximately 299,848 infants and toddlers receiving early intervention services, according to the National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center. In an effort to bridge this gap, students receiving free tuition from the grant are required to work as an early childhood special educator for one year for every semester of tuition they receive. Students receiving one year of tuition, for example, could satisfy their service obligation to the federal government by working for two years as an early childhood special educator anywhere in the country.

Students are also required to complete the UVM course “Problems in Education,” which includes 40 hours of research on the Young Children with Special Needs Project. Students must also complete 40 hours of practicum experience at COTS by providing support at one of four family shelters in Burlington on a regular basis to play and engage in activities with young children living in the shelters.

“You can read all about teaching skills like pro-social conflict resolution and emotionally supportive conflict resolution, but until you apply it in the classroom it’s hard to see how it works in practice,” says Kate Evans, a 2012 graduate of the UVM Honors College and one of eight UVM alumni working at TCC. “By working here as an undergraduate I got a good feel for the day-to-day routine of being a teacher. It made the transition to working as a fulltime teacher much easier after graduation. I would have been well prepared for wherever I got a job.”

For information about providing scholarship support for students in the College of Education and Social Services, contact Trish Shabbaz, (802) 656-3910, trish.shabazz@uvm.edu.

Whatever the figurative language, the meaning was clear: with draconian cuts in state funding, rising tuition, the advance of inexpensive online technology, the growing appeal of vocationally oriented education in a down job market, a leaky bucket in the K-12 system, and general public disaffection with higher education, America’s great public research universities, the backbone of the nation’s remarkable progress over the last 150 years, are at risk.

Examining the problems in surgical detail, with the hope that solutions, or at least new frames of reference, would emerge, was the symposium’s goal. The event was the brainchild of former UVM president Daniel Mark Fogel, who edited a book of essays sharing the symposium’s title published this year, the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land Grant Acts, which established the country’s public research universities.

Participating were some of the biggest names in higher education, including James Duderstadt, University of Michigan president emeritus; Jane Wellman, founder of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability; and Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, along with UVM leadership: President Tom Sullivan, Provost Jane Knodell, and Domenico Grasso, vice president for research and dean of the Graduate College, among others.   

The symposium unfolded in six panel discussions and two keynote speeches over three days. 

Rocks and hard places

Much of the discussion was, well, bleak.

Take the Thursday night keynote address, “Between a New Rock and a Bad Hard Place,” by Robert Zemsky, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and chair of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education. The old bad place, Zemsky said, is a governance system that seems to be broken, with relationships between university leadership and governing boards fractured or fraying at university after university. He pointing to a half dozen failed presidencies in the last several years – from Wisconsin to Oregon, with a near miss at Virginia. 

“If this were an aircraft,” he said, “we’d wonder why all the wings are falling off before we land.” 

The new hard place, Zemsky said, is the most “extraordinary shift in the market for post-secondary education in a century" --the advance of online learning technologies that appear to be delivering, in pilot after pilot, better learning outcomes at a fraction of the cost of face-to-face learning. With hobbled leadership, Zemsky despaired that big public universities would be able to muster the will and creativity needed to meet the challenge.

Not everyone agreed that the job of university president has become such an impossible one, or that university presidents are facing insurmountable challenges. “It’s easy to overstate the problem,” said panelist Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. “If you look at other industries under financial pressure, like high tech, their CEOs have short tenures, too. We haven’t suddenly become ungovernable. The situation is complex.” 

UVM President Tom Sullivan gave no truck to the idea that public universities and presidents should slim down their ambitions as budgets shrink and competition from better funded private research universities swells, a prospect proposed as a discussion-starter by moderator Scott Jaschik, co-editor of Inside Higher Ed. 

“If the public is going to support our public institutions, they need to know they’re first rate,” Sullivan said. “We simply need to make a better case than we’ve been making to the public and to donors and alumni. Why? Because higher education is critical for us to confront the big issues today. It’s always been our public research universities that have led the country in big, breakthrough discoveries.”

That isn't to say universities shouldn’t focus investment on their strengths, he added, a theme Provost Knodell took up.

“When I’m out in the community, people ask me how those pillars or posts of excellence are going,” she said, referring to UVM’s Transdisciplinary Research Initiative, or Spires of Excellence, program, which seeks to establish just such focused areas of excellence. “That tells me we’re getting some traction" with the program, she said.  

Tuition rising, but why?

Rising tuition, and its impact on access and public opinion, was a topic that never strayed far from the discussion. But ex-Michigan president Duderstadt sought to clarify the exact nature of those increases: they’ve come about almost entirely due to cuts in state funding, not increases in per-student costs. “Our per-student costs have been at about the cost of living, while the privates have been several times that,” he said. Absent increases due to funding cuts, “…we’re almost as cheap today as we were 30 years ago.”

Wellman, of the Delta Project, didn’t dispute those facts, but said perceptions matter, especially when there’s some truth to them. “There are some very strong positives here,” she said. “But there’s a huge vulnerability in the perception that we’re feathering our own nests and working toward institutional advance, not for families and students.” Higher ed needs to to deal with financial issues like tuition and financial aid, she said, “in a more straightforward way.”

Any higher education symposium that didn’t take into account the rise of the formidable MOOC (for massively open online course) wouldn’t be worth its scholarly salt, and the topic of online learning’s impact on the traditional educational model came up several times.

Arizona State’s Crow announced that his school was “stealing and raiding” every technology platform it could lay its hands on and was having great success with the new tools. The school transitioned a problematic freshman math course with an average enrollment of 20 students, 35 percent of whom failed to master the eight core concepts in the class, for example, to an online version with 120 students. Not only were costs cut in half, Crow said, but the number unable to master the concepts dropped to 12 percent. 

APLU’s McPherson cited other well known examples at Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Tec and said he wouldn’t be surprised if higher ed is on the verge of a major change. “Are we at a tipping point?” he wondered.

To be a physicist

Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, said she wished she were a physicist, rather than an educator, so “people would listen to her” when she talked about problems in the K-12 system, higher ed’s supply chain. The key isn’t flashy programs like No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top. It’s providing resources to establish “crosswalks” between universities, schools and community organizations “that we don’t have now,” she said.

Given the dearth of federal money, Zimpher and SUNY have developed an innovative “collective impact” strategy that creates solutions-oriented alliances with civic and educational partners in local communities.

“What can we do right here, right now in Burlington, Vt.?” she asked by way of example. The program makes use of a university’s expertise, allied with community organizations, to plug the leaky K-12 bucket with best practice pre-natal programs, for instance, or exemplary family and community counseling programs. The program has migrated from New York State to 70 cities across the country. “We can’t fix the problem in the first year of college,” she said.            

In defense of humanities

Given symposium organizer Dan Fogel’s background as an English professor, and the generalized drubbing they’re taking, it was natural the humanities came up for review at the symposium. 

National Endowment for the Humanities chair Jim Leach kicked off the symposium on Wednesday night with keynote lecture titled “Humanities and the Role of Public Universities.” Not only do the humanities offer education a fourth “R,” for reality, Leach said, they tap and expand imagination, foster vital understanding of other cultures, provide perspective, and stimulate the creativity and critical thinking needed to create jobs, not merely fill them, as vocationally oriented curricula are designed to do. “The ability of humanities to enhance the meaning of life is so powerful it obscures the practical benefits,” he said.   

“What it means to be human now is very different from what it meant in the Middle Ages,” UVM’s Grasso added during a discussion later in the symposium.  “Humanities research itself has to evolve. As it does it will become increasingly germane and easier to make the case for.” 

New directions

With challenges coming from so many quarters, it was understandable that much of the discussion focused on framing problems. But now and then, solutions, or a least promising new directions, presented themselves.

Duderstadt saw value in the MOOCs’ ability to collect vast amounts of data on how students learn, which could be applied in other settings. Zemsky saw promise when faculty – the English Department at Stanford, where group work is the norm, for instance – work together in collectives, rather than as independent contractors. And Crow outlined a successful new philanthropic strategy that asks neighboring municipalities to invest, not in Arizona State, but in “solution spaces,” like health or teaching and learning, that Arizona State will address in partnership with the communities.

In the shaky area of governance, Zemsky said, what was most needed were a few wins. “We need a couple of super successes to set the standard,” he said, mentioning SUNY’s Zimpher as building the kind of exemplary relationship with her board and other stakeholders that could serve as a model.

Reflecting on the previous three days’ discussion, Fogel found reason for optimism, while acknowledging the tough choices ahead.

“Looking at the quality of leadership of the enterprise represented by our panelists, I concluded that it isn’t ‘precipice or crossroads,’ it’s some kind of crossroads,” he said. “The institutions are too consequential and the leadership too smart and nimble and determined to let them go over the edge.”

This is Jason Clay’s fundamental challenge to the world. And it’s the reason he thinks small-scale change in our food system won’t solve the problem.

“In Vermont and around the world,” he says, “business as usual and incremental change will not get us where we need to go.”

That’s why he’s a passionate conservationist who works closely with some of the largest corporations in the world — helping them re-imagine the ways they produce and purchase food.

“This increase in production is so dramatic,” Clay says, “that if we don’t find the right places and ways to grow food, the earth will be unrecognizable.”

Jason Clay will deliver the 2012 Aiken Lecture, “Feeding 9 Billion, Maintaining the Planet,” at the University of Vermont’s Ira Allen Chapel at 5 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 18.

The event is free and open to the public.

Seeking global standards

Jason Clay works for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as the senior vice president for market transformation.

As one of the world’s leading experts on certification in the food system, Clay created one of the first ecolabels and helped develop standards for more than a dozen commodities, from soy to shrimp, that reduce the impacts of production.

“Right now, the single largest impact of humans on the planet is food and fiber production,” Clay says. “If we continue to expand production into natural habitat, there will be very little natural habitat left by 2050.”

His lecture will focus on understanding the most important of these impacts — as well as myths about food production. There are “key trends in population, income, consumption, urbanization and trade,” he says — worrisome trends — “that should give us pause.”

Clay’s goal is to create global standards for producing and using raw materials, particularly in terms of carbon and water. He has convened industry roundtables of retailers, buyers, producers and environmentalists to reduce the key impacts of growing many products including soy, cotton, sugarcane, salmon, mollusks, catfish and tilapia.

"We now have 10 to 25 percent of global production and buyers sitting at the table for each commodity," he says.

These gatherings and his visionary ideas are changing the way corporations — as well as governments, foundations, researchers, and NGOs — address risks and opportunities.

"There is no silver bullet that will allow us to freeze the footprint of food,” Clay says. “Every use of resources has impacts, but we must define which impacts are acceptable.”

Rainforest Crunch

Clay’s favorite flavor of ice cream is Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch, which he helped create — with sustainably harvested ingredients— after meeting Ben Cohen at a fundraiser featuring the Grateful Dead.

“The issue is not what to think, but how to think,” Clay says.

Clay ran a family farm, taught at Harvard and Yale, worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and spent more than 25 years working with human rights and environmental organizations before joining WWF in 1999.

Clay studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, and received his doctorate. in anthropology from Cornell University. He founded the award-winning journal Cultural Survival Quarterly and is the author of more than 300 articles and many books including World Agriculture and the Environment.

In addition to his WWF role, Clay is the first-ever Food and Sustainability Fellow of the National Geographic Society.

Clay was honored with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award this year.

UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources will host Jason Clay’s visit to Vermont.

“No one has all the answers,” Clay says “but together we can solve this problem and leave our children a living planet."

Rumblings of environmental interest were stirring on the UVM campus as well.

In 1972, UVM's Environmental Program was born, and that fall the program's first director, Carl Reidel, laid out the UVM interdisciplinary environmental vision at convocation: “What is required is a new synthesis of scholarship built firmly on the strengths of disciplinary analysis… This will mean tearing down some artificial barriers between disciplines, departments, and colleges; between students, professors, and administrators… It will mean new ways of teaching that recognize experience and involvement in community action as powerful teachers of synthesis and wholeness.”

The program was not created within any one academic unit, but was instead declared by then-president Ed Andrews to be "university-wide" --  a key feature distinguishing UVM from all other U.S. environmental programs. Among UVM’s early peers were University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Oregon, and Middlebury, Williams, Dartmouth, Brown.

Seven students strong in 1973, the program has since grown into one of the largest in the country with close to 500 students majoring in environmental studies. This year, the Environmental Program celebrates its 40th anniversary, making it also among the oldest programs in the U.S. Events are planned in celebration of the occasion during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend, Oct. 5-7.
"Throughout the last four decades, the mission of the Environmental Program has remained remarkably consistent," says Stephanie Kaza, program director. In part, she credits the directors who have come before her:  Reidel and his successor Ian Worley oversaw the program for a combined 35 years.

That interdisciplinary character remains a foundation of the program, with recent faculty partnerships added in plant and soil sciences, history, ecological economics and political ecology. With a round of new faculty appointments in the early 2000s, the program's existing expertise in Vermont and national environmental issues was complemented by international connections in Pakistan, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Australia, Ukraine, and the Philippines.
Among other concepts central to the mission of the Environmental Program over the years are a dedication to "high-impact learning" and "creative teaching."

One endeavor, dating back to the early days of the program, embodies both of those values. In 1974, Reidel and Tom Hudspeth, then-assistant director, proposed that UVM take the lead on protecting valuable ecological study sites for future research and education. The board of trustees established a system of natural areas to be “preserved to the greatest extent possible in their natural state, and for educational and scientific purposes insofar as such uses are compatible with the preservation of their natural character.” The trustees charged the Environmental Program with bringing these nine reserves together under a single program: Centennial Woods adjacent to campus; East Woods, Redstone Quarry, and Colchester Bog in the Burlington area; Shelburne Pond and Pease Mountain to the south; Molly’s Bog and Concord Woods farther afield; and the Mount Mansfield alpine zone. The natural areas have since served as powerful tools for teaching and research in the program.

In the 90s, Hudspeth developed the first environmental studies travel study courses to gain access to third world perspectives, and college curriculum committees approved a number of popular courses including ENVS 197 "Students Teaching Students." During this time, Professor Jean Richardson received a major Kellogg Foundation grant to distribute seed grants to build resilience in Vermont’s rural communities.

Concurrent with the growth of the Environmental Program has been a growth in environmental culture at UVM. In 1997, a major in environmental science was created. In 2002, the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics took up residence at UVM. In 2006, students flocked to the new GreenHouse, a 400-bed residential community featuring the theme of sustainable living.  A student Eco-Reps program was launched and the new Office of Sustainability established.  In 2008 spirits were hopeful, and dozens of students joined up to send the largest campus delegation to Power Shift in Washington, D.C.

All of this activity, it can be argued, is rooted in the creation of the Environmental Program 40 years ago, which first harnessed faculty and student desires to be a catalyst for change in the stewardship of the environment.

"The story of the program is the story of the people who have made it what it is."  Kaza says. "We have strong confidence in the human capacity to meet the concerns at hand. This spirit will be crucial across the next forty years as we take up the daunting environmental challenges facing our global community."

Faculty, alumni and students will share their stories at the 40th anniversary gathering this weekend. See the full schedule on the Environmental Program website.