Former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas will discuss his new book The Vermont Way at the University of Vermont at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 3 in John Dewey Lounge, Old Mill. UVM President Tom Sullivan will introduce Governor Douglas, who will sign books after his talk. The event is cosponsored by the Center for Research on Vermont and the UVM Department of Political Science.

Douglas has served the state of Vermont for more than four decades. He was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1972, the same year he graduated from Middlebury College. He was re-elected three times, rising to majority leader in his third term. He was elected Vermont’s secretary of state in 1980, a position he held for 12 years, and, in 1994, he became state treasurer and was re-elected three times. In 2002, he was elected the 80th governor of Vermont and was re-elected in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Douglas currently serves as a Marsh Professor-at-Large at UVM and an executive in residence at Middlebury College.

The Vermont Way is a memoir tracing Douglas’s political career from his election to the Vermont House at the age of 21 to meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The book focuses on the people that Douglas came to know during his four terms as governor and major policy decisions. Well-known for his bi-partisan politics and transformative health care reform, Douglas also emphasizes the importance of compromise in his book.