It was like a fieldtrip on the first day of class.
Fourteen new UVM faculty members bumped along northwestern Vermont’s back roads in a CATS shuttle bus on Tuesday, getting to know their new home state, various ways it connects with their new university, and finding common scholarly ground and sparking friendships with fellow faculty across disciplines. The brainchild of Doug Lantagne, dean of UVM Extension, this tour of Vermont’s working landscape, dubbed “A Day of Diversification,” hit the road for its eighth annual outing this week.
The day’s ramble traveled from the Vermont Maple Outlet in Jeffersonville to River Berry Farm in Fairfax, the revitalized business district and town square of St. Albans to the orchard/agri-tourism of South Hero’s Allenholm Farm, owned by Pam and Ray Allen, a UVM grad and multi-generation Vermonter. Like any well-planned field trip, the faculty learned something — the art and science of maple sugaring, the challenges and rewards of converting to an organic dairy operation, energy efficient innovations for heating greenhouses, the myriad details for establishing a new factory facility for bottling tomato sauces (at Bove’s in Milton), or the nuance of a classic Vermont accent, courtesy of farmer Jack Brigham at Holyoke Farm in St. Albans. Also essential to any field trip, the day delivered on the fun factor — the impossible cuteness of Jersey calves to the killer crust Ray Allen kneads for his apple pies to the singular experience of feeding Willie the Allenholm Donkey a peppermint candy lips to lips. (OK. Maybe you had to be there.)
A son of Newport, Vermont, and a Class of 1977 UVM grad, Lantagne’s motivations for helping introduce new faculty to the state are several. With the pride of place of a native, he wants them to immediately grasp that there is, indeed, a Vermont beyond the borders of Chittenden County. Recalling the scant orientation when he first joined the UVM faculty, Lantagne simply saw a need and found inspiration in a similar tour at Penn State University. The dean is well-practiced in the ways of a tour director. Standing at the front, hanging on a hand strap as the bus rolls along, he quizzes the new faculty about land grant university history, talks food systems initiatives at UVM, or spins out the story behind that family Christmas tree farm we just passed along Route 15 near Underhill.
But for the most part, Lantagne wants the new faculty on the tour to be talking to one another. A look around the bus as we head for lunch in St. Albans finds an animal scientist in conversation with an economist, a rehab and movement science professor talking with a business professor, a political scientist in discussion with a pair of mathematicians. Throughout the day, the gregarious group pairs up to talk academic shop or just share about their very recent relocations to Vermont.
End of the day, as the bus heads south on Route 89 back to Burlington, Srinivas Venugopal, assistant professor in the Grossman School of Business, says that he has enjoyed meeting the farmers and the up-close look at their operations. “We’ve all been talking about how we can apply our own skills to some of the issues that we’ve seen today,” he says. And, like many of his fellow faculty on the bus, he adds that he’s eager to return to places like Allenholm Farm with his own family. There’s a donkey they need to meet.
New faculty on the “Day of Diversification” road trip included: Yang Bai, rehabilitation and movement science; Emily Beam, economics; Lisa Dion, computer science; Taylor Dupuy, mathematics and statistics; Andrea Fine, Global Gateways; Jay Garvey, education; Nancy Gauvin, communication sciences; Peter Henne, political science; Suzanne Lowensohn, business; Hamid Ossareh, engineering; Catherine Miller, education; David Townson, animal sciences; Srinivas Venugopal, business; Christelle Vincent, mathematics and statistics. Jim Vigoreaux, associate provost for faculty affairs, also joined the tour.