Daniel Mark Fogel served as the 25th President of the University of Vermont from July 2002 until July 31, 2011. He continues to hold a tenured appointment as Professor of English. Just seven months after Fogel's arrival on campus, his administration marked a major milestone with the release and public discussion of the president’s 10-year vision for the University. The invest-and-grow strategy detailed in the vision called for increases in undergraduate and graduate enrollments, significant new facilities, and expansion of the research enterprise among the initiatives to strengthen the academic and financial foundations of the University.

After creating a strategic financial plan to undergird the University’s heightened level of aspiration, the Fogel administration, Board of Trustees, and UVM community put the vision into action. In 2009, six years into implementation of the plan, the University declared an end to the period of planned, aggressive enrollment growth, announcing a shift from invest-and-grow to a new focus-and-excel strategy, amid signs of transformation and progress throughout the University. Increasing undergraduate enrollment, a key component of the initial invest-and-grow, produced more than 22,000 applicants for undergraduate admission in 2009 and 2010, yielding classes of record academic quality and diversity. In the fall of 2009, 11.9% of entering undergraduate were American students of color, nearly four times the percentages that prevailed a decade ago.

The new University-wide Honors College, key to attracting the nation’s very best students to UVM, graduated its third full cohort in May of 2010. The Honors College is housed in the newly constructed 800-bed University Heights Residential Learning Complex, a facility that has received LEED Gold Certification. So has the new Dudley H. Davis Student Center, the nation’s first student union to be certified at the Gold level by the U.S. Green Building Council. In 2007, UVM successfully completed The Campaign for the University of Vermont, coming in $28 million above the $250 million goal, which was focused on funding for student scholarships and endowed faculty positions. The University has increased its grant and contract awards dramatically over the course of the Fogel era, has created new interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and boasts a Medical College that is among the nation’s finest in physician education. A Transdisciplinary Initiative to identify areas of teaching, research, and service spanning the entire University in which UVM could vie for world-class distinction led in the spring of 2010 to the designation of Spires of Excellence in three areas: Neuroscience, Behavior, and Health; Complex Systems; and Food Systems.

President Fogel’s years at the University of Vermont have also been marked by a reaffirmation of UVM’s connection to the state and the Burlington community. On January 1, 2008, a Burlington Free Press editorial named Fogel the “Vermonter of the Year” for his leadership in promoting reconciliation of the sometimes conflicting agendas of environmental preservation and economic development by positioning Vermont as a center of green technologies and sustainable enterprise. “Under Fogel, UVM has moved to bridge the gap between the energy of the grassroots global warming movement and the resources to make change happen,” according to the Free Press: “That's the kind of collaboration that gets things done, yet has been happening too rarely lately in Vermont.” In 2009, he received the Richard A. Snelling Economic Development Award from the Association of Building Contractors.

Beyond Vermont, Fogel has been a key voice on higher education issues over the past six years. He has been interviewed for media outlets such as National Public Radio and the PBS NewsHour and has published commentaries in publications that include the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and Presidency Magazine. In 2009 he served as the President of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. He is currently Chair of the Board of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (A-P-L-U), formerly NASULGC, for which he also has served as Chair of the Council of Presidents and as Chair of the National Task Force on Core Learning Outcomes for the joint effort of A-P-L-U and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to create a Voluntary System of Accountability.

Before coming to the University of Vermont, Fogel was executive vice chancellor and provost at Louisiana State University, where he spent twenty-six years, rising steadily through the academic and administrative ranks. At LSU, Fogel led an extensive strategic planning effort that entailed identification of priority programs and allocations to those programs of some $20 million between 1999 and 2001. He also spearheaded diversity initiatives that have led to LSU’s leading the nation in production of African-American Ph.D.s in chemistry and in English language and literature.

Fogel has had an active career as a scholar and teacher in English and American literature and in creative writing (poetry). The founding editor of the Henry James Review, he has produced four authored and three edited books, has published dozens of articles and reviews, and is an authority on Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. He earned a B.A. degree magna cum laude in English in 1969, an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1974, and a Ph.D. in English in 1976, all from Cornell University. Since joining the UVM faculty, President Fogel has continued to teach.

Daniel Mark Fogel is married to the painter Rachel Kahn (as a couple, they are the Kahn-Fogels). They have two children: Nicholas Alden Kahn-Fogel, an attorney and legal educator, and Rosemary Kahn-Fogel Luttrell, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia.