Dear UVM community,
Just two months ago, at our 227th Commencement ceremony, we were fortunate to benefit from the wisdom of one of the nation’s most celebrated scientists, the Honorable Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation.
Convinced that no student remembers the speech delivered at their college graduation, Panch provided a mnemonic that gave all in attendance a fighting chance to recall his advice.
V-E-R-M-O-N-T, he enthusiastically exclaimed, captures everything to remember about your time on this campus and provides sound advice for the future.
“V” for the victory each graduate can rightfully claim for rising to face and overcome the challenges on their life’s journey thus far.
“E” for the excellence that permeates the UVM experience.
“R” for the research—big and small—that fed their curiosity and taught the importance of asking the right questions.
“M” for the countless moments they have seized to grow and create great outcomes.
“O” for overcoming obstacles that are really opportunities in disguise.
“N” for the present and future power of the UVM network they have started and will build further as alumni.
And, finally, “T” for transformation—of themselves and of the communities they will join throughout life.
Beyond Panch’s lively style that earned a standing ovation from the thousands of students and families assembled, these concepts apply to everyone who is part of the UVM community and to our collective success.
Feeding the lifelong appetite for achievement that Panch champions has paid great dividends to our university, and I want to share some remarkable examples from our students, faculty, and staff over the past academic year.
Student Success
We continue to attract ever more academically prepared and diverse students across all levels of study. Again reaching nearly 30,000 applications as we did last year, the undergraduate applicant pool netted record academic achievement and diversity of all types for our incoming class: people of color, first-generation college students, and international students.
We will also welcome 8% more Vermonters to our undergraduate Class of 2027 compared to last year. We expect to continue this trend with new aid programs such as the UVM Promise, announced last fall providing full tuition scholarships to students from Vermont households with income under $60,000.
We are firmly committed to making the high-quality UVM education financially accessible for more Vermonters. Our upcoming fifth year of frozen tuition and fees adds to this effort for every one of our students and their families. Improving overall institutional success in the face of flat revenue has been a challenge for everyone, but we have demonstrated what is possible when all are aligned in our mission of accessibility.
A 35% increase in international graduate students this year (on top of last year’s increase of 22%) signals strength in our global reputation, while nearly a quarter of our entering medical students this fall come from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. And about one in three new medical students hails from right here in Vermont, reinforcing our reputation for preparing primary care physicians in high demand in our region, alongside future specialists.
This year, three UVM students won Fulbright awards, bringing our total to 22 over the past four years. Such accolades are not surprising considering that seven faculty members won Fulbright awards, earning UVM the distinction of being a “top producer” of Fulbrights, beautifully announced in a letter from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Our faculty tied Harvard and Michigan this year, a point I enjoy slipping into conversations.)
It was yet another victorious year for UVM Athletics with six varsity teams winning conference titles or competing in NCAA championships, including men’s soccer, women’s and men’s basketball, skiing, men’s lacrosse, and women’s track and field. And our student-athletes distinguished themselves once again, winning the America East Conference’s Academic Cup for the first time since 2011. The Academic Cup recognizes the institution with the highest GPA among student athletes in the conference, a distinction we’ve achieved a record nine times. Go Catamounts!
Research Excellence
In my installation speech nearly four years ago, I highlighted the extraordinary opportunity before UVM to invest more in our distinctive areas of research strength, largely connected to the environment and human health. While these two broad categories do not fully encompass all the excellence among our faculty scholars, they capture a significant amount of a rapidly growing research portfolio.
In many ways, the seeds planted carefully over the past four years have not only sprouted but grown robustly in 2022-23. We continue to set records in external research support: over a quarter billion for a second year. More than 45 awards exceeded $1 million last year, representing a diverse set of disciplines and funding sources.
We celebrated the opening of the spectacular new Firestone Medical Research Building last fall, including collaborative lab spaces and shared resources for researchers across the university. In the past year, UVM launched three new centers and institutes: the Osher Center for Integrative Health, the Institute for Rural Partnerships, and the Institute for Agroecology.
Each of these exciting new research and engagement efforts brings evidence-based research to bear on challenges facing our own region and far beyond. Each centers its work on the unique attributes and solutions that will achieve success in a rural state like ours. From non-pharmaceutical pain management therapies to small business incubation and support, UVM is simultaneously making new discoveries and delivering the fruits of those discoveries to the people in our region, in real time. As a bonus, many of the solutions are adaptable for other rural settings here in the US and overseas.
One extraordinary award illustrates the power of UVM’s capabilities. Northeast Sustainable Agriculture, Research, and Education (SARE), hosted at UVM, won $100 million from USDA over ten years to serve as the coordinating body for regional efforts in this extremely important and cross-disciplinary realm. UVM is leading SARE programs from northern New England to the Mid-Atlantic at institutions like Penn State, Rutgers, and Cornell, universities with whom we increasingly find ourselves engaged and compared.
A second noteworthy grant among many possible examples supports the Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), an enormous data analysis project that harnesses high performance computing to categorize and index qualitative online content all over the world. The NSF grant of $20 million includes specific support to increase computing resources for the social sciences at UVM and other institutions in the state.
Last December, three faculty members—Mary Cushman, Jane Lian, and Janet Stein—were recognized in the first-ever worldwide ranking of female scholars, based on total citations of their work. The project examined the influence of more than 166,000 scholars and identified the top 1,000. Cushman, Lian, and Stein, all based in the Larner College of Medicine and members of the Vermont Cancer Center, achieved top 500 national and worldwide rankings.
Our research activities were bolstered last year by the tireless efforts of UVM’s good friends, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy and his wife, Marcelle. In addition to nearly $19 million in USDA support for the Institute for Rural Partnerships, Sen. Leahy was instrumental in securing funding for the just-delivered UVM research vessel on Lake Champlain, appropriately named The Marcelle.
Although the precise amount of funding Senator Leahy has shepherded in our direction over his 48 years of service in the US Senate is practically incalculable, we can enthusiastically celebrate a specific new appropriation of $30 million to endow programs for academic excellence across the university and specifically in our honors college, including several grant, research, and fellowship support programs based there. This transformative federal appropriation will help us attract and support the best and brightest students and ensure that Vermonters have access to a world-class academic experience.
In honor of his decades-long commitment to Vermont and to UVM, in May the Board of Trustees approved my request to name the Patrick Leahy Honors College for the senator.
Senator Leahy has also accepted our invitation to serve as our first President’s Distinguished Fellow, maintaining a presence on our campus and enriching our UVM community with his participation in many initiatives.
We will continue to celebrate the senator’s remarkable legacy into the coming academic year.
Engagement with Vermont and Our Region
One of our principal roles as the state’s land grant university is to support the people, organizations, communities, and businesses of Vermont. I am proud to report that we have done so in the past year in more ways than ever before.
This summer’s catastrophic flooding provides a powerful, albeit unwelcome, example of UVM’s important partnership role as the state’s flagship university. The loss of life, property damage and destruction were historic when two months’ worth of rain fell over two days. Almost immediately, UVM Spatial Analysis Lab (SAL) drones were airborne surveying damage and helping emergency officials with prioritizing specific rescue and recovery missions.
In the immediate aftermath of the flood, hundreds of UVM students, faculty, and staff volunteered throughout the state to help with clean-up. UVM Extension, connected to the communities in all 14 counties continues to provide hands-on assistance and ongoing guidance for agricultural recovery ranging from major crops to ornamental gardens.
Fortunately, emergencies such as the Flood of 2023 have been rare. The vast majority of our positive impact on the state is longer-term. For example, each year more than 1000 of our graduates stay to live and work in Vermont, resulting in a total contribution to the state’s workforce of more than 4400 over the last four years. This growing number illustrates our role as the largest talent magnet in the state. The skills and experience of these UVM graduates are critical to our state’s workforce and overall economic vitality as larger numbers than ever before age out of Vermont’s workforce.
Earlier this summer, UVM hosted an inaugural summit for the region focused on research, innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship—or RISE. The RISE Summit attracted over 900 participants from businesses across Vermont and the region, from community development, social services and arts organizations, from federal, state, and local government, and from our own student body, faculty, and staff.
The opportunities RISE provided to connect across multiple sectors, discuss current research, explore regional challenges, and envision solutions were unmatched by any other event in recent memory.
Convening such gatherings, centered on UVM’s role as the largest innovation and scholarly entity in the region, enriches all of us and strengthens connections throughout the state. With the first RISE Summit attracting 900, we are planning for an even larger event in 2024.
UVM’s professional and continuing education (PACE) programs continued a second year of partnership with the state for Upskill Vermont. With state funding, PACE offers courses to Vermont residents at no cost to them, especially courses that promote career growth or meet critical needs in our workforce. Upskill Vermont participants came from all 14 counties and 137 companies. Our third year of the program launches this week.
Another partnership made possible by the state is the new Green Mountain Job and Retention Program. In collaboration with the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC), UVM’s Office of Engagement facilitates debt-relief grants of up to $5,000 for recent graduates of Vermont institutions who choose to live and work in our state. Thanks to the efforts of our friends in Montpelier, the program is also funded for the coming year.
The Office of Engagement has grown rapidly into a critical resource for the state, connecting Vermont businesses and entrepreneurs with UVM, providing student interns to organizations across the state, and supporting economic development organizations with data and analytics to help them achieve their missions. Together with UVM Extension and numerous outreach programs across the colleges and schools, our institution is setting the standard for state-wide engagement, and I am gratified by the response of our partners.
Looking to the Future
We advanced two important and interconnected initiatives for UVM’s future this year, an updated Campus Plan for land use and facilities development, and our first Comprehensive Sustainability Plan, pledging to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. Overlapping in many ways, the two plans reinforce our community’s values, particularly around innovation and sustainability.
Our Campus Plan looks ahead at the coming decade to establish parameters for the effective and best use of available built environments and open spaces on campus, with strong emphasis on sustainably restoring and updating existing structures as a priority. The Comprehensive Sustainability Plan complements its ambitious decarbonization program with targeted enhancements across the university’s operations, programs, and research related to increasing sustainability.
Countless students, faculty, and staff participated in the input and review processes for these two far-reaching plans, ensuring they are thorough, responsible, and well-suited to the university community’s needs and values. I am grateful for the time everyone invested in addressing these important topics.
Simultaneously, the faculty and academic leadership envisioned and created two new schools within the College of Arts and Sciences. CAS’s School of the Arts opened this past fall, creating a new center of gravity for performing, visual, and media arts. Early feedback is resoundingly positive, and we are confident the robust community of artists and performers in the school will be attractive to generations of highly creative undergraduate and graduate students.
This fall, we are launching the new School of World Languages and Cultures in the college, adding to the many global engagement elements within the UVM experience and concentrating resources in ways that will serve more students seeking a global academic experience.
Even as we celebrate our many successes, it is important to note the headwinds we face.
Persistently low inventory of housing in the Greater Burlington area is challenging, causing high rents and high home prices for students, faculty, staff, and members of the community.
The university has addressed this issue head-on by building new housing for graduate students, faculty, and staff. We were excited to break ground on Catamount Run in March which will provide the first phase of new apartments for occupancy in summer 2024, and complete the project in 2025, creating accommodations for over 600. We are working closely with municipal leaders to identify pathways to providing more housing.
Demographics in our region—and particularly in Vermont—continue to show declines in the number of high school graduates for many years into the future. We make every effort to ensure that UVM is the school of choice for our talented Vermont students. Meanwhile, we are also extending our student recruitment efforts far beyond the northeast and will extend them further in the coming years to maintain and continue the upward trend in academic quality and diversity of our incoming classes.
To attract cohorts of students who benefit one another with the broadest possible range of perspectives and experiences, we are also taking steps to recruit more international students at the undergraduate and graduate level, with some early signs of success.
As I have said elsewhere, our community is better because of the diversity of perspectives and experiences represented within it. Our commitment to inclusive excellence continues unabated, and we have taken important steps to stand together when hate, bias and discrimination give rise to behavior that is contrary to the values of Our Common Ground. We learned much this year, and as a community we will lean in with a spirit of continual improvement to ensure UVM is the safe and inclusive environment our mission and our values demand.
One persistent headwind in recent years is the increasing divisiveness in national discourse, including on most college campuses. I am heartened with the environment of our campus in terms of students’ profound desire to make the world of tomorrow better than today. One reminder of their aspirations is my weekly interaction with a dozen undergraduates in the seminar I teach with Leahy Honors College Dean David Jenemann. The experience has become one of my treasured “perks” at UVM .
The goal of these Presidential Leadership Conversations (PLC) is to equip future leaders with an understanding of the power of evidence-based civil discourse, especially when opinions and backgrounds are very different. Our students’ openness to alternative points of view and cheerful readiness to challenge and learn from one another has David and me looking forward to convening our third group next spring.
Our work together is invaluable – and it is never finished
Our university is gaining ground in many of the important measures public research institutions track: quantity and quality of applicants, diversity of the student body, increasing retention and graduation rates, growth in research support across the disciplines, increased state and federal support, philanthropic investment, and rapidly increasing engagement and impact within our region.
For all these accomplishments, I am proud of our community. I am thankful to my partners on the university’s leadership team and the Board of Trustees. I am impressed by the diverse talents and dedication of our faculty and staff. And I could not be more pleased with our students’ intellectual curiosity and drive to make our world a better place, now and in the future. I remain grateful for the support our university receives from our alumni, donors, and community partners, year after year.
And I believe there is something even greater within UVM’s grasp, within all of our grasp.
In my installation remarks, I referred to Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Where the Mind Is Without Fear.” In this marvelous creative work—one that has influenced me from a very young age—Tagore refers to a place “…where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.”
Is “perfection” within our grasp? History tells us, probably not. Only hubris would lead us to believe we have reached perfection.
I believe it is your striving that has delivered us to this place of enviable accomplishments.
It is your striving that calls each of us to be better teachers, scholars, students, professionals, and citizens. Perhaps it is the inner voice that challenges us to strive that is the nearest human version of perfection.
Perhaps our “perfection” is in realizing that we can always do better. I can always do better. UVM can always do better. Our work is never finished.
As I reflect with great pride on the accomplishments of the last year, I imagine there were many who didn’t think it possible to keep tuition frozen for five years while also increasing student success. Some may not have thought it possible to double UVM’s external research support in a short four years while increasing the diversity of disciplines conducting important scholarly and creative exploration.
Some may have dismissed the possibility of increasing applications, academic quality, and diversity while our region’s demographics pointed in the opposite direction.
Some may not have thought we could take important, great strides forward during a global pandemic.
Yet, you accomplished all these things. You were able because your “tireless striving stretched its arms towards perfection.” Your inner voice said there was something more within your grasp.
For your tireless efforts, I thank you on behalf of the people of Vermont and all of us who want to see UVM reach even greater heights in the years to come.
Imagine—for just a moment—where we can go next.
Thank you for all you do to help UVM thrive.
Sincerely,
Suresh Garimella
President
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