Dear students, faculty, and staff,
The University of Vermont is a community that champions and lives by Our Common Ground values. Achieving our mission of education, research, and engagement requires us to foster together a campus community free of behaviors that inhibit anyone from fully participating in all aspects of the university experience. I want to take this opportunity to restate our shared position that UVM unequivocally condemns, and will not tolerate, any form of discrimination or harassment on our campus.
Among my highest priorities is ensuring that we, as a community, fully and forcefully address issues of discrimination and harassment through the continual review and improvement of our protocols and the effectiveness with which we communicate our high standards to students, faculty, and staff.
Today, I am writing to share important steps in our ongoing efforts to update and improve our campus procedures for addressing biased behavior and discrimination. The changes are rooted in my goal that together we are responsive, transparent, and dedicated to ensuring a safe and inclusive environment for everyone at UVM.
Beginning this summer, we are implementing:
- A new, web-based unified reporting portal that will make reporting concerns of bias, harassment, discrimination, and sexual assault easier and empower those impacted by biased behaviors to come forward quickly and be heard with respect, support, and an understanding of the harm they experienced.
- More personalized and timely case handling guided by each impacted person’s preferences for resolving their specific concern.
- Expanding protections in our policies to include specifically shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics, including antisemitism.
- A new Bias Education and Resource Team to identify trends in reported behaviors that do not align with Our Common Ground values and provide responsive educational interventions within the university community that follow best practices on other college campuses.
Although many of these efforts are built on years of work to raise awareness and eliminate hateful, disrespectful behavior, I recognize that our work must be consistent and sustained. These improvements described above align with our resolution agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ investigation into reports of incidents of antisemitism on UVM’s campus. And while the OCR investigation led to no findings, our collaborative engagement revealed that we can do better and find more effective ways to empower and support members of our Jewish community and all others who experience unlawful bias or discrimination based on their identity. We are presenting these changes to OCR in the same spirit of reflection and openness that informed our work with them throughout the process leading to our resolution agreement.
I welcome the opportunity to continue our cooperative engagement with governance leaders and their constituents—faculty, staff, and students—around these important topics.
My fellow leaders and I remain steadfast in our commitment to ensuring that our campus remains safe, caring, and inclusive for all. I ask you to join me in this collaborative effort to lean into Our Common Ground values.
Sincerely,
Suresh Garimella
President