Pillar 1 — Forge Bold Futures: Student Connection, Purpose, and Impact

What we mean: We create an educational environment where students learn deeply, belong, contribute, and develop the tools to navigate life beyond UVM—grounded in reflection, mentorship, a sense of history and place, and substantive experiences.

Strategies

• Provide an Intellectually Challenging Environment: Educate students broadly and develop their skills in advanced critical thinking, analysis, and problem-solving, preparing them to bridge foundational knowledge with real-world applications and to succeed in their goals for future education and employment.
• Prepare Students to Navigate Life Beyond UVM: Provide opportunities for students to find purpose and meaning through which they read the world, weigh tensions, and act with intention in their lives and in their work during their time at UVM and well beyond graduation.
• Expand Opportunities for Experiential Learning: Engage every student in rich, hands-on learning occurring through opportunities such as internships, community-engaged learning, research, clinical practice, independent projects, co-op experiences, and international study that help them develop skills, build networks, and forge a meaningful career path.
• Connect Alumni and Students: Engage alumni as mentors, project hosts, and door openers in partnership with the UVM Foundation and the Career Center—inspiring current students to serve as the alumni of tomorrow.
• Foster UVM Community, Pride, Belonging, and Connection: Create an environment where students learn, build community, make lifelong friends, engage with the natural world, and grow.
• Prioritize Well-being: Integrate mental, physical, social, and spiritual well-being into the student experience, ensuring students have the capacity to fully participate and learn while building lifelong skills in resilience and balance.
• Ensure Accessible Student Success: Advance a human-centered support model that provides clear and comprehensive guidance across the intersecting zones of academic success, health and well-being, involvement and belonging, and career preparation.

Note: Unless otherwise noted, the word “student” is used in this document to refer to all learners, including undergraduate, graduate, medical, professional education students, and online and community-based learners throughout Vermont. In some cases, we also refer to individuals who are not yet students but aspire to be or are learners we hope to recruit.

Pillar 2 – Study What Matters: Values-Driven Learning, Research, and Practice

What we mean: UVM inspires learners driven by curiosity and integrity to be innovative in addressing impactful problems and serious questions in Vermont and broader global contexts. UVM community members are empowered to explore areas of personal significance and meaning and embrace a lifelong pursuit of knowledge. We reward the bold and impactful ideas of our faculty and students and encourage their efforts toward a healthier, more sustainable world.

Strategies

• Make a Lasting Commitment to Research Excellence: As an R1 institution, we will continue to grow our research enterprise, strengthen our research infrastructure, and elevate our status among the nation’s premier research universities.
• Prioritize an Enduring Pursuit of Liberal Arts: Produce and enhance knowledge that drives curiosity and innovation, making UVM nationally recognized as a time-honored leader in democracy, sustainability, ethics, and health, and a trailblazer in emerging and urgent fields of inquiry.
• Create Collaborative Solutions to Contemporary and Complex Challenges: Generate solutions that benefit from diverse perspectives and move beyond traditional disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Promote inter- and intra-disciplinary partnerships in our academic, creative, and research pursuits.
• Transform Practice and Policy through Discovery and Innovation: Develop infrastructure that shortens the arc from research and creative scholarship to use in relevant fields. Engage in teaching and research that ensures our books will be read, our art appreciated, our technologies commercialized, and our practices and policies implemented throughout the region, the nation, and the world.
• Accelerate the Innovative Impact of Emergent Technology: Boldly innovate responsible uses of new technologies in ways that expand our ability to do our most important work. With a focus on ethics, equity, the environment, and disciplinary standards, critically and openly examine artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to guide their use, understand their limits, and unlock their potential.

Pillar 3 — Create Opportunity: Access, Engagement, and Partnerships 

What we mean: As Vermont’s flagship and land-grant research university, UVM broadens access and strengthens engagement and partners with communities and organizations in Vermont and beyond. We embrace and support learners from everywhere to become lifelong members of the UVM community and contributors to Vermont’s well-being and common good.

Strategies

• Broaden Access: Open doors and build pathways for learners of all backgrounds and cultures (e.g., new, traditional, working, veteran, international, and returning learners) with flexible curricula and modalities, including robust online options.
• Expand Our Partnership Network (Local and Global): Extend collaborations with external partners—creating innovative projects that advance and convey knowledge, stimulate new insights, ensure the health of our society, contribute to workforce development in Vermont, and impact the world.
• Amplify Belonging, Dialogue, and Civic Life: Build a university culture of belonging and a sense of community in which everyone matters, providing opportunities for all to listen across difference through civic discourse and intercultural dialogue. Integrate these practices in support of recruitment, retention, and engagement within and beyond campus.
• Improve Affordability and Access to Resources: Expand institutional, community, and state capacity to meet students’ financial and social needs through the provision of affordable tuition and creative and collaborative solutions that result in increased access to on- and off-campus resources related to food, housing, emergency aid, and health.
• Celebrate Athletic, Creative, and Intellectual Excellence at UVM: Support broad community participation in the arts, athletics, academic lectures, professional conferences, and other outward-facing activities, leveraging UVM’s strengths to unite students, the Vermont community, supporters, and alumni around the world.
• Share UVM’s Story: Communicate our stories with authenticity, rooted in faculty, staff, student, alumni, and partner voices. Invite engagement and partnership to add new perspectives and enrich our history.

Pillar 4 — Enable Excellence: Campus Community, Systems, and Infrastructure

What we mean: To achieve our shared goals, we will invest in and renew UVM’s infrastructure: our physical spaces, technological systems, and organizational processes. With the same goals, we will fully support the university's most crucial asset: its people. We will approach our work with a mindset of stewardship, collaboration, transparency, and sustainability. We will modernize the practices and processes that support and govern our work, renew our spaces, and cultivate a collaborative and innovative culture where every member of our community is supported to thrive and optimize their UVM experience.

Strategies

• Champion Our Campus Community: Recognize the excellence of faculty, staff, and students through opportunities for learning, personal and professional growth, and well-being. Strengthen collaboration, shared governance, respect, and a sense of belonging and mattering across the university. Practice a culture of openness, which welcomes change and new ways of working, sharing, and recognizing improvements and successes.
• Invest in Modern Systems and Processes: Implement systems and processes that facilitate collaboration, access to information, and task completion. Ensure processes, information, and resources are accessible, efficient, and clear for all who engage with our platforms: students, staff, faculty, families, alumni, and visitors.
• Enhance UVM’s Digital Experience and Data Stewardship: Create a streamlined and user-centered experience across the university. Ensure that our data and information systems are robust, secure, open, and responsibly governed and managed. Protect privacy and dignity while enabling insight, innovation, and collaboration. Implement transformative technologies to advance our work, develop our knowledge, and empower our community.
• Prioritize Sustainable and Accessible Spaces: Commit resources to the renewal and maintenance of existing facilities, ensuring that our physical spaces are sustainable, accessible, inclusive, and designed for well-being, community, and a safer environment. Align capital investments with campus planning initiatives and our commitment to environmental responsibility.
• Engage in Responsive Resource Planning and Allocation: Invest strategically and transparently in people, technology, and spaces that advance UVM’s mission. Optimize and align resources for the long-term sustainability and evolving needs of our community.