Recently retired as president and CEO of the Windham Foundation, John Bramley was this close to leisurely mornings with coffee and the New York Times. But when asked to step in following President Daniel Mark Fogel’s departure while the university completes its search for a new president, Bramley, who has a long history with UVM, obliged, again filling his calendar from morning into the night.

Bramley has served as department chair of Animal Sciences, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and provost and senior vice president of the university. In 2006 he also served as acting president during Fogel’s illness. 

The return of Bramley’s engaging British accent and friendly approach feels like a good fit for all sides. “I love this institution,” he says. “I love the people in it, and I love the values that it has and what it does. It transforms people’s lives so I guess my overall analysis was, I can spend some time helping at a time it needs some support.” He promises to be an active interim, but after July 2012, well… “I jokingly say – it’s only partly joking – I can wait a few more months before I grow my hair, put my earring on and ride my motorcycle.”

For the next stage of Bramley’s “retirement” we can only wait and see. Until then, UVM Today had an in-depth conversation with the man who will lead the university in the coming year.

UVM Today: What do you hope to accomplish as interim president?

John Bramley: I’ve got a set of five big goals that I want to share community-wide. The first of those is to dedicate a significant part of my time, to offer my experience, my reputation within the institution, to really work on morale and esprit de corp. I think the institution has felt itself a little battered in that respect – I’m not going to get into the whys and wherefores, I want to move ahead. There are things that have diminished trust, frankly, and have made people feel less important or less valued, and that’s something we have to reverse. The problem is you can lose trust very quickly, you don’t gain it as quickly, so we need to be open and consistent and straightforward in all of our activities. The board, with the help of myself, (Provost Knodell) and others are looking at issues that will create attention around the executive compensation piece. We need to have open, clear policies and expectations just as we do in other areas. So those sorts of things help. It will take time but that’s one of my big goals.

A second one is to be more proactive talking both within and beyond the institution about who we are. Let me give you one simple example. People say, “I can’t afford to go to the University of Vermont, it’s too expensive.” You hear that all the time. Now the reality is that our in-state tuition and fees are round and about $14,000 – it’s a lot of money, but you know what the average cost per student in our K-12 system in the state of Vermont is? Slightly higher. The reality is we pay for it, it comes out of our property taxes or whatever but nobody says little Johnny’s in school, here’s your $14,000 bill. So that context gets lost. And of course the other context that gets lost is the fact that (with financial aid) about a third of all Vermonters actually pay no tuition or fees at this institution. If you work out an average, I would say the cost for a Vermonter attending UVM is probably below that of any of the state colleges’ tuition and fees. So I think we have to talk about some of those things, get that information into the hands of our employees, our alums, and when the conversation takes place at the village store or wherever it comes up, you say well I don’t think that’s quite right, here’s the reality. It’s not just how often the president says it, it’s that the community understands and talks about those things. The same thing when we think about our relationship with the state. We’re the University of Vermont – people need to know that in our Hurricane Irene relief efforts UVM extension folks are working flat out trying to help farmers, that we’ve offered the state space, that we helped run the state college computer system for days when it was down, that we’ve got students volunteering… it’s all about communication so we have to do that better.  

The third piece is the strategic initiatives project (SIP). If you look at the institution I think we’re in better shape now than we’ve been in any point in my twenty-plus years in the institution. I think I’m in a fairly good position to judge that. We have made great progress in terms of academic programs and strength and students and research. We have great faculty, we have great staff, we have really excellent students. We have become more diverse. We’ve done a whole bunch of things that I think have really been transformative. And we need to build on those. The bit that worries me is not a UVM challenge, it’s a national challenge.

I don’t think that we’re going to see much money flowing from the federal government in the next ten years. If federal budgets get cut, then the state will suffer. It will have to prioritize very carefully and there will be consequences for organizations like us. Our students, most of them, come from Vermont, the northeast, mid-Atlantic to some extent – all of those areas have demographics going the wrong way, there are less high school graduates. So there will be more competition. We can’t resolve the challenges just by increasing tuition because families are in economic stress, they can’t respond to that. And we can’t grow the undergraduate population – we’ve done that piece. So you put all that together and what that says is, through no fault of our own, if we want to invest, if we want to make sure we pay competitive salaries, if we want to maintain benefits and do all of the other stuff that we have to do, then we’re going to have to make real choices about where we spend our money and how it relates to what we really value. We’re going to have to work smarter. We’re going to have to make sure that we are as efficient as we can be, and we’re going to have to increase revenue opportunities. We can’t do anything else.

Our goal is to have this as a community-based discussion. We’ve tried to do some of these things in the past top-down, and I don’t think it will work very well. I think we’ve got to engage the whole community to find a commonality of purpose and ideas and determination that will help us as an institution say these are the things that we ought to be investing in, and these things are not of no value but they may be of lower priority than the things we need to invest in. We do that with our budgets at home. We do that with every aspect of our lives, why would we ever conceive we don’t have to do it here? But you have to have a real sense of who you are and who you want to be.

The other two goals are simple. I think I have a big responsibility to try and raise money for the institution and make the transition to the development foundation work.

Finally, when a new president is identified, I think my role is to work with her or him to make the transition as seamless as I can.

What do you hope to accomplish in terms of moving SIP forward during your tenure?

We can get a long way by having a good, open community debate, and we will probably have some sets of goals and recommendations in place by the time I leave. But I think in many ways that will be a template my successor could use to get to the next level because it’s going to be a multi-year process. There will be some low-hanging fruit, some pretty obvious things that we ought to think about. But you’ll have a process in place that’s a way of looking at how you spend money, metrics for how you prioritize things. It becomes a more informed, constructive way of making decisions as you go ahead, year by year. I think it starts with me, but it’s going to go on.

You worked closely with Ed Colodny when he was interim president. Did you learn things from him that serve you now?

I learned a great deal from Ed Colodny. I hadn’t met him before he was appointed interim president but when I think of the people that I have worked with over the years he probably had more influence on me than any other. In a number of ways, almost a fatherly bit – he may not thank me for that, but it probably was true. When he came here he had run a major airline, he was very accomplished, and yet, here was somebody who had such an ability with people. I used to joke that we’d go up to Waterman Manor to have lunch everyday and it took about 40 minutes to get there and 40 minutes to get back because Ed would talk to everybody on the way – a student, custodian, professor, he didn’t care; he was interested in people, and he was wise. He loved Vermont, he liked people, he had good business sense, good instincts. Some of those things you’ve either got or you haven’t, but I’ve tried to get better at them. I’m trying to bring some of those elements that I learned from him, in that first piece particularly. Colodny had an ability to make people feel respected and valued, and I think that’s important.

Lastly, you’ve been passionate about a new vision for the 21^st century land grant. Is that something that you’re thinking about now in your aspiration for UVM?

A little bit. It’s something that I wrote about a while ago. Justin Morrill’s Land Grant College Act was passed in 1862, and it’s always intrigued me because the nation was in the middle of the civil war when this passed, and it was really in some sense the first civil rights act that was ever written. That’s not how most people think of it perhaps. And I say that because when you think of it what did it do at that point? Higher education was the preserve of very few, essentially landed gentry. Even after Morrill’s act, it was still a preserve of males but that changed, and it was the preserve of whites but that also changed with time. Morrill, and the land grant act at some level, said education is not just the privilege of the few, it’s the right of the many, and so it became about access. It was also about curriculum because in those early days it was essentially religion and classics and a bit of philosophy. The act talked about a curriculum that was relevant to the needs of the community and its economic development. And so it meant agriculture and the mechanical arts. If you were writing it today it would be different. What he was saying was we need to educate more of our population, and we need to give them the tools that will make them successful and will make the society thrive and develop. So if you ask me what it means today, we need to educate people in what’s relevant to the needs of our society. But those are constantly changing. That’s why you have to include, in an educational system that teaches people to be molecular biologists or whatever it might be, a broad understanding of language, of literature, of numeracy and so on. That’s why we need to have general education requirements that do those things. I was trained as a microbiologist. Well how much microbiology do you think I do these days? Not very much. I spend my time engaging and talking to people and trying to listen and understand and then persuade. That’s what I do. It’s a different set of skills.