After the Floods
Water will continue to shape—and reshape—Vermont communities. Sometimes it will come in a deluge, pummeling agricultural fields and swamping downtowns. Sometimes water will be scarce. There will be seasons that feel abnormally normal. This is life in a rapidly changing climate.
Statewide flooding in Vermont in July 2023 caused upwards of $600 million in damages, the bulk of which...
Correcting Corrections
On a blustery morning in November, Kathy Fox steers her car through snow squalls to the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vt. She and her co-pilot, Abigail Crocker, wear matching green t-shirts with the words “University of Vermont Justice Research Initiative” across the front. They wear them every time they visit the 370-bed prison.
Changing the Conversation
A few years ago, a promising student confided to David Jenemann, dean of the Patrick Leahy Honors College, that she was thinking about transferring. She wanted to have big conversations with her peers, and she wasn’t sure she could find this at the University of Vermont.
“We were going to lose a really good student,” says Jenemann.
The Virtues of Dirty Work
Mark Usher, the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, stands in ankle-deep mud wielding a flame-thrower. He turns the blazing propane toward the ground and burns a hole through a black sheet of plastic that stretches across a pasture on his farm in Shoreham, Vt. Then he stomps on the hole to smother the smoke and picks up a square-ended spade.