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The Green
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eyes—that’s why it looks so freaky.”
— Sonia DeYoung G’17
Curatorial associate for the University of Vermont Natural History Museum Having fascinated generations of students, this catamount has been part of UVM’s natural history collections since at least 1898. Art history and museum studies major Sabi Ward ’24 and professional conservator Lisa Goldberg take it out of a cabinet in Marsh Life Science to be x-rayed and cleaned—part of a major restoration of UVM’s historic taxidermy collection. See page 8.
At 14 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 24 feet long, David Stromeyer’s “Tango” comes from Cold Hollow Sculpture Park to campus as the university’s latest addition of public art. Settled on the green outside UVM’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Complex, “This is a place to stop and ponder the intersection of art, nature, and science,” President Suresh Garimella said at the ribbon-cutting and dedication ceremony to former President Thomas Sullivan this summer.
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FOURTH FREEZE
The UVM Board of Trustees approved President Garimella’s proposal to freeze tuition for a fourth consecutive year, cumulatively saving in-state four-year graduates of the Class of 2023 $4,500 and $8,900 for out-of-state students. Also approved: frozen room and board charges for a third consecutive year and undergraduate comprehensive fees, and a $250 reduction of graduate comprehensive fees.
366 DAYS LATER
Work on Larner College of Medicine’s new state-of-the-art biomedical research center may have unceremoniously begun on September 29, 2020, but there’s always been a watchful eye on it. A timelapse video catches the seasons change over a growing Firestone Medical Research Building. See page 7.
BEST EVER
A special thirtieth edition of the Princeton Review identifies UVM among the nation’s top 387 colleges, naming it to two of their twenty-six “Great Lists”—Most Loved Colleges and Great College City—comprised of institutions with historically impressive appearances on the annual rankings over time. RESEARCH ON THE RISE
University of Vermont faculty attracted $227 million in total extramural support for research over the last fiscal year—a new all-time high in UVM’s history, helping build a healthy world and sustainable future. The total number of awards faculty received rose significantly, from 680 the year prior to 906.
TANGO TOWERS ON CAMPUS
| THE GREEN
Back-to-Back Commencements
Bring us back to fall traditions
CAMPUS LIFE | An unprecedented thirteen different commencement ceremonies were held on campus between May and August to celebrate students of not just one, but two UVM classes that graduated in the face of a pandemic. COVID-19 precautions spread the Class of 2021’s commencement out across eleven different ceremonies, while another two welcomed back graduates of the Class of 2020 to return and to cross the stage.
“Our emphasis is on celebrating our students,” said UVM President Suresh Garimella to the Class of 2021. “They have been through a trying fourteen months and met the challenge with flying colors. We are very proud of each and every one of them and salute their accomplishment.”
In total, 3,347 degrees were conferred upon graduates of the Class of 2021— including 2,685 bachelors, 435 masters, 117 doctoral, and 110 medical degrees— who hail from 41 states and 131 foreign countries. An estimated 800 alumni from the Class of 2020 returned to campus mid-August to take part in the pomp and circumstance alongside their classmates and families at two commencement ceremonies that signaled a sense of closure.
“This virus has taken everything from us. I am just so proud that the administration and the alumni house came through and gave the Class of 2020 what they deserve,” said Riri Nyria Stuart Thompson ’20 of Philadelphia in an interview with WCAX-TV.
Back to Fall Traditions
And just days later—after a not-so-typical year—the happily chaotic stream of students and families, lines of cars, and clusters of bins and boxes strewn across campus were a sight for sore eyes on what’s known as Move-in Day for the incoming class.
The newest Catamounts that make up the Class of 2025 are the most academically talented and the largest class in UVM’s history. Increased interest in UVM, coupled with a strong yield rate (the percentage of admitted students who choose to enroll), helps account for the growth. Total undergraduate applications increased by 38 percent this year compared to last year, making these 2,932 first-time, first-year undergraduate students also among the most selective admits in more than thirty years.
For Honors College student and London native Jamie Dixon, an early arrival for International Student Orientation offered him the chance to get acquainted with campus before the rest of his classmates descended for Move-in Day. “Last night we went to get creemees by the lake which was really nice—the name was a weird one, but I really liked it.”
On the eve of the first day classes, UVM’s newest Catamounts convened on the Andrew Harris Commons for a special Convocation ceremony alongside the Class of 2024. Led by President Suresh Garimella, the ceremony (above) welcomed students to the UVM community and officially ushered in a new academic year while the Green twinkled with the candlelight of thousands of eager students for the first time since 2019.
top 5%
Retention rate among public institutions in the US
25.5K+
Undergraduate applications received this year
93%
Of grads between 2017-19 employed or continuing their education six months after graduating
Fast Forward for Firestone Research
A groundbreaking like no other for UVM’s latest biomedical facility
MEDICINE | The pandemic put most large Vermont construction projects in a sudden deep-freeze in the spring and summer of 2020 and, for a brief period of time, it seemed the university’s plans for the new Firestone Medical Research Building would also be delayed. But the value of biomedical research, paired with the vast pool of local construction talent suddenly idled, made finding a path forward for the project more imperative than ever.
Which is why, with many activities at UVM originating remotely in the fall of 2020, one corner of the campus on the southern end of the medical complex came alive with in-person activity, as South Burlington-based PC Construction began digging Firestone’s foundations and erecting its steel frame. The outdoor nature of the first phase of construction fit well with pandemic precautions, and gave a muchneeded lift to the local construction trades at a time when such jobs were scarce. All told, over 90 percent of the work on the Firestone building will be performed by Vermonters.
The building will be equipped with approximately 150 laboratory bench stations, with the capacity to house 225 personnel, in addition to the numerous graduate and undergraduate students who will participate in research and learning in its labs. Besides “wet” benches, Firestone will contain a significant amount of “dry lab” space for analysis and bioinformatic research. The ground floor of the four-story structure will house the UVM Center for Biomedical Shared Resources, a core facility that supports researchers from across UVM and other state institutions and businesses. That center is supported by a $5.47 million National Institutes of Health grant.
The Firestone building is named in honor of the parents of the lead philanthropic donor to the project, Steve Firestone, MD, a graduate of the Larner College of Medicine Class of 1969. Dr. Firestone’s gift is part of the $10.7 million already pledged toward the $20 million fundraising goal for the building, whose total cost is estimated at $45 million in total.
On September 30, nearly one year to the day since the first bulldozer rolled into place, the UVM community came together—masked— adjacent to the construction site in Larner’s Hoehl Gallery, to hold an out-of-sequence ceremonial groundbreaking. Participants witnessed the ritual of shiny shovels turning over earth, and heard UVM leaders and faculty celebrate the opportunity for research growth that the already half-finished structure will provide. The Larner College of Medicine garnered over $99 million of UVM’s record-breaking $227 million in total extramural research funding for fiscal year 2021.
“In one fell swoop you have helped us satisfy our strategic imperatives,” said President Garimella while addressing Dr. Firestone directly during the event.
“This beautiful building has taken shape,” added Larner Dean Richard L. Page, MD, “And, thanks to biomedical research leading to vaccines, we are able celebrate this construction—finally—here together.”
The Firestone Medical Research Building is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2022 and fully occupied in early 2023.
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Timeless Taxidermy Collection Breathes in New Life
Under a portable x-ray machine, a stuffed nineteenthcentury catamount reveals a complete skull and the hidden wires and wood that hold the specimen together. LIFE SCIENCES | Sophie Feldman ’22 gently reaches out with a soft brush and dabs the tail feathers of a magnificent duck. It sits perfectly still. In fact, it’s been sitting still for decades, collecting dust in the lobby of Benedict Auditorium alongside other remarkable, but neglected, taxidermy creatures and birds that extend back to at least the 1850s. The specimens include an extinct passenger pigeon, a poached Canadian polar bear seized at US Customs in the 1970s, and a mountain lion held by UVM since the nineteenth century—all getting dusted off. “This is a king eider,” Feldman says. “We’re working our way through this entire cabinet, cleaning all these birds.” Feldman spent much of the summer vacuuming feathers, reglueing feet, and examining mounts under an x-ray machine—to restore this display and other parts of the UVM Natural History Museum’s collection.
The project is a labor of love co-led by UVM staffer and alumna of UVM’s Field Naturalist Program Sonia DeYoung ’17, who admires the collection. In collaboration with UVM faculty, she successfully applied for a restoration grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Under the careful hands of conservator Lisa Goldberg and Shelburne Museum expert Nancie Ravenel, the pieces have been examined, catalogued, cleaned, and fixed.
“This is a complex and important collection,” says Feldman, who is aiming for a career in museums. “We’d like it to be around for hundreds of years to come.”
In an era of unstable ecosystems and declining biodiversity, there is a growing recognition that natural history collections provide an irreplaceable record of the past that helps scientists better understand the present.
A few days later, Goldberg climbs into one of the glass cabinets and picks up the collection’s slightly bedraggled-looking mountain lion. It’s carefully eased under a portable x-ray machine, operated by UVM cardiology research technician Steve Bell, for a look inside.
This catamount has been an object of fascination for generations of students. “Those eyes are actually owl eyes—that’s why it looks so freaky,” explains DeYoung. It’s also historically and scientifically important. Records show it was part of UVM’s collections at Torrey Hall before 1898.
“This is an extinct animal,” Lisa Goldberg says, referring to the 2018 declaration extirpating the mountain lion (or catamount) from the northeastern US. When asked what she finds most gratifying about doing taxidermy restoration, she pauses a moment. “Bringing things back to life,” she says.
University of Vermont welcomed its new Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Amer Ahmed to campus this summer. With an EdD in Adult and Higher Education from the University of South Dakota, he brings nearly 20 years of experience developing strategies and support for diverse constituencies at institutions including Dickinson College; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and University of Michigan.
3 QUESTIONS
families. If we don’t do that, if we don’t give them those tools, then we give them every reason in the world to choose not to be here. It’s not about just talking, it’s about doing and I think that opportunity is here, which is why I’m excited to be here.
This work isn’t for the faint of heart—how did you get into this field? What keeps you going?
Amer F. Ahmed
vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion
AMER: I grew up in Ohio with Muslim parents who were immigrants from India. I went to a public high school where most people didn’t go to college, in an environment that was either white or black, and I was neither. I studied abroad in South Africa on a campus in Durban, which has the largest Indian population outside of India, during the Truth and Reconciliation process when Nelson Mandela was president. I suddenly had a racial place between this dynamic of white and black where people had grown up in complete racial segregation. They didn’t know how to socialize with one another, didn’t know how to talk to one another, didn’t know how to interact. It was incredibly foreign to them, and I was there with three other Americans—two were black and one was white—and we would walk around together looking like a diversity advertisement for the new South Africa. That shaped me, inspired me, and motivated me as I continued with cultural anthropology and Black studies and became an administrator. Advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in institutions was kind of my method, my outlet, to connect more broadly with students while working to show them ways we can learn and understand one another, how that can shape us, influence us, and impact and define what we do with our lives— What excites you about the work to be done at UVM? What because I was one of those students. tangible changes are you looking forward to seeing on campus?
Use the camera on your phone or tablet to read a longer version of this interview.
AMER: For as many challenges as I see, I also see progress. I was from a generation of apathy where most people around me didn’t care about social issues, didn’t care about what was going on in other parts of the world, didn’t care about people’s experiences that were very different from their own. With this generation, generally they do care, and that creates a completely different opportunity for the change we can make in the world. I think higher education is a unique vehicle for us to be able to do that and, at the University of Vermont, there are opportunities for us to cultivate students and alumni to enact it. We have a lot of good intentions, we have a lot of things we’d like to do, and I don’t think we have fully harnessed what we have.
One of the things that we’re going to do is create a cultural resource guide for prospective and current faculty, staff, and students to know what’s here in this community and what’s available to them. Most people don’t expect an entire community to be oriented around them, but they do look for the things they need to make it work for themselves and for their Word on campus is that you’re also pretty talented with spoken word poetry and hip-hop. Is that true?
AMER: I first started writing when I was in South Africa where I was just experiencing so much, processing so much, and I had no other outlet. There was, in my generation, a climate of people who were starting to express themselves in those ways. I was shaped and influenced by the time, when suddenly this slam poetry scene was emerging. Part of what I started to think about was how do I support voices but also, practically, how do we translate these messages into action? As I engaged the hip-hop activist community, I heard a lot of people with great messages but they weren’t always walking the walk in what they were doing, or it wasn’t translating into anything concrete or opportunities for people who were doing that work to make concrete change. It was through the hip-hop activist movement that I started speaking to my generation about creating change. Once I started working on these campuses, what could be more effective than using hip-hop in getting students engaged or active?
| THE GREEN
Assistant Professor Terry Bradshaw leads representatives visiting from USDA/ARS on a tour of 10 | UVM MAGAZINE the University of Vermont’s Horticulture Research and Education Center in South Burlington.
Together under one roof on campus, UVM researchers and USDA scientists will explore state agriculture
FOOD SYSTEMS | This fall, leaders from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) toured the new home of the Food Systems Research Center at the University of Vermont. In collaboration with UVM, the center will bring together UVM researchers and USDA Agricultural Research Services (ARS) scientists to explore all facets of Vermont’s food systems—from production agriculture to food security—with a focus on small- and medium-sized farms, all under one roof.
This is the first and only ARS research unit designed specifically to study diversified food systems and small farms’ contributions to those systems, says Leslie Parise, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
“We are proud to be leading this work at UVM and believe there is much the rest of the world can learn from the successful small and medium sized farms that characterize Vermont agriculture,” Parise said.
The tour follows a June announcement from US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and UVM leaders that $11 million of federal funding would support the Food Systems Research Center, established in 2019 with help from Leahy. “We’ve always relied on our local food systems in our state. Farms are an economic driver for our rural communities and local food is a defining feature of Vermont. We must continue to cultivate our food systems so our state can thrive and weather future emergencies. We must also ensure that it is equitable and accessible to all,” Leahy said at the time.
“I am excited to see that this important collaboration continues to take shape,” said UVM President Suresh Garimella. “This partnership with ARS builds on UVM’s emphasis on sustainability, health and environment, and it illustrates the positive and lasting impact that research and collaboration can have on our society. Having dedicated space on our central campus to promote that collaboration is an important element.”
The UVM/ARS Food Systems Research Center will be located in the Joseph L. Hills Agricultural Science Building, following a transformative 18-month renovation project beginning January 2022.
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A Reimagined Fleming Museum
The morning of September 21, Honors College students in professor Abigail McGowan’s sophomore seminar “Visualizing History: India” were among the first to fill the Fleming’s hallways once again upon its reopening. ART | Staff at the Fleming Museum greeted guests and visitors to its collection this fall for the first time in months, signaling a return to normalcy following a global lockdown. But for the Fleming, it was also an opportunity to show how the institution is reimagining itself in light of events over the past eighteen months, including the death of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We’ve used the time to present work, most of it already in the museum’s collection, in ways that we hope will create conversations about important issues,” said Assistant Director Chris Dissinger.
The result: “The Fleming Reimagined: Confronting Institutional Racism and Historical Oppression,” on view until December 10.
Today, Dissinger says, many art and history museums are in the process of squarely facing their colonial pasts. “What’s commonplace is that a lot of museums will host an exhibition of a BIPOC artist. We felt like we could do that, but it would only be a temporary and superficial response.” Now, the first-floor East Gallery’s “Learning Studio” introduces visitors to works of BIPOC artists, labeled with commentary by museum staff or artists themselves that lean into gut reactions. It also includes seldom-seen works from the museum’s collection, as well as space for visitors to engage in conversation about the work.
In the European and American gallery, guests may notice a missing portrait by Thomas Hudson. Dissinger points to the original label extolling its subject, Anne Isted, as a self-made woman in the mid-1700s wealthy enough to have her portrait
The Family, 1975 (detail)
Romare Bearden (American, 1911–1988) Color etching and aquatint on paper, 20 x 26 ‘‘ © 2021 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
painted. “What the label didn’t point out was that her fortune came from enslavement,” he said.
“Absence” represents a historical reckoning for the museum, featuring new labels that occupy the empty spaces where problematic portraits once hung. Eventually, paintings by a wider diversity of artists will replace them.
In the Wolcott Gallery, “The Storytelling Salon” shares staff reflections on their year of learning, accompanied by fresh works from BIPOC artists and a ring of comfortable chairs that invite open discussion.
“Building trust by acknowledging those past failures, and making space for true collaboration with new voices, is the first building block to a reimagined Fleming Museum,” he said. BUSINESS | If the Grossman School of Business were a publicly traded company, right now would be a great time to add some of its stock to your portfolio. There has been a sharp uptick in national and international recognition for the school in recent years as it has continued to enhance and expand academic programs, thanks in no small part to philanthropic investment.
Since 2013, the Grossman Family Foundation, founded by alumnus Steven Grossman ’61, has contributed $25 million to the UVM school that now bears the Grossman name. The commitments include two matching gift challenges totaling $15 million to support endowed funds at the Grossman School and the construction of Ifshin Hall, a 30,000-square-foot expansion to the school that opened in 2018. More than 350 donors stepped forward, committing $18.8 million to complete the most recent challenge ahead of the June 30, 2021 deadline.
Donors supported a range of key areas, including the Ifshin Hall project (below), four endowed faculty positions, twenty-seven endowed scholarship funds for undergraduate and graduate students, and academic programs and student services endowments.
Philanthropic investment has enabled the Grossman School to put an emphasis on experiential learning opportunities like internships, networking events, case competitions, business pitch competitions, industry panels, speaker series, and study abroad. Perhaps most importantly, donor support has affected students’ bottom line, helping to make the Grossman School a viable option for more families and allowing students to graduate with less debt.
“I have always said that I have a soft spot in my heart for UVM, for the education I received at the business school,” said Steven Grossman. “And now I am witnessing its ascent, with the extraordinary support of fellow alumni and friends, toward the upper echelons of world-class business programs. I look forward to seeing the school reach new heights year after year.”
The Grossman School is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a mark of excellence attained by only 5 percent of business programs worldwide. Princeton Review has repeatedly ranked the school among the top 50 business schools for graduate entrepreneurship studies and a top “green MBA” program in the US.
Grossman Challenge Moves the Needle with $18.8 Million in Support for Business Students
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In a warming world, more rain will hit Vermont. And that means bigger landslides. Undergrad Grant Long ’22 and Professor Keith Klepeis are part of a team hunting for hazards.
Use the camera on your phone or tablet to watch a video with Professor Keith Klepeis.
Slip Slide Hillside
At a Waterbury landslide, scientists build knowledge to better predict the next big one
ENVIRONMENT | One day at the end of May, in 2019, in the Mount Mansfield State Forest outside of Waterbury, twelve acres of hillside gave way and fell into Cotton Brook. This landslide, three hundred feet high, wiped out the Foster Trail, and dumped tons of silt into the brook. In turn, the silt washed down into Waterbury Reservoir, clogging it with a large muddy delta. Two years later, on a grey August morning, UVM geologist Keith Klepeis stands at the bottom of the still-raw slope amidst a vertiginous web of destroyed trees, bent and snapped into piles like gigantic splinters.
“Landslides happen all the time. But this is a big slip,” he says, probably the largest in Vermont in forty years. And, Klepeis’s research shows, they’re becoming more common and more powerful as the climate changes. “We’re seeing more rainfall and bigger storms,” he says. “We want to know more about how this kind of slide happens; it’s not well understood.” This collapse caught people by surprise and it was only by luck that no hikers went down with the trees.
He’s there with a team including Grant Long ’22, one his undergraduate students; Vermont state geologist Jonathan Kim; Julia Boyles of the Vermont Geological Survey; Norwich University researcher George Springston; three drone pilots from the state’s Agency of Transportation; and Julie Moore, Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources. They’d all like to know how likely it is that this slide will slide again—and where else in the state to watch out for rocks, or whole hillsides, that might tumble. To help, the scientists, with funding from FEMA, are studying the complex layers, and forces at work— and developing maps and models of how this landslide happened. “We want to measure the exact geometry here, which points toward the mechanisms. And that will help land managers understand the risks. Then we go onto the next place,” Klepeis says, building toward a comprehensive understanding across the state. “What aspects of this event are transferable?” wonders Klepeis, a professor for twenty-one years in UVM’s geology department, soon to join the newly proposed Department of Geography and Geosciences. He and his colleagues know that part of what happened here was a bit like the top of a tipped-over layer cake sliding on icing underneath. Fourteen thousand years ago, around the time the vast Laurentide ice sheet melted northward, this site was under water, near the shores of Glacial Lake Winooski. It left behind fine-grained lake-bottom silt and clay. On this 28-degree forested slope, this layer under the topsoil creates what the geologists call a “vulnerable slide surface.”
“It might have happened in seconds,” says Klepeis, “you wouldn’t haven’t wanted to be here when it came thundering down.” Which is why he and the rest of the researchers have, cautiously, come back here, collaborating with the State of Vermont, to build the knowledge and advanced tools needed to better predict where the earth will move and when to get out of the way.
A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom
ALA Edition, 2021 Co-Edited by Trina Haji
Have you ever wondered how or why a particular book made its way to the stacks at your local library? It turns out, the American Library Association has worked for decades to safeguard free and equal access to information for all via its Intellectual Freedom Manual. Supplemental to the manual’s new tenth edition, co-edited by Howe Library Professor Trina Haji, “A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom”—also co-edited by Haji—explores the rich history of the fight against censorship and protection of the right to read by libraries as far back as World War I. It covers topics including library advocacy on social and political issues, the complicated past of libraries’ history with race and discrimination, and the new frontier of digital information.
Arcadia, The History Press, 2021 By Glenn Fay ’76, G’98
Born in a time of political instability, Ebenezer Allen matured during the tipping point of the American Revolution. Unlike his better-known cousins Ethan or Ira, Ebenezer was a skilled commando and combat veteran, a leader who personified patriotism. Historian and Vermont native Glenn Fay ’76 G’98 recounts how Colonel Allen went on to become the forefather and elected legislator of two towns, and one of the most prominent men in Vermont in his latest Vermont’s Ebenezer Allen: Patriot, Commando and Emancipator.
How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land
Princeton University Press, 2021 By M. D. Usher ’92
Whether you farm or garden, live in the country or long to move there, or simply enjoy an occasional rural retreat, M. D. Usher ’92, Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and faculty of the geography department, offers a delightful cornucopia of writings about living and working on the land, harvested from the fertile fields of ancient Greek and Roman literature. An inspiring antidote to the digital age, How to Be a Farmer evokes the beauty and bounty of nature with a rich mixture of philosophy, practical advice, history, and humor. Together, these timeless reflections on what the Greeks called boukolika and the Romans res rusticae provide an entertaining and enlightening guide to a more meaningful and sustainable way of life.
| BOOKS + MEDIA
Thirty-seven
Guernica Editions, 2021 By Joy Cohen G’03
In her debut fiction novel, award-winning playwright and non-fiction author Joy Cohen G’03 revisits a seemingly underrated year and uncovers events and developments that made it a quite interesting time. The book follows a small-town reporter ready for a change as she “sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason—coincidence? fate?—all occurred in 1937.”
“Think Cloud Atlas meets Eat Pray Love,” the publisher says. From the Green Mountains to the remote islands of Papua New Guinea, 37 comprises nine short stories “written” by the main character, all based in historically accurate events, true and inspired, from around the world in 1937.
But why the year 1937? “That’s when Amelia Earhart disappeared. That’s when the Golden Gate Bridge was started in San Francisco. It was the year of the first Tibetan soccer team—there are just so many random, but amazing stories that happened in 1937,” Cohen says.
