Dear UVM community,
The 2023-24 academic year was especially extraordinary. As I reflect on the past five years as president of this great institution, I note with pride that we are gaining velocity in the many ways that we achieve our strategic imperatives: ensuring student success, investing in distinctive research excellence, and engaging with the state of Vermont and beyond. Thanks to the talents, passion, and energies of the people of UVM, the foundation that we have carefully built over these five years is showing its impact and its resilience, even when we are faced with uncertain times.
One uncertainty that cast a shadow around the world—including on our campus—is the escalation of hostilities in the Middle East beginning last fall and continuing even now. On campus, passionate concerns were expressed through peaceful demonstrations and vigils. Even when our community members’ points of view were at odds, a sense of mutual respect prevailed. Unlike many other institutions across the nation, UVM emerged in May from several weeks of protests with no serious disruptions, injuries, or arrests. I attribute our relative success largely to our community’s adherence to the university’s Our Common Ground values: Respect, Integrity, Innovation, Openness, Justice, and Responsibility.
By the end of the spring semester, there was a joyous air culminating in a spectacular Commencement weekend. We were joined by more family and friends than at any celebration in recent memory. Not only was the weather perfect, but the mood of the graduates and their guests was ebullient, perhaps because most were unable to fully celebrate their high school graduation due to pandemic restrictions. At the university’s 223rd Commencement, I challenged graduates to continue their commitment to “people and planet” as they set forth in their professional and civic lives. It is perhaps more important than ever for a commitment to a healthier, greener tomorrow to guide all of us.
“For people and planet” is the core identity we have recently chosen as best representing UVM. Yet, there is nothing new about our deep commitment to people and planet, a legacy that is closely associated with our university and the work performed by our students, faculty, and staff.
I’m grateful for all that our students, faculty, and staff do for the benefit of people and planet and for our success in advancing our strategic imperatives. Following are some highlights from the past year.
Student Success
Alternate Instruction Day is the official descriptor of April 8, 2024—the day the UVM campus and greater Burlington area experienced a total solar eclipse. Thanks to the efforts of faculty and staff of the Vermont Space Grant Consortium and organizations throughout campus, students experienced the rarity of eclipse totality with UVM and guest lecturers speaking on topics such as “Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Eclipses,” “Enabling Technologies for Deep Space University CubeSats,” and “Today’s Solar Eclipse and the Secrets Eclipses Tell about New Worlds on our Cosmic Horizon.” We enjoyed an eclipse scavenger hunt, art exhibitions, and music performances. By 2:14 pm, when the eclipse began, all eyes (protected by special safety glasses) were on the sky for this once in a lifetime learning experience.
Although there are many ways to measure and track student success—and we look at all manner of indicators—few are more clear and powerful than graduation and retention rates. I’m thrilled to share that our undergraduates entering in 2019 and 2017 set all-time records for their graduation rates within four (71.6%) and six years (78.2%), respectively. Last year, the university also reached our highest first-year retention rate ever. What powerful indicators of our faculty and staff’s commitment to student success!
This year, the university also launched the new Catamount Core Curriculum and a new co-major option, and refreshed our Academic Success Goals. Each of these innovations will promote success and excellence among all our undergraduates.
Access and affordability are critical aspects of our commitment to student success. For the sixth year, thanks to efforts across the campus and partnership with our Board of Trustees, we were able to keep undergraduate tuition and fees flat for Vermonters. Beyond that, the UVM Promise, launched last year, now has more than 150 eligible students who pay zero tuition and fees. I’m pleased that we were able to expand eligibility to Vermont households making up to $75,000.
The tremendous academic successes of our students have again been applauded on the national stage. We are honored to have seven student winners of Fulbright Fellowships, one Truman Scholarship winner, and one winner of a Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. In ROTC, 8 out of 10 cadets were awarded the honor of Distinguished Military Graduate, with two of them ranked in the top 10% nationwide.
The UVM GO pre-orientation global program, successfully launched last year, has expanded to include Iceland, Costa Rica, San Francisco, and New York City. A growing number of students are raving about their experiences making new connections and getting to know UVM before the start of classes.
The university’s tradition of excellence and success among our student-athletes continues both on the playing field and in the classroom. The 2023-24 athletic season brought no less than five teams to conference titles or NCAA championships, including men’s soccer, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, swimming and diving, and skiing.
Men’s basketball once again earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament, this year playing powerhouse Duke. Alumni around the world watched and cheered the Catamounts when the game was broadcast live in primetime on CBS. And, women’s basketball became the first America East women’s team to advance to the semifinals of a postseason tournament by qualifying for the Fab Four of the WNIT. The energy around both men’s and women’s basketball last season was off the charts.
Back on campus, our athletes’ accomplishments in the classroom were outstanding, winning their second consecutive America East Academic Cup (their 10th win—another record!), and scoring a GPA higher than the general UVM student population. For the first time ever, Catamount athletes boasted a 100% single-year Graduation Success Rate (GSR).
Enrollment figures are promising for Fall 2024, continuing last year’s record geographic diversity with more than half of incoming undergraduates hailing from outside of New England. Additionally, we have seen a noticeable uptick in students from outside the U.S. These achievements are balanced by our intensive efforts to recruit from the rapidly shrinking Vermont student population and to reverse the trend of gender imbalance. This year, 38% of the incoming students are male, a modest but hard-won increase over recent years. Our creative approaches such as the Young Men of Talent program and Vermont Pitch Challenge are efforts to correct the gender imbalance. This national issue in college attendance was highlighted in a news segment on CBS Sunday Morning featuring UVM.
Last fall, we announced our Comprehensive Inclusive Excellence Action Plan (IEAP) to drive our efforts to build a more inclusive and broadly diverse university community that fosters an environment of success for all our students, staff, and faculty and drives toward measurable progress in recruitment and retention. UVM’s IEAP is the result of the participation and planning of every academic and administrative unit on campus, a process that provides accountability for success in all areas across our university.
Research Excellence
We anticipate 2023-24 will be booked as another record year for research activity at UVM, well above last year’s record-setting figure of over $260 million. This year brought more than 30 research grants of over $1 million each to our campus, continuing to diversify our research portfolio across all colleges and schools.
Last May, the Board of Trustees officially approved the creation of the UVM Water Resources Institute that is poised to bring together water-related research supported by multiple organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Sea Grant, and Space Grant. The institute has already secured more than $10 million in research funding.
In the meantime, some of our newer as well as our more established institutes and centers have ramped up their activities. The Institute for Agroecology hosted an international summit attracting 50 world-renowned experts. The Food Systems Research Center hosted its first annual research symposium, attracting 80 scholars from around the country and announcing the creation of a Soil Health, Research, and Education Center.
In April, Provost Patricia Prelock hosted an internal kick-off of UVM’s Planetary Health Initiative, focused on the understanding that human health and human civilization depend on flourishing natural systems and the wise stewardship of those natural systems. The initiative will have a formal launch on October 17th following a Planetary Health Summit hosted by UVM’s Osher Center for Integrative Health.
Vermont EPSCoR (National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) began implementation of a $20 million project in advanced data analytics and natural language processing. At the center of the work is a tool called StoryWrangler a curation of tweets into day-scale phrase counts for over 200 billion tweets in 100 languages from 2008 to 2023. The findings—applying the power of advanced computing to the humanities—are used to interpret and predict trends in politics, culture, economics, linguistics, and other realms. The project is supported by an NSF-funded expansion of the Vermont Advanced Computing Center.
Of course, each of these awards and the eventual benefit of the related research is due to the dedicated work of individual faculty and collaborating teams of researchers across the university, some of whom were recognized with prestigious honors. This year, two of our faculty won Fulbright Fellowships while three faculty members received NSF CAREER Awards, raising the total to 15 CAREER Awards in just the past 5 years. That figure surpasses the total for the 15 years prior, again demonstrating our increased velocity.
Each of these new or expanded examples shows our strength as a growing research enterprise and adds to our effort to achieve Carnegie R1 status, a designation anticipated as early as next January.
Engaging with Vermont and Beyond
As the state’s Land Grant flagship university, one of our key roles is to serve as convenor of regional efforts to establish and grow an innovation ecosystem. Two examples from the past year include the organization of the V-GaN Tech Hub, recognized by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration and the return of UVM’s RISE (Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship) Summit for a second year.
The V-GaN Tech Hub, led by UVM, is a coalition of more than 30 Vermont and national businesses collaborating to create a semiconductor design hub in Vermont. The potential for the hub to attract federal funding at a significant scale for Vermont is enormous. Much credit goes to Vice President Kirk Dombrowski and his staff for shepherding the collaboration and earning the designation, announced last winter by the Biden Administration.
The 2024 RISE Summit, built around the theme of “partners in place,” attracted more than 900 participants for a second year, including business leaders, government officials, researchers, economic development executives, and many others. Special guests included the USDA Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, Senators Welch and Leahy, and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) consortium partners from the University of Wisconsin and Auburn University.
RISE 2024 was coordinated by the newly established Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, named in honor of Vermont’s long-time Senator Patrick Leahy. Housed in the newly renovated Leahy Building, the institute fosters relationships and sponsors grants that benefit the state’s rural communities. Their vision: A Vermont where all communities have an opportunity to thrive. The institute has already announced grants totaling over $1.7 million supporting projects in all parts of the state.
We showed our appreciation for Senator Leahy’s legacy and celebrated the promise of the rural partnerships institute inspired by his vision with a fantastic ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Patrick Leahy Building in November, attended by Governor Scott, Senator Welch, and dozens of friends of UVM including the Leahys, and featuring a video greeting from US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
Our region was devastated by historic flooding in July 2023, calling to action dozens of UVM staff and faculty volunteers in key support roles. Among them, the University’s Spatial Analysis Lab used cutting edge drone technology, playing a crucial role to help state and federal officials assess and prioritize the affected areas for recovery activities. Volunteers and drones are stepping up once again this summer, as floods have unfortunately returned.
Last Spring, our student government (SGA) partnered with Government Relations to host the first ever volunteer Together Vermont! Working with non-profit organizations in every ward of the city of Burlington, this effort recruited student and staff volunteers for a day of service. Activities ranged from serving food to people experiencing homelessness to scouring local parks to pick up trash.
This year, UVM partnered once again with Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC) to administer the Green Mountain Jobs and Retention Program. The program provides up to $5,000 in student loan forgiveness to graduates of Vermont institutions who choose to live and work in the state. For the most recent year, some 1,100 UVM graduates in 2022 chose to stay and work in Vermont. Together with our partners at VSAC and in the state legislature, we hope that this number will continue to increase, providing essential talent and generational balance for Vermont’s workforce.
We proudly launched the Presidential Lecture Series this year as well, bringing together important campus events into an organized, thematic approach that expanded awareness and significantly increased student and community participation. The theme of the past year’s series was the key contemporary issue of social media. This coming year will focus on the topic of free speech.
We will continue such conversations through the series and several other programs in the year ahead, with a clear sense that universities have a responsibility and purpose to foster civil discourse and civic engagement within their communities.
Speaking of communities, our engagement activities through the Center for Community News (CCN) have been recognized as a national model. Filling the gap left by shrinking local media outlets, CCN has successfully placed student journalists to cover local news throughout Vermont. A $7 million investment from the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and others will allow CCN to serve as a national leader in news-academic partnerships and a unique resource for similar partnerships at other universities.
The Presidential Lecture Series and CCN are two of several building blocks of a new President’s Initiative on Civil Discourse. The initiative, launching this summer, strives to highlight and strengthen opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to participate in informed debate on contemporary issues. Creating opportunities for civil discourse through co-curricular activities is an important investment in UVM’s and our nation’s future, and a natural role for a Land Grant flagship university.
With Gratitude
Before I close, I would like to recognize the senior leaders of the university. While the work they perform is seldom individually recognized as news, it is nonetheless critical to supporting our strategic goals across the institution. From enrollment management and student affairs to budget planning, campus safety and human resources and dozens of other areas, not to mention direction and support for the essential academic life in our colleges and schools, our senior leaders and deans apply innovation and creativity on a daily basis and the institution is all the stronger for their efforts.
I would also like to thank the leaders of our shared governance groups, the Faculty Senate, Student Government Association, Graduate Student Senate, and Staff Council. Through their deep connections to the students, faculty, and staff of the university, our shared governance groups provide insights and advice to university leaders and trustees on most major decisions. Their counsel and engagement are great assets for the institution.
I am grateful to our Board of Trustees for their tireless work on behalf of the institution. At every opportunity they are present, engaged with the campus, and available to guide UVM in its overall strategic course. The board’s unwavering support of our efforts in affordability, sustainability, and inclusive excellence are critical to our success.
Finally, I am pleased to thank our generous alumni and friends. This past year, the UVM Foundation—working with the university—raised over $82 million to support our students, faculty, and key strategic initiatives. Their gifts help ensure a financially secure future for UVM and support nearly every area of the institution.
For the students, faculty, staff, alumni, partners and friends of the University of Vermont, there is much to be proud of – and much more to accomplish. On behalf of the university’s leadership, thank you for all you have done to advance these and countless other examples of our commitment to people and planet. I remain committed and ever more energized to see our velocity continue to increase in the coming years.
Sincerely,
Suresh Garimella
President
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