Publisher’s Note: Catching up on Vermont news since back from travel, including at University of Vermont, our once and future republic’s flagship land-grant university (and for those who don’t know, Vermonter Justin Morrill birthed the idea of “land grant colleges” back in the mid-19th century. ) Like many part time UVM professors, I was not invited to teach any courses at UVM during the COVIDtastrophe. Watching UVM from a distance has proved eye opening, Thanks to long-time friend and colleague, Burlington progressive lawyer and citizen activist Sandy Baird, for sending over this extended video capturing a recent public forum in which UVM faculty, staff and students voice their frustration with the current austerity measures being imposed on UVM in the name of the COVID. Meanwhile, UVM looks more and more like Evergreen College every week – in the grip of Wokeness of the “ANTI-RACIST / WHITE FRAGILITY” variety, as graduate school professor Aaron Kinsvatter points out in his viral video “”Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont. Below – the list of demands to the UVM administration and Vermont state legislature from UVM faculty – watch their video testimonies here. 

Our Demands of the UVM Administration:

      1. A full, publicly available (on UVM’s website) accounting of Huron’s work for and with the UVM administration and an immediate halt to their work.

2. Complete and publicly available (on UVM’s website) independent end-of-year audits of both the Operating Budget and Foundation’s accounts, with the understanding going forward that they are to be presented annually before a recorded Faculty Senate Assembly with a quorum of its members.

3. Concrete representation of faculty, who are furthermore representative of our diversity, in university deliberations on major decisions, with complete disclosure of information and in-depth consultation with the Faculty Senate and units affected.

4. Reopening and expansion of the Children’s Campus School.

5. Restoration of the BLM flag to the Davis Center flagpole and inclusion of Jewish and Holocaust Studies in Anti-racist curricular initiatives.

6. Immediate reinstatement of our faculty lost over the past 5 years due to economic layoffs and non-renewal of contracts and opening of faculty lines in programs hobbled by attrition.

7. Abolishment of IBB — Incentive Based Budgeting, which has been used under Huron’s direction to restructure the university in a way that has lacked transparency, has been anti-academic, and has undermined our research labs and strong liberal arts curriculum.

8. An annual campus climate survey administered by the Faculty Senate rather than the Provost’s office, with the full report and de-identified raw data released to the campus community.

9. Faculty-led review of UVM’s hiring, compensation, workload, and promotion processes in order to measure against equity goals.

10. Requirement that each department and program must have a specific staff person with no less than 50% of their workload assigned to the department or program.

11. Financial stability for our faculty, the lifeblood of this institution: salaries competitive with peer institutions as determined by the Faculty Senate and more job protections for our non-tenure-track faculty.

12. We declare no confidence in President Garimella’s leadership and demand his resignation.

Requests and calls for action addressed to the State Legislature:

      1. An investigation into what the Board of Trustees knew about Garimella’s involvement in the decision to keep Camp DASH open when they took the unprecedented action of limiting the field of candidates to one candidate and denied the rights of the faculty to participate in the selection of the University president as provided under Section 1.3 of the Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws.

2. Alteration of the Board of Trustees’ membership to include three faculty (appointed by United Academics) and three staff representatives (voted upon by staff) as voting members. Undergraduate and graduate student members should be selected by the student body and not appointed by the administration. Furthermore, open and public deliberation on the University’s business, in compliance with 1 V.S.A. § 313. Only personnel decisions and legal deliberations that could put the body’s interests into jeopardy can legally be considered in executive session. All other board business must be done in open session.

3. We call upon the state legislature to impose conditions on state appropriations so that tax dollars are not used to enrich administrators and coaches, paid well above the median salary in Vermont, to pay consultants to dismantle UVM’s proud academic legacy in favor of some proprietary, undisclosed future vision, or to be used for some other purpose not in line with UVM’s land-grant mission and vision.