PRESIDENT'S PERSPECTIVE

photo by Michael Sipe

Soaring upward

Five years ago, we raised the bar with a vision of UVM as the nation’s premier small public research university. Today, with gratitude to the countless faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends who have been key contributors to the University’s advance, we can say that we have come a long way toward that goal.

There are ample metrics to support the rosy view of UVM’s trajectory. More than 79,000 donors gave to the Campaign for the University of Vermont that has now closed at $278,461,114 (comfortably above the $250 million goal). The fifth class to enter the UVM Honors College includes twenty-three students of color, 20 percent of the cohort (up from the 15 percent predicted a few months ago). We had record applications this year, nearly 19,000 for first-year admission alone. UVM’s largest undergraduate class ever entered this fall with the highest SAT scores in our history. Meanwhile, enrollment in our Ph.D. programs is at an all-time high. We have added over a million square feet under roof to the campus to support academic excellence and student life. And the metrics are splendid, too, for UVM athletics: who would have predicted a 25-win season for UVM basketball so quickly on the heels of legends Taylor Coppenrath and T. J. Sorrentine, or an unprecedented three straight academic cups in America East for our student athletes?
 
Our students are soaring: witness, for example, SGA President Kesha Ram, UVM’s first Truman Scholar in more than a dozen years. Our faculty are soaring: witness, among others, Josh Bongard, assistant professor of computer science, who has recently been named one of five Microsoft Research Fellows in the nation and also, by MIT Technology Review, as one of the top thirty-five young innovators for 2007, those “whose inventions and research we find most exciting.” And together members of the UVM community are soaring, forging the programmatic richness and distinction called for in last fall’s call to UVM to create Signatures of Excellence for the 21st Century: witness the upcoming launch this spring of the problem-based learning communities called for in the Signatures document.

But even more than these numbers and milestones, nothing speaks more loudly and boldly of UVM’s advance than the soaring feelings of all who hold a special place for UVM in their hearts. A palpable surge of enthusiasm electrified more than four thousand people gathered at the Patrick Gym on August 26 for the Convocation, a multifaceted event structured around a challenging address by Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which our entering students and many of the rest of us had read. You can watch a video of the Convocation at uvm.edu/~presdent/ceremonies/ convocation to get a feel for what led one former Faculty Senate president, a professor here over the course of five decades, to call it the greatest single event he had ever witnessed at UVM.

What followed Convocation built the emotion even higher. The crowd marched out of the gym, followed and led by two flatbed trucks carrying spirited Taiko drummers. We marched en masse down all four lanes of Main Street (closed to traffic for the occasion) to the University Green, where, under a brilliant sunset and full moon, 2,440 first-year students were inducted into the UVM family, taking a candlelight pledge to academic excellence and to UVM’s values of respect, integrity, innovation, openness, justice, and responsibility.

And the feeling had yet to peak. The evening’s activities moved on to the Green Carpet premier of the Dudley H. Davis Center, UVM’s environmentally cutting-edge student union, which has already established itself, within weeks of its opening, as the vital center of community envisioned in that call to aspiration five years ago. Today and every day, the place is buzzing, a panorama of engaged students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors, day and night. I hope as many readers of VQ as possible will visit the Davis Center soon to feel first-hand the buzz of good feeling that is powering UVM, fueled by solid achievements and measurable advances.

—Daniel Mark Fogel

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