Author: vermontnews

For a senior who would step gracefully from graduation into a job in the Vermont Governor’s Office, Jason Maulucci admits that his college leadership got off to a slow start. He came to UVM having worked on a few local campaigns in his hometown of Bolton, Conn., but didn’t immediately get involved in politics at UVM, keeping a low, quiet profile in his political science classes.

That changed dramatically when Maulucci re-started UVM’s College Republicans Club and earned a spot as a Student Government Association senator as a sophomore, setting him on a path to consecutive terms as SGA president.

“I learned more in my role as SGA president and being involved with campus committees that steer decision-making at the university than I could have ever imagined,” says Maulucci, who turned down an internship at the United Nations to accept a post with Gov. Phil Scott.

Maulucci, a moderate Republican who is liberal on social issues, caught the eye of then-Lt. Gov. Scott after he saw the student speak at a Vermont Republican Party event. Scott asked him that night if he’d work on his gubernatorial campaign. “It wasn’t long before I was traveling with the governor, doing field work, social media, phone banking, fundraising, staffing, setting up events and whatever else was needed,” says Maulucci, who brought about a dozen student volunteers with him to work on the campaign. 

Maulucci was eventually fully immersed in the political world as SGA president, chair of the Vermont College Republicans, and working for Scott. His schedule involved waking up at 5:30 a.m. to head into the SGA office; driving to Montpelier to work in the governor’s office from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; driving back to the SGA to meet with people until 9 p.m.; and finally sneaking in a few hours of studying before going to bed. Not to mention finishing off the two courses he needed for his bachelor’s degree.

After Scott was elected governor, Maulucci joined his transition team, which eventually led to his full-time staff position working for Rachel Feldman, Senior Director of Boards, Commissions and Public Service. “There aren’t many places like Vermont where students can get involved in government on this level, so I feel really fortunate,” says Maulucci. His job duties include vetting candidates to recommend to the governor for various state boards, including the UVM Board of Trustees; constituent services; overseeing interns; special projects; and writing briefs and remarks for the governor.

“I’m kind of utility guy,” says Maulucci, who would like to eventually attend law school. “Whatever they need me to do, I do it. There’s a lot going on at all times, but I think that’s the nature of working in any governor’s office. Fortunately, I work for a governor who treats people with incredible respect regardless of their political views. If everyone conducted themselves like Governor Scott, especially in Congress, the world would be a much better place.” 

Not long after Maulucci started his new job, he started receiving emails from an unexpected group: prospective UVM students. The essence of their inquiry: “Is UVM too liberal for a center-right individual like me?”

“A lot of students have contacted me basically saying, ‘UVM is my top choice and I love Burlington, but I’m wondering if I’ll fit in because I’m a Republican,’” says Maulucci. “I tell them, ‘absolutely you will.’ Most of my friends don’t share my political beliefs, but they are still my best friends who I would do anything for and they would do anything for me. UVM is a very accepting place.”

Source: UVM News

Deb Markowitz, visiting professor at the University of Vermont in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has received a 2017 EPA New England Lifetime Achievement Award. The award honors the region’s most committed environmental leaders who have made lasting improvements to New England’s environment during their careers or lifetimes.

Markowitz, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources from 2011 until 2017, was one of seven 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award recipients invited to the EPA New England Environmental Merit Awards Ceremony in Boston in May.

“The Rubenstein School is very fortunate to have Deb Markowitz as part of our faculty,” said Dean Nancy Mathews. “Her significant contributions to environmental protection and leadership serve to make her a role model for students and faculty alike.”

“It is her unmatched ability to create wins for the environment in our special state,” wrote Sarah McKearnan, former ANR special assistant for climate policy, who nominated Markowitz for the award, “and her commitment to bringing Vermont’s environmental influence and good ideas, small as we may be, to national and international arenas where the challenges we face are grave and daunting, and where the opportunities to motivate transformative change are tremendous.”

McKearnan described pulling up to the airport parking booth with Deb Markowitz after returning to Vermont from the last meeting of President Obama’s Task Force of State, Local and Tribal Leaders on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, where Markowitz represented the State of Vermont.

“As she opens the window to offer her credit card, the attendant greets her with a deluge of warm appreciation for her service to Vermonters as our Secretary of Natural Resources. One can’t go anywhere in Vermont in Deb’s company without the same story replaying,” wrote McKearnan.

While leading the Agency of Natural Resources, Markowitz shaped Vermont’s environmental agenda, focusing on the challenges of climate change, forest health, and cleaning up Lake Champlain.

During her tenure, the agency secured new protections for Vermont’s lake shorelines, a new Lake Champlain plan for reducing phosphorus pollution, and new universal recycling requirements; increased attention to forest fragmentation; and created Vermont Parks Forever, a foundation to enhance and protect the state’s parks.

In the wake of Hurricane Irene, Markowitz worked to strengthen flood resilience planning in the state. She brought agency leaders together to address climate change impacts and both prepare for and work to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

“Deb Markowitz is a proven leader with national stature on climate, energy, and resilience issues,” said Vicky Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “Representing the small state of Vermont, she has left a large legacy. Her strategic vision and leadership in regional collaborations such as our Transportation and Climate Initiative have been essential to maintaining the momentum of regional, bipartisan efforts to reduce emissions and energy use from this important sector.”

Markowitz continues to educate constituents and policymakers through op-eds and speaking engagements and by convening dialogues that create pathways for policy change.

She speaks nationally and internationally on the importance of state action in the fight against climate change, having served on the board of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. She represented Vermont at the United Nations Summits on Climate Change in Paris and Morocco. 

“Deb Markowitz oversaw tremendous and positive transformations in Vermont’s work on climate change mitigation, clean water, and wild land conservation as Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources,” said Trey Martin, deputy secretary under Markowitz, then appointed to secretary of the Vermont Agency of Administration, “but perhaps her greatest gift was the culture of continuous process improvement that she instilled in her leadership team, managers, and agency personnel.”

“There is no more important work than protecting the people and the places we love,” said Markowitz, who was also elected Vermont’s Secretary of State six times serving 1999 to 2011. “I feel lucky to have gotten to work with the passionate and mission driven workforce at the Agency of Natural Resources.”

Markowitz is a graduate of the University of Vermont (1983) and earned her Juris Doctorate degree from the Georgetown University Law Center (1987). She clerked for Louis Peck of the Vermont Supreme Court, and she served as founding director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns Municipal Law Center. Markowitz serves on the boards of advisors for the Georgetown Climate Center, Antioch’s Center for Climate Preparedness and Community Resilience, and the Rubenstein School, where she teaches on environmental policy and leadership.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont Board of Trustees passed the lowest tuition percentage increase in 40 years at its May meeting, held Friday and Saturday.

Under the resolution approved by the Board, in-state tuition increased $408 or 2.7 percent (from $15,096 to $15,504 per year); and out-of-state tuition increased $960 or 2.5 percent (from $38,160 to $39,120 per year).

The new rates for both Vermont and out-of-state students represent the lowest percentage increases since 1977.

Beyond these historically low increases, the university provides substantial financial aid resources that help keep UVM accessible and affordable for Vermont students.  

For instance, the average amount of financial aid awarded to Vermont students last year was $11,324 – an amount higher than the average discount of $8,384 for national public research universities. More than 90 percent of Vermont students receive scholarships or other types of financial aid.

“The university’s strategy to hold down tuition increases is possible because of our private philanthropic support for scholarships in the comprehensive campaign and because we use more than half of our state appropriation to support Vermont students with scholarships and other financial aid,” UVM President Tom Sullivan said.  

Low tuition increases at UVM have helped keep the amount of debt students graduate with well below national figures. In fact, the median debt for Vermont students (among Vermonters who graduated with debt) upon graduation last year was $24,858, considerably below the $30,100 average for students at all public and private non-profit colleges.

Sullivan also pointed out that when scholarships and financial aid are taken into account, 42 percent of Vermont students attended UVM tuition free last year.

In other board news:

Capital Planning update. Robert Vaughan, director of capital planning, gave the full board a report on the capital projects just completed, underway, or about to begin. For the next phase of construction, new pedestrian pathways will be clearly marked and are also viewable in map form at the Office of the Provost’s website. Descriptions and renderings of the new buildings are available on the provost’s site, as well as at the Facilities, Design and Construction website. Projects coming up include:

• Phase I of the STEM complex, Discovery Hall, and the near completion of the Central Campus Residence Hall & Dining Facility, opening in August. Both projects are on time and on budget, Vaughan said.
• Phase II of the STEM complex, Innovation Hall, will begin June 1 with the deconstruction of the Cook Physical Science building. The new office and teaching facility, built on its footprint, will be completed by August 2019.
• The selected renovation of Votey Hall, Phase III of the new STEM complex, is underway and will be completed for the opening of the fall 2017 semester. The building will be closed over the summer.
• Ifshin Hall, a new addition to the Grossman School of Business, has broken ground and will be completed by August 2018.
• The renovation of Billings Library has begun, and the construction will be completed by May 2018.  The relocation of the Special Collections from Bailey Howe will occur over the summer of 2018.
• The construction of the UVM Medical Center’s new inpatient care facility bordering the UVM campus broke ground in April 2016 and will be completed by July 2019.

New degree programs. A number of new degree programs were approved by the EPIR committee on Friday and by the full board the next day. They include:  

• A new minor in Public Policy Analysis in the College of Arts and Sciences.
• A new undergraduate Certificate in Physical Activity Promotion in Children and Youth in the College of Arts and Sciences.
• A new Certificate of Graduate Studies in Agroecology.
• A new minor in Education for Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in the College of Education and Social Services
• A new undergraduate Certificate of Computer-Aided Engineering Technology in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.
• A new Quantitative Reasoning General Education Requirement.

Update on UVM’s innovation/entrepreneurial ecosystem. Provost David Rosowsky and Vice President Richard Galbraith gave a presentation to the EPIR committee on building and sustaining an entrepreneurial ecosystem to support and increase innovation, and enhance state and regional economic growth. The Office of the Vice President for Research is committed to supporting the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem by marshalling the efforts of faculty, staff, and students; by working to identify the gaps in technology and other areas of the economy and attempting to fill them; and by providing direct financial support to local initiatives, entities and events related to innovation and entrepreneurship whenever possible.

Marketing and communications update. Vice President for Enrollment Management Stacey Kostell, Vice President for University Relations and Administration Tom Gustafson, and Creative Communications Director Amanda Waite provided an update on communications work that has strengthened the capacity of communicators across campus, increased engagement with the University’s audiences, and raised UVM’s profile on the national and international stage.

Source: UVM News

James Fallows, national correspondent for “The Atlantic” and one of the country’s leading journalists across more than three decades, delivered the address at the University of Vermont’s 216^th commencement ceremony with a call for the graduates to be active participants in American democracy. Vote, run for office, be informed, be engaged, Fallows told the UVM Class of 2017. And Fallows offered some more personal advice, including, “Exercise. Get in the habit of being happy. Get in the habit of being excited.”

On a cool May morning, Fallows spoke from the stage in front of the Waterman Building. Assembled before him across the university green were an estimated 3,228 graduates and thousands more friends, families and faculty. The degree recipients hailed from 40 states and 21 countries.

President Tom Sullivan was among the speakers who preceded Fallows. In his congratulations to the Class of 2017, Sullivan encouraged them to rely on the humanistic grounding of their UVM education to meet the challenges of the digital information revolution as boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds blur. “The fundamental question is how is the revolution shaping you and humanity, and how do you want to shape this future?” Sullivan said.  

When James Fallows, whose career includes working as speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, took the lectern he wasted little time before addressing the turmoil that dominates the headlines and is likely on the minds of those stepping off campus with a freshly printed diploma. 

“But what I hope you’ll focus on are the times in which we meet. The times of our 45th president. The times of challenges to liberal democracies and open societies all around the world. The times of contested news, and siloed news, and ‘fake news,’ and ever-emergent real news. Times of imperiled science, when science matters more than ever—of social and economic divisions, as technology both unites us and drives us apart. Of increasingly urgent global threats, starting with sustainability in all forms and extending to disease and disorder and terrorism and migration, at a time of increasingly frayed global ability to focus on what matters and cooperate,” Fallows said.

In the face of such uncertainty, he encouraged the graduates to find comfort and confidence in the fact that, historically, they are far from alone in graduating into turbulent times. Recalling his own college graduation in 1970, Fallows said, “… in those times hundreds of Americans and thousands of Vietnamese were dying each week in combat; and that the world environmental crisis was dawning; and that discrimination forms you would find incredible was still enshrined by custom and law; and that many American cities were literally in flames.

It was a terrible time, which felt more on-the-edge even than the world may do to you now; yet because of social and technological advances that flowed from that era, it was a wonderful time as well.”

Fallows followed that idea back through history — his own father’s “Greatest Generation” emerging from the horrors of World War II or his grandfather’s coming of age in the early 1900s when even a high school diploma was rare, yet it was a time when American innovation flowered.

Drilling down on his theme of challenge and promise, Fallows described what he sees as the greatest challenge of the day. “But national politics and policy — our ability to address collective problems in a reasonable, compromise-minded, fact-based, and future-oriented way — are the major failure of national life right now,” he said.

Finding promise, Fallows said, isn’t hard. Look around you, he told the graduates, look on the local level. The promise in local action is rich in places like Burlington, Vermont, and countless others throughout the nation.

“Local solutions can never fully substitute for national or global approaches. But for now they are what’s possible, and for the long run they are fabric from which larger solutions are woven.”

But none of that progress will happen without the actions of citizens taking the initiative to vote, run for office, be informed and support the independent flow of information with a subscription to a newspaper or magazine. Fallows suggested “The Atlantic, perhaps,” to laughter from the crowd.  

“And get in the habit of engagement,” Fallows said in closing. “We are counting on you, and on this day we celebrate what the University of Vermont has done to prepare you, for the service we need from you, starting now.”

In addition to James Fallows, the university presented honorary degrees to:

Diane Greene, UVM Class of 1976, senior vice president of Cloud Computing at Google and a member of the board of directors of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company.

Martha Pattee Heath, UVM Class of 1969, a longtime education advocate and public servant as a member of the Vermont State House of Representatives.

Dr. David R. Nalin, a pioneer of oral rehydration therapy, a life-saving remedy for treating patients with cholera and other severe illnesses.

Alexander Nemerov, UVM Class of 1985, a distinguished art historian who explores broad topics of American cultural history, literature, and material culture as they apply to American visual art

Patrick Wong, who received his doctorate in biochemistry from UVM in 1975 and went on to a career in research that built on his discovery at UVM of a class of lipids now known as prostaglandins in bone and cartilage.

Recipients of the 2017 UVM senior awards honored at the ceremony: Miriam Haq, Mary Jean Simpson Award; Kyle Kellett, Kidder Medal; Ian Weider and Alex Jenkins, Class of ’67 Award; Rebecca Potter and Robert Parris, Keith M. Miser Leadership Award; David Waller and Kaelyn Burbey, Elmer Nicholson Achievement Prize; Shae Beckett, Katherine Anne Kelly Award.

Source: UVM News