Tag: University of Vermont

Some of the textbooks in the “History of the Book” seminar can’t be purchased at the UVM bookstore or checked out from the open stacks of the Howe Library. 

That’s because the books are original manuscripts transcribed centuries ago, and can only be accessed by visiting the Silver Special Collection in UVM’s newly restored Billings Library. 

History major Jonah Goldberg ‘21 has to pinch himself when he realizes a text he researched, Pope Innocent III’s “On the Misery of the Human Condition,” was transcribed 700 years ago. 

“We were given guidelines of how to care for the manuscripts,” he said. “But manuscripts have been around for hundreds of years and they’ve been handled by many people.”

Jeff Marshall, library professor and director of UVM Special Collections, explains that wearing latex gloves can reduce the sense of touch which makes accidental damage more likely. “We’ve recently discovered your fingertips aren’t all that greasy. Any moisture you feel is mostly water, so we really emphasize keeping hands clean.” 

The books are from UVM’s own Silver Collection in Billings and 21 other manuscripts on loan from Les Enluminures, a company that specializes in collecting, selling and displaying manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Marshall sees seminar as a creative way of collaborating with teaching faculty to bring library materials out of the archives and into the hands of students in a classroom setting. 

Charles Briggs, senior lecturer in history, has expertise in the intellectual and cultural history of later Medieval Europe, and he believes Marshall’s perspective adds another dimension to the class. 

“Students are learning from Jeff that ‘Oh, there are archives, there are museums and libraries where precious artifacts are kept and preserved and studied.’ For UVM to have this collection and experts to guide them is pretty rare.” 

Searching for Hidden Clues

Briggs points out that the main challenge for students is the books are usually written in Latin, a language they don’t know. 

“There are many other aspects of the book the students can get to know,” he says. “The question is, ‘how do I approach this as a material object by looking at other evidence that I can analyse?’”

Briggs describes the three-credit seminar for graduate and undergraduate students as a laboratory to sleuth out many other clues the manuscripts leave behind, filling in the picture of how Medieval culture and society developed. He loves the approach in part because the books can be examined through multiple interdisciplinary lenses. UVM Medievalists from five different departments in the College of Arts and Sciences will make guest appearances through the semester to discuss how they use manuscripts in their scholarly research. 

“The history of the book brings in history, literature and language, art history, and also the sciences in terms of things like materials analysis and spectral analysis, the tools used to determine the age of manuscripts,” Briggs said. 

The course describes the process of making handwritten manuscripts, painstakingly inscribed by anonymous scribes.

“Students are able to see that these manuscripts are manufactured things. There is a process that goes into producing books, starting out with the cow in the field which is the source of the parchment, the cover and the binding,” Briggs explains. 

One graduate student in the seminar, Sophia Trigg ’14, reviewed a translation of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero from the 1400’s. “It was essentially his impression of what a good gentleman citizen should be–kind of a political text drawing on previous opinions of Greek philosophers.” 

She discovered that tools like Google translate weren’t often useful in yielding a direct English translation. “There were different conventions used in forming the characters, and often scribes had unique ways of writing them.”

Other clues led to interesting discoveries. The large margins in the books were left for students or later readers to make notes, and the “marginalia” on the pages, written in Italian, leave more clues of how the manuscripts were used.

The parchments were made from the stretched and thinly shaved untanned skins of animals, which speaks to their longevity over the centuries. The course culminates with the print revolution around 1500, which coincided with the availability of paper as a cheaper alternative to parchment.

“Suddenly there’s this tremendous demand for written text,” Briggs said. “It stimulates all sorts of innovation to fulfill that demand, including making artificial writing and building an economic market for books.”

Colloquium

The class coincides with a colloquium presented by UVM Medieval Studies on November 8-9 “Interpreting the Handwritten Book: Medieval Manuscripts at UVM” to be held in the Marsh Room of Billings Library.

The colloquium features presentations by Briggs, Marshall, and UVM Medievalist faculty including Antonello Borra (Italian), Anne Clark (religion), Sean Field (history) and Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier (French). Invited speakers include curators and scholars Ray Clemens of the Beinecke Library at Yale University; Lisa Fagin Davis of the Medieval Academy of America; and Cecilia Gaposchkin and Walter Simons of Dartmouth College. Students in the class will also be presenting papers during the colloquium on the early stages of their research.

The event is made possible through a Lattie F. Coor Collaborative Fellowship from the UVM Humanities Center, with additional support from Silver Special Collections, and the departments of history and German and Russian.

“All of our talks will be based on materials in the Silver Collection, so it really highlights the materials UVM owns, and demonstrates why they are valuable not just for their rarity but for the academic opportunities they offer,” Briggs says.

Source: UVM News

Last summer, Anthony Lamb had a look into future possibilities, working out with several NBA teams to get a sense for whether he was ready for that next big step. The answer: stay in school and continue to hone your game, in particular shooting from the NBA three-line, guarding on the perimeter, ball handling. The latter might be one reason he’s returned to his high school regimen of carrying, or dribbling, a basketball as his constant companion. That six-foot-seven guy walking across the UVM Green after classes, backpack slung over one shoulder and a basketball in his hand? Anthony. 

But early in the semester, as Lamb and a group of his teammates prepare for some morning work in Patrick Gym, he says that his future—National Basketball Association, professional ball in Europe, whatever it might hold—is not the point right now. “All I’m looking at is how can I get this done today. I’ve got, what, thirty-one weeks left of my college life here,” Lamb says. “That’s all that matters.”

Thirty-one weeks, two semesters, one final season to shine at Patrick Gym before Senior Night, March 3, 2020, when his mother, Rachel, will, no doubt, have made another six-hour drive from Rochester, New York, to see her son play. 

Anthony Lamb is solidly built and tough, deft-footed and determined, a mix that makes him a force in the paint and has helped enable mid-major Vermont to compete with any high-major program in the country, Kentucky to Purdue to Florida State. Credit for that toughness, to great extent, is due to his mom and his blue-collar hometown. Lamb has the symbol of the city of Rochester and the area code along with the phrase, “I can, I will, I must,” tattooed on his left wrist. 

Rachel Lamb was pregnant with Anthony at age sixteen and has worked long hours, juggling responsibilities as a single mom, to provide opportunities for Anthony and his younger brother, Timothy. “Anthony was a baby and I was a baby, too,” she says. “We grew up together.” After years of eldercare in community nursing homes, she has worked as a roofer for the last three years. (When I reach her on her cell late one afternoon in September, she’s on a rooftop searching for the source of a leak. “Like a needle in a haystack,” she says.)

While Anthony is a force on the court, his mom, in kind, brings it from the stands. At halftime of UVM’s first-round 2019 NCAA Tournament game versus Florida State, tied 27-27, sports reporter Nicole Auerbach tweeted: “Anthony Lamb’s mom briefly heckled Leonard Hamilton (FSU head coach) as he came off the court. ‘How about No. 3? That’s my baby! Maybe you should cover No. 3!’”

Asked if he’d heard that, Lamb smiles and laughs, “Probably, that sounds like her.” 

Lamb entered UVM in 2016 as a highly promising recruit out of suburban Rochester’s Greece Athena High School, one of four finalists for New York’s Mr. Basketball title. From scoring twenty-three points in his Catamount debut to becoming the first freshman to win America East Tournament Most Outstanding Player, he quickly found his stride during that first season, culminating in a trip to the NCAA Tournament. (Lamb scored twenty points and collected nine rebounds as #4-seed Purdue knocked the Cats out of the bracket.)  

Though he spent a good deal of his sophomore season on the bench with a broken foot, Lamb says it might have been his most important year of development. “Without that happening, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” he says. As a player, he used his perspective, removed from the heat of competition, to better understand defensive rotations, the coaching staff’s expectations of him, “all of the little things that go into basketball.” 

A finance major in the Grossman School of Business, Lamb’s season dealing with injury coincided with an impactful business communications class with Lecturer Paula Cope. “What’s the most important thing to getting your message across? Listening. Listening so you can learn how to best reach somebody in a way that they will hear what you need to communicate,” Lamb says. It’s a lesson that has stuck, helping him grow as a teammate and team leader. 

When Rachel Lamb considers how her son’s experience at UVM has squared with her expectations, she says she didn’t expect the help he has had to develop not just as a player, but as an individual. She credits the whole coaching and support staff, but has particular appreciation for assistant coach Hamlet Tibbs. Anthony’s connection with Tibbs from New York AAU leagues was key to his recruitment, and their relationship has grown close, spending hours together talking basketball and life. 

“Anthony is a very thoughtful and cerebral person,” Tibbs says. “He spends a lot of time in the community visiting people that are going through hard times, visiting kids at schools and the hospital. He cares about people’s well-being; he’s a wonderful person.” 

Now a senior on a team that is rich on returning talent, bolstered by a number of promising new recruits and transfers, Lamb says the squad came together well during summer workouts, maybe the best he’s seen in his time at UVM. As that potential of summer and fall practices is put to the test this winter, Lamb is set to lead with his voice and by his example—focused on the moment, taking nothing for granted.  

Source: UVM News

With past locations on South Prospect Street or Colchester Avenue, UVM Hillel has long been located on the fringe of campus. Those locations belied the centrality of Hillel to the spiritual, social, and intellectual lives of many Jewish students and the broader campus community, particularly as the organization has grown significantly in recent years.  

That all changed in August with Hillel’s move into the Burack Hillel Center, located in the renovated Vermont marble and slate building at 439 College Street, originally home to Phi Delta Theta fraternity. Across the street from Waterman, next-door-neighbors with the president’s Englesby House residence, steps from the Green, it’s on one of the most traveled paths between campus and downtown.  

Allyson Tazbin ’20, an early childhood education/special education major, is president of UVM Hillel. She notes that expansive space in the new location has already made an impact. Shabbat dinners last year would typically draw approximately fifty students; attendance has more than tripled at every Shabbat this semester. The Challah for Hunger fundraiser often packs the Hillel kitchen with student bakers on Tuesday evenings. 

The three-story building includes event space and offices for Hillel staff on the first floor and additional space for events or services on the top level. The second floor is currently UVM residence hall space; a number of the residents are students active in Hillel. 

The center is named for the Burack family, longtime champions of UVM Hillel. Daniel Burack ’55, Hon ’08, a member of the UVM Foundation’s Leadership Council and chair of the UVM Hillel Board, and his wife, Carole Burack ’08, made a gift of $2.5 million in 2017 towards the new home for Hillel. 

UVM Hillel has received support from numerous alumni and parents, Debbie Koslow Stern ’72 G’75 and Mitchell Stern ’79 among them. Debbie Stern recalls the immediate sense of welcome she received from Hillel as a first-year student and, years later, the organization would also impact the college experience of her son David Moss ’02 G’10.  “I am honored to be able to help promote Hillel at UVM to give future generations of students opportunities for growth, validation, community, and a home away from home,” Stern says. 

Source: UVM News

As part of his commitment to making the University of Vermont accessible and affordable, UVM president Suresh Garimella announced today that tuition for the academic year beginning in fall 2020 would not increase over 2019 levels.

“Student loan debt is the second highest category of consumer debt—second only to mortgage debt and higher than credit card debt. Funding a college education is one of the very largest expenditures families face in the United States,” Garimella said. “Forty-four million borrowers owe $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. Yet, education is increasingly important to future success. It’s critical that we do everything we can to address the pressures that families and individuals face in their effort to achieve their educational goals.”

Garimella said the university has kept tuition increases at modest levels in recent years and commits over $160 million in grants, scholarships and tuition remission every year, enabling 44 percent of Vermonters to attend UVM tuition-free.

The university has seen a steady rise in its four-year graduation rate, which now ranks in the top six percent of public universities nationally. Garimella said the university will work hard to further increase its already enviable graduation rate as another cost-cutting strategy for students and their families. Timely graduation decreases the overall cost of a degree and enables students to join the work force earlier.

“Despite that solid record,” he said, “we need to do even more.”

The zero tuition increase is part of Garimella’s efforts to enhance the value of a UVM education.

Half of the value equation is educational quality, he said, an area the university has devoted thought and resources to in recent years, creating new courses, expanding experiential learning opportunities, investing in student advising and career counseling and continuing to recruit top teacher-scholars, trends that will accelerate during his presidency.

Cost is the other half of the value ratio, an area today’s announcement addresses.

“Relying on annual tuition increases, even modest ones, is not sustainable,” Garimella said. “As we move forward, we will focus intently on all the ways the university can generate additional revenue to relieve the pressure on tuition.”

Garimella cited a number of sources where the university could find new revenue, including private philanthropy; improved retention of current students; increased graduate and summer enrollments; expansion of flexible and online course offerings geared to adults and non-traditional learners in Vermont and around the world; enhancing graduate, post-doc and undergraduate research support through grants from the federal government and other sources and through partnerships with private industry; and supporting more students transferring to UVM from other colleges.

“Our recently completed capital campaign, which exceeded its $500 million goal by $80 million, is evidence that we can be successful in finding new non-tuition sources of revenue,” he said.

In addition to benefiting students and families, Garimella said that enhancing UVM’s value will position the university well in the intensely competitive higher education market and act as a talent magnet for both in-state and out-of-state students. Sixty-nine percent of Vermont resident students and thirty-one percent of nonresident students choose to stay in Vermont after graduation, helping address the state’s workforce challenge.

“The relentless rise in tuition over the last several decades has placed an unsustainable burden on students and their families,” said David Daigle, chair of the UVM board. “Our board is fully supportive of this objective as it will immediately reduce this burden and sends an important signal that the university is committed to affordability and accessibility. We look forward to working with the administration on formal board approval next semester.”

“Affordability is a top priority for students,” said Jillian Scannell, president of UVM’s Student Government Association. “We applaud the administration’s effort to contain costs and help keep the university accessible for all.”

“We’re proud of the role faculty play in preparing our students to be informed citizens and to have successful careers after graduation,” said Thomas Chittenden, president of the Faculty Senate. “But these benefits have to come at an affordable cost. I support UVM’s decision to make accessibility and affordability top priorities.”

The board of trustees will officially set tuition rates when it meets during spring semester. Once approved, a tuition freeze would apply to new and returning in-state and out-of-state students enrolling at the university in the fall of 2020. It also would apply to graduate students.

Source: UVM News

Off the Marble Court at the Fleming Museum of Art, a striking print signals visitors to a modest, one-room exhibition in which the piece is currently featured. A black-and-white linocut, the print depicts the backsides of four black bodies holding themselves up against an off-white wall. Their hands are up, heads down, feet spread apart. They appear to be waiting their turn for a pat-down by a man clutching a rifle in his right hand. This is the first piece of artwork guests see in the small exhibition, which announces itself with a punch: “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!”

According to art history professor and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Kelley Hemlstutler Di Dio, the image at the literal center of the show is rather unusual for Sabra Field, a Vermont-based artist who’s known for colorful landscapes. “It is not at all what you would expect for a Sabra Field print to look like,” she says. For this piece, “Plainclothesman and Residents: Watts,” Field relinquished her vibrant colors and scenery and instead opted for stark contrast to capture a fearful moment of the 1965 race-related Watts riots, which left 34 dead in Los Angeles.

Provocative and thoughtful, “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!” features work from acclaimed artists like Pablo Picasso, Kara Walker, Francisco de Goya, Mildred Beltré, Diego Rivera and the Guerrilla Girls—nearly all from the Fleming’s permanent collection. Together, the artwork engages in a bold conversation about racism, state oppression, sexism and other social justice issues that have raged on for centuries. “In investigating these issues, we will encounter some controversial and distressing images and ideas, but we must not shrink from them. As citizens of this messy world, we have a duty to address our past, ugly as it might be, and use what we learn to shape a better future for ourselves and those who succeed us,” write the show’s curators, students of Di Dio’s fall 2018 museum studies class.

Yes, students. “They did a really great job with it,” Di Dio says. “One of the wonderful things about the class is that I did not dictate how the show was going to turn out or what the focus was going to be.” Di Dio instead guided the class through difficult conversations about the histories of museums and art, curation processes and career possibilities, while fully immersing her students in real-world exhibition creation. They collaborated on a proposal for “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!” complete with original curation, layout design, educational materials, artifact labels and research, which they presented at the end of the semester to the Fleming Museum for consideration. While the proposal had been built into the curriculum, Di Dio periodically reminded her students that the museum was in no way obligated to accept it.

But what appears now in the Fleming is nearly identical to what the students originally envisioned a year ago. Peering over her shoulder at the exhibition she helped build, Anna Duckworth ’20 gives the museum a nod for bringing their vision to life. “I’m just thinking about the exhibition design and I’m pretty sure it’s spot-on. The wall texts are all where we thought they were going to be. I think it’s pretty close to what we presented to them,” says the art history and art education double major and museum studies minor. 

While Duckworth has long aspired to work in a museum, the pertinent class almost wasn’t in the cards for her. She admits the lure of free pizza is what really drove her to the art history information session where she first learned about the special seminar course, and, when the time finally arrived to register, the class conflicted with her schedule that had filled with double major and minor requirements. Determined to take the class, she asked to participate through an independent study. “A class like this only comes around so often, you know? It’s such a unique opportunity. I couldn’t see myself not taking it, that wasn’t an option for me,” she says.

But what Duckworth found when she dug into the readings and curriculum was a bitter pill to swallow. “Institutions are absolutely historically racist, and the collections that they have reflect that racism and other kinds of privileged identity,” says Di Dio. “Curators have to pull from the objects that are in the museum’s collection. They’ve got to be able to manage that as best as they can. It’s not easy, and I think the students and I were made even more aware about how important that work is as we were digging into the material. It takes a great deal of time, a lot of conversations and learning.”

In addition to researching, curating and planning a social justice art exhibition from scratch, Di Dio also wanted students to consider how exhibitions and objects are curated and to “approach the process with a greater understanding of historical and institutional biases. We need to counteract that when we are working as curators or working in other areas of a museum,” she says.

For students like Duckworth, the revelation that these places could be biased, racist, sexist or prejudice—the very characteristics they were supposed to confront in class through art—was unsettling.

“The most challenging thing for me was learning that museums are, in many ways, quite bad. They’ve had a long history of racism and sexism, and they cater to people who give money—typically rich, white men. As a young, white woman who wants to go into a career in museums, that was hard for me and I’m still struggling with accepting that a place I thought was perfect and a vehicle for change is actually so institutionalized,” she says.

In fact, one of the pieces of artwork included in “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!” reflects on museum bias and specifically calls out New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for being gender exclusive. A color print by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists and activists, portrays an altered version of the famous nude portrait “Grande Odalisque” by Ingres with a gorilla mask over the female subject’s head. Above the altered image, the artists ask: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” According to the group’s most recent count, “Less than 4% of artists in the Modern Art section are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.”

Though the class considered and researched dozens of works of art from the Fleming for the show, they democratically dwindled down the list to the select pieces that currently hang in the exhibition today. Each student was individually responsible for researching and writing the label for at least one work of art featured in the show. Duckworth’s piece—a self-portrait photograph by artist, activist, model and photographer Matuschka—hangs just to the right of the Guerrilla Girls’ print. In it, a nude Matuschka makes a statement on femininity and health as she bears the scars from a mastectomy she had when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37.

“Every time I look at it, I still feel a divine feminine energy coming from it. I think it’s very powerful. She’s a cool lady,” Duckworth says of Matuschka—and she would know. Duckworth didn’t just research the portrait and its significance to the artist. She actually spoke to Matuschka herself for the class, on the phone, for more than an hour about the photograph, her work and her experience as an artist. “Matuschka was very integral into my writing of that label. I couldn’t have done it without her,” she says.

While the average visitor won’t know how many hours of discussion, deliberation and consideration went in to the creation of “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!”—from the meaning of the word “activism” and its exclusion from the show’s title to the use of punctuation in each label—laboring so intensely over the small yet salient exhibition provided Duckworth a fresh perspective on an old acquaintance. “I still can’t even quite fathom the amount of time and minds that go into creating a show at places like the Met and the Louvre and all the other museums.”

 

The student-curated exhibition “RESIST! INSIST! PERSIST!” is on display at the Fleming Museum now through December 13.

Source: UVM News

Three University of Vermont faculty have been named to a list of the world’s most influential researchers, based on the number of times their published studies have been cited by other researchers over the past decade. Researchers on the list are in the top 1 percent of all scholars whose work has been cited. The prestigious Highly Cited Researchers list is compiled and published annually by Clarivate Analytics.

UVM faculty named to the list are William Copeland, professor of psychiatry, and Mary Cushman, professor of medicine and of pathology and laboratory medicine, both in UVM’s Larner College of Medicine. Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment, was also named to the list.

“The Highly Cited Researchers list is the gold standard for work that is making a real difference,” said Patty Prelock, University of Vermont provost. “We couldn’t be more proud that the research accomplishments of Drs. Copeland, Cushman and Ricketts have earned them inclusion in this select group.”

William Copeland, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry in the Larner College of Medicine and director of research, Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families.

Trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Vermont, Copeland specializes in childhood mental illness and early adversity. With support from the National Institute for Mental Health, the National Institute for Drug Abuse, the National Institute for Child Health and Development and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, his studies have resulted in more than 100 scientific publications, including Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Nature Neuroscience, American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, Lancet: Psychiatry, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been covered in such national news outlets as Slate, the New York Times, TIME magazine and CNN. 

Currently, Copeland is principal investigator of the community-representative Great Smoky Mountains Study, which has been following 1420 participants in rural Appalachia for over 25 years to understand the long-term consequences of early adverse experiences.            

His research focuses on how childhood mental illness and other adversities compromise health and functioning across the lifespan, including how early experiences impact different biological systems. Copeland also teaches undergraduate students in the “Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies” course as part of the Behavioral Change Health Studies Minor.

Copeland was named in the Psychiatry and Psychology category. He was previously named to the Highly Cited Researchers list 2017.

Mary Cushman, professor of medicine and of pathology and laboratory medicine, Larner College of Medicine, University Scholar.

Cushman is an international expert on the epidemiology of coagulation, inflammation and other vascular-related domains in relation to etiology and pathogenesis of stroke, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular diseases and other diseases of aging. She conducts research and publishes as a key investigator on a number of longitudinal health studies and has been a recipient of continuous National Institutes of Health funding for more than 20 years. 

Also the medical director of the thrombosis and hemostasis program at the UVM Medical Center, Cusham is editor-in-chief of the newest journal of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis, Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis. She was recently awarded the American Heart Association’s Population Research Prize.

Cushman leads a large research laboratory and mentors UVM graduate students in the clinical and translational science and public health programs, postdoctoral students, as well as medical students and residents and fellows in UVM Medical Center training programs. She is also a University Scholar at UVM. 

Cushman’s category was Cross-Field, which identifies researchers with substantial influence across several fields. Cushman was also named to the Highly Cited Researchers list last year.

Taylor Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment and Gund Professor at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Ricketts studies environmental issues Vermont and worldwide. His over 130 scientific publications range from investigations of climate impacts on global crop pollination to analyses of the economic and health benefits provided to humans by forests, urban parks, wetlands, reefs, and other natural areas.

Ricketts is a pioneering scholar in the field of ecosystem services, which quantifies the benefits that nature provides to people. He co-founded the Natural Capital Project, a partnership among universities and NGOs to map and value the benefits of nature. He also authored and edited two UN-sponsored efforts to assess global ecosystems and their contributions to human wellbeing.

As a teacher and scholar, Ricketts explores a critical question: How can we meet the needs of people and nature in an increasingly crowded, changing world? Besides leading UVM’s Gund Insitute for Environment and the Taylor Ricketts Lab, he teaches undergraduate and graduate classes, including Landscape Ecology (NR 220), Ecosystem Services (NR 342), and Biodiversity: Patterns and Processes (EnSc 295).

Taylor was selected in the Environment and Ecology category. This is the fourth consecutive year Ricketts has been named to the list of Highly Cited Researchers.

The methodology that determines the high-impact researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts from the Institute of Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics. It uses Essential Science Indicators, a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data from the Web of Science, the premier web-based environment of scientific and scholarly research literature totaling over 33,000 journals.

View the Highly Cited Researchers 2019 list. 

Source: UVM News

For the third consecutive year, the University of Vermont Grossman School of Business’ Sustainable Innovation MBA has been named the No. 1 “Best Green MBA” program by The Princeton Review.

“We are honored to be named the #1 Green MBA by The Princeton Review for the third year in a row,” said Sustainable Innovation MBA program director Caroline Hauser. “We have built an MBA program with sustainability at its core that trains students to view the biggest challenges of our time as opportunities for value creation. Businesses need leaders with this knowledge and perspective to remain competitive in an increasingly complex world. We are excited to be recognized as a leader in a growing peer group of MBA programs at the intersection of business and sustainability.”

By being recognized as the top “Green MBA” for 2018, 2019 and 2020, the continued ranking success underscores that, while the program retains the foundational business school toolkit required for graduates to succeed in business, its complete redesign five years ago prepares and equips the next generation of business leaders to transform existing businesses and create new enterprises that address critical issues facing the planet.

“Congratulations to our team for continuing to deliver an exceptional program that builds managerial and leadership capacity to address the global sustainability challenges faced by society” said Sanjay Sharma, dean of the Grossman School of Business. “With the #1 ranking three years in a row, the pressure is on us to continue to innovate and improve to stay ahead as others attempt to catch up.”

The Sustainable Innovation MBA is a one-year, AACSB-accredited program that boasts tight-knit cohorts of students who collaborate and move through the program together. During their short, yet intensive, time in the program, students learn from globally renowned business leaders, including Vermont-based companies that have excelled in social and sustainable enterprise, such as Ben & Jerry’s and Seventh Generation, and gain real-world experience through a required practicum. Previous practica have immersed students in topics from fighting poverty in Indonesia and Bangladesh using enterprise investment opportunities, to building a blockchain evaluation tool for development organizations.

The Princeton Review ranking adds to the growing international recognition of the program, which was recently ranked the No. 4 “Better World MBA” program worldwide in 2019 by Corporate Knights, a leading sustainable business publication based in Toronto.

In addition to being ranked No. 1 on the 2020 “Best Green MBA” programs list, the program was ranked the No. 10 “Best MBA for Nonprofits,” a list containing other prestigious schools including Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown, UT Austin, NYU, Harvard, and Babson. The Grossman School of Business at UVM was also named to the Princeton Review’s “Best Business Schools for 2020” list, a distinction shared with 248 other elite business schools across the nation.

The “Best Green MBA” rankings are based on students’ assessments of how well their school is preparing them in environmental/sustainability and social responsibility issues, and for a career in a green job market. The “Best Business Schools for 2020” list was based on data from surveys of more than 20,700 students attending the schools and of administrators at the graduate schools.

Source: UVM News

Journalists write “the first rough draft of history,” says a well-worn truth. Reporting and rapping out some of those first drafts was the day-to-day for alumnus Terrence Petty, Class of 1974, as an Associated Press correspondent based in Germany during the dramatic political shifts of the late 1980s. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to democratic revolutions in Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Petty says there was a distinct adrenaline rush to covering the breaking news in that time and place. 

The duty abroad was the realization of a dream for Petty, whose interest in Germany traces all the way back to a childhood fascination, growing up in Fair Haven, Vermont, with the state’s Revolutionary War history and the German mercenaries who fought in the Lake Champlain region. In college, Germany would be a particular area of focus as a UVM history major. 

Petty retired from his journalism career in 2017, having spent the previous eighteen years managing the AP’s news operation in Oregon. Living in Portland with his wife, Christina, and son, Tristan, the seasoned newsman has shifted his focus to diving deep on research and writing history’s later drafts in long form. His recent book, “Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler,” was published in print by The Associated Press in 2019, and a condensed version is available on Kindle. 

The project sprang from Petty’s interest in the years that preceded the Third Reich, the social, economic, and political circumstances of the Weimar Republic that led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The Munich Post was a small paper, circulation 15,000, with a decidedly socialist slant. Its editors were fearless in writing investigative pieces that exposed the brutality and corruption of Hitler’s circle and unfettered in pushing the boundaries on journalistic standards with lurid or sensational stories. For readers, knowing the looming horror of Nazi Germany makes Petty’s book all the more compelling, as the Post keeps the presses rolling through threats, physical attacks, and multiple libel cases upheld by Nazi-friendly judges. 

“As a journalist, I was trying to understand how different the news media landscape was in the 1920s and 1930s,” Petty says. “And I wanted to understand how a democracy failed. Why did people not listen to journalists like those at the Munich Post who were warning for about a decade regarding the dangers of this guy Adolf Hitler?” 

The phrase “enemy of the people” has a haunting ring, of course, in contemporary America, where President Donald Trump demonizes the media daily. Petty notes that echo inevitably comes up in questions after he gives a reading or talk about his research. 

“There are some very chilling parallels,” Petty says. Though he cautions against comparing different political eras and countries, some of the parallels lead him back to one of the fundamental premises of his book—what causes a democracy to fail? “Are there any freedoms that Americans would be willing to give up for whatever they would receive in return?” Petty wonders. “That’s the question that is still hanging in my mind.”  

Now at work on a new book about post-war West Germany, Petty says he’s motivated to sit down at his desk early every morning by a fundamental drive for a writer/historian. “There are so many nuances in history, really interesting stories, that may have been lost or never told. If I find them intriguing, I think other people will as well. I don’t want these things to be forgotten.” 

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont, Norwich University and food services provider Sodexo are among the winners of the 2019 New England Food Vision Prize. The prize, awarded by the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, is designed to encourage college and university campuses in the region to improve the health, sustainability and vitality of the region’s food system. 2019 marks the second annual round of $250,000 prizes. The grant competition invites food service leaders from the region’s 200 college and university campuses to submit bold, collaborative, catalytic ideas to increase the amount of regionally produced food on campus menus.

The foundation announced six teams of winners today representing 16 campuses. Each of the six teams of winners will receive an award of up to $250,000 to begin implementation of their project.

The University of Vermont and Norwich University, in partnership with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the University of Vermont Medical Center, Vermont Food Venture Center and the Pioneer Valley Growers Association, will use the prize funds to invest in state-of-the-art new equipment for food processors in the region. The new equipment will allow them to buy and prepare much more locally grown produce than they do currently and sell it to a variety of institutions who don’t have the staff to do the processing themselves. By coordinating higher education and healthcare institutions, the team can also mitigate seasonal demand challenges that are created by campuses alone. The upfront investment provided by the prize funds leads to a sustainable model that provides a stable and predictable demand for processed local food for institutional markets.

“The Kendall Foundation grant aligns well with the University of Vermont’s land grant mission of providing service and support to the state of Vermont,” said Dennis DePaul, associate dean of student affairs, who oversees the university’s dining program. “It will allow us to use the university’s buying power to purchase significantly more produce from local growers and to add small Vermont farms to our supply chain. The program will benefit both our students, by giving them access to fresh, healthy locally grown food throughout the school year, and the local agricultural economy.”

“This is a great opportunity to serve more locally produced, healthy products in our institutions, while also growing markets for our farmers,” said Jon Ramsay, executive director of the Vermont Food Venture Center.

The New England Food Vision Prize is designed to accelerate progress towards the New England Food Vision, which calls for the region to produce at least 50 percent of its food by 2060, while supporting healthy food for all, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities. The prize is designed to support ideas that result in higher procurement of regional food by institutions, more regional food on campus menus and increased demand for regional food by students while on campus and beyond the campus as alumni.

“Our Vermont First initiative was created to identify and develop sustainable solutions for our clients, customers and communities where we serve,” said Phil Harty, Sodexo senior vice president, North America Operations, Universities. “We are excited to partner with University of Vermont, Norwich University, Vermont Food Venture Center and the Pioneer Valley Growers Association to create efficiencies and grow their facilities.

Ideas for the prize were required to be collaborative, with two or more campuses working together. Ideas also had to be replicable and sustainable, applicable outside of the specific contextual factors of one campus or one period of time. Applicants also had to demonstrate how they would measure impact and include elements of movement-building, such as growing demand or knowledge around regionally produced food.

“We are thrilled to have sparked such interest and creative thinking within just two short years,” said Andrew Kendall, executive director of the Kendall Foundation. “The winning teams and their partners are leveraging their purchasing clout in the marketplace together with engaging their students to create the consistent, long-term demand that local farmers, fishers, and ranchers need to sustain and grow their operations. We believe that the ideas represented by this year’s winners reflect the kind of ingenuity needed to build a healthier, sustainable food system in New England.”

The Henry P. Kendall Foundation is a New England philanthropic enterprise that is part of a strong and rapidly expanding network aiming to create a resilient and healthy New England food system.

For a full list of prize winners, please visit kendall.org/prize.

 

 

Source: UVM News