UVM Faculty, Students, and Alumni Plan Campus-Wide Teach-In on Why UVM Should Defend, not Defund, Liberal Arts Education

Teach-In Livestream Link (with live captioning): https://youtu.be/VSjVQKL-TKI

For more information contact: uvmunitedagainstthecuts@gmail.com

Burlington, VT—A coalition of University of Vermont students and faculty will hold an all-day, online “teach-in” to spotlight the value of threatened teachers and fields of study and reveal the truth about the artificial “structural deficit” in the College of Arts and Sciences: Wednesday, February 3, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, via YouTube Livestream.

The event comes just one day before university trustees will begin discussing a proposal to close down the departments of Classics, Religion, and Geology and eliminate more than 25 majors, minors, and programs in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The coalition, UVM United Against the Cuts, argues that these closures plus the firing of the three long-time instructors will not only limit students’ educational options and seriously damage the University’s reputation, but are also financially unnecessary.

For decades faculty and staff have dedicated themselves to building the University of Vermont’s reputation as a public ivy, a rare state university that combines the expansive opportunities of a research institution with the intellectual rigor and individual attention of a liberal arts college.

In the past five years, however, administrative priorities—including systematic underfunding of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and overspending on extra-academic amenities, consultants, and administration—have undermined UVM’s promise to its students and its reputation for excellence.

CAS is at the heart of the university’s mission to provide a comprehensive liberal arts education, offering courses in natural science, social science, humanities, and the arts, which are essential to the education of students in all seven of UVM’s undergraduate degree-granting colleges. Now UVM’s hard-won reputation is imperiled by a manufactured budget crisis. What UVM faces, teach-in participants assert, is not a financial crisis but a values crisis.

Faculty-taught classes include “Why Religion? Why Liberal Arts?”, “Classics and Crisis: An Ancient Response to a Disastrous State of Affairs,” and “How UVM Geology Students Are Helping to Solve Vermont’s Environmental Problems.”

Each class, planners explain, will highlight the vitality of the liberal arts education that benefits all UVM students plus the gaps in knowledge that the planned cuts and closures will create. For instance, senior lecturer James Williamson, targeted for termination after 31 years of service, will lead a class on Native American literature—a subject that will vanish from the curriculum if the cuts are not reversed.

Also featured will be two sessions on the Myths v. Facts of UVM budget and spending priorities and an examination of how UVM administrators manufactured a CAS budget crisis to divert funds elsewhere.

A full teach-in schedule is coming soon with the launch of the UVM United Against the Cuts website:

http://uvmunited.org. UVM United Against the Cuts can also be found on Facebook or followed on Twitter and Instagram.