Editor’s Note: The Underground Workshop is seeking submissions from Vermont’s high school and college students. Students can contribute to our series about the BLM flag, our series of “profiles in resilience” from our school communities in the pandemic, or independent stories of their own, like the article below. For more information please contact Ben Heintz, the Workshop’s editor, at ben@vtdigger.org.
by Olivia Belrose, of Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans
In 2002, Larissa Hebert received her master’s degree in comparative literature from Dartmouth College. She wrote her thesis on the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” comparing the French and German versions.
Hebert’s interest in German fairytales came from having taken UVM Professor Wolfgang Mieder’s course in the late 1990′. Mieder was also Hebert’s adviser, and she always looked forward to his animation and excitement when talking about the classes she might take.
Today, Hebert is an English teacher at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans and an adviser to the next generation of critical thinkers. Some of her students will go to UVM, but they will no longer be able to major in German, religious studies, geology or classics. Due to an $8.6 million deficit, UVM will cut low-enrollment programs in liberal arts, focusing their investments elsewhere on campus.
With the department cuts come difficult questions: How will the community and character of UVM change when these departments are gone? How will UVM’s graduates be prepared to face the social and environmental issues of today’s world? And how will UVM’s students find their passion without exploring a variety of disciplines?
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Fenton
The Professor
On Dec. 15, UVM English professor Elizabeth Fenton participated in a car protest on South Prospect Street in Burlington. The turnout was smaller than she expected but a lot of people made signs, and they circled the block for 45 minutes.
Fenton is a UVM alumna of the class of 2000 and an expert on early American literature who has taught at UVM for 14 years. She likes discussing her students’ future plans, and the vibrant culture of UVM, but this year the English department is among the programs slated for up to 113 faculty cuts.
According to Fenton, many department chairs found out about the cuts only hours before the rest of the faculty.
“The timing of the rollout seems to have been very fast and designed to prevent the information from being disseminated widely before [department] administrators had time to prepare their own statements,” Fenton said.
While some of these departments in the college have small major numbers, they teach a large number of students, especially in religion and geology, in order to fulfill requirements for liberal arts degrees. Furthermore, Fenton said departments like classics interact with a smaller number of students, but have a “rich and vibrant community.”
According to Fenton, the faculty from the affected departments may transfer to other departments, but their courses will need to satisfy the curricular needs of those departments. Fenton said if those faculty cannot be reassigned, they will most likely lose their jobs, and with a limited job market for professors, it’s difficult to find another job in their specific professions.
“I think it will be a long time before we fully understand the magnitude of what this is going to do,” she said.
“These are people who have built lives here, and they’re important to the UVM community. Some of these professors have received grants and teaching awards,” Fenton said. “If they leave, that’s a permanent loss to the institution of their intellect and their talent for mentoring students.”
Fenton said it’s difficult to cut faculty members with tenure, which grants a professor permanent employment, without eliminating their department, in which case the whole tenure line of faculty could be fired. Many UVM faculty are considered senior lecturers, with a multiyear contract without the protection of tenure, which increases the risk of termination during contract renewal.
“I have a colleague who was four years away from retirement,” Fenton said. “He was a highly respected professor because of his exceptional job performance, but his contract happened to be up this year, and he was terminated.”
Photo courtesy of Woodrow Thompson
The Geology Alumnus
For Woodrow Thompson, no day is ever the same in geology.
“Geology teaches people about how the earth is made, the mountains and how our oceans formed,” Thompson said. “It impacts all facets of our environment.”
According to Thompson, there are many aspects of geology in our day-to-day lives that people are unaware of, from the groundwater located in gravel deposits to the soils on which Vermont farmers thrive, to the many geological hazards such as landslides and issues of water quality.
Thompson is a 1971 alumnus of UVM’s graduate geology program. Aside from working for the Maine Geological Survey from 1975 to 2014, Thompson was a lecturer at the University of Maine, Colby College and the University of Maine Farmington to fill in for absent faculty members. He has led many educational field trips in the White Mountains with the Mount Washington Observatory and the New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference, published research on the glacial geology of Maine and the White Mountains, was the chief compiler and science editor for the glacial map of Maine, and mapped all over New England. Even in retirement, Thompson maps for the State Geological Survey in New Hampshire.
Thompson studies the effect of the Ice Age, which plays an important role in studying climate change and global warming. Thompson said geologists study these effects by taking samples of sediment core from the bottom of a lake, organic remains, pollen content, oxygen isotopes and by reconstructing a record of climate and vegetation change since the glaciers disappeared.
With climate change, Thompson also emphasized the importance of geology in studying the recurring forest fires. He said geology students have been taking survey cores from lake bottoms and looking for charcoal layers to prove past fires.
Vermont has relied on UVM’s geology department for mapping projects and discussing geological hazards. Without the geology department, what will happen to these projects?
During his time at UVM, Thompson remembers the welcoming, tightknit crew of people from graduate students to faculty members, who possessed a lot of excitement in what they did. As the secretary of the Friends of the Pleistocene, Thompson sent an email to a couple of hundred people throughout Canada, New England and Pennsylvania from other colleges and organizations and wrote letters to the UVM administration to show support and respect for the program.Â
“Lake Champlain was all ocean. It came up through the St. Lawrence Valley and into the lake where you can find marine clays and real shells, not just the impress,” Thompson said. “It would be a shame not to have this opportunity for students.”
“You can go anywhere in the world from the North to the South Pole. I’ve worked in Antarctica, Idaho and all over the mainland,” Thompson said. “Geology is worldwide; you can’t get away from it.”
The Religion Major
Some students, like Katherine Brennan, weren’t going to sit back and watch the administration slash their program.
Brennan, a senior religion major, enjoys the people aspect and examining the ideas of society’s politics through the lens of individual people.
Originally a political science major, Brennan was not satisfied with her first choice of study, decided to take a religion class her freshman year, and immediately fell in love with the discipline.
In 2019, there was another push to cut liberal arts programs, and Brennan started to worry about her favorite professors leaving and going to another institution.
“I resolved within myself to go with them wherever they ended up,” Brennan said. “UVM isn’t a place I want to be if my major isn’t available or considered valuable.”
Any students who are currently majoring in a cut program will be “grandfathered,” graduating with their degree. Beginning in 2022, if the cuts go through, incoming students won’t be able to major in religion.
Brennan started a petition through change.org that quickly generated 4,450 signatures. She ended up receiving comments from parents of prospective students who are considering attending UVM, who questioned the institution for not valuing liberal arts.
According to Brennan, having a religion department is important for students, but also for a community like Burlington, where there are diverse beliefs.
“There are not many programs that teach respect, recognizing mistreatment and remedying the situation if possible,” Brennan said.
The religion department has given Brennan lots of learning opportunities beyond the classroom. She helped the Fleming Museum update its African Gods exhibit. For one of her assignments, she was asked to choose and observe a religion of her choice. Brennan observed a Catholic church in downtown Burlington for a French Catholic service and later wrote about the impact of music in French Catholicism.
“I got in touch with the Congolese immigrant population in Burlington, and they still reach out here and there. I’ve been able to practice my French as I help them with certain things,” Brennan said. “I would never have found them having not pursued that project.”
Brennan said religion is an area of study that people tend to forget about, though it is everywhere.
“The study of religion isn’t about whose God is right,” Brennan said. “It’s about what motivates people and how those motivations change the world.”
According to Brennan, the university is cutting a lot of departments and majors that fulfill diversity requirements, which proves it is “money-motivated and not as people-motivated.”
“It just seems a little ridiculous to me when they say that they value all of the things that humanities teach so much,” Brennan said. “Yet, here we are facing cuts against humanities.”
Photo courtesy of Woodrow Thompson
Two Alumni of the German Department
Larissa (2000) and Phillip Hebert (2001), brother and sister-in-law, both studied German at UVM. Larissa Hebert’s undergraduate degree in both German and English helped her get a position at Milton Junior/Senior High School teaching “exploratory languages” to eighth-graders. Her passion for writing eventually led her to teach high school English.
Phillip Hebert is an academic program manager for an MBA program called Building Sustainability at the Technical University of Berlin, which trains students in architecture and engineering for employment in technology or business. Hebert advises students as they develop their schedules. He has a strong connection to German; he grew up speaking it with his mother, who is an Austrian citizen. He has lived in Germany for the past 18 years, where he manages his family’s apartment complex.
The German department was like a family. Both Phillip and Larissa Hebert had unique opportunities and relationships as German majors. German professor Wolfgang (“Papa,” as many students fondly call him) Mieder was particularly caring and influential.
“I don’t think American institutions stress enough how important languages are,” Phillip Hebert said. “I work with international students who come from all over the world with the ability to speak six languages.”
Larissa Hebert, originally interested in international business, ended up double majoring in German and English. She connected to the German culture through reading German literature and especially by studying abroad.
Hebert said studying a language also teaches students about cultural differences. She said if students aren’t studying a foreign language, their opportunities for places to study abroad can become more limited.
For both Larissa and Phillip Hebert, their education in German opened up opportunities that have greatly impacted their lives.
Larissa Hebert received an internship at American Expeditions International, a business in Vermont that formerly organized New England bed-and-breakfast tours for Europeans. Since most of the customers couldn’t speak English, German helped Hebert to communicate and understand the cultural differences.
For Phillip Hebert, it was an internship at Music Contact International, which turned into a full-time position thanks to connections that Professor Mieder had with the company.
Larissa Hebert stressed the importance of having a state university that gives students the opportunity to explore their passion, especially for those who don’t know what to study in college.
“It reminds me of when schools start cutting arts programs, and then what happens to those creative students?” she said. “We aren’t all engineers and business professionals, and I learned that international business was not for me.”
“There’s no rule that says an engineer can’t study a language. In the business world, if you speak a foreign language, it will actually benefit you,” Phillip Hebert said. “English is naturally a world language, but there are billions of people who don’t speak it.”
According to Phillip Hebert, institutions of higher learning have the responsibility to promote the liberal arts, even if those programs aren’t necessarily making money.
“Who knows what to study at 18 years old?” he said. “If they’re not exposed to it, how will they learn about it?”