click to enlarge - Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
- Vermont College of Fine Arts campus
A new undergraduate engineering program will occupy five buildings in Montpelier vacated by the Vermont College of Fine Arts, which has moved its residencies to schools in Colorado and Pennsylvania.
The nonprofit Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability has agreed to purchase the VCFA buildings and will start using them this fall as a campus of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, said Greenway’s cocreator, former Vermont education secretary Rebecca Holcombe.
Greenway will offer semester-long residencies in sustainable and equitable engineering for students enrolled at Elizabethtown, a private, four-year institution, Holcombe said. She expects 20 Elizabethtown students to enroll this fall and hopes the program will grow to accommodate more students and a full-year exchange.
“Green energy and green tech is one of Vermont’s most promising sectors,” Holcombe said. “It has comparatively high wages, yet we do not have the breadth and the strength of the pipeline to put people into those jobs. We’re interested in contributing to that.”
The program will provide foundational math and science skills to students from traditionally disadvantaged groups to help them enter the engineering field, Holcombe said. And it will offer engineering courses in the area of sustainable construction, such as solar energy.
Surveys show that engineering students want coursework that helps them solve sustainability problems, Holcombe said in an interview on Wednesday.
“It also gives them concrete, marketable skills,” she said. “If everyone is going to participate in the green energy transformation, we have to have engineers coming from rural communities who can do this work in rural areas as well.”
Conventional engineering programs have sought unsuccessfully for decades to attract a more diverse student body, the program’s founders said in their application for a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant.
“A lot of students go into engineering because they have a strong high school program in science and math and a good guidance counselor, or because they know someone, a parent or an uncle or something, who was already in engineering,” said Rachel Koh, an engineer who recently left a teaching position at Smith College to develop the Greenway curriculum and teach in the program. “We want to meet students from rural Vermont who maybe took calculus online and say, ‘You can do this here.’”
Montpelier residents and officials have been watching the VCFA campus closely since president Leslie Ward announced in June 2022 that the college would sell most of its buildings and move its residencies to Colorado College and Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Ward said it was too expensive for VCFA to maintain the buildings, which were empty nine months of the year. VCFA has retained College Hall, the centerpiece of the hilltop campus, and its administrative offices will remain there. The campus has 30 acres and about a dozen buildings. Some of the space has tenants.
A group of prospective buyers briefly emerged last year and held a public meeting about their plans for a health facility in three of the campus buildings, but they later backed out.
On Wednesday, Greenway said it plans to buy three dorms — one of which includes a dining hall — and two classroom buildings.
Many locals, including
MontpelierMayor Jack McCullough, have said they would like to see the buildings converted to housing. But McCullough said on Wednesday that he's glad the structures will be used for education.
“The whole idea of trying to make Montpelier a real hub of sustainable engineering is attractive, and it aligns well with our ideas of net-zero development and being environmentally responsible,” McCullough said.
Tavia Gilbert, who graduated from VCFA’s writing program in 2013 and taught in the program between 2016 and 2022, had rallied other alumni, students and faculty in an unsuccessful effort to get administrators to change their minds about moving the residencies.
“It’s really the end of an era,” Gilbert said on Wednesday. “It’s a shame.”
Holcombe said she started Greenway two years ago with Troy McBride, who cofounded the solar company Norwich Technologies. McBride served as tenured faculty at Elizabethtown College before moving to Dartmouth College, she said.
Holcombe served as Vermont’s secretary of education from 2014 to 2018. She sought the Democratic line for governor in the 2020 primary but lost. She was elected to the Vermont House in 2022 and represents Norwich,
Sharon, Strafford and Thetford.
Correction, July 6, 2023: A previous version of this story described Holcombe's House district inaccurately.