click to enlarge - ANNE WALLACE ALLEN ©️ Seven Days
- Vermont State University-Lyndon
Vermont State College trustees have chosen Elizabeth Mauch, president of a Lutheran college in Kansas, as the system’s new chancellor.
Mauch will start on January 1. She said she and her husband had been wanting to move to Vermont to be closer to their daughter, who is a first-year at Middlebury College, and recently bought a house nearby in Cornwall.
Mauch is president of Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan. She received an undergraduate degree in math from Moravian College — now Moravian University — and a masters and PhD in math from Lehigh University.
She’s moving to a college system that has undergone an extensive and controversial overhaul in the past few years as administrators combined three institutions into one: Vermont State University, known as VTSU.
Administrators
announced in October that VTSU will cut 10 academic programs and eliminate about 30 full-time faculty positions. Another 13 academic programs will be consolidated, and 11 will be moved to new campus locations. The administration also plans to sell some campus land and buildings.
Mauch’s job will be to continue cutting costs, said Lynn Dickinson, chair of the board of trustees.
“We still have a lot of work to do with the transformation,” Dickinson said on Wednesday.
Mauch, who will oversee the presidents of VTSU and Community College of Vermont, said in an interview on Wednesday that she’ll have three priorities in her new position: trimming the budget, publicizing the system's offerings to Vermonters in order to raise enrollment, and coming up with new degree programs and other offerings.
“What are some of the degrees we don’t even know about?” Mauch said of the third priority. “How can this system continue to meet the higher ed needs of all Vermonters?”
Mauch served as dean of the College of Education at Bloomsburg University, part of the Pennsylvania state system of higher education, from 2009 to 2017. She launched a regional STEM education center there.
Dickinson said Mauch’s experience will be valuable.
She's raised $32 million for renovations, programming and an enrollment campaign at Bethany College, Dickinson noted. Mauch said she expects to secure external funding from grants or gifts in Vermont as well.
State college alumni, staff and faculty have strongly protested the recent budget cuts and earlier ones. Many have questioned whether a chancellor, a position with a salary of about $250,000, is needed at all. Dickinson said it is. The board alone cannot carry out the tasks associated with running the system, she said.
“We all have outside jobs, and we’re extremely busy and time-constrained,” she said. “The board looks at things at the 30,000-foot level, and administrators do the day-to-day work.”
click to enlarge Thirty people applied for the chancellor's job, and six were interviewed, said Katherine Levasseur, the system's director of external and governmental affairs.
On Wednesday, associate professor of biology Bill Landesman, who helped interview candidates, said Mauch was a good choice.
“They selected someone with excellent ideas, outstanding communication skills and a demonstrated record of success in higher education leadership,” said Landesman, who works on VTSU’s Johnson campus.
“She previously was a math professor, so will bring a faculty perspective to the position,” he added.
The chancellor's role is now filled by Sophie Zdatny, who has been employed at the state college system for nine years, the last three and a half as chancellor.
The system has seen several recent governance changes. While CCV’s president, Joyce Judy, has been in her position since 2009, VTSU, which was formally created in July, is on its third president.
Its first, Parwinder Grewal, resigned in April after less than a year on the job. An interim president, Mike Smith, oversaw sweeping changes to the system after he stepped in to replace Grewal, but he agreed to stay only six months. This fall, the trustees hired another interim president, David Bergh, who is expected to serve for about 18 months. Trustees then plan to appoint someone permanent.
While high turnover is common in higher education, Dickinson said trustees believe Mauch plans to stay around.
“She wasn’t hired as an interim; she was hired to be as permanent a chancellor as you can get in higher education at this point,” Dickinson said. “We hope that she’s here for a while.”
Mauch said she plans to be.
“I am looking forward to a good long career here,” she said. “What gets me up every morning is to try to look for students who might not otherwise go to college and see what kind of impact we can have on their lives.”