After just two workdays in the office, Interim President Mike Smith had his first Board of Trustees meeting Monday afternoon where he announced the reversal of the decisions to downgrade athletics programs at the Johnson and Vermont Technical College campuses and lay off numerous library employees.
On April 14, 2023, an email was sent to the student body on behalf of Chancellor Sophie Zdatny, releasing information regarding Dr. Parwinder Grewal’s resignation. His resignation was announced to be “effective immediately for personal reasons.” In Dr. Grewal’s absence, the board of trustees elected Mike Smith, former Vermont Agency of Human Services secretary, as interim president of Vermont State University. He was to start a week after Dr. Grewal’s resignation for an “approximately six month” term.
As one of his first acts as interim president, Smith recommended the continuation of all existing athletics programs on every VTSU campus. This means that each program will stay in their respective division for the next three years. During this time, Smith is creating key benchmarks for each campus to determine the viability of these programs. These metrics will be worked on over the summer with athletic directors. Some examples he gave were the number of student-athletes per program, retention rates, the correlation between athletics and retention, the percentage of students participating in athletics, student engagement, and if teams can be fielded moving forward. Smith would also like to sit down with the athletic directors and coaches yearly and find out what we are doing and what can be changed if these metrics are not met.
This will allow the Board of Trustees to have hard data on what is working and what is not. After three years of this data, Smith thinks it would be best to re-evaluate where to go with the athletics programs. Trustee Sarah Truckle also said that this will bring key insight into “the individual natures of each of our campuses.”
Smith also announced that, regarding the libraries on each VTSU campus, new actions “will be implemented fairly quickly.” Smith will be withdrawing the layoff notices of library staff that were announced in February. However, the interim president will still be streamlining the libraries. “There is a move towards the digital evolution or revolution… as we move forward,” he claimed. Smith then went on to say that his office will work with all parties to see what this means and how the jobs in the library will evolve. This process will include working with unions to make sure that this streamlining of the libraries is done in the most efficient and productive way. Smith understands that both of these decisions are part of the transformation and affect how the university will move towards the new era that “[we] have to move to.”
“I think it is important that we have the people in place to do this evolution or revolution in our process. I want a message that libraries are for books. But some books have other ways to access, including digital.”
Smith believes that rescinding these decisions made under previous leadership is a way to “put them behind us” and make it so these two issues are no longer a distraction from the rest of the transformation efforts.
Interim president Smith has already been on both VTC campuses and the Castleton campus, with plans to visit the Johnson and Lyndon campuses this week. He also announced that he will be attending all graduations.