University of Vermont - State of the University (2026)

Let's give him a hand. Thank you so much. I'm so pleased to welcome to the stage, Reverend Dr. James Ross III. This is our land acknowledgement. The campus of the University of Vermont sits within a place of gathering and exchange, shaped by water and stewarded by ongoing generations of indigenous peoples, in particular the Western Abanaki. Acknowledging the relations between water, land, and people is in harmony with the mission of the university. Acknowledging the serious and significant impacts of our histories on indigenous peoples and their homelands is a is a part of the university's ongoing work of teaching, research, and engagement and an essential reminder of our past and our interconnected futures. for the many of us gathered on the land. UVM respects the indigenous knowledge interwoven in this place and commits to uplifting the indigenous peoples and and cultures present on this land and within this community. Welcome to our first State of the University address. Isn't it wonderful to feel the energy coming back up on campus again? All right. So, I'm going to give you some cues so that you know how this is going to go today. There are going to be three videos. On the gold slides, you'll see an announcement, something that's new news that we're sharing today. And I want to tell you, there's a lot of information here, but there are so many amazing things happening at this university that there's no way I could talk about them all in just one set of remarks. But everything that you see here today is a product of the incredible work of people all across this university. And this is how it's going to break down. First, I'm going to talk about the challenges that we're facing. Then, I'm going to talk about the things that we have done that have elevated this university nationally and internationally. Then, I'm going to move into our strategic plan, green, gold, and bold. And then, we're going to have a few special announcements to talk about some of the dazzling things we're seeing in the future. So, let me begin with those headwinds. We are facing a number of serious challenges. I had somebody say to me the other day, "The public is just starting to hear about the demographic cliff, but we knew it was coming. For a long time, for at least the last 15 years, we have been aware of this demographic cliff. And we know that it's going to change the way that all of us recruit. It's going to change the kind of students that we can reach out to. It's going to increase the competition." And the cliff moves in short stops for the first few years. and then it's a really significant decline. So, we're facing those challenges. We're also facing changes in federal research support. That landscape has been completely shifted. We have the second highest median age in the US. Our demographic is upside down. And that means we have fewer young people within our state to come to our land grant university. We also have a state with a small population which means there are limited ways that they can support the university and that shifts our tuition price point from most public land grants. And we are under that enrollment pressure because there's so much increased competition. And we've seen challenges in our home city, the city we've called home since our birth. And we are partnering to help work on those changes. These challenges are why our strategic plan is so important right now. So as we face this demographic cliff, one of the things we need to understand is that New England is the place where we have been hit the hardest. And if you look at the states around us, some of them have quite dramatic declines like New York. We've also had to work together to face unprecedented financial challenges as a result of this. Do you know that the entire sector of higher ed faced a ratings downgrade this year? The entire sector, not an not an individual university, all of us because of these changes. So, we are building a three-year planning process so we can think ahead and instead of being reactive, we can be proactive in the face of the changes that are before us. I am so proud. One of the things that makes me the most proud to be at this university is our deep and profound commitment to our values. We are a valuesdriven university and our common ground values guide us to the way that we can find our path through these difficult periods. We also know that students in the age group that tend to come to university make their choices based on an institution or an organization that aligns with their values. So we know that's an advantage to us and I want to thank Air Ahmed for the work he's been doing to bring our common ground values into that strategic plan in a robust way and his whole team and to all the folks who work across the university on that effort. Now I want to talk about some of the ways that we have been identified by our peers and across the country for the work we're doing. Somebody told me I should come up here and say, "What's the state of the university?" Vermont. It is indeed. And there are so many amazing things about us. We have been named the number one school in the country for making a social impact. Isn't that an amazing way to describe our institution? Our MBA has been named number one in the world and number two globally for the better world MBA. We are a place that is in alignment with our values and striving every day to execute on those. We're number 11 in top green colleges, 68 in top public national colleges and universities, and we have an amazing home. Number 10 best small college towns. These are from this year. Number six, America's best towns to visit. We know we have challenges. We are working on them together. We have our fifth consecutive gold rating for AI stars, which is our commitment to sustainability and our impact on the world around us. And we are number three in Peacecore volunteers. Are you surprised by that incredible statistic? Of course we are because we train our students to think like our research researchers think to think how our faculty think. They choose us because of this. We care about our impact on the world. We want to make the world a better place. It's one of our distinguishing characteristics and it's one of the distinguishing characteristics of our state. We also have an extraordinary number of fullbrite scholars, Goldwater scholars. We've made such an incredible impact over the years with these students who go out and make their mark on the world. And we know where we're headed. Today when you came in, you found on your seat just a little reminder, a compass with our logo on the reverse side to remind us that our values and our strategic plan will guide us through whatever challenges that we face together. So now I'm excited to talk about our strategic plan, green, gold, and bold. And I'm going to highlight just a couple of lines here. With optimism and purpose. With optimism and purpose, the UVM community leads boldly to solve complex challenges. We will not be daunted in the face of the challenges before us. We will not be bent by the hardships that we will have to face. We will come together and solve our common problems. We will build a better university. We will build a better future for the state of Vermont. And we have the tools to do it and the history to do it. Innovation has been in our DNA for over 200 years. I just have this slide got so crowded. We had to decide which Pulitzer Prize winner are we going to take off this slide because we have so many amazing people in our history, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner, Pulitzer Prize winners, CEOs of tech companies, the greatest band of the '9s, Olympians, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court, the first woman lieutenant governor and the first African-American Fi Beta Kappa scholar. Pretty amazing, right? And of course, I didn't name anybody. And I'll tell you that right now, I'm a quarter done. Across the university and in every field, we are doing pathbreaking research. These are just a few quick hits to show you that across this university, regardless of the area of study, people are asking big questions, creating bold solutions to complex problems. We have been at the forefront across this university's history. Now, I mentioned to you we're going to have three videos, and I want to take just a moment to mention that our English department is about to have its 200th anniversary. And you might think, yes. All right. You might think that sounds pretty cool, but when you understand why we're having our 200th university and the fact that we were the first English department in the country. And when I tell you that had everything to do with James Marsh wanting to align the values that we teach our students in the language of business and government and family. He wanted to bring together those value systems and not have them bifurcated off in another language. So now you'll hear from the chair of our English department, Mary Lu Kit, about this amazing anniversary. How does language work? How can you use language um and use art to make yourself better? And by making yourself better, make society better. At the University of Vermont, the study of English is a place where you can really learn from amazing scholars and amazing colleagues. Not only were we the first English department in the country, we've endured, we've grown, and we've at various different points been on the vanguard of higher education in the United States. The origin of UBM's English department is that it was a critical part of then University of Vermont President James Marsh plan to design higher education and it was this bold radical experiment. This is how we understand ourselves. It's how we work upon the world. For over 200 years, the English department at the University of Vermont has earnestly striven to provide students with what they need to be successful in their futures. And right now at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we are committed and actively engaged in doing the same thing. This has had been happening over our history and across the university. these bold ways of thinking. The thing every high school, every middle school in this country has an English department, every university. James Marsh's lecture on why he was doing this can be a found can be found in the archives of universities all across this country because we innovated a new way of thinking and what we know is that those value systems are going to help us as we face new challenges ahead. So what is our next chapter? Our next chapter is built on this bold thinking. I'm going to walk us through the four pillars of our strategic plan. The first forge bold futures, student connections, purpose, and impact. We have incredible students and the exceptional quality of our firstear class is something I want you to be incredibly aware of as we launch. We continue to draw people from beyond our region. Over 50% of our students are from outside of New England. 13% of our class is firstgen and it's the second most diverse class ever in our history. And I'm proud to note that over twothirds of these students participated in community service as they prepared to come to UVM. And Verters play such an important role in our class and in our identity. We have over 50% of Vermont validictorians who come to UVM and many of our Vermont students are peligible students or our firstgen students and we are changing their lives so they can go on to change the world. And we are striving in every way. And with our strategic plan, we will do even more of this in an even more thoughtful and and powerful way where we can measure our results in helping students succeed. But let me share with you some of the data on what we've done to help students succeed. Our first year retention rate is 89% which is incredibly high for a public university. In fact, if you take a look at our graduation rates and compare them to the national average, which is just below the number, the big number on this slide, the national average for the four-year rate is 45%. Ours is 76. For the six-year rate, 64%, ours is 81. And we can do even better, and we will with our strategic plan. I'm also really proud because students are struggling with this as they graduate right now. that 94% of our students are employed within 6 months and 95% of them are happy with their positions and feel like they're doing the work that matters in the world. I'll tell you what, because of who we are. The measures that just look at earnings when somebody graduates do not tell the whole story for the University of Vermont. Many of our students want to go on to work in sustainability, in education, in social justice fields. They want to be a part of making the world a better place. And their priority is making an impact, not making a dollar. But we want them to have meaningful careers. And we want them to be able to sustain themselves. And that's who we are. And I am very proud to announce today, as I mentioned when we had these gold slides, this is new information that our Vermont UVM Promise Scholarship, which has always been awarded to students whose families make less than $100,000 a year, we are bumping that up to $125,000 a year. Even in a time of financial challenges and especially because of the financial challenges, we have to be cognizant of the people of Vermont that we serve. So, we're finding new ways to get more of those Vermont students in the door. And we are creating curriculum that will help them be prepared for the complex future that they face. We're taking our insights in research. We're taking our insights in innovation and we're driving them into new programs that help our students succeed in this complex world. And I'm really proud of the work that the provost and her team has done partnering across the university to create this integrated student services and support model called Ask UVM. It's down on the gateway entrance. If you come in by our common ground value stone and walk in those doors, you'll see Ask UVM right there. It's a one-stop shop for our students to ask questions so they can get the help and support they need without moving from office to office. And I'm proud of the way that our university is striving to expand our reach just beyond our local location. We know that there are people who are placebound in Vermont and across our our region that need the incredible programs that we have to offer. We don't want to deny people access to our healthcare programs or to our programs in Rubenstein. We want to make sure that those folks have access to these programs. There are 38 million people in this country with some college, no degree. And those folks need access to be able to finish their degrees where they are. They may be placebound. We have 75,000 of those people right here in Vermont. And if you go out to New England, it's 2 million. New York, another 2 million more. We have incredible work to do to make our programs available to people who are hungering for what UVM can offer. And we heard an amazing keynote at the faculty event yesterday. Thanks to Jessica Stlen Grossman. Thank you, Goldzman. Thank you. Um for an incredible keynote. She called for engaged experiences in an amazing address. Thank you, Jessica. That was incredible. We know that those kinds of high impact learning experiences make a difference not just in their lives but in how they learn over the course of their whole degree. So we're striving to find new ways to do that all the time. students right now are experiencing the most difficulty finding a job of any generation during our lifetime. There are fewer entry-level jobs because people aren't moving from job to job as they often have. Do you know that right now only one out of every 50 entrylevel jobs do not require prior experience? one out of 50 as reported by Forbes. So for our students to have access to this incredible co-op program and Grossman is giving them a chance to get out and get that experience in the workplace. We are looking for opportunities like that across the university and driving those high impact experiences. And I want to talk to you about these amazing things that our students are doing when they do this engaged learning. So you see here on this slide MJ and Sky and these two folks worked with one of our faculty members Nico Perriol in geography and geosciences. They developed a machine learning protocol to study the mineral makeup of the Martian surface, a technique that can be used to gather information on other celestial bodies. and they were invited to NASA to present this information to NASA scientists who said this may affect how we do work on other missions. These are two undergraduate students who are literally out there not just changing the world but impacting the universe. What do you think about that? And I'm coming back again to values. So the second pillar of our strategic plan is study what matters valuesdriven learning research and practice. I am so proud that we have earned the Carnegie R1 designation. Only 3% of colleges and universities in this country hold the R1 designation for very high research activity. Isn't that amazing? And the reason it matters so much is because of the kind of work that we produce. Because we care so much about the world and about what's happening in the world and the humans who inhabit it. We have a responsibility to grow our research enterprise and to do this incredible work that makes such a profound impact. And now you're going to hear about one of the big findings that has happened just this year. Around 2014, a biologist named Cassidy Shaw with Fish and Wildlife of Vermont came to us uh with this problem that they had. They knew they had these brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphog that had melanoma, but they didn't know why. There are only three other known animals with these kinds of transmissible cancers and so it's rare in nature. Discussing this with the other people in the field, the conclusion we're coming to is maybe it's not as rare as we think. You know, you only kind of see what you're looking for. Now, we have this collaboration with the the main transmissible cancer lab in the world, which is at the University of Cambridge. We only know of transmissible cancers in three groups of species until now. Now work from University of Vermont has revealed that these melanomas that these catfish get are actually a new type of transmissible cancer. So this raises so many questions. How is it transmitted? How does it escape the immune system despite being foreign? We always get asked is it still a virus that's spreading the tumors? And it's not. the the tumor cells themselves are the infectious agent spreading from fish to fish. We know um that tumors matching this description were actually first described by Henry David Thorough uh a famous naturalist in the 19th century. So it actually is possible that this very same cancer that we see today first arose more than 150 years ago which is just incredible. Maybe if we look harder, we will find this occurs more in nature. And we think it's an opportunity to understand cancer better. That's incredible, isn't it? Thanks to Julie Dragon for the incredible research that she's doing like folks across the university. And we our figures are just in. How about that? $222.6 million in extra mural research support. Given the headwinds we're facing in federal funding right now, I find this an extraordinary outcome. Given what's happened in the federal funding landscape, it's incredible. And I have other news to avoid. I am now half done. Okay. I want to share with you something that Brian kind of is working on. I find this extraordinary, too. So, we're not just discovering new ways of understanding cancers. We've built new treatments. Um, we have positive early clinical trial results from a strategy that overwhelms tumors with oxidative stress, which turns previous strategies on its head. And this kind of work has been partnership in partnership with our undergraduate students and our graduate students. Just incredible findings. And we don't just stop at the sciences when we're asking big questions about the future. We don't just study these questions with technology. The school of the arts is inviting us to think about how we imagine a new future with all the new technological discoveries that are taking place. And our complex systems units that brings together all this technology, all the data and the social sciences has actually discovered that language operates differently than we think it does. This is incredibly important in a moment when large language models are playing such a key role in the way that we're understanding meaning in the world. They've discovered that language is more safety oriented than they thought that it was. And their model explains 90% of language instead of 75% of language. We have incredible research that's being done on the very impacts of people of our state. You see here Anna Mausle, one of our graduate students who's been working on wildfly wildfires in Vermont and asthma because we live in a state where we haven't needed a lot of air conditioning, right? So the air is not filtered in their homes. It's affecting young people in our state differently. We have healthc care leaders who are transforming the face of health care and health education and some of our great leaders are pictured on this slide who have received national and international recognition. But I also want to underscore that the discoveries they make are making a difference in the lives of people in our state every single day. Our third pillar of our strategic plan is create opportunity, access, engagement, and partnership. So, I want you to see the ways that we're opening the door of the university to people and stepping out to support and advance them. Our work not only reaches every corner of Vermont, but what we do in Vermont affects the whole world. And let me just give a a note that is one of the most important pieces of information I think I got when I arrived here. For every Verter that we graduate at UVM, two of our out ofstate students stay and make their careers and their lives in Vermont. So in a state with that upside down demographic, we're bringing that energy, that innovation, and the insight of those new young people who stay here. And we have 36,500 alumni who live and work in Vermont right now and even more who are making an impact around the country and around the globe. We have research that is unique to us and pathbreaking. Our Proctor Maple Research Center was the first ever dedicated maple research facility in the entire world. It was founded in 1946 and they have a 100 acre sugar bush and they do lots of research on on tapping on processing. It's incredible the outcomes they have built there. We have a programs that reach out and send our students across the state. The Lehey Institute for Rural Partnerships sent 10 young people to Brattleboroough who were working across the city and across the region to help communities thrive and to help new Americans thrive in their communities. And we are transforming healthcare in this state. We've heard the call of the state to help with this workforce. 50% of residents and fellows who complete their training here remain in Vermont. A third of the physicians in the state have trained here. And of the 124 amazing students that were selected to be in our medical school class this year, 33 of them were Vermonters. And we know that nursing capacity is a big priority. We've heard it from leaders across the state. We received a $16.5 million gift this year to help increase our capacity to give scholarship money to nursing students. And we've expanded the use of our SIM lab so that we can make sure that we get students trained and ready and we're reducing the bottlenecks in the pipeline of getting those students out to serve in the state. And I am so proud of this story. If you haven't read this story, please go out and find it. And I want to give a high five to Anna Elliott if she's here. These uh grad students in counseling and social work got a $3.8 million grant from DOE to go out and serve in rural schools across the state. And that grant was one of the grants that was cancelled this year. Anna raised money herself. So those 10 students still went out into those rural communities and still did that service in spite of that funding cut. Isn't that incredible? That's the kind of value system I'm talking about where when we face challenges, we're going to find the right solution and we're going to stay committed to our values. And we recognize that we have a role to play as the land grant flagship university in the state of Vermont in helping the state's economy thrive. And I'm very proud to announce today that we are creating a new division of statewide economic development and alongside the division of research and innovation under the leadership of VP Kurt Dumbrosseski. With this new division, we're going to seek to help our state thrive in every corner, in every region, and to find ways that the university can partner and help people live good and meaningful lives. It's our mission, and I'm really proud of our center for community news. Um, you may know that what they do is they go out into rural news deserts and news deserts all across the country and they send these student reporters. It doesn't matter what their major is. They train them and they help them cover local in issues and local challenges. And it's helping people be better voters and better decision makers in their local communities. Well, look at the impact they've made. nearly 500 original pieces just in Vermont. But this is a part of the way that we operate. Our innovation doesn't stay here. It impacts the entire country. Over 10,000 students across the country have produced more than 44,000 stories to help educate and empower the populace of this country. Isn't that incredible? I'm really proud of our community schools collaborative, which uses our public schools to bring together programming for family support, health resources, and create local partnerships that help students and communities thrive. And I'm proud to announce a new program this year called Vermont Listens. This program is designed to help democracy thrive by bringing people together to meet their neighbors who have different ideas and values than they do. And I'm going to share with you a video so you can learn more about it. >> What do I value? Art, >> respect, >> neighbors, my family. >> What do I value? Access, friends, >> relationships. >> Listening is sometimes perceived as weak, as soft, as passive. As we look out across the country, we see how difficult it's become for people to engage with each other, especially when they disagree. Vermont Listens is an opportunity for regular everyday citizens in community to get together and talk about what matters to them and why. By focusing on values, we give people the chance to talk about what matters to them and why instead of beginning with issues, which can often drive people further apart. What you often find is that it startles people to discover how much they might have in common with the value system of somebody else. >> What do I value? Community. >> Community. Community. >> Sense of belonging. >> Collaboration. >> Learning. >> While people are speaking, all participants in the audience have to practice silent listening. No audible reactions, no clapping, just listening and taking in what they're saying. The value of talking about values is that it really asks someone to think about what they are for as an individual rather than what they're against. It asks people to be vulnerable. That in and of itself breaks down barriers and builds community. This university is a public land grant university that was founded in order to serve the state and the people of Vermont. We are not the University of Chittnik County. We are the University of Vermont and we need to be present in all communities throughout the state. My biggest hope is that we get neighbors and community members to see each other as human beings again to exist in relationship and community with one another. UVM has a role to play in ensuring that we remain a model for what a thriving democracy looks like. >> I want the legacy of this program to be an impact on human hearts and an impact on human lives. And I think this is a fundamental part of that. >> What do I value? Love. Our first event is going to be in Bennington. We're partnering with Bennington to launch that event and we're going to have uh another event here at UVM and we're going to reach out across the state to move this work forward. I'm also really excited to share with you what our Ley public policy forum is doing. It's regarding climate change and how we can proceed with optimism in the face of these challenges. This will take place on October 28th at 7 PM and then we have a UVM panel uh the next morning featuring Julie Newman, the founding director of MIT's Office of Sustainability. I'm also really excited for this year's presidential lecture series. We are taking very seriously the evolution of the world around us through AI. And we're bringing in a number of speakers that can deepen our understanding, help us deepen our analysis and understand the impact on our world, make good choices as a university. And our akin lecture will feature Timnit Gabru from Stanford who's an author who studies AI algorithm algorithmic bias and thinks about things related to race and the complexities around the way that uh AI works. Now, now we're on the fourth pillar. Feel like we're getting close to your lunch. Campus community systems and infrastructure. I am so proud to announce our common ground staff awardees. If you have many of you are present today, stand up. Thank you so much and congratulations. This is one of the acts that's in alignment with our values to recognize people when they embody them. And boy, I'll tell you what, this committee has the hardest job every year because the kind of people that we have at this in this campus and in this community that are doing incredible things every day is just mind-blowing. So, please shake the hand to these incredible folks when you see them today. Sorry, I'm moving backwards. Don't worry, I'm not going to keep doing that. Um, we've also hired a lot of senior leaders and what we've done with these hires is we've really striven to think about how we can be prepared for the future that's ahead of us. We're trying to make budget processes more transparent. We're striving to create better relationships with our community. We're trying to ensure that we have the best processes follow uh possible at the university and that we are driving forward in our academic enterprise with innovation and I know that we're searching for an incredibly important position right now, our provost. But the first thing I want to do before I talk about that is thank our prohost, Linda Shadler. Linda, will you please stand? I am so grateful for her leadership and for her willingness to stay on when I stepped into this role to step up and and really take on some difficult challenges. Our uh faculty senate president and CFO are the co-chairs of this community and we are striving to find the right person for us. That committee has developed a process seeking candidates that honors our values and will help us drive towards our aspirations. Across UVM, we are asking questions right now about how we can use AI today and what is in alignment with the ways that we think about how this should operate. We've done this in a way that I think is incredibly brilliant by having faculty fellows in every single department who are helping to guide that process. Our VPR's office has provided incredible leadership and Kirk is even serving on a statewide AI working tax task force. As we increase our innovation, we will also stay in alignment with our values. And we've in received incredible support to keep moving forward with innovation. I'm going to give you some really interesting facts about our new system, the ice core, because this is so fascinating. So I had to learn what a pedaflop was in order to talk to you about this. So it's one of the top 50 fastest computers in the country. One of the top five in New England. And are you ready for this? It does a single pedlop is a quadrillion quadrillion calculations per second. Per second. So if you did one calculation every second to do one quadrillion calculations would take you 31.7 million years. Icecore performs that work in 1 second. So this this technology is going to enable incredible work on our campus and around our region. So, we're building the tools. We're building the models that work for our university. And I have another really exciting announcement. We are advancing snow research, which is critical to our state. It's filling a gap in tracking snowpack and it's going to help. It's a partnership with 10 universities. is going to help with our regional studies for northern New England to understand our snowpack better and the changing ways that snowpack is operating in a new climate. We are also making a commitment to our own campus facilities. We have a comprehensive datadriven roadmap to address the considerations that I've identified on this slide in alignment with our strategic plan and our resources. We have to have a 10-year plan to think about how we're going to solve these challenges as we go forward. We have one of the oldest, most beautiful campuses in the country, but that means we have an aging infrastructure. So, we have to have a plan for that work. Now, let me mention our catamounts. We had seven teams that competed in the America East Championship for the first time ever in UVM history. We had seven athletes that were selected as all-Americans and for the first time ever in the America East, we won both the academic cup and the commissioners cup. We're the only school to have ever done that. Can you give our athletics program a round of applause? It should be no surprise to anyone that our student athletes are incredible scholars, thinkers, leaders, and that's why they won this award. And we've seen this happen in the real world in a big way recently because our graduates in every field take their experiences here at the University of Vermont and they make an impact. We are working on a new multi-purpose center facility, our student wellness facilities. We've heard from our student government who passed a resolution to ask us to do this work. We've heard from our prospective students. We want access to these facilities. And our state stepped up and committed $12 million to us for which I am deeply grateful because this facility will not just serve our student athletes. It will not just serve our students who want access to wellness facilities. It will serve the entire state of Vermont as the largest indoor venue in the state. We have 900,000 people that visit those facilities every year. Over 400,000 of them have no relationship to the University of Vermont. So, we are getting people onto our campus and engaging them with what this university does with these facilities. And I'm really proud to announce that we just blew the lid off it this year with Kathleen Keller's leadership. Thank you to Kathleen. Second highest fundraising year in history. And we know that right now we need those resources for scholarships and for faculty research. We know what a priority that is. We need the scholarship funds to make sure students have access to this great university experience and we need to support our faculty's research at a time when those federal funding when that federal funding is diminishing. So, I'm proud that we're welcoming Chris Jacobson who worked at both Cornell and Dartmouth and who has a lot of experience with new campaigns because we will be launching a comprehensive campaign to fundra for the University of Vermont and we are launching a new effort. This university has never had a comprehensive marketing campaign to share with people the story of who we are. I've just told you that this university has some of the most profound commitment to values in the entire country and that that's what students are looking for. So, how do we build our story so we can tell them and that's with our new effort in communications and we want our faculty to become a part of that. So, we are building a faculty newsmaker process so that you can help us know. And if you haven't already signed up, get into our expert database so that we can engage and support your research and let people in the world know what you're doing here. I've talked to you today about a lot of the challenges that we are facing and that higher education is facing across the country right now. The answer to our challenges is our bold thinking. It's our creativity and our innovation, our commitment to our values. Together, this community will advance green, gold, and bold for our students, for our faculty, for Vermont, and for the future. Thank you so much for being here today and please join us at the President's Picnic.