PRESIDENT'S PERSPECTIVE

Photo by Sally McCay

A conversation with President Daniel Mark Fogel

For this issue’s President’s Perspective, VQ editor Thomas Weaver sat down with President Daniel Mark Fogel for a talk about recent progress and priorities at the University. The conversation ranged from the importance of philanthropy to UVM’s future to new multi-disciplinary approaches in the classroom to the risks of covering Bob Dylan in black tie. Excerpts follow.

VQ: At the campaign celebration, you strapped on your guitar and serenaded the supporters with “If Not for You.” Was that the single scariest moment of your presidency?

DMF: (Laughs.) Well, I was certainly nervous. It was a kind of “out there” thing to do.

VQ: It sounds like it went over.

DMF: I had a lot of fun doing it. The audience, I can say at the very least, was very kind. They seemed to be enthusiastic.

VQ: I hear your guitar playing goes way back to high school. What was your band’s name?

DMF: You know, we didn’t call it anything. It was just Steve Miller and George Anagnost and me.

VQ: Steve Miller Band?

DMF: That was taken.

VQ: On to more serious matters, UVM just closed a campaign and opened a new student center. Do you feel like these events are turning points?

DMF: They certainly are huge milestones. I think they’re enormously important for the University. I think the campaign was extremely important—not only in the direct benefits that are received by students, by faculty, and by programs, not to mention the entire campus through investment in facilities, thanks to the generosity of donors. It also enlarged the imagination of philanthropy in our community—our alumni, our parents, our grandparents, our friends. We really operate more like a private university than like  a public one with respect to sources of support that allow us to build quality. We have not historically had the levels of support from our community of stakeholders that private institutions have had. We need to have that level of support. I think that this campaign was a very important way station in taking us to the next level. No one had ever imagined that we would do a campaign that approached $280 million. But we have, and I hope that in the next year or two we will announce the next campaign and it will be a much larger number.

VQ: What does the close of the campaign mean to you in terms of your attention and day-to-day work?

DMF: It doesn’t change that much. I have spent a lot of time on the road just this last week. I’ve had two development events in New York City, continually working on building the resources of the University. With the Campaign’s close, I’d say we haven’t turned a corner, so much as passed a milestone on a road that runs in one direction, ascending.

And I’d say the same thing for the Davis Center. The Davis Center is a huge milestone. It creates a new, vital center for campus life. We hoped it would; we said that it would; and I think that we already see it happening. That the Davis Center could make such a big difference suggests, I think, how far we have to go with many of our other facilities.

VQ: You’ve been a strong advocate for creating the new “problem-based learning communities” that are an option for undergraduates. Why do you think they’ll be such a valuable addition to the learning experience?

DMF: For two reasons that are captured in that big, clunky term “problem-based learning communities.” One is that I think our students are very eager to make a difference in the world, to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to the solution of real-world problems. And, as part of this first reason, I think that our students, like students elsewhere, learn more and retain it longer when the abstractions or the theory of the classroom is reinforced by hands-on, real-world experience. Attacking a real-world problem not only speaks to the aspirations of our students to make a positive contribution to the world around them, but it actually deepens the pedagogical value of what we do with them. They learn more and they carry it into the world.

The other piece is communities. The term points to building communities across disciplinary lines. Real-world problems today, from global climate change to infectious disease prevention, require multidisciplinary approaches. These are the kinds of approaches we described in “Signatures of Excellence” (a planning document from 2006 which seeks to identify the future foundation of a UVM education), where faculty in two or three disciplines integrate the methodologies, the insights, the perspectives of their disciplines in order to really lead the faculty and the students together toward a holistic understanding of an issue.

VQ: You’re a bit more than a year removed from a serious health scare. How are you feeling?

DMF: I feel terrific, much better than I did before I got sick.

VQ: How has going through that continued to influence your life and your work?

DMF: First, on the personal, health level, I’ve kept the weight off. I lost eighteen pounds in the intensive care unit and another twenty-some pounds after that because I’ve watched my diet so closely and because I’ve been so devoted to making sure I get exercise. So, simply physically, that’s changed me.

I think I’ve been changed some psychologically or even spiritually—having a much more acute sense of my own mortality, that life is short. I have, I hope,  a deepened sense of empathy with my fellow mortal creatures. I’ve come out of it with a determination to see other people in a fuller and more whole way, to listen to them better. So I hope it’s made me a more sensitive and responsive leader. That’s something I would aspire to.

VQ: There are places you’d expect to find the president— Davis opening, Convocation, Campaign celebration— where celebration of the institution is part of the event and there is great pride in the University. Can you tell me about less-predictable experiences that have left you feeling very good about the state of UVM?

DMF: On a somber note, I’ve shared a number of both touching and inspirational moments with the parents of Michelle Gardner-Quinn in the last year. When I got back from a trip yesterday, there was a lovely, lovely note from the Gardner-Quinns that was essentially a thank-you note now that the Michelle Gardner-Quinn Scholarship has been fulfilled. But it was so affirmative of the value of the University. For these people to have lost their daughter here to a horrific, appalling crime, yet to feel, as they said in this letter to me and Rachel, that this was the right place for Michelle, that it was a wonderful institution for her, was very affirming of the work we do.

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