sarahBy Thomas Christopher Greene
Years ago, when I was president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, we hired an architecture firm to help us imagine the future of the campus. They sent a drone up in the air and when they finished, they marveled at the discovery that Montpelier was an intentionally designed city. The seat of state government as exemplified by the Statehouse on lower State Street, the seat of higher education as exemplified by the campus on the hill, and the seat of commerce in between, fed by both of them.
When I formed VCFA in 2006, a big motivating factor was to keep the historic campus in continuous educational use, as it had been since 1868. When I left the college to return to my writing in 2019, my successor in 2023 made the decision to move VCFA first to Colorado, then to Pennsylvania, and finally to Los Angeles where, far from its roots, it continues as part of CalArts. For the first time in 155 years, there was no college on the hill in Montpelier. As someone who now owns a business downtown, I can tell you firsthand the difference is palpable.
Fortunately, a new group of visionaries led by Dr. Mark Somerville, an MIT Ph.D. and member of the founding faculty of Olin College outside of Boston, have been working tirelessly over the last few years to build the Greenway Institute, a new four-year engineering college on that historic campus. I’ve spent over 35 years in higher education, and the same amount of time in Vermont, and I can tell you it is not an exaggeration to say that Greenway is both the most important economic development project for central Vermont in a generation, and also the most important reimagining of undergraduate residential education nationally in a generation.
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, if you want to build a great community, start a college and wait three hundred years. Central Vermont’s cultural and economic landscape has been shaped by its colleges and universities in the same way our confluence of rivers have shaped our physical one. From the steady presence of Norwich University to the heyday of Goddard College in the 1960s and 1970s, to the rise of NECI in the late ‘70s and its peak in the ‘90s, to the creation of VCFA, our higher education institutions have driven our economy; brought artists, entrepreneurs and business owners to our community; and enriched our lives.
Twenty years ago, when I was a new college president, there were 23 independent colleges in Vermont. Today, there are eight. There is no question we live in an era of mass extinction in higher education. And while some of it can be prescribed to a demographic cliff — put simply there are fewer students, especially in the northeast — it is also self-inflicted by college leaders who have been, by and large, unable to create a viable value proposition for students.
Greenway starts with a simple principle. Students should graduate debt-free and with meaningful, well-paying work in hand. Engineering students will learn by doing, which fits perfectly into the progressive education tradition started by Vermont’s John Dewey. Students will spend two of their four years on campus, and the remaining two embedded with firms and corporations in paid internships. These internships will pay for their education, the cost of which will be kept low by focusing expenses on instruction and not on expensive amenities. Unlike traditional engineering cooperative programs, Greenway students will earn two years of credit for their internships and will receive supplemental instruction from faculty and mentorship as they work. In this way, their studies inform their work, and their work informs their studies. They will graduate with two years of professional experience in a field desperate for qualified employees.
Greenway intends to enroll their opening class in the fall of 2027. Plans call for growing to 400 students here in Montpelier with 200 students on campus at any given time. The larger vision includes, eventually, other locations and other fields in the same model.
When VCFA was at its largest shortly before I stepped down, our students and faculty were directly spending around $1 million downtown. Greenway’s economics suggests when they are fully up and running, that direct spend will be closer to $7 million, which will be absolutely transformative for our community and the health of our downtown.
In the meantime, they still have a lot of work to do, namely raising the remaining philanthropic money they need to launch Greenway. Mark Somerville and his team have been traveling the country and around Vermont, meeting with donors. If you’re reading this and may be able to help, I encourage you to get in touch with them at greenwayinstitute.org.
If they’re successful, we may not have to wait 300 years to build our great community. It could be right in front of us.
Thomas Greene is a novelist and the founding president emeritus of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
The material presented here represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of The Bridge. Commentaries may be submitted to editor@montpelierbridge.com. Preference is given to submissions by those who live in central Vermont. Submissions are encouraged to be 500 to 750 words in length.
