Teach Us Please

As we crowd watch all the accepted student tour groups amble by let’s take a minute and remember what makes this school, and all universities for that matter, what they are. The professors.
They are the core foundation of this intuition for higher learner. It is why we came here and are paying thousands of dollars in tuition so we can be here. To learn from them.
That is why it pains me to learn about what a bum rap they are getting here at UVM. While the number of undergraduates continues to skyrocket, along with tuition and tuition revenue (up 48%), the number of newly hired full-time professors has stagnated along with their wages.
Waterman would tell us that money is tight, that they don’t have the funds to give our professors wages to match their worth. But then they go out and increase their own wages (up 207% for administration level staff), raise up a multimillion dollar student center and pay for it all by raising tuition yet again (68% above national average).
If livable wages and top quality professors are the sacrifices we have to make to get the Davis Center and pay for our 21 Vice Presidents’ six figure salaries, then I say we need to get our priorities straight.
They try to tell us that the Davis Center will allow us to be a more competitive against other schools in undergraduate enrollment. But by becoming more competitive in superficial appearances we are really becoming less competitive in substance.
The upper echelons of this university must remember that the purpose of an administrative bureaucracy is to serve the teachers and students, not the other way around.
The University of Vermont should aim to provide the best benefit and wage incentives to bring in, in large numbers, the greatest minds of today to help train the greatest minds of tomorrow. Everything else is less than secondary.