The University of Vermont board of trustees is facing criticism for its lack of diversity — with concerns that less than a quarter of its members are women and an even smaller percentage are people of color.
Some state legislators say the issue is critical enough that they plan to submit a bill this upcoming session requiring the board to achieve gender parity by a certain date. Currently, only six of the 25 board members are women. There are three people of color who serve.
While community members have been critical of the board’s composition, board members are pushing back. They say that enforcing quotas disregards complexities in the search process for trustee positions.
And UVM isn’t alone — many of the largest colleges in Vermont are also struggling to reach gender parity on their governing boards, as are colleges across the country. As student demographics are becoming more diverse in higher education, boards are reckoning with how to best represent the communities their decision-making will ultimately affect.
Boards struggle to diversify across higher ed
Paul Bierman, a professor in UVM’s Department of Geology, first noticed the gender imbalance among the university’s trustees when sitting in front of them.
On Oct. 26, a group of 50 students attended a trustee meeting and urged members to divest the university’s endowment from fossil fuel companies. Bierman was at the meeting and noticed that there were a limited number of women present on the board.
“That struck me as really odd,” Bierman said.
The board didn’t indicate whether it would divest, but it has turned down proposals before in 2013 and 2016. Bierman isn’t hopeful that board members will take the students’ proposal seriously this time around either, and he can’t shake the feeling that this may be caused in part by the homogeneous representation of the board.
“Climate change is not a hazard that impacts everybody equally,” Bierman said. “If you are privileged … you can avoid the worst effects of climate change. It falls disproportionately on women, on minorities and on the poor.”
Board vice chair Ron Lumbra says the board’s makeup has nothing to do with how it would vote on divestment.
Beyond the impact of the board’s decision-making, Bierman said the board has a moral obligation to diversify its membership and to ensure that traditionally marginalized groups have a say in UVM’s decision-making.
The lack of gender diversity on UVM’s board of trustees is also discouraging to UVM’s Student Government Association president, Jillian Scannell. She interacts with the board frequently, and said she considers herself lucky as a woman to have a leadership position on campus given the lack of representation at board of trustee meetings.
Scannell said she believes students lose confidence in the board’s decision-making when they see the makeup lacks diversity.
“They automatically think ‘OK then, the people who are making decisions aren’t making them for me,” Scannell said. “‘They’re not making them in my best interest, or in the interest of all students.’”
While research is mixed that diverse governing boards conclusively benefit an organization’s decision-making, professionals across fields have warned that homogenous groupthink can harm the innovation and creativity of any governing body.
Merrill Schwartz, who is senior vice president of content strategy and development for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), agrees.
AGB has studied the diversity of college governing boards, and Schwartz said there has been an increasing desire among college boards nationally to diversify their membership. As more and more students of color attend college, boards want to aim to be reflective of the communities they serve, Schwartz said.
In a 2016 study of college governing board diversity conducted by AGB, it found that boards among public and private colleges are comprised of 32% women. It also found that 23.9% of public college board members are minorities and that 13.5% of board members at private colleges are minorities.
These low numbers are also reflected in the board diversity in Vermont’s other largest higher education institutions. Saint Michael’s College has seven women on its 26-member board of trustees. It declined to give the racial identities of its board members. Champlain College has eight women and three people of color on its 23-member board. Norwich University has seven women and three people of color on its 31-member board.
Two governing boards come close or reach gender parity. Middlebury College has 15 women on its 32-member board. And the Vermont State Colleges board of trustees has seven women on its 15-member board. However these two boards still struggle to reach racial parity. Middlebury has seven people of color on its board and the Vermont State Colleges board has one person of color.
How to achieve true diversity
Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden, said he was “stunned” when he recently learned the number of women on the UVM board.
“There is really no excuse to have anything other than 50/50 gender parity,” he said.
Pearson and others are planning to introduce a bill next legislative session requiring that UVM reach gender parity by a certain date. Currently drafting a bill are Pearson and Reps. Mary Sullivan, D-Burlington; Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, D-Bradford; and Selene Colburn, P-Burlington.
Questions also have been raised about the racial makeup of the UVM board. In the second whitest state in the United States, does true diversity represent Vermont’s largely homogenous population, or the nation’s?
This is a question that legislators are still struggling with. Pearson said the upcoming bill won’t address racial representation because these are the questions that still need to be asked and answered among lawmakers.
Achieving gender parity among UVM’s trustees may be more complicated than it sounds, given that trustees are appointed to the board through various channels.
Nine members are elected by the Vermont Legislature, nine are elected by the board’s Committee on Board Governance, three are appointed by the governor, two students are elected and two “ex officio” members are the governor and the UVM president. Trustees are appointed to six-year terms and the student trustees are appointed to two-year terms.
Despite this, Sullivan said her bill plans to require each of the appointment bodies to consider gender parity in their election process.
Lumbra, the UVM board vice chair, recognizes that the board has work to do in diversifying its membership. He agrees that governing boards operate better when there are various personal and professional perspectives at the table. He said, however, it is difficult to find candidates with financial expertise and time to dedicate to the volunteer post.
Many strong candidates, Lumbra said, are also being recruited by other organizations.
He’s raised concerns that the bill legislators are proposing will create diversity quotas that promote tokenization — electing people to become trustees for the appearance of diversity, not for their expertise. As an African American man, Lumbra said he knows what this feeling is like.
“The last thing you want to be is the diversity candidate in the room,” Lumbra said. “They want to be there because they have the skills, attributes, experiences that will help impact the board. They happen to be diverse.”
Instead of quotas, Lumbra said he’s focused on “intentionality” in the board’s election process. He said the board will focus on diversifying its candidate pool by extending its outreach and working harder to find more diverse candidates.
Schwartz of AGB said she thinks the best way for boards to diversify their membership is by constructing a plan to achieve a target board makeup by a certain time period. To her, “intentionality” may not be enough to achieve an institution’s strategic vision.
She said colleges should construct a “profile” of what they want their boards to look like in 10 years — literally. She recommends mapping out a grid, lining up trustee members that include their expertise, backgrounds and term expirations. If there are upcoming goals for specific industries a college may want to expand into, Schwartz said, they should plan for the type of trustee guidance they want to bring on next, including those with diverse backgrounds.
“I think it may be hard to find the talent that you want with the diversity that you want,” Schwartz said. “But I don’t think they’re too hard to find.”
Correction: Because of a miscalculation, a chart showing the percentage of racial minorities on college boards was inaccurate in an earlier version. It has since been updated.
