Marlene Tromp was confirmed as University of Vermont’s 28th president on Thursday. She will start in the position this summer, university officials said. Tromp, a humanities scholar who has led Boise State University since 2019, will move to Burlington with her 23-year-old son, her sister and a family friend. She’s taking leadership of Vermont’s land-grant university at a time of budget cutbacks and mounting concerns about freedom of speech. Introduced at a community forum on Wednesday, Tromp, a Wyoming native who has spent her career in the West, steered clear of outlining specific plans. Instead, she pledged to learn as much as she could from UVM’s faculty, staff and students — and to use her position to help stimulate conversations about the issues roiling campuses. [content-3] She said she was excited by the prospect of working in a state that values higher education and academic freedom. “Higher education has been a distinct target in the state that I'm coming from,” she said. “Here, there is a deep and profound commitment across many sectors to higher education. That’s a striking difference.” In the community forum, many people raised concerns about academic freedom. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced it would pause about $400 million in contracts and grants involving Columbia University over accusations that the Ivy League school did not do enough to fight antisemitism. On Thursday, the New York Times reported the White House was taking aim at the University of Pennsylvania over its embrace of transgender athletes. Tromp has extensive experience with similar attacks. Days after she arrived at Boise State, 28 lawmakers urged her to end all diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus. Her defense of the programs sparked a long-running campaign by Idaho conservatives. Her eventual concessions to conservatives along the way earned her sharp criticism from others. Ultimately, last December, the governing body for all of the public institutions, the Idaho State Board of Education, ordered the closure of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Idaho's four-year public institutions. Tromp shuttered the university’s gender equity center and multicultural student center in November. Asked at the UVM forum about that decision, Tromp said she had no choice. "We have to follow the law," she said soberly. “It was a very, very difficult and often painful process." [content-2] She added that as a first-generation college student, she has a lifelong commitment to underrepresented groups, and noted that… ...read more read less