Boise State President Tromp Confirmed as UVM’s New Leader

Marlene Tromp was confirmed as the 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.

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 that 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.”

She added that as a first-generation college student, she has a lifelong commitment to underrepresented groups and noted that she had worked as director of the women’s studies program and cofounded a queer studies program as a faculty member at Denison University in Ohio.

UVM, which relies on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants, is looking through its courses and programs to see where diversity and inclusion language could make it a target. The school is already struggling financially, partly as a result of soaring health insurance costs, and reported a budget deficit this year. It recently instituted a 60-day hiring freeze.

In an interview on Thursday, Tromp said that if UVM is pressured to limit social justice or diversity language programs within academic research, she would leave it up to individual faculty members to decide whether to alter their language or program to comply with federal demands.

“We have to give each researcher the academic freedom to make the choice that is right for their scholarly research,” she said. “There will be some faculty who will say, ‘I won’t make changes here,’ and we’ll support that effort.”

If that pressure is directed at UVM’s array of social justice clubs and programs, Tromp expects to resurrect the process she led in Idaho.

“We sat down with faculty and staff and students and said, ‘How do we navigate this moment within the confines of the law? How do we continue to serve students?’” she said. “It was not a simple process; it was painful.”

Chris Danforth, a mathematics professor who co-runs UVM’s computational story lab, served on the hiring committee. He said on Thursday that communication skills and the ability to understand different perspectives were a priority when selecting candidates.

“This is a very uncertain time in higher ed, and we need someone with experience in managing big decisions and uncertainty,” Danforth said. “Someone able to stand up and defend a lot of hard decisions.”

Union members turned out in force to question Tromp at the forum. She told them that her father, a miner, was a union member, and she joined the graduate student union when she was studying for her doctorate in English at the University of Florida. She added that she worked closely with campus unions when she was provost and vice chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, the job she held before joining Boise State.

“I took very, very seriously the responsibility of the institution to think through all of the questions that the union brought forward,” she said. “It can be very painful and difficult to navigate those questions, but it is an obligation and it is an opportunity to make people’s lives better.”

Cameron Ishee, a spokesperson for UVM Staff United, said after the forum that under Tromp’s predecessor, Suresh Garimella, managers neither collaborated nor communicated effectively with the union. She was encouraged by what she heard.

“Her history of centering communication and collaboration with community stakeholders is a very positive indicator,” Ishee said.

Tromp will experience a large culture shift in her 2,500-mile eastward move. Boise State, located in one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S., has been on a construction spree for years, fueled by philanthropic and corporate support. The university has 27,000 undergraduates and a nationally known football program. Tromp has been a fixture at football games, home and away.

UVM, an established land-grant university with a growing research program and a strong emphasis on the humanities, has about 12,000 undergraduates and is struggling to meet its enrollment goals in a state with one of the oldest populations in the country.

Her salary at Boise State was $473,000 last year. Adam White, UVM’s executive director of university communications, said on Thursday that the details of her UVM pay were still being worked out.