Letter to the editor: Selling the College of Fine Arts buildings is an outrage

Letter to the Editor • VT Digger on February 16, 2023 • Original Source

As a founding trustee of the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a longtime faculty member, I find innumerable reasons to resent the decision of its board and administration to savage the institution’s very soul.

I’d cite indifference to community resistance and to the overwhelming objection of past and present faculty, early trustees, and alumni. I’d also note the high-handed and opaque way in which so many crucial alterations — for instance, the removal of residencies to Colorado Springs (I thought we were the Vermont College of Fine Arts!) —  have been effected.

But I’ll limit myself to one particular outrage, the proposed sale of certain crucial buildings. One of these is Crowley Hall, built and named to honor longtime director of the writing program Louise Crowley. I personally donated as much as I possibly could to that building’s construction. I also persuaded many others with VCFA ties to do so — an easy job, because absolutely everyone involved in that program benefitted from Ms. Crowley’s competence, her unflappable resolution of crises, and her generally profound decency and good humor.

I donated like everyone else with satisfaction that Ms. Crowley’s long service would be appropriately memorialized. Certainly no one envisioned the building bearing her name would become a Russian spa and bathhouse. When it comes to expressing my anger over this development, words simply fail me.

Sydney Lea

Newbury

Sydney Lea was poet laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he received Vermont’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.