Students and alumni at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier are pressing administrators to suspend their plan of moving residencies to Colorado College.

Some want administrators to work with them and find a way to keep the programming in Vermont, or at least in New England. The college, though, is trying to sell the 15-acre campus — something that concerns neighbors, who are wary of what might take the school's place.

Time is running out for students; this Saturday, February 11, is the last day of the last residency to be held on campus.



“We signed up for graduate school in person, in Vermont, and they have effectively moved us to a conservative area without any regard to our safety,” said Jessie Keating, who is enrolled in a two-year masters of fine arts program in visual arts. Keating noted that Colorado College is located in Colorado Springs, a conservative area where five people were killed in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in November. She strongly prefers to be in Montpelier.

"There is something about being at such a special program and having that in an idyllic setting where I feel safe as a queer person," said Keating, who lives in Tacoma, Wash.

College president Leslie Ward announced in June that VCFA would move its summer residencies to the larger campus in Colorado as a way of holding the programs simultaneously instead of staggered over several weeks. Winter residencies will be held remotely.

Ward has said the move will save VCFA the money it now spends to maintain the campus. Under the plan, the college will keep its name, and its administrative offices will remain at College Hall, a large 19th-century building facing the college green.

Keating and others who oppose the move said administrators should have notified them before the June announcement and given them a chance to come up with alternatives. Many students learned through news reports that the campus was for sale, said Tavia Gilbert, who graduated from VCFA’s writing program in 2013 and taught in the program between 2016 and 2022.

Gilbert said she asked Ward and other administrators why they hadn’t launched a capital campaign as a way of keeping the residencies in Vermont. “The answer was it would take vast human resources to do it — a team of 20, a whole office,” she said.

Gilbert, though, doesn't buy Ward's claim, based on reports she's heard from fundraising professionals.

Katie Gustafson, the college’s CFO and vice president for finance and administration, did not return phone calls from Seven Days, and Ward declined to speak on the record.

“We’d like to move forward with a collaborative effort to problem solve,” Keating said. “None of us were consulted.”

They also don’t believe what they’re hearing from college officials.

“We’ve been fighting for transparency from the board,” Keating said. “[Ward] said the college is in arrears. Can you show us the documentation?”

The group has enlisted the help of actor Luis Guzman, a part-time Cabot resident who has served as a visiting faculty member in VCFA’s film MFA program, to advocate for delaying the plan. During an Instagram live stream last Friday, Guzman encouraged people to get in touch with Ward directly. Guzman said he would be sorry to see VCFA’s programs move out of Vermont.



“I’d like to see VCFA continue to grow and diversify,” Guzman said. “So many great, wonderful people have come out of that program.”

Bestselling author Wally Lamb is also helping out. Lamb earned a master’s degree in creative writing on the campus in the 1980s, when the school was called Vermont College of Norwich University. He said he has used what he learned then as a model throughout his long teaching career; he also spent time on campus writing his third novel, The Hour I First Believed. Lamb, who lives in Connecticut, has taught at VCFA and worked informally with students.

“I think something really special is slipping away,” he said in an interview on Monday.

Lamb and several others signed on to a November 16 complaint filed with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office saying VCFA’s trustees misled donors and future students when the school didn’t disclose earlier that residencies would no longer be held in Montpelier. Faculty and staff learned of the move just before an email went out to the college community about it on June 15, the complaint said.

The group has also filed a complaint with VCFA’s accrediting agency, the New England Commission of Higher Education, Gilbert said.

Four of VCFA's six program directors have resigned since the announcement, as has visual arts faculty member Dont Rhine. He wrote a scathing letter about VCFA's choice of Colorado Springs, which is home to Christian activist group Focus on the Family.

Singling out Ward, Rhine dismissed a message of support she sent to the community that condemned all acts of violence and hate.

"Moral abstractions about hate mean one thing in the context of Montpelier," he wrote. "It means something else entirely when those same weak platitudes are voiced in a right-wing Christian fundamentalist stronghold like Colorado Springs."

Students and alumni aren’t the only ones pressuring VCFA. Many neighbors of the campus, which is located in a quiet residential neighborhood on a plateau just outside of downtown Montpelier, are fiercely opposed to the college’s plans to change its zoning permit to allow for more uses.

The campus includes the administration building, a large green that is frequently used by the public, and 11 buildings that include dorms and a library. Some neighbors are worried that a change of permit could prevent them from speaking out if a new buyer decides to use a building for offices or a restaurant; others fear a new owner would block the public from using the green.

VCFA is scheduled to present more information about its permit request at a Montpelier Development Review Board meeting on February 21. The permitting change would benefit the next owner; David White, of White + Burke Real Estate Advisors in Burlington, told neighbor Joe Castellano in an email on Monday that the college was discussing the property with several possible buyers.

Alisa Dworsky , a leading opponent of the zoning change, said she’d approve if the buildings were used for affordable and moderate-priced housing. Like Gilbert and Keating, she said the administration has not been transparent.

“We don’t have, as community members, much insight at all into what they are planning,” Dworkin said. “They have talked about a wide range of possibilities but not any specifics. Yet we know they are marketing the property.”

Lamb said it’s too late to stop the college from moving its residencies.

“I don’t wish the Colorado College program ill, but I can’t see that it’s going to survive,” he said. “I think it’s kind of ridiculous to call a program in Colorado the Vermont College MFA.”

He added that he doubts there’s widespread knowledge in the larger VCFA community about the plan. “I think a lot of people are unaware of this and will be disappointed when they catch up to the news that they have gone elsewhere,” he said.