“Many of the ‘hippies’ talk about fairness and well-being… surrounded by liberal white people like themselves. Give them something to be conservative about, see how liberal they stay.”
–Post on Unigo responding to the question “Is the stereotype of students at University of Vermont accurate?”
“One of the things that bothered me the most about Vermont is that Vermont lies,” says Tyeastia Green, Burlington’s Director of Racial Equity from 2020 to 2022. “Vermont has the entire country believing that they’re something that they are not. The entire country believes that Vermont is this uber liberal, you know, uber progressive, very welcoming space. But it is not. There’s a reason why Vermont is still one of the whitest places in the country. There’s a reason.”
We now approach the core paradox of the University of Vermont: an institution that champions progressive values while maintaining one of the most homogeneous student bodies in American higher education. With only 1% Black, 4% Hispanic, and 3% Asian students among its undergraduates and 82% white students overall, UVM illustrates how culture can act as an invisible gatekeeper, excluding diversity not through explicit barriers but via subtler mechanisms of presumed inclusion. Green’s description of Vermont reflects UVM's reality: a campus that displays progressivism to the world and to itself while keeping whiteness firmly at its core.
How can a school that claims to be progressive also be a community where “Black [students say] ‘don’t come here, it’s not worth it’”? A place where nonwhite students state, “Similar to many of my BIPOC peers at UVM, I wanted to transfer during my first year”? These are not quotes from the distant past—that last quote is from 2025, and the first is from 2022. More than just demographic numbers, the fact that this environment exists at UVM is a shameful institutional failure. And living at UVM without constantly having to think about it is a privilege of the highest level.
UVM’s progressive self-image is built on three pillars. The first is the idea that holding progressive views—or at least believing you do—automatically leads to progressive actions. This provides a sense of comfort in self-perception: if you see yourself as “on the right side of history,” you assume your actions, culture, and institutions will align with that.
The second is the assumption that visible progressivism in some areas grants you an overall reputation for progressivism in all areas. UVM highlights its strong LGBTQ+ support systems and its record on environmental sustainability as proof of its moral credentials, as if success in these fields automatically indicates equity everywhere else. These are real achievements, but they do not give the university a free pass on the more complicated work of undoing exclusion in other areas.
The third narrative claims that UVM’s lack of diversity is simply the unavoidable result of its location in Vermont—an area seen as too rural, too white, and too remote to change. This assertion, which I call “the Location Excuse,” will be thoroughly examined in Section VIII: Designers of the Default.
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When this “progressivism” is tested outside its usual areas, it quickly reveals its shaky foundation. The university can mobilize for climate action or LGBTQ+ visibility, but when the same urgency is demanded for racial equity or economic access, enthusiasm wanes. During the George Floyd protests, activist Sarah Scioctino (Class of ’21) observed that “A lot of the environmentalists that I know … have just not been showing up as much as I had hoped” and that members of UVM environmental groups were “apathetic towards the Black Lives Matter protests.” Chris Harrell (Class of ’21), an environmentalist involved with UVM during this period, mentioned, “I’ve had conversations with environmentalists of color who really feel like they are just not welcome or invited to these white environmentalist spaces.”
The granola “UVM” aesthetic welcomes surface-level diversity in skin color, but it promotes conformity in cultural expression.​ Most granola students may be earnest progressives, but the granola default at UVM is fundamentally anti-pluralist: it rewards conformity to a narrow code over genuine diversity of expression.​​​​ It’s not that there is no space for BIPOC people—it’s that there is far less space for BIPOC personhood. In Green’s words, Vermont “has to stop saying that it’s welcoming. Because it’s not. It depends on who you are if you are welcomed into Vermont or not… You see all the ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs. But when you go into those spaces as a Black person, you find out real quick how much you don’t matter.”
This superficial approach to inclusion—tolerating difference in name but not in practice—lets the institution keep its granola aesthetic as the unchallenged norm, effectively discriminating against everything outside its narrow view of “progressive” culture without ever admitting the contradiction. As former Black Student Union President Harmony Edosomwan (Class of ’20) said: “That’s UVM for ya, ‘progressive’ until it’s inconvenient or not affecting their whitelihood.”
Post on the official @universityofvermont Instagram account, 17 July 2025.
Two months ago, UVM’s Instagram account posted a graphic mimicking a dictionary definition of the word “Catamount.” Almost every detail listed—outdoor recreation, specific clothing brands, environmental activism as connected to wilderness—aligns with predominantly white upper-middle-class cultural signs. Even though the text attempts to make these traits seem “unique and undefinable,” the examples provided are anything but—they are highly specific and culturally loaded. This isn't coming from students anymore—this is coming from UVM itself, who are, literally, promoting a specific definition for “being a Catamount”—a standard that depends on conforming to a particular cultural script.
It’s time to discuss who is truly responsible for all of this. Because students who identify with granola culture might be sustaining it on campus, but student support alone isn’t enough to create this kind of cultural stronghold.