X.
Threshold

“Of course we don’t listen to hip-hop, we go to UVM.” 

 

That line, delivered confidently in a UHeights dorm, now sounds different. It wasn’t just peer pressure or snobbery; it was the result of a deliberate institutional marketing strategy. What seemed like organic student culture was actually a carefully crafted brand identity, marketed to wealthy families as an authentic Vermont experience while systematically excluding everyone else.

 

The Division of Strategic Communications, under Alessandro Bertoni’s leadership, continues to operationalize a state-backed blueprint for exclusion, transforming Vermont’s “lifestyle brand” marketing into UVM’s recruitment strategy. The result is a student body where 58.8% come from the wealthiest fifth of American families while only 3.8% represent the bottom quintile—numbers so extreme, they could only result from systematic design.

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There’s a curious thing that happens when you mention the University of Vermont. People don’t think of a university at all. They think of skiing. Of farmers’ markets. Of students in Patagonia jackets sipping fair-trade coffee between classes. But here’s what we’re missing: we’ve confused the marketing with the institution.

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Students have become so conditioned by StratComm’s relentless granola branding that, by and large, they are no longer able to distinguish between the university’s carefully crafted marketing persona and the institution itself. UVM’s “unique student culture” is plastered over every social media page, underwritten in every brochure, and exhibited as our greatest feature.

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Granola culture and institutional reality are not the same thing.​ We need to take off the granola-colored glasses and look at UVM for what it is. When we do, we see a school with deep, systemic problems trying to compensate by selling an aesthetic rather than an education.

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This is the other UVM:​​ a school grappling with persistent racial and economic homogeneity. A school where tuition is the highest of any land-grant university in America.​ A school where the campus housing crisis regularly forces freshmen into forced triples and upperclassmen into expensive rentals, and where finding a decent apartment means signing a lease nearly a year in advance.​​​ A school where sexual misconduct cases are repeatedly mishandled, with survivors forced to organize protests when the university responses amount to silence. ​A school that, within just the last decade, is no longer among the top 100 schools nationally, no longer within the top 1,000 schools globally, and doesn’t even rank in the top three schools in the State of Vermont.​​​​ A school that has lost its “Public Ivy” status, removed from expert rankings and prestige lists.​​ A school hemorrhaging students as retention rates plummet below peer institutions. A school in which institutional research has revealed a student body that reports profound academic and social disconnection, little to no sense of school spirit, and forced its own administration to acknowledge a systematic neglect towards students “at the fringes.”

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This investigation uncovered how granola culture functions as what might be called encoded whiteness: markers that appear benign but demand comfort and fluency in upper-middle-class, predominantly white spaces.​ When a Black student is warning a prospective applicant, “Don’t come here, it’s not worth it.” When a student playing a song from the second most popular music genre on the planet warrants raised eyebrows and dismissal, while at the same time UVM lauds its Noah Kahan lookalike contest.​ Where BIPOC students across campus write and speak about “constant instances of covert racism” wrapped in “condescending jokes and denial... relating to your culture.” 

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UVM is a place where exclusion is happening through aesthetics, and where aesthetics are enforced through policy. We call this aesthetic granola, but more often, we just call it “UVM”—and it is one of the most camouflaged systems of exclusion ever devised.

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What does resistance look like among our student body?

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Here’s the question every UVM student should start asking: When someone dismisses something as “not UVM,” what does that mean? Because, without realizing it, they’ve probably learned to internalize an aesthetic accessible only through in a very specific set upper-middle-class, white-coded norms, as the necessary default.

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When students who don’t fit the granola mold stop pretending they do—when they bring their full selves to campus without apology or explanation—the monoculture loses its monopoly on legitimacy. This isn’t about seeking permission. It’s about occupying space. Play your music in the common room. Start the club that reflects your interests, not theirs. Wear what you want, speak how you speak, exist as you are—loudly, consistently, unapologetically.

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The truth? Nobody is purely granola. We’re all just deciding which parts of ourselves to show and which to hide. And the whole system is built on a lie.

The mechanism here is fundamentally about repetition and normalization. The first encounter with a cultural expression that violates the granola script gets dismissed as an aberration. The tenth encounter generates cognitive dissonance. By the hundredth, the campus is forced to reckon with a new reality: that UVM contains multitudes, and those multitudes aren’t going away. This is how monocultures fracture—not through confrontation, but through persistent presence. The normalization of difference occurs when alternative cultural expressions become so deeply embedded in the everyday fabric of campus life that they can no longer be delegitimized away.

And most critically, refuse to let anyone—students or administrators—weaponize lifestyle aesthetics as the definition of what UVM is and isn’t. Harvard isn’t defined by how many students wear boat shoes. MIT’s identity doesn’t collapse if someone prefers poetry to programming. Yet at UVM, we’ve somehow accepted the bizarre premise that institutional character depends on everyone looking, acting, and thinking in similar and compatible way.

This is the crucial realization: we are not UVM-therefore-granola. We are UVM-therefore-anything. The campus doesn’t shrink to fit the aesthetic; the aesthetic should expand to fit the campus. Every student who refuses to conform to the outdoor-gear orthodoxy proves that this place is bigger, more expansive, more interesting than the marketing materials suggest. They prove that institutional identity isn’t about limiting possibility—it’s about multiplying it.​​

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The real work requires something harder than implementing diversity initiatives. It requires admitting that what the university calls “campus culture” is actually a sophisticated filtering mechanism, designed to select for a particular type of student while maintaining plausible deniability about that selection. Every marketing photo of students on a ski slope, every orientation activity centered on hiking, every casual reference to the “real Vermont experience”—these aren’t neutral cultural expressions. They’re signals, broadcasting who belongs and who doesn’t before prospective students even submit their applications.

The prescription is straightforward but radical: dismantle the outdoor recreation monopoly on campus life. Yes, the Ski and Snowboard Club has worked admirably to increase accessibility, and People of Color Outdoors deserve absolute commendation for their efforts. But when skiing remains the presumed default of student life—when it’s treated as essential to the “authentic” UVM experience—you’ve built a class barrier and called it tradition. Hip-hop concerts, fashion shows, urban exploration, and other cultural expressions don’t just deserve token recognition; they need the same institutional weight, the same funding, the same assumption of legitimacy that outdoor programming currently enjoys.

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Imagine a different UVM. Picture a university where the Division of Strategic Communications creates messaging that genuinely reflects cultural diversity instead of aesthetic uniformity. Envision residence halls where hip-hop music flows as naturally as folk music, where fashion shows are given the same marketing support as ski races, and where student profiles feature authentic diversity rather than Patagonia-clad stereotypes.

 

Imagine a campus where that late-night dorm conversation goes differently, where someone asks about a rapper’s new album and gets genuine curiosity instead of immediate dismissal. Where “Of course we listen to everything, we go to UVM” becomes the natural response because the university dismantled the systems that were creating exclusion.

 

The students deserve better. Vermont deserves better. And the fields that UVM graduates enter—environmental science, education, public service—desperately need the diverse perspectives that our cultural gatekeeping currently excludes.

 

UVM has the chance to be something new—a national leader in doing away with the lifestyle branding that passes for campus culture at too many institutions. The question is whether the university will choose transformation or continue letting its Division of Strategic Communications function as a Division of Strategic Exclusion.

 

The culture has to change. And that starts with a new story—one where UVM’s identity isn’t sold to the highest bidder, but built by and for everyone who walks through its doors.

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This is Granola Dialogue.