I don’t want to be overly alarmist about this, so I used a smiley happy dumpster fire illustration instead of the out-of-control inferno kind. But good grief, where exactly is Vermont State University headed?

The latest is the announced departure of system chancellor Sophie Zdatny, who will leave VSU at the end of this year. Don’t forget that interim VSU President Mike Smith, who took the job in April, has promised to stay on for only six months. He’s now in month number five, so time’s running out. Smith replaced Parwinder Grewal, who resigned even before VSU was officially launched because he’d squandered all his political capital on an ill-considered decision to close the system’s libraries.

Zdatny, you may recall, replaced Jeb Spaulding, who resigned as chancellor in 2020 after floating a universally unpopular — but absolutely sensible — plan to consolidate the system by closing the Johnson, Lyndon and Randolph campuses.

It’s been bad times, and we haven’t even gotten to the finances or the precipitous 19% drop in 2023-4 enrollment or the looming demographic crisis staring the system right in the face. And now we’re looking at a leadership vacuum that will see VSU saddled with interim leadership for, what’s that? Two more years?

Yep. The VSU Board is looking to hire an interim president to, according to Seven Days, “serve until the summer of 2025” to give the Board time to search for a permanent president. And now the position of chancellor is about to be vacant.

I’m sorry, but does this seem at all optimal? VSU is in the middle of an educational, financial, demographical, existential crisis and it’s going to limp along with placeholder leadership until the middle of 2025? Yikes.

Spaulding, by the way, stands by his plan. “I still think that was a good idea,” he told VTDigger in June.

Political considerations aside, it’s hard to disagree with him. In fact, radical surgery seems even more prudent now than in 2020, before the Covid pandemic and declining high-school classes and three years of bad news all put their combined weight on the sagging shoulders of the VSU system.

We desperately need some sort of Vermont State University slash College thing to work. With the University of Vermont occupying, or at least striving mightily for, the status of major research and higher learning institution, a VSU is an absolutely necessary complement to provide (relatively) low-cost education for many a Vermont student and a wide variety of technical and career-oriented programs that would be out of place and/or unaffordable at a UVM.

How we get from here to a sustainable future for VSU is anybody’s guess. It’s going to require the kind of strong, visionary leadership that can probably find better prospects elsewhere in the world of higher education. In any case, they won’t be on the job for quite a while yet. Meantime, VSU is threatening to sink into unsustainability. If there’s anything positive about the situation, aside from a strong belief in Mike Smith’s Mr. Fixit capabilities, I don’t see it.