From a quick look at her background, Elizabeth Mauch seems an odd choice to fill one of the hottest seats in all of Vermont. But fill it she will, as the new chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges.

It’s one hell of a big job, and she’ll have to hit the ground running.

Mauch’s first priority will be to continue cutting budgets. Mike Smith got things off to a strong start, but he almost certainly picked all the low-hanging fruit. It’s only going to get tougher from here.

Mauch will arrive in Vermont from perhaps the unlikeliest outpost of academia you could imagine: a small private college in a tiny town dead in the middle of Kansas, 200 miles west of Kansas City.

How small? Bethany College has a student body of… 800. That compares to a total enrollment of more than 11,000 in the VSC system. Bethany’s location, Lindsborg, has a population of… less than 4,000, most of Swedish descent. The hottest ticket in Lindsborg is the every-other-year Svensk Hyllningsfest, a two-day extravaganza that honors the community’s heritage with Swedish dancing, music, arts, crafts, a beer garden, and a big ol’ smorgasbord.

More culture shock? VSC is a public entity answerable to the people and political leaders of Vermont, while Bethany is a Christian institution owned and operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

To sum up, Mauch leads a small college on a campus that covers about six square blocks and fits into a neat org chart. In Vermont she’ll take charge of a sprawling, multi-campus empire whose constituent parts were recently forced to merge.

And her tenure at Bethany goes back a whole entire [checks notes] three years.

Meanwhile, VSC has been burning through top administrators about as quickly as a losing football team with an impatient billionaire owner. For her sake and VSC’s I hope she succeeds, but based on recent events the Vegas oddsmakers have set the over/under on her tenure at 2 1/2 years. I’d be inclined to bet the under.

To be fair, she is not without accomplishment. She led a big fundraising campaign at Bethany. She launched a STEM program at an outpost of the Pennsylvania state higher-ed system. But there’s nothing in her background to suggest that she’s prepared to face the level of systemic challenges presented by VSC. Of course, I’m not sure there’s anyone who really is.

The search process produced 30 applicants, six of whom were interviewed. We’ll never know who else applied, but what do you think? Would a promising educator with aspirations for further advancement really want to muck out these stables?

And why did Mauch want the job? Paragraph two of Seven Days‘ article on her hiring: “She said she and her husband had been wanting to move to Vermont to be closer to their daughter, who is a first-year at Middlebury College.”

Ah. Hm. Well, nothing wrong with family closeness, but it’s a motivation that has nothing to do with the job’s actual appeal.

For all I know she may rise to the challenge. I hope so, for her sake and for the institution’s. We need a strong, vibrant state college system to supplement the University of Vermont and help develop a more robust workforce. I wish her all the best, as should we all. She’s gonna need it.