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.

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