Patricia A. Prelock, provost and senior vice president at the University of Vermont. Photos: Baldwin Photography.
by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine For the past four years, Patricia Prelock has been the provost and senior vice president of the University of Vermont. For the past four years, the university has been experiencing a run of exceptional successes. This may not be a coincidence.
Prelock became provost in 2019 when Suresh Garimella was appointed the 27th president of UVM. By all accounts, they make a formidable team.
“She and I started together,” Garimella told me. “And I couldn’t be doing my job without her.”
First and foremost, Prelock is a nationally recognized expert on the treatment of autism spectrum disorders, known as ASD. She has an affinity with people who communicate differently.
“When I started my early work as a speech pathologist, a lot of people were afraid to work with individuals with significant disabilities, including autism,” Prelock said. “And for some reason, I just was able to be one with them. What I could do differently was to create an environment that would be easier for them to communicate their thoughts and ideas. I could give them a pathway where they would have a voice. That’s how speech pathology works. I give voice to people who don’t have voice.”
In addition to serving as the university’s chief academic officer, Prelock runs several different autism research projects and teaches. Her colleagues in the field of autism research adore her.
“It is a personal and professional privilege for me to be counted among Patty Prelock’s colleagues and friends,” said Robert Augustine, president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. “She is a powerful teacher, able to make information come alive for a student in a dynamic, exciting kind of way. She’s a powerful collaborator; she knows how to get people to work together to achieve a common goal. You know that she’s brilliant, but she’s also humble. I admire that about her.”
Before Prelock, 69, was appointed provost, she spent 10 years as the dean of UVM’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences. She is also a professor of communication sciences and disorders as well as professor of pediatrics at UVM’s medical school.
Prelock’s curriculum vitae runs to 78 pages. She has been awarded more than $24 million in grant funding; written over 200 publications, including 188 peer-reviewed papers; delivered more than 300 keynote addresses; and won numerous academic awards.
In addition to her frightingly sharp intellect, she exudes a charm, wit and warmth that make her, well, too good to be true.
“I’ve got nothing on the negative side of the ledger on Patty,” said Ron Lumbra, chair of the UVM Board of Trustees. “She’s nothing short of sensational. In her presence, I actually feel I’m with somebody who’s a better person.
“She’s brilliant,” he added. “She can review material faster than anybody I know. She can synthesize the main points. She can deliver what you’re trying to say more succinctly. Her ability to bring pieces together is incredible.”
Lumbra said that Prelock’s “superpower” is that she is a good person who wants to make this world a better place.
“She does that through helping connect people, helping to find funding resources, even helping to write a proposal,” Lumbra said. “Whatever the proposal is, she always makes it better.”
Being provost is a difficult job, Lumbra said, but Prelock often makes it look easy.
“You get the difficult challenges,” he said. “But she has got this unbelievable combination of empathy and compassion, as well as resilience and tough-mindedness. It’s really, really hard to put those traits together in any one human being. But she’s got them, and she demonstrates them every day.”
When Garimella took over the UVM presidency, Prelock was interim provost. The word “interim” was soon dropped. Garimella and Prelock have compatible attributes, Lumbra said.
“They are different in terms of their interpersonal skills and approaches,” Lumbra said. “What it did for us as a board is combine Patty, who’s got network connectivity for years and years and years on campus, with a president who was new. It was a nice yin-and-yang kind of balance — just outstanding for the university.”
Garimella said he and Prelock have shared “among the most successful years” in UVM history.
“No one single person does this, of course,” Garimella said. I’ve been blessed with an amazing team of senior leaders. And Patty is at the top of that list.”
One of Prelock’s greatest achievements was bringing an Osher Center for Integrative Health to UVM.
“There are only a few of them in the U.S.,” Garimella said. “One is at the University of California-San Francisco. One is at Harvard. And now there’s one at UVM!”
Prelock is “a selfless person,” Garimella said.
“She has nothing to prove,” he said. “She’s just doing this for the good of UVM. She works all the time. The job is very difficult. There are a lot of moving parts. And she keeps up with them. She’s very organized. She gets a lot done. And yet she is able to have warm relationships with everyone.”
How does Garimella measure the university’s success?
“We’ve doubled our research funding in a four-year period,” Garimella said. “And this doesn’t happen easily. The largest universities are seeing some growth, but doubling in a short time? We had among the best performances in the country. The whole research growth is unprecedented.”
In addition, UVM has seen at least a 64% rise in applications over the last two years.
“That’s huge, right?” Garimella said. “We’ve got about 30,000 applications for 3,000 (undergraduate) slots. UVM has not seen numbers like that before. It allowed us to fashion the kind of incoming classes we want. We have the most number of students of color, the most numbers of first-generation students. More than half of our students are from outside New England, which speaks to our national and international presence.”
When COVID hit, Garimella said he and Prelock became “joined at the hip” in their efforts to keep the university running as normally as possible.
“The university stayed open,” Garimella said. “We didn’t have a single student hospitalized for that entire time. All the employees and faculty staff were vaccinated, and the students are doubly vaccinated.”
To maintain the university’s affordability and accessibility, the administration froze tuition for a five-year period and instituted a new program called UVM Promise.
Colleagues call Prelock a gifted leader who is always willing to listen. Courtesy photo.
“We’ve said that any Vermont family that makes less than $60,000 a year gets to send their kid to UVM while paying no tuition at all,” Garimella said. “That’s a very big deal. And so this year, this fall, there’s a big jump in the number of Vermonters coming to UVM, even though the number of students in Vermont graduating from high school is dropping.”
When talking about success, leadership matters, Garimella said.
“Patty is a scholar and a university citizen, which means she’s got the right attitude coming into the role,” he said. “She’s pulled together a strong team in the provost’s office. She’s selfless as a leader. She’s got very high standards. Her work ethic is off the charts. Plus, you’ve got this positive, cheerful, optimistic, can-do attitude. If you’re looking for dirt on her, there’s none. She’s quite the jewel.”
Prelock is enthusiastically supported by many university deans. Linda Schadler, dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, calls Prelock “the best boss I’ve ever had!”
“She understands the role of the deans,” Schadler said. “She is very willing to discuss anything. She is the kindest, most thoughtful, tough-as-nails person I’ve ever met. She really cares about listening and making decisions that are good for everyone. But in the end, she makes tough decisions and tough calls, and she makes things happen.”
Frank Cioffi, president of the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation and Cynosure and a UVM board member for 22 years, is also a huge Prelock fan.
“I’ve watched her working with the faculty and staff in her school, and with the students,” Cioffi said. “When I was on campus, I listened to students just raving about her. I saw her capacity as an administrator, as a professor, as a teacher and as a mentor of some amazing young people with incredible minds.”
Cioffi has a personal reason for praising Prelock. After his daughter died, he adopted his 9-year-old autistic grandson. He was immediately advised to reach out to Prelock in her role as an expert in the field.
“It was hard enough to lose my daughter and then adopt my grandson,” Cioffi said. “But autism presents just a monumental, overwhelming predicament for a parent.”
Prelock helped Cioffi put together a team of specialists and was always available for consultations.
“She’s kind of been my Sherpa throughout the process,” Cioffi said. “She’s my compassionate, all-knowing guide. She’s been our source of knowledge in helping us find the compassionate way.”
Cioffi said his admiration and respect for Prelock only continues to grow.
“She is just an amazing administrator,” Cioffi said. “She is someone the faculty, staff and students have tremendous respect and admiration for. They can talk with her about anything. They can bring up any issue, whether it’s contentious or not, or any problem at all. She’ll always listen and always try to find a practical way forward that meets the best interests of them and of the university. And that’s rare in a leader, to not only have the expertise and the knowledge of how to deal with complex issues like budgeting and organization and governance, but to have the emotional intelligence that she has as well. She is absolutely phenomenal.”
All in the Family Business
Prelock’s values and strengths come from her family. She was born and raised in a small town outside of Youngstown, Ohio. She described her parents as “intellectually gifted” people who never had the opportunity to get a higher education.
“My mom was a brilliant young woman,” Prelock said. “She lived through the Depression. When she graduated from high school, her mom said she had no choice about college. She had to go to work.
“My dad was an amazing football, baseball and track star, but he had to go to work as well. He started out as a mechanic. From there, he developed a skill in the service of mechanical parts. He went to work for this company and later became a sales manager. Then he bought the business. Then he owned a franchise, which became a family business.
“My mom worked for him as controller after she raised all the children. Both my parents were really very gifted intellectually, but they never had the opportunities that I had.”
Prelock’s grandparents were immigrants; her grandfather worked in the steel mills, then retired and bought a small rural community gas station.
“That’s where my dad learned to become a mechanic,” she said. “They had a little store where my grandmother would make homemade bread and cinnamon rolls for the truckers. They would sell bread and milk and ice cream and they had a candy store. I would help her in that store. It was fun.”
Prelock is the second oldest of six children, all of whom contributed to the family business.
“Every summer, my brothers and I would help work in the business,” she said. “We did a lot of filing. What we learned from my parents is the value of hard work, the value of engaging your employees, the value of supporting the families of employees and creating a legacy of families in the business so that they take some ownership.”
To help earn money for books and clothing, Prelock also worked in department stores during this period. “Mom and Dad felt it was really important,” she said.
Her parents were excellent role models. “My dad, as the owner of the company, would sometimes sit out front and answer the phone and take all the messages,” she said. “The people who called had no idea that they were talking to the owner of the company, and that’s what he modeled.”
Her younger brother, James, was born with Down syndrome.
“He also had some intellectual challenges,” Prelock said. “But he was totally a part of our family. When he was first born, the doctor told my parents to put him away in an institution. My mom never went back to that doctor.”
James, it turned out, was physically gifted.
“My dad was a great athlete, and all of his sons were athletes, but they were much more into arts and drama and theater and accounting,” she said. “But James, with Down syndrome, was probably the most physically gifted of all the kids. He was a very good swimmer and did track and field and softball and basketball.”
When she visited James at his special school, she discovered her calling.
“There were about 450 kids there,” she said. “I went to their superintendent, and I said, ’What do you have to do to work here?’ He said, ’Well, you don’t need a degree in Special Ed yet. But the laws will change, and you will have to have the degree.’ I said, ’I don’t understand how kids can learn if you can’t communicate with them.’ And he said, ’Let me introduce you to my nine speech-language pathologists.’
“So he marched me in to introduce me to these speech pathologists who are working with kids, some of whom had zero capacity to talk. That Monday, I went to see my guidance counselor, and I said, ’I’m going to go to school to get a speech pathology degree, because I’m going to be a speech pathologist.’ I was 14. It drove my brothers nuts, because none of them knew what they wanted to do when they left school.”
In a way, Prelock’s education was James’ education.
“I was fascinated by the genetics,” she said. “I won a state fair prize on the genetics of Down syndrome, and I took my brother with me. I had his whole genetic profile, all his chromosomes and stuff. I had him sitting with me, and the physicians who were evaluating go, ’So, this is your brother? He doesn’t mind being here?’ I said, ’Oh, no! We’re buddies. Here’s the flat nasal bridge. And this is what the chromosomes look like.”
James eventually went into the family business; the vice president of the company became his job coach.
“He was probably in his mid to late 20s,” Prelock said. “She designed his workload, taught him how to sign in and sign out, led him through the tasks he would do each day and introduced him to the people who worked for the company. He learned from her how to organize service parts, do photo copying, mow the lawn, stock and clean the lunchroom, file papers and other things.
“She also took breaks with him to help him connect at lunchtime, and they would do word puzzles together on break. This was not her official job, but she took it on to create a community culture in which James was accepted and supported. James worked there for more than 20 years with her guiding support and, of course, that of my mom.”
Prelock could have chosen to be a geneticist or a medical doctor. But for her, communication was primary.
“I wanted James and all kids to be able to communicate,” she said. “I believe the ability to effectively communicate is a human right. Without it, they’re not going to be able to achieve and learn. I could have gotten into developmental pediatrics. But now I work with developmental pediatricians. I work with physicians. I work with nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and special educators. I have the best of all worlds with all of them. I decided to develop my career in kids with disabilities.”
Prelock said she fell in love with the challenges of the autism population.
“They taught me different ways to think about how you learn your emotions,” she said. “How you engage socially, and what it’s like to live in a neurotypical world when you’re neurodiverse. And when I graduated with my Ph.D., my brother James was sitting next to me. And he said, ’Now, Sis, don’t forget the reason you have your Ph.D. is because of me.’”
When it came time for her father to retire, family again became an important factor.
“My oldest brother was a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers and did not want to take over the company,” she said. “I had those two brothers who were in the arts and very creative, and James, and then a sister who died when she was very young. So my dad sold the business to the people who worked for him. And now it’s become a family business for each family that has bought the business after him. It’s been quite wonderful.”
Prelock’s family has suffered many tragedies; of the six children, only two are still living.
“My mom buried four children before she died,” Prelock said.
Prelock believes that her upbeat nature could be a result of grieving and loss.
“Especially during COVID, a lot of people asked, ’How can you be so happy all the time?’” she said. “Certainly, being a health care professional helped. But I think it is about living through those moments of loss and realizing that you can survive it. You can be sad. But seeing the strength that my mom had, going through all of that, I realized she was right when she said that every day is a gift. If you have your health, you have everything. And if you don’t, you have almost nothing. My mom was so right.”
Early Career
Prelock graduated magna cum laude from Kent State University in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in speech pathology and audiology. Her MA is also from Kent State. In 1983, she took her Ph.D. in speech-language pathology from the University of Pittsburgh.
“I went to Kent State because my mom had just had her last baby,” Prelock said. “She was 41 when she had my youngest brother. I was looking at out-of-state schools, but I wanted to make it affordable for my family. And I wanted to be close enough so I could go home if they needed me, but also to have a really good program. Kent had a five-year program, one of the best speech pathology programs in the country. You could get your bachelor’s and master’s in five years, so that’s what I did.”
Prelock finished her undergraduate work after three and a half years, then took a job teaching foreign doctors how to speak English. After that, she earned her master’s while doing an assistantship.
“Then I worked for two and a half, almost three years, in the schools,” she said. “I had 145 kids on my caseload in Ohio. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. I was in 12 different classrooms before it was popular, trying to see how to really support children’s learning and communication.”
At the time, Prelock was married to her first husband, who worked in insurance. He was having a peripatetic career, and Prelock had to give up jobs she loved in order to follow him.
When he got a job in Pittsburgh in 1980, Prelock won a National Institutes of Health fellowship to do her Ph.D. She also had her only child while she was there.
“I did my Ph.D. in three years and had the baby in the middle of it,” she said. “He was 2 years old when I walked across the stage to get my degree. And he went to every class.”
Prelock used her son as a test subject.
“We studied his cognition and his ability to play and how to think,” she said. “When he was an infant, from say 6 months to 2 years old, we would take him to class and look at his physical development. Then we taught him sign language to see what he would learn from the sign versus words. I would take him to college campuses every time we moved, and he would sit in the back of the room and listen to me. When he had to go to school, he said, ’Mom, I don’t need to go to school. I can just go directly to college. I sat in all your classes, and I know what’s going on.’”
Her son, a UVM grad, is now a high school teacher and a football coach.
“He’s an amazing teacher,” Prelock said. “He’s sensitive to kids with disabilities because he grew up with my brother. Now he’s an adult who has his own children. And he always talks about, ’Mom, do you remember when you did this experiment on me?’ And, ’Do you remember this?’ And I go, ’Yes, George. I’m looking at how great you turned out.’”
Finding Her Place
The family had already moved at least six times, and Prelock was happily working at the University of Cincinnati, running two grant research projects, teaching and being considered for a promotion, when her husband was offered a position in Vermont at National Life.
She was reluctant to move again. “I said, ’But it’s cold there. And it snows.’”
She came to Vermont in August 1994, knowing no one and without a job. She immediately set about making a place for herself.
“I introduced myself on campus and drove around the state to see what I could offer,” she said. “I had already had a lot of grants and collaborations on how to support language in the classroom and how to support the ability to communicate with people who don’t typically have a voice. And how to be very inclusive, especially in the disability world.”
No positions were open, so she created her own opportunities.
‘I love what I do. I love coming to work every day,’ Prelock says. Photos: Baldwin Photography.
At the time, UVM’s Center on Disability and Community Inclusion had just learned about a federal Health Resources and Services Administration grant and needed someone to write the application.
“Nobody knew how to write it,” Prelock said. “It required multiple disciplines like physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, pediatrics, nursing, social work, etc. They knew I wrote grants at the University of Cincinnati. And my friends at Cincinnati contacted them and said, ’You need to talk to Patty.’”
The grant was to create a virtual clinic to empower people in rural communities to learn to support people with disabilities and complex needs. Prelock was introduced to the state’s developmental pediatrician, whose idea it was.
“Because I had worked in the autism clinic in the University of Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Center for Developmental Disabilities, I knew about what are called LEND (Leadership Education and Neurodevelopmental Disability) programs and how they function,” she said.
“I didn’t know anything about UVM. I just went and introduced myself to everybody, and said, ’I have this idea. I’m working with some colleagues. Would you be willing to think about this? This is what needs to happen.’ I got input from multiple people. And they asked me to write the grant. So I went away for six weeks, came back, and said, ’OK, here it is.’”
Not surprisingly, they got the grant.
Prelock served as training director on the grant. She had found her place.
In 1998, Prelock’s husband found his next job — in Arizona. But their son was just starting at UVM, and Prelock decided that she loved Vermont and did not want to leave. The marriage ended.
“Vermont, I found, was a beautiful place,” she said. “And the people were thoughtful and kind. You could be innovative if you wanted to. And I found as a woman, I could create my own space.
“The state was small enough that you could walk into the governor’s office and say, ’This is really important.’ So I was able to speak to an autism bill. And I could talk with the health commissioner. I fell in love with Vermont.”
Romantically, the decision worked out well for Prelock, as she met and married her future husband, Bill Congleton, a general/family practice attorney who Prelock calls “the love of my life.” They’ve now been together 23 years.
“He’s retired and now makes it possible for me to do everything I want to do,” she said.
Having a Voice
It may surprise some people, but autism is not a contemporary problem.
“Autism has probably been around from the beginning of time, but people identified it as some kind of psychiatric disorder,” Prelock said. “People were put in institutions or out on the street.”
Things changed in 1944, when psychiatrist Leo Kanner first identified a group of individuals at Johns Hopkins University who shared a pattern of behavior focused on sameness.
“There was isolation,” Prelock said. “There were sometimes communication challenges. There were restricted, repetitive behaviors.”
Around the same time, in Europe, Hans Asperger identified the same patterns of behavior in patients with whom he worked.
“They discovered that it’s in every culture,” Prelock said. “But how it is managed or addressed and understood is different across cultures.”
The autism “spectrum” contains a wealth of characteristics. These can include social communication challenges, restricted patterns of behavior, failing to make eye contact, repetitive talk, doing unusual things with their hands, lining things up a certain way or talking all the time, but only about things that interest them.
“You can have nontalkers, which is about 25% to 30% of the autistic population,” Prelock said. “And you can have those who are kind of engaged in monologue. There’s such variety.”
The field of autism has grown over the last 30 years.
“It’s more about describing how the individual fits as a neurodiverse person,” Prelock said. “There are neurobiological differences in autism. There are hundreds of genes that they’ve identified that are different, but no single gene. So it’s a very complex framework.”
Prelock tries to create cognitive strategies that will play to people’s strengths.
“How can they adjust behavior so they can function in the world?” she said. “And at the same time, I need my neurotypical people to understand, ’Guess what? This person’s neurodiverse and you might have to cut him some slack. Here’s how you might adjust so you can communicate with him so you both can be successful.”
Part of Prelock’s job is to help autistic people navigate the social environment.
“The social environment is often not respectful and not very inclusive of different voices sharing different perspectives,” she said. “While autistic people may have a different perspective, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is the wrong perspective. They do not necessarily have to share everyone else’s perspective. They just have to be able to have a way to communicate why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking, and to try and understand why you might be thinking your way.”
Prelock said some of the most honest individuals she knows are autistic.
“Like my brother who had Down syndrome, they just say it like it is,” Prelock said. “Some people have difficulty with that.”
Her experiences with autism helped Prelock navigate the COVID pandemic.
“I tell people the pandemic was a little easier for me than for most,” she said. “I missed the human contact, but when you look at individuals with autism — when you have experienced the isolation, the disengagement, the frustration, the anxiety of the unknown in a global pandemic — that’s what individuals with autism experience every day of their lives.
“You saw strange behavior, people shouting out things, saying things they would never say if they weren’t feeling isolated. That’s the world autistic individuals have to manage. I feel like our whole world went through what my autistic family and peers have experienced in their lives.”
Prelock once had a private practice, but gave it up when her responsibilities became too burdensome. She still has several ongoing research projects that she helps her advanced students manage.
“I am currently working on a parent-implemented narrative book study where we’ve pulled three different kinds of books that have a focus on theory of mind or how your perspective might be,” Prelock said. “One of the books is ’Good Night, Gorilla,’ which really focuses on visual perspective-taking and knowing what the monkey is doing. One is about developing emotions, ’There’s a Nightmare in My Closet.’ And the third is about false belief, trickery and foolery, which is a more advanced skill of theory of mind. That’s ’The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”
Researchers create scripts for those books that help families start a dialogue with their child.
“We ask probing questions to get the children to think about how the character is stealing,” Prelock expalined. “Why they might be feeling that way. ’Have you ever had an experience where someone cheats? How did that make you feel?’ We videotaped one of my graduate students practicing the script with a 6-year-old neurotypical child, and then we give the thumb drives to families. We have them watch each story. And then we have them, for two weeks, read one story six times and probe their children with these questions. We want to see if over an eight-week or 10-week period we can see change in their child’s interactions in understanding the mental states of others, the emotions of others.”
Families consistently report changes in their children.
“Families have seen some really nice interactions,” Prelock said. “We see some changes in how they talk with their child and how their child is able to talk about emotions and the characters and stories in a rich way.”
Another study is supported by the Vermont Children’s Health Improvement Program.
“We have an eight-week session with families and teach them how to communicate with their children when they have a new diagnosis,” Prelock said. “And we connect them with other families who have a similar experience.”
Along with a physical therapist and a neuroscientist, Prelock has two grants from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the leading funder of patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research in the United States. The goal is to help physicians provide care for their adult autistic patients.
“I realized that I’ve been working with real little ones, and then the 5- to 9-year-olds, and then teenagers,” Prelock said. “But there’s a big problem. Autism doesn’t go away when you become a young adult or adolescent. My worry is the health care transition from pediatric to adult primary care. I’ve facilitated interviews with groups of autistic youth and adults to get their views on what we should do to improve health care.”
The other grant supports work with families of autistic individuals to learn what research studies they would like to see.
“We want to find out how they would like to be part of research and what kind of research we should be doing that they care about,” Prelock said.
A Management Job
Prelock was the dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences when she was appointed interim provost by then-UVM president E. Thomas Sullivan.
“What I saw of her accomplishments as dean was a terrific energy and energetic leadership,” Sullivan told me. “She was very strategic in her thinking and implementation processes for changing and managing the school. We had an opening in the provost’s office, and the new president was coming in. He asked me for my recommendation for provost. I shared Patty’s name with him, he interviewed Patty and we had a number of conversations. And that’s how her appointment came about.”
As the academic leader of the university, the provost has direct responsibility for faculty and academic affairs; the colleges and schools; student life and services; the division of diversity, equity and inclusion; enrollment management functions; global educational initiatives; university libraries; the university museum; and numerous university-wide offices, centers and programs, including the new Osher Center for Integrative Health.
Prelock shares Garimella’s visions: student success, distinctive research, and supporting the university’s original land grant mission.
“For me, it’s about how do I provide the best teaching so that our students can learn.” Prelock said. “President Garimella has a strong focus on distinctive research strengths. And I’m all about how do I help my faculty, and my students create new knowledge. How do I make sure that what we do engages our community and increases access for education for all people, so that we can create a workforce that is going to support Vermont, our region, the world?”
Academia is all about creating a new generation of leaders, Prelock said. And the UVM is successfully trying to do just that.
“We have amazing faculty,” Prelock said. “If you come here, you will get individualized attention. You’ll have opportunities to study abroad. You will have internships. You will get to do research. You will get to work in the Larner College of Medicine. You will have the opportunity to create a pathway to your career success. And we will guide you on that pathway.”
Once the need for students from outside New England became clear, UVM set up recruiters in other states.
“The Northeast is going to experience an enrollment cliff, because the number of 18-year-olds who live in the Northeast is the lowest in the country,” Prelock said. “So in the last two years, over 50 percent of our students are from out-of-state. We started strategically placing recruiters. We had someone in California, but we’re also looking at Atlanta and Chicago. We started an effort in Texas on sustainability. So we’re getting students from Georgia, Florida, Texas and Arizona. Typically we would get students from California, Colorado and Utah. That makes sense because they’re ski places. But now I have students from Seattle.”
This kind of recruitment is making Vermont values and Vermont education known throughout the nation — in red states as well as blue ones.
“The state of Vermont is appealing in lots of ways,” Prelock said. “Our commitment is to independence and the outdoor experience. This is where you can be an independent thinker. You can meet your legislators. You can be part of a community. And if you need a city fix, you’re close to Montréal, Boston or New York. Here, I think, they see problem-solvers and people who are trying to do some innovation in the midst of chaos.”
There’s an emphasis on attracting first-generation college students, whose parents never had the opportunity to go to college, as well as students of color.
“It’s really powerful for students to see somebody who’s a first-generation student and is leading the university,” Prelock said. “And a woman! I think that’s important for students to see.”
Not all changes are easily accepted.
Some courses in the College of Arts and Sciences were poorly attended and left the college with a significant budget deficit. Rethinking was needed, and many changes were made to the curriculum. The changes did not always go over well or easily.
“The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was in a precarious situation,” Prelock said. “He had a significant budget deficit, enrollment was down in several programs and he couldn’t meet the needs of programs where enrollment was extremely high, like neuroscience, psychology and biology. No one had the courage to support this effort until the dean used the data on low-enrollment/ low-completion programs to come up with a plan where we could still meet the breadth of the liberal arts and offer access to coursework for students outside the College of Arts and Sciences, but maybe not in the form of majors and minors.”
The school closed several low-attendance liberal arts departments and melded some of the classes into two new departments. The new School of the Arts, which comprises art, history, theater, dance and music, is now one of the most popular schools on campus, Prelock said.
“It’s within the College of Arts and Sciences,” she said. “And the faculty, once they realized they share more in common, are much more interdisciplinary in what they’re doing.”
The other new school is the School of World Languages and Cultures.
“We don’t have enough students who are interested in majoring in classics, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take courses in it,” Prelock said. “When the faculty sat with one another — Latin, Greek, classics, Italian, Spanish and French — they realized that they shared more in common than not. The core values are still there.”
Osher Center
Hosting the new Osher Center for Integrated Health is a $5.5 million feather in UVM’s cap.
Integrative health looks at the whole person — mind, body and spirit — rather than focusing on a specific disease. The center teaches integrative health, offers some clinical services and also does research.
“It’s very patient-focused,” said Associate Director Cara Feldman-Hunt. “It incorporates the least-invasive approach first. So we use a lot of Eastern modalities, like acupuncture, yoga and meditation. But that doesn’t exclude surgery or medicine. It’s really the best of both worlds.”
In 2015, when she first met Prelock, Feldman-Hunt was running the Laura Mann Center for Integrative Health, a nonprofit that had ties to the medical school and UVM Medical Center.
“She was the dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, and her interest was in bringing in some educational programming,” Feldman-Hunt said. “Patty was the first leader who I had met within the university and the hospital that I thought, ’This woman could make a difference.’ She just is that kind of person.”
The two decided to merge clinical, educational and research options.
“We brought all of that together to start a new program, UVM Integrative Health, in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences,” Feldman-Hunt said. “Then Patty became the provost, and we were approached by the Osher Foundation to submit a very involved proposal — which we did and eventually won.”
The reward was a $5.5 million endowment.
“Now, in 2023, we are an Osher center, the holy grail of integrative medicine,” Feldman-Hunt said. “Patty was absolutely a huge part of that. She’s the best leader you can ask for. The sky’s the limit. There was never a time where there was ’No.’ It was always, ’Yes, and how can I help you?’ She can make things happen, and she will not take the credit. She just empowers her team to do the work.”
Future
Leadership finds people, Prelock told me. It often seems to find her.
From grant writer, to grand administrator, to teacher, to department chair, to dean, and now to provost, leadership seems to seek her out.
As dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, she faced one of her few failures. She wanted to eliminate departments and bring everyone into an interdisciplinary team.
“I wanted to flatten the organizational structure, the administrative structure, so that I could reinvest in program directors and young leaders and really have the college see themselves as a team,” she said. “I think I miscalculated how people hold on to their identity through their departments, or their schools, or their titles, or their names. Because that’s never been important to me. My nursing program, in particular, really struggled with that. And I understand, because they’ve always struggled with their identity with medicine.
"So I stepped back and said, ’OK, what did I learn from this? How could I still do what I think makes sense, but in a way that evolves from the grassroots and allow it to be their idea, and define how they want to be engaged?’”
Prelock loved being a dean.
“I never wanted to stop,” she said. “And then the provost stepped down. They were bringing in a new president who had never been a chair, a provost or dean, but had these great ideas about innovation and research. My husband said to me, ’You’re going to be nominated. You need to follow through. You need to help your institution. It’s going to be more work, and it’s going to be hard on you. But you have to do this.’”
Being a provost is traditionally a stepping stone to becoming president of a college or university. But Prelock does not seem to be driven by ambition.
“I had no plan to become provost,” she said. “I just want to do my job. I love what I do. I love coming to work every day. I don’t sweat the small stuff. And I have a fantastic team. If I didn’t have the team around me that I have, there’s no way I could do this. I see myself as a servant leader, focusing on the well-being of my community and the people that I serve. I see teaching and educating and mentoring people as my ministry.”
Sometimes other universities seek to recruit her.
“I get several requests to apply for presidencies, but I have no intention of leaving Vermont or UVM,” she said. “I have a lot that I still want to be able to do, and this is where I belong. I love Vermont and the people I work with. I will lead in whatever capacity the university needs me.”
Joyce Marcel is a journalist in southern Vermont. In 2017, she was named the best business magazine profile writer in the country by the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. She is married to Randy Holhut, the news editor and acting operations manager of The Commons, a weekly newspaper in Brattleboro.
