 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am your host Melinda Moulton and today I have as my guest Dr. Scott Thomas. Hi Scott. Hello Melinda. Good morning. How are you on this sunny, warm February 8th day? Never better thank you. I'm in Washington DC and you're in Vermont. So you're in DC. I'm in a suit. You are. You're not. No, well I'm not. But I'm doing great. I had a chance to meet with our fantastic congressional delegation and we are, I'm heartened by how well represented we are in Vermont. So, but I'm doing great in answer to your question. Aren't we lucky? Well, let me let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. Dr. Scott Thomas is the 12th president of Sterling College. Scott has 25 years of teaching and leadership experience at private and public institutions. He is a first generation college student. He has devoted his career to advancing programs and policies to expand access to quality college opportunities and ensure student success and build diverse organizations. He holds a BA in sociology and a PhD in education policy leadership and research methods from the University of California, Santa Barbara. There you have it on that. Now, I'm going to jump right in because I want you to share a little bit about your childhood and being the first person in your family to go to college. My childhood boy. Well, it's pretty, pretty simple. My father was professional baseball player. Eventually for Cincinnati Reds, he met my mother in Florida and what they call the Grapefruit League. He was originally from Connecticut, Massachusetts. And so that was his career and his life met my mother in Miami. And from there they carved out a pretty good existence. He was out of the game, so to speak, pretty quickly due to an injury and went into insurance and did pretty well with that. But as a result, I'm the first one in my family. I have a younger sister who followed me and graduated from the University of Central Florida as well. So my parents did pretty well setting us up and kind of reminds me of the maximum that I carry around. The most important thing you can do in life is choose your parents really well because that's where advantage comes from. So it's really true. So my next question was for you was who do you feel have the greatest impact on your life choice to enter the field of education? Oh, Mr. Satava. I guess every educator has that person that really had a profound impact on them. I wasn't a very good student in high school. In fact, I was a pretty rotten student in high school, middle school too, for that matter. But we won't go back to middle school years. My grandfather was an engine in an undegreed engineer with Eastern Airlines. And he flew a lot. And when I was about 12 or so, he said, Hey, you know, you keep on the straight and narrow and I'll keep you flying. And so it gave me a motivation to really buckle down in school and think about the applied nature of everything I was learning. You know, train leave station A at 1242 and arrives at station B at 213. That didn't make much sense to a lot of my peers, but to me that it did because I was applying it every day, which is the connection to Sterling College too. But the answer to your question, of course, my grandfather had a huge impact through that. Also, the teacher that I encountered in high school who looked at me and says, God, you know, you're kind of wasting my time and you're kind of wasting your time. Let's come up with a plan. And we came up with a plan and I wound up in the community college nearby during my high school years. And really got pretty serious about math and computer science and languages and it was that that was a pivotal moment in my life. I love those stories about educators who help educators to become educators. So, you know, you were obviously born in Florida. What was your journey to get you up to Vermont? What brought you to Vermont? Well, I guess I followed him, my father's footsteps in some ways because I was a, my father was a pretty good athlete. I was a pretty good athlete, but I was a not very good professional server and at least not good enough to really make it on the big league. And the big league was a pretty minor thing when I was growing up. But I wound up, as you mentioned, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which was a great choice for a surfer. And it turned out that it was a great choice for a sociologist. And I have to say, Melinda, that when you introduced me as a sociologist, it warmed my heart because that's what I am through and through. I think I'm thinking about the relationship between structure and agency. And as I traveled around much of the world surfing, I had that lens on looking at different societies and looking at how people interact with different societies. And I decided I wanted to pursue that. What college access looks like, how education makes a difference in people's lives. So, I became an academic. My first job was Surprise, Hawaii, University of Hawaii, where I was at the University of Hawaii for six years. And as my career progressed, I was at the University of Arizona, the University of Georgia, the Claremont Colleges for a while. And then at the Claremont Colleges, I became an administrator and I was Dean of a College of Education. And I got to thinking about where I might make a big impact. And I became aware of the opportunity at the University of Vermont. They were looking for a new Dean for their College of Education and Social Services. And I said, what do I know about that? I applied and I absolutely fell in love with the place. And that was another transformational moment in my life, is coming to Vermont, working in Vermont in education. The spirit of everything. We were kidding around a little bit before we came live and you talked about sort of the hippie nature of things. But there's the back-to-lander piece of it that was an inspiration. And there was the kind of harder reality of the libertarian roots to sit under a very thin topsoil of liberalism and progressivism in the state. And a long tradition of education that cuts across this thing. It was just absolutely inspiring to be in Vermont doing that. I went to Wyoming at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a variety of opportunities to think about doing some different education projects around competency-based education and working with teachers on scale. And frankly, I was really curious to know what it would be like to work in the political environment that we're in, in a very, very conservative place. So I traded Bernie for a Liz. And Liz didn't turn out to be a great day because she got thrown out of office. And being a little irreverent here, I probably shouldn't be. But the point was that there are very good people from all different perspectives. And I had a great opportunity to work with some fantastic legislators that I just don't agree with on much. But we had a productive relationship. I learned a lot. And lo and behold, Sterling College is looking for a president. And I was not ready to leave Wyoming, but I was ready to take a hard look at Sterling College because it has always been an inspiration to me. A bit of an enigma, but also an inspiration. We can explore that if you want. So here we go. Well, we're going to move into that. So my husband went to the University of Hawaii and he got his beginning in film by making surf movies. Okay. All right. I got to get the two of you together. I mean, he never was a great surfer. He's a great skier. And he always got, you know, but, but anyway, we're going to have you watch the series, The Hundred Foot Wave yet? Yeah, I have. Okay. I mean, not my cup of tea. Well, I'm not a surfer, but my God to see what those, those, those people and the women. I mean, it's an extra because I'm not as, but anyway, I was very moved by it. And so let's talk about Sterling College. Sterling College is 100% environmentally focused college up in Craspery Common. And I'm going to encourage my, my viewers to go to the website at sterlingcollege.edu. And the college has about 125 students and offers both a two and four year undergraduate degree in environmental science. So talk to us about Sterling College and, and we have a lot of questions about Sterling, but tell us a little bit about your love of Sterling College. Yeah, well, the love of Sterling started when I was at the University of Vermont. And we were putting together some programming on place based education and what better place to do it than, you know, where John Dewey, sort of, you know, began his good work across his career. And we were convening a group of native Hawaiians and Marory from New Zealand and a number of others at Shelburne Farms of all places, which is a great place to do that. And I had come through Craspery Common. I'm a pretty avid Nordic skier and biathlete as well. And so I had spent a bit of time in Craspery and I was very curious about Sterling College. So I stopped in one day, met the then President Matthew Durr, wonderful, wonderful person, met a couple of the faculty and I explained what we were doing. And they listened to me very patiently. And I said, you know, be really nice. A couple of you came over to Shelburne Farms. And this would have been 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. And they did. And they were part of this gathering that we had on place based education. And I always was struck by the thoughtfulness, the consistent connection to the principles that were important to us in place based education and in learning. And they're a central connection to the land that they work on in Craspery is very, very different than anything that I had seen before. So that was the Sterling connection. Now, the reality of Sterling coming back and actually, you know, being a key part of the community is that everything we do is connected to the farms, the gardens, the forests. Our fiber studios are forages. We work in the morning and academic intensive courses. We come together as a community for lunch each day or a small place. So we do this as kind of part of how we operate as a community. And then in the afternoons, we engage in what we call experiential endeavors where we're applying the academic learning that we're engaged into the morning to real world projects. We're one of 10 work colleges in the country, federal work colleges where every student or on our campus, every student engages in work as part of their time at Sterling. And this is through the federal work study program and what they earn from that work goes toward helping support them at Sterling with their tuition and their fees and such. But it's a very, very different model than you find it most institutions we have or our semesters are broken up into three big chunks. We're constantly outdoors. We are kind of building a lot of activities around things like our winter expedition where our students make their way back to campus from quite a ways away over a multi day period and learning about their environment and applying their skills and navigation and that making these types of things. So there's really nothing like it that I've seen and it's an honor to be there. When you say place based, what does that mean to my viewers? What does that mean place based? Well, it means that everything we do is connected to where we are. So we make sense of the knowledge that we develop and the knowledge that we draw in. We make sense of that in the context of the place that we're located in our instances, the Northeast Kingdom, the North Country, Craftsbury, however you want to segment that. But we want to learn about something in the environment or ecology or outdoor education. All that draws from the communities where we are. We try not to have a town and gown relationship. We try to be part of a larger community that's embedded within the locale that we exist in. So you go to the farms, you go to the forest, you go to the rivers and the wetlands and they become your classrooms. So do you also focus a bit on socially responsible thinking at Sterling College as well because environmental and socially responsible sort of tie together. Is there a bit of that? Right. That's key in a way. It's interesting. I was just in a conversation with somebody here in Washington and they used the word sustainability. And I realized that they were using the word sustainability clearly in a squarely colonial capitalist context. And I don't know that we really want to be sustainable in that context. We can't be. We have to be adaptable. I think that make that point. I don't know that I was very successful, but yes, we're very socially conscious. We're socially conscious when we think about, you know, what sustainability means. Who's sustainability? Who is advantaged when we talk about sustainability? We do a lot of work and sustainable agriculture and sustainable food systems in a different way where we really think about inequalities and who has access to good nutrition and who has access to land that's viable for being able to regenerate and promote well being of all people in the communities. So I, you know, why don't more people know about Sterling College? I mean, do you have a limited amount of people? Obviously you can go to Sterling. I don't know if you do an online program, but you only take so many students. But I've heard of Sterling College, but I didn't know a whole lot about it. Why is that? I think you should be, I mean, I think everyone should know about this college. It's the president of Sterling College. I want everyone to know about Sterling and I think everybody has a story about how they encounter Sterling by driving through Craftsbury. We're a very, very, we operate on a very, very thin budget and we always have. This is part of our identity. We reuse things. We rehash things. We don't have big marketing and advertising budgets. And much of our recruitment over time has been through networking and in word of mouth. Yes, there are only, we have 120 beds on campus. So we have a capacity of physical capacity and residents of 120. How many people apply every year? Well, it's very self-selected. So we actually, if you look at our acceptance rate, it looks very high, but it's artificial because it's very self-selected. When people learn about Sterling, they come and make a case that I want to be a part of this community. So to get that far, they're already self-selected pretty clearly. But the point to your question, the point being that there are only 120 slots, our average enrollment for the last 10 years has been about 100. COVID took a beating. We took a beating through COVID and we're growing back from there. But it's something that we're working on and making sure that more people know about Sterling. I can think of so many young people who would go nuts for this college. And when you think about the college experience or even the online experience of going online. But anyway, so I hope that my show helps to educate my viewers out there about Sterling College up at Crosbury Common. I'm talking to Dr. Scott Thomas, who is the 12th president of Sterling College. So I was on your website. You publish an annual journal called Terrain. Students and faculty contribute to this publication. And it's super informative and cool. I love the recipe from Liz Shadwick for Bavarian beer cheese and bundles. But I also really enjoyed the article, Traveling Through the Watershed, which was written by Farley Brown. Talk to us a little bit about this journal and how do people get a copy of it? Tell us about this, Scott. So let me take a step back and then come to the journal. The online piece, which is connected to the journal and outreach, the journal is clearly a vehicle for outreach. We have a program for your website you'll see called EcoGather, which is basically it's an online learning environment for people who are interested in some of the most cutting edge topics on food systems. And how we create a more, I'm avoiding the word sustainable now that I brought it up. Adaptable. Use adaptable. Yes. So, but also connected to that is how we communicate about some of the other things that we do and some of the expertise that we have. You note the, both the column by Liz, our great chef and head of kitchen at Sterling and Farley Brown, one of our faculty experts there. Farley's fantastic. We've got a great faculty. They write in this train. It's a fairly young publication. And we usually release it in the fall. I came in in the summer and we decided that we were going to hold it until later in the spring when we'll be likely to be releasing an issue again in the summer of that. Thank you for highlighting. Oh, I am. And I'm going to put it up as soon as we're done. I want to get up on my social media that I met with you today to talk to us a little bit about the Sterling capstone project. Yeah. So every student. Is it is said every student there are studies culminate in a project of some sort. And I had the pleasure of sitting through presentations and students that were graduating in the spring. But it's very much like it did. I think similar to how you might think about thesis at a traditional college, but these are often very applied. We had students doing capstone projects on leadership with youth groups. And in the summer we had a student do a fantastic presentation on a project that they were doing with algae and water algae. And we had another student that was focused on tanning and all the different ways that you can tan different types of hides. And again, all real world connected skills. You know, we, I heard somebody the other day talk about the role of colleges and in encouraging dreaming and really getting people to think big. Yeah, we're dreamers, but we're also doers is Sterling and I think that's manifest in these capstone projects. So there's a there's a practicality to this this college, which really appeals to me. So you also have a work program where students can develop their skills and refine their interests in the work program. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so the campus is run effectively by students and we have a staff of less than 50. Every student has a job as part of us being a designated federal work college students are working in the kitchen students are working in the offices. We have a lot of students working on our farms, the animals and working at the gardens, running our CSA and in these types of things. So everybody has a hand in the functioning of Sterling community. And it's a gig and another very unique feature of Sterling. Well, the other unique thing is that you have social support groups for BIPOC folks and also for the LGBTQIA and pride community to that you have the support groups. Talk a little bit about the diversity up at Sterling. Yeah, so, you know, diversity in places like Vermont is a challenge, certainly diversity in rural areas are always a challenge. And speaking of challenges I was challenged by some students recently about, hey, we have we replied black lives matter flag with a pride flag. You know, great, but is that just performative what are we doing. And so these are constantly conversations that are coming up and again, you know that the COVID years it was difficult to to really engage and in that work meaningfully in a physical way. So we're finding new ways to to be able to support those principles and try to diversify our student body and our staff constantly at a return. Those are priorities for us. I wish we could be making more progress on them, but we're relentless in our commitment that for you. Yeah, I really love seeing that. So I've told you this one before this the show started, but you know, I love Sterling College. I have fallen in love with this college and I probably would have loved to have studied there. I wish I wasn't so old. Now, even your dining experience 30% of the food that you serve this the students, they grow 30% of the food. Right. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, here's an interesting factoid and I'll send you the link to the group that that has done this. Sterling College is ranked number one in North America. For its farm to table, I'm short circuiting their phrasing for its farm to table food system. We like to think that we're operating in a circular economy and a circular food system in a circular culture where everything that we do is brought back to our community. So we try to source everything as locally as we can, whether it's grown on the farms or the gardens, or whether it's coming from providers that are in our area. So that's our top priority and we've been recognized for that internationally. So can my viewers who are up in Craftsbury, can I drop in and walk around and visit? You have 130 acres up in Craftsbury. It's one of the most beautiful farms. 130 acres in Craftsbury. We love people to stop in. Again, this is something that I've been struck by that in COVID there was a lot of discouraging of people mingling and coming across campus. So I've been at every turn, I've been asking people to come visit. We'll be happy to give you a tour, come in and meet our great admissions team and in our outreach group. We would love to see you. I would love to meet folks. They want to come by. It's a pretty flat place. You know, I come up and knock on my door. I'd love to say hello. Fantastic. What a little loving gesture to invite us all up there. So it's up at Craftsbury Common. So I'm going to pause for a moment and take you to the world today that we live in. It's February 8th and it's sunny and dry and unseasonably warm. Scott, what is your vision for the future of humanity on this planet? My future of humanity on this planet. I pause because I'm coming from Sterling College with this answer. You know, I think anything that we say in relation to a question like that could be seen as insufficient in trite, but it really all starts with the community. So what I see for the future of humanity is that I want to say that the global is the local in some important ways. I have a colleague who our dream weather at EcoGather likes to talk about Cosmo localism and how everything emanates from our local relationships. And this again is something that I think Sterling can be a model for and emblematic of. All of our activity has to think about the community and everything that we do should reflect our community values and our community resources. Not just in Sterling, not just on the Sterling College campus, but across the community across the region. You mentioned Melinda jokingly that you're old, you said that yourself. Well, I'm older. Older, thank you. But I'm truly only 14. I just, but I'm older, but I'm really just 14. Being being 61, but being 14 too. Another piece of that future is about learning and the way we think about learning. And I talk about our age because when people think of Sterling College, they traditionally think of Sterling College. So it's a college traditional college age students. There are young people there and maybe some old people on the faculty and maybe an old president and all this business. But we're really focused on how we create a community of learners trying to provide learning opportunities around the environment and ecology. This span from preschoolers, folks who are retired that might want to come back and think about, you know, I want to learn a little bit about, you know, a food system. I want to learn how to share sheep and think about how to spin wool and maybe make a blanket. These are the things that we do very hands on. So thinking about lifelong learning as part of that ecosystem of the future is also key. So all of my viewers, if you're thinking of going to back to college, look at Sterling College because it looks like it's really where we need to be right now. So I want to ask you a question and this is one that's kind of bothered me with the environmental movement. The environmental community doesn't really ever embrace reducing human population in their movement. I did propose this question to a very famous environmentalist at the Sanders event a few years ago, and population never comes up. And sometimes, and oftentimes the environmental NGOs do not work closely with reproductive rights groups. And I think one of the issues in our world is that there are that our population is growing and we're not learning how to protect the earth with this growth. And I'm just wondering how you see this with the environmental and the reproductive rights community. Well, certainly an issue and uneven growth and growth that is contested on a capitalist and I think even militaristic basis of need is problematic as well. So yeah, growth is certainly I'm thinking of the population bomb, you know, from the book from 20th century. This is long been an issue. Reproductive rights certainly figure into that, importantly, what, you know, what, how we engage and mobilize around that is something that, you know, we would cover in some of the issues that we explore at Sterling. How we go out and mobilize to affect it. That's, that's the future of our graduates and graduates from other areas. So there's with a political situation. What it is we have two wars democracy on the line authoritarianism rising around the world. How are young expected to navigate this new political maze. Clearly with the challenges that we're seeing not just on college campuses, but mental health and well being challenges. We're all wondering that this is front and center on the lines of many, including me and my colleagues at Sterling. I'm thinking about trying to understand agency and trying to think about how we take the knowledge that we have in the privilege that we have to bring to bear on improving the conversation again that sounds cliche and in a bit right but it all starts with these types of issues and working into into larger groups the information the knowledge the sharing some of that is contested in ways that it never has been. I think we're reckoning with a moment of social media where truth is a far more relative idea than it ever has been that's part of this problem so again back to how do we build trust within communities and trusting relationships with one another toward improving the we're having debates about you know existential issues like those that you democracy really concerns me right now. And unfortunately oftentimes we're talking to the choir you know we're talking to the choir we're talking to each other, and it doesn't get out of the belt way I mean in Vermont we live in this bubble. Now, do you believe our country's educational system is growing our young population to deal with the realities of our time. Very unevenly. I joked earlier that single best decision we can make is choosing their parents wisely. The inequality and education the education system itself is is a real issue and that would be a great place to start to think about how we advantage the disadvantage disproportionately here. And I've been dean so that the Dean of Colleges of Education for the last 12 years and understand quite well the challenges associated with getting resources to the people that need them most to address some of those inequities this is one of our biggest challenges in the country. Absolutely, and I think Vermont does a pretty good job educating our, our young here in Vermont. So Sterling was one of the first colleges in the nation to divest its endowment from fossil fuel extractors. Bravo on that. I want to give you a high five on that because I was involved in in trying to do that and some of the other colleges and some instances we failed so I wanted to give you a shout out on that. It's very important to us. It really is. So, I did talk about my age and I didn't and I got to tell you age is so relative. Because I, but anyway, I was part of the 60s revolution we talked about that too. And we tried to transform our social and environmental vision. But I'm not so sure as a generation that we succeeded in doing that because human behaviors inherently driven to seek its own self satisfaction. How do you think we're doing. Well, clearly there are challenges but there were challenges 300 years ago to back. Have you read have you read the book sapiens because back then, they weren't destroying the they weren't destroying the home that they were they're living on. They, and they were, I mean, we, we, we inherently do things that are not in our best interest and I find that and I'm, and I'm part of that I don't, I don't disengage myself from that. And have you have you read the book sapiens. No. Well, I loved it because it because it really took you through the growth of human, human beings and I did that's what I love about your college is that you're educating young people to to feel the earth to feel to be engaged and so many of us live above the earth and we're engaged in it. And, and we're coming to the end of this show and there's so much that I want to talk to you about I think I'm going to have to do it separately over dinner or lunch or something but I think the work that you're doing is exactly what humanity needs. I guess that's my point. Well, thank you Melinda and I believe it too and that's why I came to Sterling College. It is a moment for colleges like Sterling I think Vermont has been a great context for experimental colleges. They've struggled they we've learned lessons from them. I think Sterling is is an exemplar for how we might think about learning be high school and as I said earlier learning across the lifespan as it relates to the environment. It should be an exemplar for the rest of the country in the world. So I think that over the years ahead you will see an increasing reach of Sterling and increasing opportunity to engage with Sterling on these issues that you're highlighting on your show about the future of our planet. I want everyone to know about this college and I you know I would love to I would love to see CBS Sunday morning. I want to come up and do a story on the college I think and you know I think it would be great to take this model and move it into the women's prison where we can take the women out of prison put them in an educational environment where they're growing their food and there. I mean I just think that this this model could be used in so many areas of our humanity. I want to I want to just thank you for all that you're doing. Dr. Scott Thomas the president of Sterling College I hope this has been valuable and that you've enjoyed your time with me and I really appreciate you. It would be hard not to Melinda I enjoyed your questions and the engagement and your appreciation for what we're doing is sterling and I'll come back to something that you asked about earlier visiting with us. We're a very place based college and nothing like seeing it in place rather than online so we'd welcome your viewers to come join us in any time come enjoy our wonderful dining hall for breakfast or over lunch and we would be happy to to show you around. I'm going to bring my I'm definitely going to bring Rick up because you have to talk about University of Hawaii and surfing and surfing movies. And I think our viewers should get up it's sterling it's sterling college.edu is their website it's a beautiful website. There's so much information and I encourage you all to go visit sterling college and for Dr. Scott Thomas. Thank you for your time my friend and I hope to see you. I have so many more questions that I want to ask you. I want to pick your brain so thank you for your time my friend. Thank you Melinda it's been fun. Okay bye bye.