Talk:Vermont State University

This article and its constituent campuses

I noticed that there have been work done on this article and the articles of its constituent campuses; thanks to everyone! Please correct me if I misunderstood but I think the way that things that have proceeded is that the former colleges' articles got past-tense'd (e.g., Castleton University and Vermont Technical College), and campuses were put as individual as sections in Vermont State University.

My main concern with the current state of things is that Vermont State University itself does not contain much information about each campus, but the campus sections also do not, e.g., link back to the original independent colleges. And because it sounded like the former colleges' articles were meant to be deprecated, I also wasn't sure if they were meant to be expanded upon going forward.

Personally, I think the best way would be to un-past tense the individual colleges, rename the page if the institution decides to fully rebrand, and use Template:Main to link Vermont State University back to the individual colleges so that this article stays as an overview of the system. Happy to hear what folks think. Thanks! Maiacosis (talk) 18:31, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

cc @Oswako, Maiacosis (talk) 18:31, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Hey! This situation is very complicated and I have been trying to figure out a solution for a while.

The issue is that each campus still exists but the institutions don't. It's not a system, it's one unified university. So I don't love converting the pages to be campuses (erasing the previously independent institutions) nor an awkward phrasing like "Castleton University is a former university and now a campus of Vermont State University located in Castleton, Vermont..." Oswako (talk) 18:43, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Quick note that we don't have to stick with a subject's preferred wording if it doesn't align with other sources and common sense. In particular, I think there are already a few good examples in Wikipedia of institutions that don't call themselves systems but they're clearly systems and we label them as such. For example, when I was a grad student at Indiana University Bloomington they were adamant that Indiana University is not a system but one university with many locations or something along those lines but our articles clearly and correctly label it a system. ElKevbo (talk) 19:14, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

For sure, and thanks for that clarification @ElKevbo. I think that's still a situation where the university isn't a "system" but obviously has a lot of clear divisions. VTSU doesn't seem to be organized like that. VTSU is one institution that has five locations. I mean, IU Bloomington has its own (sub-)website. None of the VTSU campuses have more than a page on the VTSU site describing student life there. I'm not totally opposed to rebuilding each former college's page, but I also think it's hard to predict if VTSU is going to function like a system or not. Oswako (talk) 18:16, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Glad you all are trying to figure this out. Let me know when you do, lol. Jjazz76 (talk) 06:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I think another complicating factor is that both the former NVU and VTC had multiple campuses. There are articles for NVU's two campuses (qua Johnson State College and Lyndon State College) but the two Vermont Tech campuses were always in one article. I would think the correct approach if we wanted to do it would be new articles for each campus, leaving the old articles to reflect the pre-merger institutions. But I still don't think I would be on board with that until I saw some evidence that VTSU intends to treat the campuses as stand-alone, autonomous units. So far, the news out of VTSU is the opposite, with the phrase "near-constant transformation" coming up frequently. Oswako (talk) 15:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

But there were two separate pages for the two NVU campuses because they were separate institutions until 2018. NVU only existed 2018-2023. Full disclosure - I interviewed for a job there. Didn't get it. The setup was kind of complicated back in 2021, now even more so. Jjazz76 (talk) 03:41, 30 September 2023 (UTC)