We in Connecticut have a special interest in Vermont Law School because so many alumni live and practice here, and the school has done a great job in educating a generation of committed environmental lawyers. Vermont Law School, an independent school and the only law school in Vermont, has been at the forefront of environmental law education and advocacy since its founding in 1972, and modest beginnings in an old schoolhouse in the sleepy little town of South Royalton.

But today, VLS is floundering, up to its neck in debt brought on by the sagging enrollment caused by the Great Recession and struggling to stay afloat with a totally inadequate endowment. Applications, admissions and enrollment are up, but the improvements are recent and follow too many years of financial losses.

The most recent difficulty arises out of the dean’s precipitous and ill-considered action in taking tenure away from 14 professors. It was a desperate move in the face of a deficit that seemed insurmountable without drastic budget cutting. Somewhere in this ham-handed restructuring, the notion of due process got lost. The American Association of University Professors jumped in, investigated and issued a devastating report. On June 15, AAUP delegates voted to add VLS to its “list of institutions sanctioned for serious departures from AAUP-supported standards of academic governance.” There are just six schools on the sanction list. A lesser AAUP denunciation is censuring. There are 58 institutions on that list.

While the dean is responsible for the sanctions, VLS as an institution, and its faculty and students deserve our support in moving forward. We need trained stewards of the environment, especially now with the threat of extinction, just reported by the United Nations, of one million species. Any hope of reducing those losses, and combatting other environmental problems such as climate change, will depend on the rule of law and able lawyers.

We can support VLS in two ways. First, those who want to see the school survive can seek to understand what happened, why the dean felt compelled to take the action he did, and what the AAUP report reveals—and then be ready to counsel prospective students that there remains much to be gained in attending VLS.

Second, we can help to promote the joint degree programs that bind us here in Connecticut with our neighboring institution to the north. There is a joint program with Yale. The Juris Doctor/Master of Environmental Management (JD/MEM) Program requires four years in residence at both schools—two and a  half years at VLS, and one and a half years at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The joint degree candidates are able to “share” the equivalent of 12 credits between the two programs. And there is one with the Quinnipiac University School of Law in which in three years Quinnipiac students receive their law degree from Quinnipiac and their master’s in environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School. For those wishing to partner with schools at more distant venues, there are joint degree programs at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France and the University of Cambridge in England.

We lose a lot if VLS does not return to its former strength, or worse, closes. Support the school and you support Yale, Quinnipiac and the next generation of lawyers, especially environmental lawyers who may be the ones to save the planet.