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But Gil Kujovich, the man who’d helped secure her a spot at the school based on her work ethic instead of her LSAT score, wasn’t through with her. Not even close.
“He mapped out my whole career, including when I left here,” said Jefferson, now associate dean for student affairs and diversity at the South Royalton institution. “He took me under his wing …Without him I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I wouldn’t have helped all these students.”
Kujovich passed away in December 2017 at the age of 71, but Jefferson and others whose lives he touched are continuing his legacy of helping the underprivileged and supporting equality. The new Gil Kujovich Diversity Fund, announced last month, will assist students struggling to pay their expenses while attending law school as well as addressing issues of diversity more broadly through initiatives such as bringing special speakers to the school.
“The fund will help students in crisis, so they don’t have to take out a loan,” said Jefferson, who helped create the fund with Kujovich’s wife, Joni Chenoweth, and former Vermont Law School student Mike Hill. “There are students who come here who don’t have snow tires … There are people who start a new medicine and they can’t afford to pay for it.”
Jefferson, who will administer the funds based on need, knows firsthand what a difference that kind of support can make. Growing up in segregated Alabama, she was among the first students to attend the newly integrated Selma High School in 1971, enduring racial slurs scrawled on the walls. She lost her mother at age 15 and had to take time off from school to help her father with her eight siblings. After high school she moved to Baltimore and then Washington, D.C., working low-wage jobs to put herself through Southeastern University and help support her family back home.
“I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to fight injustice,” said Jefferson, who participated in the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. “I didn’t know how I was going to do it.”
Jefferson’s law school application landed in the hands of Kujovich, who had just begun teaching at Vermont Law School, following an enviable career clerking for Supreme Court Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White, and helping Shirley Hufstedler, the first U.S. Secretary of Education, set up the Department of Education.
In his new role, he’d made it his mission to address the inequalities he’d witnessed as a lawyer.
“He noticed that I didn’t get a high LSAT, but he noticed that I could overcome obstacles. He knew that I was highly motivated … and that I had gained my education at a personal expense, so he admitted me,” said Jefferson, the third black student and second black woman to study at the school. “He saw the discrimination that this country had bestowed on me, and he wanted to correct it.”
From the day she arrived at the law school, spending her last $20 on the taxi that took her from the train station in White River Junction to the school in South Royalton, Jefferson received Kujovich’s support.
“Gil realized, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to put some things in place for her,’ ” Jefferson said, recalling how Kujovich worked out a reduced course load for her and made her his research assistant so that she could supplement the courses with extra writing. In 1985, he arranged for her to work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City, where, among other things, she assisted in defending civil rights activists Albert and Evelyn Turner against charges of voter fraud brought by then U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions in Alabama.
Meanwhile, Kujovich, who also had a hand in the landmark 2000 legislation approving civil unions, continued recruiting minorities and other underrepresented groups to the law school. Today, about 20% of the 450 students who study there are from minority groups, Jefferson said.
The diversity fund, which has a balance of about $100,000, will support members of these minority groups, as well as anyone who demonstrates need. In keeping with Kujovich’s desire to help everyone succeed, “It will take into consideration everything: race and ethnicity, socioeconomics, older students, veterans, sexual orientation….” Jefferson said.
The people whom Kujovich helped through the years have given back to the fund as well. Nearly half of the donations that have come in so far are in sums of $50 or less, said Hill, who now works at a private law firm in Washington, D.C., and serves on Vermont Law School’s board of trustees. All donors will be listed in a notebook in the newly dedicated Gil Kujovich Seminar Room. “And they’ll be listed in alphabetical order, not by how much people have given,” Hill said.
Along with his efforts to promote equality, Kujovich left his mark on the school in other ways.
“Gil Kojovich was an outlier. He was far better than any professor I ever saw, hands down,” said Hill, who attended Vermont Law School for a year before being accepted at Yale Law School. “He had this way of asking probing questions, not in an insulting, demeaning way, but an empowering way. He showed us all that we could go deeper than we thought we could. … After we left his classroom we all felt smarter and more capable than we knew ourselves to be.”
“He was a very judicial, rational, brilliant man,” Chenoweth said.
At the same time, Kujovich was a man of action. “He did what needed to be done,” Chenoweth said. “He would just look at a problem and see how it could be fixed.”
That method applied whether Kujovich was uncovering government malfeasance during his stint in Washington, or replacing a convalescing student’s toilet on graduation day, dressed in his formal attire.
The diversity fund is very much in keeping with her husband’s vision, compassion and sense of duty, Chenoweth said. “I think Gil would just be honored that this was done and pleased that somehow or other he was able to continue to help students,” she said.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.