The Death of a Progressive College
What the closing of Goddard College says about our times
This week the trustees of Goddard College announced that the school will be shut down at the end of this semester. This is a significant loss for the already battered cause of progressive education and another example of the ruthless forces of modernity snuffing out more organic ways of learning, thinking and living.
Goddard was a pioneering experiment in higher education, established in the rural hamlet of Plainfield, Vermont in 1938 by a local educator, Royce “Tim” Pitkin, who had studied with John Dewey at Teachers College, Columbia at a time that the philosophy of progressive education was gaining followers and influence. This was an ominous period in history, with the Depression ravaging confidence in American institutions and Fascism on the rise. Progressivism, then as now, was a vigorous answer to authoritarians’ seductive promise to fix society’s unnerving problems.
Pitkin envisioned a “college for living” and built a school dedicated to “plain living and hard thinking.” The college bought the land of a gentleman farmer with a quaint manor house, barn, outbuildings, garden and woods. As progressive education emphasized hands-on learning, students participated in designing and constructing additional buildings for the campus, as well as growing food and assisting in college management.
The Goddard approach embodied Dewey’s precept that authentic learning must involve reflection and action: students need to own their learning, to make sense of their world and respond to it thoughtfully. The course of study would revolve around students’ own experiences, passions and questions; they would take responsibility for their learning and actions, gaining self-reliance within a mutually supportive community. Pitkin’s ultimate goal, like Dewey’s, was to nurture the practice of participatory democracy, to teach and model the principles of open-minded inquiry, respect and equality.
Goddard was always a small college, but in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of dissenting social movements and countercultural lifestyles brought thousands of young seekers to Vermont, including a wave of students to the campus, which reached a peak enrollment of just under 2000. Many graduates (as well as dropouts) stayed in the area and gave the nearby state capital, Montpelier, a hip quality that has characterized its culture ever since. Goddard people started food co-ops, alternative schools, arts venues and other non-mainstream places.
The college itself contributed to the regional culture through its radio station (which has since become an independent community-owned resource) and hosting of the Alternative Media Conference and the Institute for Social Ecology, among other initiatives. Dramatic and musical performances at the Haybarn Theater showcased the emerging talents of student artists; many creative figures including playwright David Mamet, actor William H. Macy, filmmaker Jay Craven, author Walter Mosley and several members of the band Phish attended Goddard. Poet and future Nobel laureate Louise Glück served on the faculty for a time, as have many other notable artists, activists and scholars.
But as the cultural and political mainstream resurged after the mid-1970s, educational practices at all levels reverted to traditional top-down models that had been dominant earlier. In a tighter and more harshly competitive economy, education was increasingly defined as training for the job market, and outside-the-box programs lost enrollment and institutional support; the experimental liberal arts program at Michigan State from which I graduated in 1978 was closed down in 1979. Enrollment at Goddard began a steady decline, and in 2002 the decision was made to end full-time on-campus programs.
Still, until this week, the college managed to endure on the strength of its low residency programs. Goddard had earlier established an adult degree program that enabled mature students — especially women — to earn college credit for life experience and to engage in academic work during short term residencies on campus. The ADP was a successful and influential model. It grew and diversified into specialized programs, and Goddard became widely known for its low residency offerings in creative writing, interdisciplinary arts, psychology and education.
I served on the education faculty at Goddard in the 1990s and early 2000s. We did not teach pre-planned courses but served as mentors to small groups of adult students with interests that aligned with our areas of expertise. Some were professional educators seeking advanced degrees, while others were idealistic people wanting to change careers to make a difference in children’s lives. I once had a Hollywood “key grip” professional who had worked on major films but now wanted to teach. I worked with many activists who sought to push the boundaries of education, wanting to start or work in alternative schools or community learning projects.
During our eight-day residencies, faculty mentors met individually and in groups with our students to help them develop their independent study plans for the ensuing semester, and we gave workshops on general topics such as research methods and academic writing. We ate meals together and often had long, deep conversations in the dining hall. Although faculty members were accomplished scholars and practitioners who guided students’ work, our interactions were based on mutual respect, and our guidance aimed to support the students’ own learning goals. We did not give grades but wrote detailed narrative assessments of their work. We learned a great deal from them, as well.
It was a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding environment — education at its very best. Goddard was truly a place where thoughtful, engaged people could pursue their passions and deepen their commitment to democratic practices and positive social change.
This is why the death of Goddard College is such a loss. We are living at a moment in history when democratic values and practices are rapidly eroding. A toxic combination of powerful forces, such as corporate globalization, disruptive technology, gross inequality, dysfunctional and polarized politics, and the multiple ripple effects of global warming require citizens, communities and nations to find common ground and address our looming challenges with critical intelligence. We desperately need more people educated to be thoughtful, engaged and collaborative, not fewer of them.
Is higher education up to these challenges? On one hand the educational mission of colleges and universities is handcuffed by the iron demands of the market: Millions of young people, driven by the brutal inequality and competitiveness of the modern economy, seek degrees in order to qualify for professional, financially rewarding careers, and expect a solid vocational training to justify the astronomical cost of attending college. On the other hand campuses are riven by polarized, self-righteous conflict over social issues and cultural values. In this harsh environment, Tim Pitkin’s progressive vision has been kicked to the gutter, too idealistic or gentle or maybe obsolete to gain the influence it ought to have.
Goddard’s trustees say that they were forced to close the college due to “financial insolvency.” Enrollment was down to 220. The endowment was puny, and fundraising was always a steep climb because few (if any) alumni are high-flying businesspeople or billionaires looking to stick their names on everything. The school has been struggling financially for decades, and could not attract enough tuition-paying students to turn its finances around.
But the story is more complicated than this. Leadership in higher education is an impossibly difficult and thankless job on almost any campus these days, but Goddard presidents faced a unique dilemma, having to reconcile the college’s ethos of participatory democracy (which a significant number of faculty and students understood through a more or less anarchist lens) with the insistent demands of modern economics and government regulation. There were always more hoops to jump through, more paperwork to file, more required procedures to administer. These were at odds with the school’s more freewheeling, organic pedagogy, and drove up the cost of tuition.
As an example, I remember how our education program had to implement a more structured curriculum when new “standards” in teacher education were imposed by the vast corporate/bureaucratic drive for educational “excellence” in the 1990s. I do not believe that our students were any better educated after these changes, but our teaching environment suddenly became less spontaneous and creative, and despite our efforts to resist standardization our graduates were probably handicapped in becoming truly progressive educators by the requirement to compartmentalize and incessantly measure learning (theirs as well as their future students’). But they were prepared to “teach to the standards” and thereby find and keep their jobs in public schools.
Goddard’s presidents had to navigate such pressures on every front. After Pitkin retired in 1969, twelve men and women have served in this position (an average term of four and a half years, after Pitkin’s thirty-one). Some were more competent than others, some were more attuned to progressive pedagogy than others (and the ones who weren’t became targets of faculty and student wrath). All, I believe, left the place deeply frustrated. In the bureaucratized, standardized, consumerized, polarized society of late capitalism in the United States, managing an educational experiment like Goddard has become virtually impossible.
Perhaps, just as radical educational experiments at the pre-collegiate level have almost always taken place outside the bureaucratic, politically sensitive institution of public schooling, an authentically progressive and democratic higher education has a much better chance of succeeding in alternative settings that do not attempt to be accredited colleges. There have been various attempts to establish such programs, some of which may be working out fairly well on a small scale, but with limited impact. There are also a few accredited colleges and programs within established universities (shout out to the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, the successor to my shuttered program at MSU) that strive to uphold many of the principles that Goddard embodied.
In fact, a group called Cooperation Vermont is attempting to buy the Goddard campus and establish a “just transition center” and cooperative college; they envision “a place of transformational learning, experimentation and community resilience and relocalization.” This organization is allied with a similar movement in Jackson, Mississippi that has been working for several years to empower local communities and redefine economic relationships. Maybe this sort of organic activism is the way forward, the way to preserve and further develop the practice of democratic, progressive education. Certainly our modern society and systems of education are hostile to its ideals.
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