In its recent preliminary report, the Visiting Team of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges observed that at Goddard College: "Governance is an area that seems to change and evolve continually."

They give tribute to a significant history. Since its earliest days, as the Preamble to the Constitution of the Goddard College Community stated in 1938, students, faculty, administration, staff and trustees have been trying "to attain a truer democracy." Goddard College has been Jeffersonian in this sense, realizing that how we, the people, govern ourselves must change from time to time, and that democracy can have many forms as the eminent political scholar Robert Dahl has noted.

But of equal consequence, the art and vocation of demcratic self-governance has been a crucial aspect of learning at Goddard. Goddard College students have learned about democracy by writing, by debating, and by adopting constitutions or by-laws, or through designing appropriate organizations, and through testing the complex nature of procedural and distributive justice along with the limits of equality, of freedom and civic responsibily. For instance, on the eve of World War II, fifteen students from Black Mountain College, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Antioch and Goddard colleges met to learn from each other how their own colleges were governed. Will Hamlin was a delegate from Black Mountain. Cushing Greene, Norman van Guilden, Cyndy Nicholson and Scotty Sheehan represented Goddard.

However, there was a sense of urgency in the tone of the Visiting Team's report. Since 1985, the Goddard College community has fashioned and rejected three ways to govern itself. Debate about governance has been continuous for nearly seven years at Goddard. Individuals, working groups, and the organization itself seem sometimes to have been frozen into inactivity. Some crucial decisions have not been taken in a timely manner, or made democratically when finally decided. As trustees, we bear responsibility for what apparently appeared to the visiting academics as a suicidal flirtation "with the edge of the cliff."

Perhaps, too, the visiting academics worried because for the most part, we, as trustees, seem to have been observers willing to let students or faculty or staff propose and test ways of democratic selfgovernment but without much direct involvement or interest from us. Nevertheless, it is we, the trustees, who bear in law and in custom the fidicuary, the moral, and the ethical burden of governance.

Finally, the visitors may have spoken from their own recent experiences. The knotty problems of governance have beset nearly every college or university in the United States. Students, and staffs from janitors to executive secretaries, and faculties, even trustees, are pressing these institutions for democratic governance and for participation in management. Governing the academy presents grand challenges, especially because of its layered conventions. the legal precedents, the protocols of the learned societies, or the typically hierarchic academic organization.

Fortunately for Goddard College, our educational purpose and rich history offers a treasure of knowledge about democracy, about democratic self-governance, and education for democracy. We have a unique opportunity to replace paralysis with a positive, experimental process which demonstrates how to design and how to experiment with democratic forms of academic governance. Our own problems with these formidable issues can be used as a model for other academic institutions and, perhaps, as happened in 1941, Goddard can foster collaboration with like-minded colleges.

In this context then, we propose that the Board of Trustees resolve to commence An Experiment in Democratic Social Change at Goddard College. At the very least, the experiment would seek objective answers to these key questions:

What does democracy mean at Goddard College? How can this political ideal and system of thought be fully realized at Goddard College? How should a college founded on democratic ideals be organized so that justice and efficiency are served without harm to freedom? How can we use the expressed concerns of the Visiting Team to nurture the ideals and skills of democratic self-governance and practice of participative management?

The answers to these questions bear directly on Goddard today, and Goddard tomorrow. Democracy, like Goddard, is an experiment in living, in sharing power, and in making decisions with other human beings close by on the campus, in Vermont, in the United States, and in a diverse world.

Because we seek to test an academic governance system, to formulate its values and norms, and to establish goals for governance at Goddard, we expect every student, staff member, faculty member, administrator, and trustee to participate in the theoretical and parctical aspects of this collective effort. We expect each phase to accepted as a part of learning and teaching at Goddard.

To launch this experiment, we ask the trustees to establish a broadly representative Governance Steering Committee, to allocate a small budget, and to designate staff support. The Governance Steering Committee would have at least one year to design the experiment, to determine if other colleges will collaborate, and to find all necessary funds. We recommend that the experiment operate five years. At end of that time, the experiment must be rigorously evaluated by objective measures. What we learn can be considered by the Goddard College as one basis upon which policies can be recast to governance into the next century. Trustees can expect the Governance Steering Committee to report routinely and fully at each board meeting.

As a part of this experiment, we propose to undertake a review of relevant statutory law in Vermont and the United States, and an analysis of our own charter, constitution, and by-laws, comparing them to prevailing norms and to the highest democratic ideals. We must examine carefully and as objectively as possible how we as a governing board organize our work and how we govern ourselves. As trustees, must behave as democratically as we know how.

This raises some additional expectations, too. We expect students to take up the study of democracy as well as demand its implementation. We presume the faculty, the staff, and the administration will engage fully in the give and take of this process - by offering group or individual studies in democracy, by visiting colleges with promising governance systems, by conducting workshops, or by critical analysis. We encourage the administration during this experiment to pay especial attention to managing operations as if Goddard College were in continuous, complex organizational transition.

Each of us bears responsibility for finding appropriate ways to improve every persons' ability to wisely judge the college's performance in its economic affairs, its political process, and with nurturing the culture of democracy. As a whole, we expect the college to become a laboratory for democracy. We expect that accountability, responsibility and innovation will be the hallmarks of this experiment.

Students, staff, faculty, administrators and trustees who are elected to serve on the proposed Governance Steering Committee will be expected to report to their constituencies routinely and fully. Each person will be expected to fulfill each task they agree to take up, or to offer one good reason or another why they were unable to live up to what they expected of themselves. Every member of the community will be asked to stretch their imagination about the ideals of democracy, and about how to make those ideals real.

Goddard College can be thought of as a social and economic enterprise whose existence and decisions can be justified only insofar as some educational purpose is served. Goddard College can be thought of as a political system, an organization where individuals particularly formal or informal leaders - have and exercise power, influence, and control over other human beings. Democracy is regarded widely as a appropriate means of governing such enterprises and such systems.

With these axioms in mind, and to begin designing An Experiment in Democratic Social Change and Control at Goddard College, we, the Goddard College Board of Trustee, resolves that:

Whereas, the Trustees of Goddard College have the fiduciary and moral responsibility to establish a means of democratic governance at Goddard College;

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Whereas, the students, staff, faculty and administration of Goddard College have the capability to debate, to design, to evaluate, and to reconstruct a means of democratic self-governance;

Whereas, the governance of every legally chartered educational corporation rests upon and is determined in part by custom, by constitutions and by-laws, in state and federal administrative and case law, by organizational structure, by the collective self-interest of affected groups, or by individual self-interest;

Whereas, the most suitable form of governance for Goddard College will evolve from within, through, and with the consent of the entire Goddard College community, be it now therefore resolved:

Therefore, the Goddard College Board of Trustees herein invites the college community - meaning the students, staff, faculty, administrators and trustees - to discuss this report and resolution for An Experiment in Democratic Social Change at Goddard College during the next three months, or until the next regularly scheduled Board of Trustees meeting. At which time, the Board of Trustees will:

1. Accept proposed modifications to this proposal, or alternative proposals, from by elected representatives of each constituency within the Goddard College community but who must demonstrate in writing who elected them and how, and how they are accountable to the community they represent.

2. Discuss and complete the preliminary plans for An Experiment in Democratic Social Change and Control at Goddard College, along with establishing a means of measuring the impact of an experiment in democratic self-governance on economic, political, and cultural performance of Goddard College.

3. Expect the administration to have identified other colleges to join Goddard College in an experiment in governance in higher education, and to jointly seek foundation support for such an undertaking.

4. Expect the administration to propose a detailed management plan for the experiment, including a timeline, budget, lines of authority and decision-making, and potential sources of funding.

5. Create a Governance Task Force Steering Committee to be composed of at least two trustees, two faculty, two staff, two students from on-campus and off-campus, and two administrators to oversee the experiment.

A copy of this resolution, if adopted, should be sent immediately to the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the New England Association of School and Colleges. We propose that they be asked to seat a person of their choice to sit ex officio on the Goddard College Governance Steering Committee for the duration of the experiment.

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