Not knowing whether the Board's shortened agenda on this busy weekend, will allow room for constituent member reports, I have prepared this statement that can be shared in writing if not read in attendance. As the Board emphasized at its meeting in June, constituent member reports must be an integral part of each Board meeting. So, too, does an open session for community input need to be a regular part of the meeting. I fear that such an omission, for whatever reason, sends the wrong message to the members of the immediate Goddard community.

Nevertheless, I am here today ready to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the College by practicing at least one of the democratic ideals upon which it has been built -- open dissent, necessary debate, and welcomed dialogue about the present and future state of the College. I know that some of you will not want to hear all or parts of what I have to say, but I encourage you to listen with the hope that healthy disagreements, and different points of view can make this a stronger educational organization.

I recognize and respect the Board's efforts to project the College as stable. A perception of stability, which masks some lingering tensions and problems, can only last so long, before the undercurrents bubble up to make themselves known. Two very significant parts of this drive toward stability are this Board's remarkable commitment to its fiduciary responsibility through increased fund raising efforts and the serious approach to its legal obligations to the College. I do not mean to undermine or demean these efforts in any way. Rather I celebrate them as essential and necessary to that stability that the Board seeks.

I think this is a very good Board, from my brief experience to date. And in the world of conventional boards, I might even say remarkable. But Goddard is not a conventional college; it is intended to be a democratic alternative. So, I am not convinced that this is the Board we need for the College that we have. Some of you may think the reverse, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a College that matches the Board we now have?" We, the immediate College community, and the Board are two very disconnected bodies swirling around in a maze of plans and intentions and seldom, if ever, overlapping in our interests and desires. In fact,one former constituent member to the Board referred to his board meeting experience as "going into the bubble."

I would suggest that we are so different that we make it nearly impossible for any president to survive the tensions that often arise from our differences. While the President spends so much time working for the Board, there is little time remaining to adequately serve the community in which she lives and works. We, as Board members, end up with a Board packet that is essentially a public relations document, the majority of which has never been exposed to the collective wisdom of the faculty or benefited from the historical continuity that the faculty perspective might bring. In

short, this packet of Board materials is not a collaborative work of the College community. So many of the ideas herein could be critically assessed and enhanced if the principles of the governance document were followed within this community before they came to the Board. These could be joint initiatives with considerable support and enthusiasm.

The faculty's past history with the Board has been one of unfortunate tensions and, as a result, the faculty has been characterized, unfairly I think, as obstructionist. If intending to follow the principles and processes of the governance document mean that we are obstructionist, then we are indeed guilty. Good shared decision-making takes time. It is seldom neat or efficient. But from where we sit, there can be no good decisions without good process. The ends do not justify the means. We have had an unfortunate string of administrators who have shown they do not agree with this by their actions. Even, it is rumored that there may be current discussions going on behind closed doors, to undermine the current governance document in an effort to create new processes that are less open to "obstructionist" efforts and more favorable to one person initiatives. That would be unfortunate.

In my brief 6 year history here, I have been subjected to numerous comments that devalue the perspective of faculty, staff, and students. It has been implied that only administrators can have the "best interests of the whole College" at heart. At best this view is misinformed, and at its worst, it is arrogant and insulting. The College naturally attracts people who are holistic thinkers. They cannot only easily understand the roles of all of the parts, but they also can grasp the different constituent perspectives from within their own view. This is the basis for that important principle of equity which is at the foundation of Goddard's mission: we all can understand the "big picture" needs and interests of the College and we all have a valued point of view to bring to the conversation. That's why constituent members of the Board are integral. I would suggest that an underlying reason for the College's past insistence upon the "flattest" organization possible is because we do indeed believe that everyone has the best interests of the College at heart.

I am here to say that the faculty's past relationship with the Board doesn't have to be that way. I think it is very possible to change. The history that has led past Board members to devalue the wisdom of the faculty has roots in the structural problems that lead to the disconnection of the two spheres in which we operate. It is time for us, faculty and Board, to challenge these past assumptions and lingering misconceptions. Yes, we have many differences, but I suspect that they are more philosophical disagreements about "how" we proceed, rather than about what might constitute good ideas.

The faculty has a key role to play in this institution. While the Board may be the legal and fiduciary authority, we see ourselves as the moral authority of Goddard. To use a crass analogy, what we sell is learning, and the faculty and students are those constituencies of the College which are most familiar with this service. In the past when the viability of our educational programs were jeopardized by the resignation of Presidents and Board members, it was the faculty and staff who pulled together, exerting tremendous energy to ensure that these programs happened. Legal and fiduciary responsibilities only go so far; someone needs to be trusted to make this place happen. Faculty elsewhere are often referred to as "officers" of the College. This might be a worthy title.

I am here to tell you that the faculty desperately wants to find more of an overlap between these two disparate spheres of the College. We need to, because we are weary of worrying about how every new president will interpret the governance document. We want a College whose basic values will remain unchanged by whoever happens to be its leader. These ideals of democracy referred to in the mission statement are greater than any one of us. We are worn from years of being blamed for the College's instability. Whether we are understood by others or not, we have always had the best interests of the college in mind. And we are tired of not being able to focus more effectively on one primary task of helping our students learn. We need to find some genuine stability through which we might move this College to a deeper level of significance and a higher level of influence.

We think we share some common ground with the Board and the administration and the only way to realize that is to increase and improve communication. Here are some suggestions:

• The Board can ask constituent members to include their reports in the Board packet for each meeting.

• The Board can reaffirm the principles and processes of the governance document and direct the administration and others to become more collaborative and realize the democratic potential.

• The Board can direct the President to develop initiatives with the benefit of the collective wisdom of the faculty, as described in the governance document.

• The Board can agree to meetings with the faculty, perhaps at its Board meeting in the spring. These could be seminars on certain issues of import to the College to show that we can work collaboratively and that would allow us to get to know and trust one another better.

This lack of communication and trust has manifested in a number of current issues about which the faculty is concerned. Below is a sampling:

Academic Leadership

Since the first 3 weeks of Dr. Mossberg's tenure we have been without a full-time, other-than-interim Dean for Academic Affairs. We found it a bit strange that the President saw the need for a provost position in such a small College, but were willing to not resist this idea to allow her to make herself comfortable. The President's report implies that there has been collaborative work between the administration and faculty to resolve this vacancy. The faculty worked long and hard to propose some practical leadership models,as directed by our consultative role in the governance document, which were not responded to by the President in subsequent conversations. We had agreed to the role of provost being filled by Terry Keeney. The whole story of how and why this did not come to pass was most troubling. While we can make a patchwork process work somewhat with the new council of directors and the special assistant to the President, she has her own job o perform and the faculty needs more stable leadership that can help us continue to organize programs and move ahead on many important tasks.

Budget Crunch

Quite frankly, this is a tiresome issue for faculty members who have been here for any length of time, for we have seen this happen 4 times in the last 6 years. A new president comes with great enthusiasm and expectations and rushes through a shortened, less than collaborative budget process, and we end up with unrealistic enrollment projections. When the current budget was questioned by a few faculty members, some were "called on the carpet" for raising such concerns. So who takes responsibility for this poor planning and what do we learn from it to prevent a repeat performance? The President's report implies that programs did not meet their enrollment projections. Program enrollments are approximately where they were last year at this time. IIIinformed enrollment projections are the cause of the problem. Admission has done a remarkable job with little administrative support. The catalog, which was nearly ready a year ago, has still not become available to prospective students. The director of admissions left over this and other problems which prevented him from doing his job.

Case Statement

The faculty is very supportive of the concept of a case statement for development purposes. However, again, the details have not received the benefit of faculty collaboration. There is a process outlining how new programs will be adopted in the governance document, and we hope that this will be followed by all. There are many good ideas among the faculty, a few have been incubated and grown, but many more have never been exposed to full scrutiny and subsequent implementation due to lack of resources. Shouldn't more of these capture some of the print space of the case statement?

Evaluation

The faculty is very supportive of the concept of a 360 degree process of evaluation for all personnel and a very thorough and comparable evaluation of programs. Indeed. Already, the faculty receive feedback from students each semester and our response to this is always included in our reappointment portfolios. This, for me personally, is the most valuable feedback I get on my work here. As the faculty continues to revise and refine our own evaluation process, we have reaffirmed some of the basic Goddard ideas of beginning with oneself -evaluation from the inside out. The criteria of knowing, doing, and being have served Goddard students well over the years and should play no less of a role in the evaluative structures of faculty, staff, and administrators. We encourage all personnel, including the administration, to get on with the work of designing their own evaluation process and to share such designs with other groups. As we do so, we also would like to offer a warning about some of the dangers and limits of outcomes-based evaluation. Goddard has always used a process-inquiry model of evaluation which starts with the person involved. There may be some value in exploring the use of outcomes in our work, as there are some benefits, but to not build wisely on our rich tradition of inside-out evaluation would be to miss out on our past learning.

On this sixtieth anniversary of the College, we, the faculty and the board of Trustees, need to recommit to establishing a new level of trust among all the groups who have an interest in Goddard. We need to make the perception of stability a reality. We share so many interests that it is unfortunate to find our differences still jeopardizing the present and future of the College rather than enriching it. It doesn't have to be this way. I propose we get on with the hard work we have ahead of us.