This committee's work is important, perhaps the most important task the College faces. The committee is asking the right questions and I believe a good product will result. I want to be helpful and I've written this letter from the perspective of my role as president within the college.

The committee and Goddard have a wonderful opportunity while it reviews, revises, or scraps altogether the Interim Governance Plan. Traditional forms of governance in society, in general, are just not working all that well.

Recent history about governance

Three years this summer, the campus was rife with conflict, the Board was barely functioning, and I could not find a written governance plan anywhere. I found few traditions or conventions to grab hold of. In short, there was no governance, much less a plan.

I met with the students of DINER in long negotiations that resulted in the Interim Governance Plan. The Plan began with the administrative structure that was in place, and added a Diversity Committee and other ideas.

I argued to expand student participation in the real, ongoing administration of the college (like COCOCOM and the Planning Committee) in contrast to giving students power over very small issues. I believe that students should be involved with the real business of the college rather than struggle over the size of the budget for student activities.

The business of running a college, however, is quite specialized and often tedious. I now believe Goddard needs a combination system that gives students real access to real decision-making processes, as ponderous as they may seem, while encouraging students to have full responsibility for campus life.

The Interim Plan also tried to deal with the Community Meeting, its functions, administration, and limits. Over the last three years, my administration has tried several times to improve the meeting, to no avail. ¹ Eventually, no one wanted to work with it. While the Community Meeting has strong mythical legitimacy, it has not worked well for at least two administrations and more

than ten years. Perhaps it has not worked well since Pitkin's day when the college was small and the times were not as complex. And as president, he ran the meeting.

Despite having a written governance plan, student criticism about disempowerment continued. I asked Dan Chodorkoff to lead a student group to review the Interim Plan. By Dan's account, the committee experience was difficult. In my view, it also did not result in major recommendations.

Goddard has the most forms of participation of any college governance system in the country, but even so, alienation is high. Why? One explanation of why Goddard has such a problem with governance is the lack of accountability that results in what Hannah Arendt called "rule by Nobody." Nobody is in charge, Nobody is president. ²

This anarchic turmoil about governance also may have been fed by an individual fear of authority that has undermined progressive institutions (a major reason why few survive). ³ If this analysis is correct, there is a hidden problem that might account for some of the alienation. Not having a governance plan also means chronic intergroup conflict, institutional instability, and job insecurity, all of which contribute to alienation.

There has not been a successful Goddard presidency for more than a few years since the Pitkin days. Several presidents have left feeling bitter.

In general, there have been just too many centrifugal forces pulling on a weak governance system. No one person, or office, is strong enough to resist these forces for long. Both Lindquist and I were worn down by the pressure as our predecessors were.

The result is that the college is perpetually unstable. Thus I believe Goddard badly needs clear, defined boundaries, strong norms, and increased accountability -- and a strong presidency. (I realize that this flies in the face of some Goddard voices. But I personally believe highly dispersed decision-making or classical anarchy are not options for a small college facing today's volatile economic climate.)

Democracy and Anarchy at Goddard

The term democracy is overused, meaning everything and thus nothing. Democracy does not mean everyone is equal in every way, or that judgments should not be made about people or behavior, or that all forms of hierarchy are evil.

A college is not a democratic community although it should be run democratically. A college is not a township or a city. This is true for four reasons. First, its primary function is education, which means continuous evaluation of students and faculty, or lots of daily judgments about behavior. That judgments will -- and must -- be made means that there is a hierarchy of experience and responsibility. Moreover, the quality of a college depends upon the quality of its evaluation systems. Most municipal communities do not have the evaluation function so central. Few for-profit corporations of any type have evaluation as a central, daily activity.

Second, because education is the primary function of a college, there will be rapid turnover of the largest population. Third, that population may not be experienced or trained even though they bring other strengths. Fourth, serious internal divisions sometimes exist at Goddard within student groups about both process and substance. When DINER was active, the smallest decision took weeks. A college can't run like this.

The most angry students can polarize the campus and cause major problems, like the "7388 group" or the "red hands" of last year. They would test the limits of even the most established governance system.

Two domains of governance:
policy decisions and-daily operations

The new governance plan must allow for the pace and complexity of daily operations. Most of this work is unseen by people, especially if systems are running smoothly. (Please look over the inventory of existing meetings and committees, both standing and ad hoc, contained in a separate memo from the College Executive Committee.)

The formal governance system described in the Interim Governance Plan does not really capture the complexity or dynamism of what happens in running a college. While there is a need to accurately describe the governance architecture for a college, actual decision-making does not work so neatly.

Most discussion about issues, especially conflicted ones, takes place off-stage, informally, before or after a meeting. There needs to be lots of informal consultation with the people whose lives are affected by the decision. Thus the real decisions are made in a complex mode using both informal channels and the actual meeting itself, which frustrates observers who don't follow a committee closely. Power, in this perspective, is complex and seldom all that visible. Very little ever comes to a "up or down" vote because of the off-stage work.

The central importance of democratic elections

We have made great strides in trying to run serious elections. To keep this going, I propose that the Governance Plan set forth realistic, detailed requirements for running elections, charging one office with the responsibility for running them. If the Community Manager system is adopted, that office should run the student elections, following written guidelines.

Board of Trustees

To offset the danger of conflict of interest for staff and faculty members, the Board must ensure it is operating at full strength and it might consider increasing its size.

The Board continues to be ambivalent about fund-raising. It spends too much time on internal politics and too little on strengthening its own numbers to include major donors. Its preoccupation with process and the degree of internal conflict (which is abating) do not make it an attractive Board assignment for precisely the types of people we most need.

Therefore I propose that the total number of Trustee seats be increased; that a seat also be created for a parent of students in the campus program and that one seat be filled by a member of the town leadership of Plainfield.

The role of president

For a small college to thrive in today's environment, the president has several tasks. In order of importance, they are to:

• push projects and people on a daily basis,

• coordinate affairs on a daily basis,

• hold accountable other persons and committees, especially supervision of senior administrators,

• be vigilant for abuses of the process or threats to the College by either individuals or groups, and

• worry about the whole, or worry about the integration of all forces and issues.

The most important task of all -- and the most time consuming -- is responding to daily crises, large and small, while trying to "push" the college along.

In addition to presidential "push," both of policies and people, a large part of a president's role is coordination. Coordination happens on several levels: design standards for publications, moving a project along so that it is timed with actual resources to make it happen, coordinating campus politics with Board politics, and the like. Relatively "hidden" policies .like having one letterhead, the use of the clockhouse logo, and the choice of a specific color green for doors and trim -- all make a difference.

The more change is needed in a college, the more pressure is placed on the role of president. I personally believe that Goddard needs major change, which however I did not have the mandate to lead.

Having a weak or undefined role for the president is too risky because there are few perfect leaders to fill it. Only the founding president had the right -- in an different era -- to be a benevolent despot. Antioch only had one Morgan, and Goddard, one Pitkin. Most colleges are not that lucky. We need to make the role of president attractive, effective, and supported, especially with so much skepticism about authority on campus and so little history with an effective presidency.

The role of the faculty and staff

A chronic weakness in governance at Goddard has been the lack of power of the faculty, unlike most American colleges. According to George Beecher, when Tim Pitkin was president, the two power sources were students and him.

The new governance plan should strengthen the role of the faculty with the provision that they are governed by an effective, rigorous evaluation system.

The role of students

The campus program provides less than half the resources of the college and is the slowest growing portion. The campus program contains less than a third of the students we serve.

To include off-campus students in the governance of the college has been difficult and costly. Many only want representation and want to feel included, but are not interested in day-to-day committees.

Few campus students have the experience or the willingness to deal with the tedium of ongoing college committee work. Or they get involved one semester, but drop out the next.

Thus I propose that Goddard experiment with the Community Manager system that Antioch College has used for more than fifty years. (Several members of the governance committee have the details on this proposal, which I think would be popular and effective.)

The role of the alumni

Current students or faculty are perhaps the wrong constituencies to run a college. Both groups are temporary and have short-term interests. It is the alumni that are in the better position, by virtue of both increased experience and having seen what their education can bring, to make judgments. about the college and what it needs. While students should have an effective voice, their sheer numbers and immediate interests should not pull the college in one direction (as happened in the 1970s). From this perspective, Goddard is a complex, extended institution with perhaps 10,000 stakeholders. It would be a radical idea to increase the formal participation of alumni in the governance of the college.

I propose that the number of formal alumni seats be expanded on the Board of Trustees.

The Community Meeting

The Community Meeting is perhaps Goddard's most celebrated institution, but it has been very difficult to run well. Few of my colleagues wanted to be responsible for it. By recent tradition, it is run by students, some of whom are trained in facilitation. Its structure, function, and real power are often debated. Several unscheduled meetings represented, in my opinion, serious threats. Recently, the Community Life Meeting has taken over some of the functions of the larger meeting and the job of setting these meetings up.

I propose that the Community Meeting be run by the Community Manager and his or her staff. What has worked in the past is that the faculty, students, and staff eat together on Monday night and then have Community Meeting afterwards. It would helpful, also, to have the meeting debate matters with real impact.

Committee meetings

Goddard has too many meetings that are too poorly run. We need training in meeting facilitation and help from the Governance Task Force on a campus-wide decision-making process. I have experimented with a rough consensus model with the groups I chair and the process seems to work.

I propose that a curriculum on running meetings and making decisions be constructed for all staff, faculty, and students.

A judicial system

Several years ago, difficult discipline issues were handled by a Sensitive Issues Committee. A senior faculty member would lead a group of students to a decision. I was told that this system had serious problems.

Sexual assault and harassment problems are investigated by a team, and there is a formal policy and an appeal procedure. We don't have a policy on other kinds of problems, which then get handled in an ad hoc basis.

Goddard needs an effective judiciary system. Perhaps it could be joined to the Community Manager idea provided there is an appeal system.

When we add up the ways that Goddard is vulnerable, it is easy to understand why the college has been at risk for so years and why NEASC is so concerned that we settle the governance question.

I urge the committee not to further weaken the office of president, in particular, or authority and accountability, in general. A strong presidency usually defines a successful college (Antioch under Morgan, early Goddard with Pitkin).

In this regard, why do we debate what may be a false dichotomy-strong leader model or strong group process? Why can't Goddard have both? I believe each requires the other.

I am a pragmatist, not a Utopian, when it comes to college governance because of the special nature of a college. Governance at Goddard is working better than most believe, but it has serious flaws. I urge thecommittee to focus on what needs repair.

The administrative structures of Quaker schools like Haverford and Earlham have quite tight boundaries between groups, much reduced forms of student and staff participation compared to Goddard or Antioch, but a climate of quiet collaboration and comity. Quaker colleges, in general, have prospered over the years--what are they doing right? Can we study their systems?

Here is a central paradox: despite having multiple and overlapping forms of participation on virtually every body or committee of the college, alienation is high. The form of participation seems negatively related to the felt substance of participation. Perhaps they are correlated in ways we don't fully understand. Perhaps we meet too much, with too little organization, and don't communicate well what is going on or has been decided.

I hope my remarks are useful to your work.

Jackson Kytle

1. One of the strangest paradoxes at Goddard, for me, is that virtually every group feels disempowered even though there are so many forms of participation. Students feel disempowered, and so does the president, at least compared to most colleges. How do we explain this?
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2. One result, in my opinion, of not having a strong central authority has been the gradual deterioration of the physical plant over thirty years.
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3. Anarchy is not a bad word to some Goddard folk. Having once belonged to an obscure anarchist group and being familiar with the theory, I believe anarchy is a wonderful but unworkable political philosophy, especially for a college.
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