One of the original aims of Goddard College, developed by faculty and students of Goddard Junior College in Barre, is thus stated in the March 1938 issue of the Goddard Bulletin:

The participation of students in the formulation of policies, in the management of the college and in the performance of work essential to its maintenance and operation, and the inclusion of such work in the educational program.

Governance seems something of a poor cousin to the Work Program in that statement, but both appear intended as implementation of the first published aim:

The education of young men and women of junior college age for real living through the actual facing of real life problems as an essential part of their educational program.

That Goddard was, in its first years, a four-year junior college (the last two years of high school, the first two of college, with students from 15 to 20 years old) probably qualified what the founders meant by "participation" in the formulation of policies and the management of the college. Later the bulletin states:

Standards and rules for the community life of Goddard College are determined by joint action of the students and members of the faculty. After several weeks of discussion and many attempts at formulating a plan of government, the students and faculty adopted a constitution which provided for a Community Council, the purpose of which is to deal with problems concerning the whole school and to take such action in connection with those problems as in its judgment will promote the welfare of the Community...

Within the Council there is free exchange of opinion between student and student as well as between student and teacher, which gives assurance of the consideration of many points of view before action is taken on the problems that are presented. Through its deliberations the members discover that there are often many sides to an apparently simple problem. They are forced to a realization that the task of government is sometimes difficult and tedious; but through actual experience they grow in their ability to handle community affairs.

Note that nothing is said about the "power" of this Community Government (defined as including "all employees as well as faculty and students"), or about its relation to the President and the Trustees. Nor are faculty meetings mentioned, the weekly sessions in which the academic program was continually created and examined.

A year later the government is described in slightly different terms:

...adopted a constitution which provided for a weekly meeting of the entire college community at which problems concerning the whole college could be thoroughly discussed and acted upon. All standards, agreements and regulations affecting student life are adopted by the college community at these meetings. The execution of policies is directed by a Community Council, assisted by four standing committees.

At the Community meeting there is a free exchange of opinion...

So it took just a year for the Council to be turned into an executive body, with the community as a whole becoming the legislative body. The 1939 bulletin says nothing about "all employees" being members of the Community Government; instead, responsibility is with "students and faculty."

In March of 1940, Goddard published a two-page leaflet titled Community Government at Goddard College. It enlarges upon the 1939 statement, noting that the President is an ex-officio member of the Community Council, and that the Council elects a Judicial Committee from its own membership, "to which it refers offenses against the community." It also specifies the other standing committees: Recreation, Work Program, and Educational Policies. The "duties" of the last of these were:

...to consider and discuss the College's educational policies, chiefly from the viewpoint of the students; to confer with the president of the College concerning the educational effectiveness of members of the faculty; and to plan and administer a program of lectures, forums, concerts and discussions during the course of the college year.

The leaflet states that the community council and the committees "may consist of students, members of the faculty or staff members, in any ratio."

The power of this 1940 government is suggested: it may set up "general standards" about community life, but "Payment of tuition remains, of course,

a private matter between individual students and the administration ... payment of the faculty and staff is primarily a private arrangement"; and the government operates within "certain faculty policies concerning in a general way the nature of the learning procedures," later summarized as "Goddard's educational beliefs."

As a student delegate from Black Mountain College, I attended a conference of "Progressive College Community Governments" organized by Goddard and held at Teachers College of Columbia University in the fall of 1940. I was interested to hear about Goddard (the opening of which I'd learned about in the summer of 1938, as an Antioch student spending the summer in Burlington). I was told that the Goddard faculty and president were more in control than the bulletin published that spring seems to indicate: they had banned smoking and drinking by students, and the community meetings were dominated by the opinions expressed by the president, whose basic position was that while the community was free to take whatever position on a matter under discussion it might wish to, he as president was free to resign if the position was one he could not support. At this conference, as in the several Goddard bulletins, there was no reference to the power of the trustees, or of the faculty as a group meeting in closed sessions.

Six years later things have changed little. The January 1946 bulletin gives ssomewhat more space to "College Government," and does include something new:

A per capita community tax is voted by the College Community for the purpose of meeting expenses incurred in organizing community affairs and providing a recreational program. Detailed budgets for the expenditure of all funds are prepared by the committees and submitted to the Community Council for further study and final approval.

As in former bulletins, the jurisdiction of the community government is implied as broad - "the conduct of the college community" - followed by "except for administrative matters," which remain undefined.

I came upon the scene two years later, and quickly discovered that there was, indeed, a Board of Trustees, and that students and faculty were represented on it. One of the budget items periodically debated in community meetings was funding for travel and lodging expenses when student trustees went to meetings in New York or Boston. The debate might be framed as realilty testing: other trustees paid their own way; if students were genuinely committed, shouldn't they do so too? The 1948 bulletin told me the community tax was $10 a year, and I discovered that everyone, including me, was expected to pay it.

I also discovered that the weekly faculty meetings (beginning with tea and cookies) were a very central part of the operation of the college. This wasn't a surprise: it had been true at Black Mountain, though there the three Student Officers were non-voting members of the meetings, and might invite to any meeting one other student. Over the next ten years, however, Goddard bulletins, consistently failed to mention these meetings.

Leaping those ten years to the August 1957 bulletin affords little significant difference in the picture given of community government structure. But more attention is paid both to the educational importance of the government and to its responsibilities:

The several aspects of the student's life at Goddard undergo continual examination as he [sic] is brought face to face with the everyday problems of living within the college community. These are problems which each student must face, for the concept of democracy underlying the Goddard College Community Government is one which stresses responsibility as well as freedom. Citizenship in the community is a maturing experience simply because it demands of each community member as mature a consideration as he can bring to the various areas of community life for which the government is responsible. Community meetings are among the most important learning experiences a student takes part in, for he is working with the entire college group-students and staff members - in dealing with matters of daily concern to that entire group.

- page 5 -

...The government is a genuine administrative body within the college framework, handling large areas of responsibility delegated to it by the staff. These community government responsibilities include the creation and enforcement of rules and standards for community living, the administration and supervision of the campus work program, and the planning and carrying out of college recreational activities. A different areas of community government responsibility is a continuing review of educational policies and practices in the college, including evaluation of the work of each faculty member.

The section on government also states that "Faculty members serve on each committee except the all-student group concerned with educational policies." The sentence was inserted to assure prospective students and their families that what was being described was not "student government," and that the college saw participation in the government as a "situation in which learning is likely to take place" that faculty should help students make use of. Beyond that, Tim Pitkin wanted the faculty to learn things about their students as persons outside the classroom, and to realize (and act on the realization) that they, like their students, were citizens of a learning community.

Re-reading that 1957 catalog (for which I had been largely responsible), reminded me that however "concerned with educational policies" an all-student community government committee was supposed to be, the curriculum - described in 23 pages of course descriptions, categorized both by subject-matter areas and by the enrollment levels of the students for which the courses were planned and to whom they were open - was wholly faculty planned. Not a word is said about following student interests or seeking suggestions from students about what they might want to learn. While students were much involved in other aspects of their lives on the campus, the faculty are here indicated to be firmly in control of "courses of study" and the ways in which students might use them in moving through the four-year program.

In 1960, Tim Pitkin wrote about the first year of the six-year experiment in Curriculum Organization, funded by

a grant from the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education. Published as The Evolution of a College in January 1961, the report begins with the basic premise of the Experiment: that curriculum is "the activities an individual student operating as an adult plans and carries out to learn what he [sic] needs to learn." Under the subhead "Relating Work to Study," he noted the importance of a "type of work experience for those who have demonstrated through their campus jobs [in the Work Program] readiness for greater responsibility." The aim was "giving Goddard students more opportunities to work as responsible adults." Three examples of work program assignments are cited: helping staff the Learning Aids Center; assisting the Senior Counselor by making preliminary investigation of requests for special counseling; and serving as assistant directors of the all-college midsemester conferences held as part of the Experiment in Curriculum Organization. Tim commented:

In ... these cases ... of which there are many in Community Government, Goddard students and staff members work together, sharing their knowledge and understanding as they deal with the manifold problems of a college community. One of the effects is that the college atmosphere becomes more and more conducive to the development of maturity.

Tim Pitkin's retirement in 1969 brought about changes in many aspects of the college. So did the "counterculture era" in which that retirement took place. For several years after 1969, Goddard had no overall college catalog: instead, three small brochures discussed a) the philosophy of the college, b) admissions and fees, and c) the structure of the educational program. Brief notes about governance and "subject-to-change" course listings were issued semester by semester (or trimester by trimester) in mimeographed handbook form, suggesting their impermanence. The first full Goddard catalog during that difficult period in American higher education is dated 1974-1975. The section on governance (the first use of that term, instead of "government," I can find) speaks for the temper of the times:

Many college students are disillusioned with or distressed about what they have heard called 'democracy,' and wary of institutional governance systems which appear to parallel or mimic city, state, or federal models. The New England town meeting was Goddard's first governmental model, but that, too, has become suspect, as an arena where covert personal interests or ignorant emotionalism appear too often to win the day. One result is that Goddard has little organized student or community government; instead, students are invited to membership on most of the standing committees charged with running the college, and interested persons may sit in on all but a very few committee meetings. (Committees may close their doors to visitors when particular individuals are under discussion.)

A description of the committees "charged with running the college" follows. While, indeed, they have to do with a great many aspects of Goddard administration, it is interesting to note the absence of one vital area: finances and facilities.

The description of governance continues:

Committee membership doesn't tell the whole governance story. There are community meetings, usually called to discuss a campus problem a number of students feel is not getting enough attention - or fair attention - in one of the committees, or in faculty or trustees; meetings. There are the faculty meetings, which students many attend as invited guests, and meetings of the trustees, where students have on occasion outnumbered trustees and those officially reporting to them. Such meetings can be loud and long. There is a lot of leaflet writing and poster making, as persons argue a variety of questions from a variety of points of view....

Formally, it should be noted, resident undergraduate students have two elected representatives, with full voting power, on the Board of Trustees. Faculty, staff, and External Degree Program students are also represented.

In 1978, Goddard issued a variety of catalogs--separate brochures for each of many programs, and a sort of umbrella titled The Goddard Programs. There is little mention of governance in any of those multiple brochures. The Goddard Programs states, in the middle of a section headed "A Climate for Learning":

The life of the Goddard community is the matrix for learning to behave more intelligently and responsibly, for it is a life planned about individuals rather than about classes, titles, or ranks. The several programs either require residence or urge it because the interaction of individuals (as persons, not simply as students and teachers) can ground ideas in some consequential reality and make clear how social a matter is a belief or an opinion. Student participation in college governance was provided for when the college was founded because taking part in the making of important decisions is intrinsically educational. Living closely with persons whose lives have been affected by the decisions one has made or helped to make teaches moral responsibility in a way no exhortation or intellectual exercise ever can. For similar reasons, a share in the work necessary to the college's operation has always been part of resident study at Goddard.

Lo and behold: the wheel has come round! Here as in Goddard's first bulletin, a share in policy making is intimately related to the work program, both seen as functional parts of the same whole, the name of which is intelligent and responsible behavior.

In the Lindquist college of the 80s, governance was assumed to follow earlier patterns, but the emphasis was on informality: discussions aiming at consensus, and the consensus (often arrived at through exhaustion, as a meeting became smaller and smaller) was sometimes understood as determining policy about matters that had earlier been "administrative matters" - the college calendar, the maximum number of semesters of advancement through Assessment of Prior Learning a student might be granted. Committees like those in the mid-70s still functioned, with students, staff, and faculty all supposedly represented, though sometimes it was hard to fill out the hoped for representation (a continuing problem). The Work Program takes precedence over governance in this statement from the 1986-1987 "Campus Study" bulletin:

Goddard College is a face-to-face community, purposely small so that its members - students, teachers, staff - get to know each other. You discover that life in this community is very down-to-earth. Vermont's broad spectrum of weather impinges on the fields and woods and small buildings that make up the campus. There is work to do (eight hours a week for every student) to keep the college going. There are policies and procedures to be talked about in meetings of the full community and its many student-faculty-staff committees. You are asked to make your own down-to-earth responses to the real-life problems, issues, and questions that are the basis for the curriculum. There is an emphasis on doing-turning ideas into action, trying out careers, relating theory to practice.

Twenty-two words about governance, and not very specific ones!

You know what the current catalog says. Its sincere but necessarily vague statement about education for democracy implies why NEASC and Goddard are concerned that we define a structure. Does this brief history suggest what that structure might be?

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