5/12/1981, Burlington Free Press
GODDARD SELLING FOUR PROGRAMS TO REMAIN OPEN
by NEIL DAVIS
PLAINFIELD - Goddard College has agreed to swallow another bitter pill to
try to avoid shutting down.
Goddard College officials announced Monday two undergraduate and two graduate
programs will be sold to Norwich University and moved to its Vermont College
campus in Montpelier.
Norwich will take the Adult Degree Program, Goddard Experimental Program in
Furthering Education, Goddard Graduate Program and the Master of Fine Arts
in Creative Writing Program.
By shedding those programs, Goddard will lose 800 students - more than
three-fourths of its total enrollment - and will revert to the tiny
experimental college it was 40 years ago.
Although a large majority of the college's trustees approved the sale
Sunday, former 31-year president Royce Pitkin resigned from the board
in opposition.
"I don't see how the sellling off of programs solves any problems," he
said. "It only makes them worse. The reason another college would want
to buy our programs is that it needs students, just as we do.
"I don't understand how you sell programs, anyhow, unless you have a slave
system and sell off the slave," said Pitkin, who founded the college in
1938 and presided over it until 1969.
He said he believe $1 million in donations could be raised to stave off
creditors without the college having to give up the programs it created.
Norwich's trustees unanimously approved the transaction Saturday.
The Northfield-based military school, which annexed Vermont College
in 1972, has offered terms that are expected to relieve Goddard's
financial woes by up to $500,000 in the next year.
Norwich assuming operating expenses of the programs will save
Goddard $300,000. In addition, Norwich has offered Goddard a $25,000
cash payment and 10 percent of the net income of the four programs,
up to a maximum of $175,000 the first year, a Goddard official said.
Director of experimentation, Douglas North, said Goddard enrollment
next year is expected to be 100 to 250 students - at best a tenth
of what it was in the college's 1960s heydey.
If the college remains accredited by the New England Association of Schools
and Colleges, enrollment is expected to be at the high end of the range,
he said.
The association probably will decide this week whether to revoke Goddard's
accreditation and will inform the college by mail next week.
Soon Goddard will be concentrated in the area known as Greatwood. Most
of another area, Northwood, is earmarked for sale, and the college
is putting on the market scattered buildings, including president
Victor Loefflath-Ehly's residence.
The 35-member faculty - greatly reduced by prior retrenchment - will be
cut to about 15 members by September, North said.
"It's historic and sad, too," North said. "It's also in one way exciting.
As of next fall, Goddard will be back where it was in 1938.
"We'll be a small experimental college where the sky is the limit."
The transition will be made this summer when college activities are slow.
"We plan to begin in the fall 1981 semester as a renewed college," Loefflath-Ehly said.
"Our physical size and debt load will be trimmed to realistic proportions by then,
and we will have developed several dynamic educational opportunities for students
of all ages, which are now in the plannning stages."
Students in all four of the purchased programs are on campus very little or
in some cases never.
Although Norwich is expected to recruit some new faculty members, some
Goddard teachers and administrators will follow the programs to Montpelier.
"I would hope they (Norwich) would take as much of the experienced faculty
as they can," said Dean Corinne Mattuck of the Adult Degree Program. Her program
has an enrollment of 360 and a faculty of seven.
Ellen Cole, dean of the Goddard Experimental Program in Furthering Education,
said faculty members in that program are "committed to finishing the semester
but after that, feelings are really mixed."
That program serves nearly 200 students.
Goddard Graduate Program faculty chairman, Kenneth Carter,
said he is concerned the nature of the program might change eventually
as a result of the move, "but I'm encouraged about the early signs."
He said he would predict the bulk of nearly 200 enrolled students and 11
faculty members would make the move.
Roger Weingarten, director of the master's in writing program, said the
"nationally known poets and fiction writers" who largely make up its faculty
of five probably will stay on.
"They want to see the Goddard MFA in writing continue, whether on this campus
or the Vermont College campus," he said.
The program has 40 to 45 enrollees he said.
Despite the program sales, Goddard will have to raise "several hundred thousand"
dollars to offset anticipated operating losses next year, said development
director F. Stephen MacArthur.
The Northfield campus has a predominantly male student body, and the Montpelier
campus a predominantly female one.
Free Press Staff Writer
