PLAINFIELD - Despite a walkout, students, faculty and staff at Goddard College put aside many of their differences during graduation ceremonies Saturday.

All 14 members of Goddard's graduating class of 1996 had asked the college's embattled president Richard E. Greene, not to attend the ceremony "in the interest of defusing a potentially explosive situation."

But Greene, the target of intense criticism for the past month, had refused to honor the student's request. When Greene stood to confer degrees on the graduates, about 35 students and their supporters stood and slowly walked out of the ceremony one by one.

But the protest, which came at the end of the two-hour event and only lasted moments, didn't mar what otherwise was moving graduation ceremony.

While Goddard has been racked by disputes over Greene's management style since early April, the focus at Saturday's ceremony was mainly on community, cooperation, and celebrating the things that make the college unique.

Wilfred Hamlin, who has taught writing and literature at Goddard for the past 48 years, stressed the importance of "choices made not alone but in community," during his commencement speech.

Quoting extensively from the poetry of Robert Frost and Vermont educator Morris Mitchell, Hamlin told an audience gathered in the college's historic upper gardens that "Nature, like democratic society, is a matter of mutual assistance."

"Community arises," Hamlin said, "when we are shocked into awareness that our individual less-traveled roads share a common destination. To give meaning to that end, we must each contribute our individuality to the ongoing creation and recreation of community."

Earlier Stu Bautz, a member of Goddard's board of trustees, who hosted the ceremony, asked the audience to remember how important "it is for people to connect to each other as well as themselves."

Co-host of ceremonies Stuard Bautz holds up an arrowhead and a computer software box to make a point during commencement on Saturday at Goddard College in Plainfield.

John Sexton, a member of the class of 1996, and the editor of Goddard College's student newspaper, said that both Greene and his critics have made mistakes.

"Much of this semester was spent in a struggle in which both sides saw the other as being in the wrong," he said.

But nobody's right all the time and nothing is all bad, Sexton said "We should have remembered that this spring," he said.

Sexton criticized Greene's administration for not listening to the community and acting like it has all the answers.

But Sexton also took aim a Greene's critics for thinking of themselves as "mistreated, woebegone underdogs scrapping to the last against a harsh and uncaring administration."

Greene's opponents say his administration is placing Goddard's, "long tradition of progressive education in jeopardy, and threatening its very soul."

The president's critics claim Greene has mismanaged the college's finances, fired staff who don't agree with him and is trying to "corporatize" Goddard.

Some members of Goddard's community have called on the college's board of trustees to replace the college's existing administrative structure with one more democratic.

The trustees, however, strongly support Greene and refuse to change Goddard's governing structure.

The conflict could come to a head on June 14 and 15 when the trustees hold their next board meeting.