Diana Waters, a faculty member who has worked at the College of Education for a long time, learned from a student that Goddard College was about to close. In April, when Waters heard the news, she told the student, "No, no, no—you've got it wrong. What they're closing is thecampus, not the college."

Earlier this year, the board of trustees of this Vermont college had informed faculty that the financially struggling college—which had consideredmoving to fully online instruction—would close its campus, which officials at the time called a temporary move.

So Waters, who has worked at the college for nearly three decades, thought the student was confusing the closure of the physical campus with the closure of the entire 86-year-old college.

But after reassuring the student that the college itself was safe, Waters's phone began ringing off the hook. "I put them on hold and checked my email. Just as I was looking at my email, the announcement to faculty popped up," she said.

Goddard—the college itself—would close at the end of the semester。

Waters was not the only one surprised by the suddenness of the April 9 announcement. Maike Garland, a nearly 30-year faculty member of the College of Education and a Goddard alumna, initially learned of the closure through an email notification sent to alumni. When she saw it, she thought, "This must be a mistake." But then Goddard's official announcement confirmed the news.

Like Waters, Garland had expected the closure of the physical campus. She said that in March, campus faculty and staff were told to move out of their offices, and by April locksmiths were changing locks on campus. But there was no indication that the college would close completely and permanently. "There was no warning," Garland said.

Before the announcement, the college had experienced years of leadership turnover, declining enrollment, and deep tensions between management and rank-and-file employees. Since April 9, faculty, staff, and students have scrambled to get more information and to finish their careers, duties, and studies in Goddard's final days.

"Students are panicking"

According to Otto Muller, who has taught at Goddard since 2008, the college's final cohort of spring students had only registered a few days before the announcement. "We were in the middle of developing course plans for the semester for our students," Muller said. "Not only were we not given any advance notice, they didn't even think to contact the faculty who were actively planning the semester for students to ask what we should tell them."

Garland said that until the day before the closure announcement, the admissions office was still asking her to evaluate prospective students. "It seems absurd," she said.

Even after the announcement, information from officials remained scarce. "Students are panicking," Waters said. "They don't know what to do, and there's no message telling them what to do. It just says: more information will be released later."

What faculty wanted and needed were details on how the college would close—the process. "For the sake of my students, I've been trying to fight for clear information," Garland said.

In the absence of information, Muller said faculty had to reach out to their deans and the college's provost, essentially requesting meetings. Even by mid-May, college President Dan Hocoy had not directly communicated with faculty about the closure, Muller and other faculty members noted. "It's terrible," Muller said, "to close the college and not even speak with its community."

Since April, Hocoy has not responded to multiple requests for interviews or comments made via email, LinkedIn, and phone. Goddard Board of Trustees Chair Mark Jones also did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Among other things, faculty have also been scrambling to obtain details of theteach-out agreementGoddard reached with Prescott College in Arizona. The agreement was mentioned in the public closure announcement, but the announcement was vague on details. According to faculty interviewed by Higher Ed Dive, those details were also not released through other channels.

"The few administrators remaining on campus are doing their best to put together the details of the teach-out plan," Garland said in early May. "The plan is not yet complete. But they're doing their best under the circumstances."

The closure plan developed at the time included aspects that Garland "strongly objected to," she noted, particularly the suspension of program extensions that served as accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She knew students who had planned to use extensions to complete their theses.

By mid-May, there was still mixed information and a lack of clarity about whether certain Goddard programs—including its interdisciplinary master of fine arts and bachelor of arts in socially engaged art—would be offered as parallel programs at the teach-out institution, Muller said. Even for programs Prescott offered, the two colleges were not identical.

"I want my students to transition smoothly, and I'm working hard to find alternative schools for them. That's my biggest concern right now," said Garland, who teaches in Goddard's College of Education. "Prescott is not suitable for all students because their approach to teacher education is different from ours."

Meanwhile, faculty have also had to plan their own next career steps. According to people interviewed by Higher Ed Dive, Goddard's severance packages seemed to range from meager to nonexistent. For example, Waters and Garland both said they are nearing the end of their careers, but they still plan to continue working after Goddard closes. Garland said she will receive eight weeks of severance. She worries about what comes next. "It's hard to imagine starting a new career at my age," she said.

Waters plans to do consulting work after the college closes. Because her faculty status had been changed to something equivalent to a part-time lecturer during a broader restructuring several years ago, she will not receive severance. "I feel like a 10-year-old because all I can think is, 'This isn't fair, this isn't fair,'" she said.

"An interesting little college in Vermont"

Goddard may indeed be unique among U.S. colleges. It began as a theological seminary, and its modern form began in 1938 on a sheep farm in Plainfield, Vermont. According to its website, Goddard was conceived as a democratic educational experiment emphasizing "simple living and deep thinking." The higher education journal Change described it in 1971 as "perhaps the most innovative college in America."

Its founder and first president, Tim Pitkin, believed that education and students' lives outside of college could not and should not be separated. As its original 1938 course catalog noted, the college sought to integrate education with community, bringing with it a "major change" that would "break down the barriers separating school from real life."

The college became a radical experiment in education and democracy—and in how the two intertwined, with students taking the lead in building the college, both materially and intellectually. The first catalog described "student participation in policy-making and execution of work" as "essential" to "maintenance and operation as part of the educational program."

Goddard students designed and built some of the campus buildings. They also created the campus fire department, grew food, operated the switchboard, worked in the kitchen, and performed other campus jobs, according to a college history written by Cara Hoffman, published in Teen Vogue in January 2023. Hoffman, who later taught in Goddard's creative writing department, also highlighted that Goddard was founded in part as a response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

Financial fragility was also inherent to Goddard. As documented by Goddard graduate Elle Oille-Stanforth in her master's thesis, which drew heavily on Goddard's early history and its turbulent recent history, the college faced a rocky financial path since Pitkin's tenure. The founder shied away from fundraising from parents but often found local investors at the last minute to support the college. "During Pitkin's presidency at Goddard, he was able to get the job done and raise the money needed, but the school was never able to operate without the support of wealthy individuals or his network," Oille-Stanforth wrote.

In the following decades, the college continued to grow. Into the 1960s and '70s, the back-to-the-land movement helped spark interest in and enrollment at Goddard. Among its thousands of alumni are notable figures in the arts, such as actor William H. Macy, novelist Walter Mosley, playwright David Mamet, jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, and two members of the band Phish.

Although Goddard was accredited and had some features of a traditional college to maintain accreditation, it essentially rejected standard classroom instruction. Students only stayed on campus one week per semester, studying remotely the rest of the time. Instead of absorbing information from teachers and assigned readings and taking exams, students directed their own learning, with faculty serving as guides and mentors. As Muller described Goddard: "A school with no curriculum, no grades, where all students are always engaged in independent study."

The path to Goddard also differed from the typical college story. Oille-Stanforth enrolled because Goddard recognized life skills she had gained while studying to become a doula in a Maine program, which she left after changing her career plans. "I wrote a long paper with lots of details about midwifery, and they gave me 43 credits," Oille-Stanforth said in an interview. "The fact that this process could happen was significant."

Before joining the faculty, Garland attended Goddard as a student in the 1980s. This was mainly to allow Garland, who is from Norway, to obtain a student visa to be with her partner (now wife) in the United States, at a time when U.S. law did not recognize same-sex partnerships. When Garland was looking for schools, her partner (who had worked in Vermont) said, "Well, there's an interesting little college in Vermont that might suit you," Garland said.

Divergent directions

Setting aside its unique structure, Goddard on paper looked much like other small liberal arts colleges struggling with declining enrollment and revenue. According to federal data, its enrollment fell by more than 35% from 2017 to 2022, to 320 students. In the college's closure announcement, the board noted that Goddard had only 220 students at the time—about a quarter of the 802 students enrolled in 2010 and a fraction of the nearly 2,000 students in the early 1970s.

Accompanying the enrollment decline was financial strain. According to its most recent financial statements, in the fiscal year ending June 30, revenue fell short of $7.5 million in expenses by more than $500,000. Between 2022 and 2023, unrestricted revenue declined by 18.4%. The college also carried $1.9 million in debt from a $2.1 million U.S. Department of Agriculture loan for a biomass heating system. The debt was secured by campus buildings.

Despite these challenges, Goddard had managed to accumulate $3 million in investment reserves and more than $500,000 in cash, thanks to a series of surpluses through fiscal 2023. But somehow, between last June and this April, most or all of those reserves were depleted. "The pace of the closure was a bit faster than I expected," Leesa Stewart, who served as Goddard's chief financial and administrative officer from 2019 to 2023, told Higher Ed Dive. "There were cash reserves, and there were other things that made me think it could have held on a bit longer." Stewart also noted that enrollment was higher when she left, meaning tuition revenue was also higher than when the college announced its closure.

But the college's troubles went far beyond finances. For decades, faculty and staff had clashed with various forms of Goddard's board and administration. Among other issues, the past few years saw painful labor disputes, including a strike by unionized workers in 2023. Stewart believes this was a potentially fatal factor leading to the college's demise. "People have to be committed to the budget, the plan, and the direction," Stewart said. "If people aren't invested, plans tend to fail. I think I felt overall that investment was waning. When people aren't rowing in the same direction, I don't think you can survive."

With Hocoy taking office in mid-2021, a deep estrangement and distrust developed between management and nearly all other campus stakeholder groups, according to Garland, Waters, Muller, and others interviewed by Higher Ed Dive. One outspoken group believed Hocoy—who had previously held leadership roles at Antioch University Seattle, Erie Community College in New York, and Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City—was not a fit for Goddard before he even started. This included the Goddard Alumni Council—an organization created at the board's behest to serve as the college's official alumni association, but which never received final approval, according to Oille-Stanforth, who served as the group's press contact. Before the interview process concluded, the group publicly denounced Hocoy's candidacy for president. The group said Hocoy's vision was "antithetical to [Goddard's] mission, values, and pedagogy" and called his fundraising approach "corporate and capitalist." This was the beginning of tensions between Hocoy and this not-quite-official alumni group, which at one point received a cease-and-desist letter from the board's lawyers accusing it of defamation.

As a faculty member, Muller recalled becoming concerned when Hocoy, as a candidate, mentioned mergers during a public interview—a sign that the future president might have consolidation plans for Goddard. According to Muller, Hocoy also stated that his goal was to transform Goddard from a "commune" into an effective organization. Oille-Stanforth wrote in her thesis: "I was visibly upset by Dan Hocoy's statements." The council had pushed for another candidate, a feminist scholar they believed was a better fit for the college. "We had a choice. Most people in the community wanted that choice," Oille-Stanforth told Higher Ed Dive. "So when things happened, we were all very confused."

Broken communication

After Hocoy took office, he rarely appeared on campus, according to faculty and others interviewed by Higher Ed Dive. Muller said the president...