Goddard College: The Experiment That Ran Eighty-Six Years

In nineteen thirty-eight, in the rural hamlet of Plainfield, Vermont, an educator named Royce Pitkin opened a small college on a farm called Greatwood. Pitkin had studied with John Dewey at Teachers College in New York and believed, deeply, that experience and education were inseparable, that students learned by doing, not by sitting in rows listening to lectures. He called his school Goddard College, successor to Goddard Seminary, a school founded in Barre, Vermont, in eighteen sixty-three.

The pedagogy was radical for its time. Students helped design and build campus buildings. They grew food. They ran college governance alongside faculty. There were no grades in the conventional sense, and no required courses. Instead, students designed their own learning plans with advisors and documented their growth through written evaluations. In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, when the counterculture sent waves of seekers toward Vermont, Goddard's enrollment surged to nearly two thousand students, and its model spread: student portfolios, individualized learning, and adult education programs were all Goddard innovations that mainstream colleges eventually adopted.

The alumni list runs to unexpected names, playwright David Mamet, actor William H. Macy, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, novelist Walter Mosley, sprinter Tommie Smith. Each of them shaped their own education here, which was the point.

By two thousand twenty-four, enrollment had fallen to fewer than two hundred fifty students and the money ran out. The board voted unanimously to close, citing financial insolvency. After eighty-six years the experiment ended, leaving behind the ideas it had seeded elsewhere, and a farm campus in the Vermont hills that still looks much as it did when Pitkin built it.