Early History
Goddard College began in 1863 in Barre as the Green Mountain Central Institute and a year later was renamed Goddard Seminary. Royce S. "Tim" Pitkin, the first Goddard president, a progressive educator and follower of John Dewey and other, similar proponents of educational democracy, earned a doctorate at Columbia and returned to Vermont where he started Goddard College from Goddard Seminary in 1937, moving it to Plainfield in 1938. Pitkin conceived of the college as a place for "plain living and hard thinking."
Having narrative transcripts instead of traditional letter grades, as well as learner-designed curricula, Goddard was one of the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities, which also included Franconia, Nasson, Antioch, and several other educational institutions.
Goddard College advocates innovation in higher education as its expressed objective; in 1963, Goddard introduced the first Adult Degree Program for working adults.
In 2002, after fifty-four years, the college terminated its traditional age on-site experimental bachelor degree program. Today its more than six hundred adult students attend residencies in either Plainfield, VT or Port Townsend, WA. Only two programs are available at the Port Townsend site: the MFA in Creative Writing and the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, which was new to Port Townsend in the fall of 2007. Also new for the fall of 2007 was the first low-residency Bachelor of Fine Arts program in creative writing.
The History of the Goddard Experiment Exhibit, 1949-1959
The History of Goddard College Exhibit, 1960-1969: An Era of Growth, Expansion, and Transitions
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