David Vanadia

(Stamped) Received March 15, 2013

All Show and No Tell: The Real Story of What’s Going on at Goddard College

Send on behalf of concerned members of the Goddard College Community

The Board of Trustees has recently completed their meeting at Goddard College in which they considered a number of items. These included approving and ongoing deficit that has climbed to $800,000 and is likely to cross the million dollar mark by June 30, the end of the college’s fiscal year. In addiction the board approved a line of credit for over a million dollars to sustain the college as it slides deeper into a deficit under the administration of current president, Barbara Vacarr. This is a far fry from the state of the college during the previous Schulman administration as longtime Goddard friend and associate, Art Chickering, has pointed out in a recent letter to Seven Days http://www.7dtvt.com/2013let-editor-7. Vacarr and chief financial officer, Faith Brown, attribute the increasingly precarious financial situation of the college to an alleged national trend of declining enrollments. Moreover, at the board meeting a claim was made that the ongoing pattern of antagonistic relations between the administration and the faculty is also a cause of the college’s state of affairs. In fact, the current chair of the Board of Trustress, Andrea Clay, opened the meeting with a statement that Barbara Vacarr has assembled a number of newspaper articles that demonstrate a long history of such tensions at the college. Apparently the desire of the faculty to participate in governance is causing problems that are hindering the function of the college and needs to be countered by more administrative measures. It does not seem to have dawned on the trustees that a more plausible explanation is that Vacarr has been on a spending spree since she arrived just over two and a half years ago and has not made good on her promise to raise money (diversify revenues is her term) nor has she brought the necessary resources to bear to sustain enrollments. Instead the staff had to deal with the fiasco of having Vacarr’s chosen candidate, Christine Persico, as cheif enrollment officer and who eventually was let go at considerable costs to the college. No one of competence has been hired to replace her as enrollments in a number of programs slide downward. Predictably, the administrations position, as we have been informed in Vacarr’s recent update, is that the latter is due entirely to a national trend plaguing small colleges as well as the college’s uncooperative faculty.

Another matter of interest at the board meeting was a request the board consider approving an elder housing development. A similar request came before the board in the past and resulted in a seminar being offered on conflict of interest in February 2008 that ended with the board turning down the proposal. The conflict of interest, then as now, is that Andrea Clay and her husband and now current board member, Jim Clay, are in the business of elderly housing! Among the last items to go before the board was a reminder by Vacarr that she us up for review and is hoping for an increase in her salary that now stands just short of $252,000 with added bonus, benefits, and an expense account! Given the mess the college’s finances are in and her lack of effective leadership a significant cut in her salary would be the more appropriate action for the board to take.

Reports of the board meeting have begun to circulate among the staff, faculty, and students of the college with predictable results. In the recent past a significant number of faculty, nearly 50 and not a minority as Vacarr likes to put it, send a letter to the board raising their concerns. The letter was unfortunately largely ignored by both the board and administration. Program directors have also raised concerns with the administration, again to no avail. There are now a growing number of the college community who are running out of patience with Barbara Vacarr and her administration. In fact her administration consists of de facto appointees who were never vetted in a huring process as is customary and appropriate. Instead, Vacarr appointed friend and Lesley colleague, Marianne Reiff, as academic vice president. Her tenure in that position was filled with a number of bad decisions. These included dismantling the successful Health Arts and Sciences Program, launching a costly and badly under sources undergraduate program in Port Townsend, and creating a host of ineffectual committees that ended up undermining the Faculty Council. The Faculty Council had been constituted by an act of the Board of Trustees almost a decade earlier and by all reports had been functioning well until her arrival. Reiff’s inability to work with the Faculty Council or accept any input along with her embarrassing outbursts and pouty resentment characterized much of her time and interactions at the college. Since her departure, the Faculty Council’s mandate to oversee the academics of the college has been further circumvented by invented councils of one sort or another and, most recently, the co-called Academic Council.

Faith Brown, chief financial officer and another appointee, with no experience in higher education has turned into an autocrat whose own frustration in the job have caused her to burst into tears at meetings. Her inability to work with staff and faculty without becoming entrapped in power dynamics of her own making has resulted in her remaining isolated in the administrative offices of the Manor building. Mickey Cronin who is the current undergraduate dean is, in fact, also an appointee in spite of there being a hiring process. It amounted to a series of lengthy interviews with three candidates, two from within the college, and one of these was advanced as the preferred candidate with Cronin being a distant third. In the end Reiff disregarded the recommendation os the hiring committee and appointed Cronin, another former Lesley colleague. This caused considerable reaction from the faculty and staff whose concerns were dismissed. Cronin’s tenure as undergraduate dean has turned into one in which nobody, not even in academic services, seems to know what she does. Her enthusiastic displays at meetings of all the “wonderful partnerships” that are developing and any number of other matters “in the works” leave most staff and faculty baffled as to what all of these are going to bring to the college and to increasing enrollments. She has also taken up the newly invented spin of how the faculty, as in her past, is causing the administration difficulties as it attempts to forge ahead with one project after another. Jackie Hayes, former of faculty and current graduate academic dean, is the only member of the administration that the faculty has any trust in. But even she seems at risk of being compromised by the hype and spin that is generated in the circle of yes people who Vacarr surrounds herself with as she weaves together her most recent narrative of post Pitkin Goddard. The most developed form of this narrative is found in Vacarr’s recent update and serves as a diversion from the more concrete and vital issues of what is to be done about the financial situation of the college and the downturn in enrollments. Neither of these are adequately addressed in the rhetorical fog or facile and empty theorizing about overcoming resistance and dwelling in the past and the need to implement her ongoing and nebulous “strategic plan.” All of this from someone who really does not understand Goddard pedagogy that continues as before in each and every residency and semester as the grand newly invented post Pitkin narrative is added layer by layer.

When Barbara Vacarr was hired many faculty and staff had hopes that she would bring to the college an openness to participatory and shared governance and she clained she would in her interviews. Faced with difficulty adjusting to her role, the faculty and staff were very supportive. In fact, the union even agreed to forgo an increase in compensation she proposed when student enrollments went into decline. Many now believe this was a wrong decision in light of Vacarr’s inflated salary that she must have negotiated, her inept hires, outsourcing to consultants, recycling of administrative assistants who found working with her intolerable, and expenditures galore. In fact, the staff too has found Vacarr and her administration so problematic that they voted recently to become a union to protect their interests. They did this despite the determined effort on the part of Vacarr and Brown and with chief advancement officer, Lauren Moye, in tow to engage in an anti union campaign and bully the staff into voting against unionization. That the overwhelming majority of the entitled staff voted to unionize by joining the UAW is a telling indicator of the level of concern and mistrust among them. In all of these matter the program directors and other senior staff are powerless and try to stay out of the limelight. Those who do talk confide to faculty that something has to be done since the discrepancy between the bombastic rhetoric about new visions of education and strategic planning and the reality of administrative incompetence and decline in enrollments cannot fo on because it will bring down the college. Now even the students are becoming concerned with many of the decisions being made, the noticeable decline in enrollments, the financial instability, and especially with the palpable tension between the administration and the faculty. This will only be compounded when they discover that the board has voted a 5% increase in the tuition and residency fees.

It seems unlikely that this state of affairs can continue ad something is going to have to give. The hope of many that the Board of Trustees would step up has not happened. The recent letter Vacarr included in her so-called update that typically makes no mention of the financial mess is hardly an encouraging indication that the trustees are on top of things. In reality so many of them are new and inexperienced and appear to be under the spell of Vacarr who was instrumental in getting them appointed after she purged the board of long standing members. In fact, the opening statement by Clay about the faculty is a stunning abnegation of her responsibility as chair to remain independent and put before the board any mater arising rather than naively sanctioning Vacarr’s dubious and distracting interpretation founded on a selected scattering of newspaper articles. It is starting to look like a case of the tail wagging the dog!

These days staff and faculty report Vacarr looking nervous and concerned in spite of they hype and spin she generates and the displays of her face in newspaper articles that extol her accomplishments and plans for an ailing Goddard College. The recent Seven Days piece http://www.7dvt.com/2013ho-president-barbara-vacarr-plans-save-goddard-college is an appalling example of the skills of her KSE consultant handlers to promote their client by demeaning the college. In fact, the arrogance that comes across not to mention Vacarr’s angry outbursts are well known to many who have been on the receiving end of her “undigested rage” as she once described it in an explosive outburst before the undergraduate faculty. This “undigested rage” is evident in her ongoing faculty suppers at the residencies when she talks at those present, insisting on the precarious state of the college she inherited, her convoluted and largely insubstantial views of education and the need for change, and recycling stories of all that she has done and will do. Any who speak up to offer their views that in any way deviate from this established narrative are quickly shut down or pulled aside afterwards and given a reprimand. It is painful and disconcerting for those who attend these meals to witness faculty and program directors, many of who are seasoned and accomplished professionals, being talked down to by an insecure, manipulative, and defensive administrator who is clearly way out of her depth. For many these events are becoming insufferable and fewer and fewer want to attend future meals or have even proposed canceling them altogether. Cutting through the rhetorical fog the reality looming on the horizon is the dark cloud of layoffs and retrenchment, the legacy of Vacarr and her administration. All of this does not bode well for where we are headed as a community but this is what’s going on at Goddard College.