Goddard College appears to have a buyer — a local group called the Greatwood Project will purchase the campus for $3.4 million.
This past April, the Plainfield institution announced that it would be closing and selling its campus due to low enrollment, according to its board of trustees. Alumni urged the board to sell to a buyer that would preserve the spirit of the campus.
Earlier this summer, the board had reached a sales agreement with another entity. But that agreement appeared to fall through, putting Goddard back on the market.
On Friday, the Goddard Board of Trustees released a statement announcing its new sales agreement.
“The Goddard Board is hopeful that this sale will allow us to meet our fiduciary responsibility to pay our faculty and staff, pay off the debts to our creditors, and ensure a smooth transition for our students,” the board wrote. “We are also thrilled that this sale will allow the campus to remain in the hands of the Goddard community and ensure that the Goddard legacy lives on in Plainfield.”
The Greatwood Project, which was founded and funded by alumni and former faculty, says it plans to lease space out to local businesses and organizations in a village-like model. The group also says that it has hopes of adding affordable housing on campus.
Named after one of the original sections of the campus, the Greatwood Project formed in the early summer when the sale of the college meant the campus was at risk of being developed. Kris Gruen, spokesperson for the Greatwood Project and Goddard alum, says that the group didn’t submit a formal bid in the first stages of the sale.
“We were watching, kind of from the sidelines, at the adjacent groups that were interested in buying the campus,” Gruen said. “[We were] seeing a lot of similar mission-aligned interests were matching there. We felt good about that.”
He said it took the pressure off, seeing groups like Cooperation Vermont that also wanted to preserve the campus and its legacy.
“We weren’t in any way interested in competing with those folks. It was just when we saw that those other sales weren’t manifesting that we continued to put ourselves forward in a more real and genuine capacity and ended up in the position that we are in now,” Gruen said.
In a statement to Seven Days on Thursday, Cooperation Vermont was tepid in its response.
“This is the latest in a series of announcements from Goddard that they have accepted another bid, so we will see,” wrote Michelle Eddleman McCormick, director of Cooperation Vermont and the Cooperation Vermont Community Land Trust.
The deal has not closed. But the Greatwood Project says that “both parties are moving as quickly as possible, excited by the inherent potential in moving Goddard forward into its next iteration.”
The college, founded in 1938, was hailed as a beacon of alternative education. Its radical uniqueness distinguished the institution from others of its size, along with its host of notable alumni and faculty which include playwright David Mamet, poet Louise Glûck, and members of the band Phish.
Home to a student population of only a few hundred, with no grades and a reputation for non-traditional majors, it was a place where students and professors created curriculums from scratch each semester, rerouting traditional learning maps to get at what they wanted to learn. Gruen was a Goddard student in the '90s.
“The entire campus as it sits right now is a memorial to transformative learning and action, you know, a bulwark that rose up against fascism, an institution that was interested in preserving democracy in its pedagogical model,” Gruen said. “So it’s also that; it’s a testament to those good efforts and that amazing history.”
Gruen says the Greatwood Project hopes to preserve Goddard’s grounds so the local community can access them.
Goddard’s campus hasn’t housed its full student body since the early 2000s when the college shifted to being mostly online. The campus currently leases out some of its empty spaces to local ventures, like the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, the Maplehill School and WGDR radio. The Greatwood Project says it plans to expand upon this model.
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