Earlier today, Green Mountain College announced it will close after the Spring 2019 semester. The institution dates to 1834, when it was known as the Troy Conference Academy. After several iterations, in 1957, it became Green Mountain College, offering two-year degrees to women. In 1975, it began offering four-year bachelor and two-year associate degrees, this time to women and men.
But then, in 1995, the school took a turn. Led by a new president, the college adopted an environmental focus. After several years of discussion and experimentation, in 2001, Green Mountain College declared a new mission statement for all the world to see:
“As a four-year, coeducational residential institution, Green Mountain College takes the social and natural environment as the unifying theme underlying the academic and co-curricular experience of the campus. Through a broad range of liberal arts and career-focused majors and a vigorous, service-oriented student affairs program, the College fosters the ideals of environmental responsibility, public service, international understanding, and lifelong intellectual, physical, and spiritual adventure.”
In 2002, not giving a fuck about any of that, I accepted admission to the college.
I didn’t choose Green Mountain College, and Green Mountain College didn’t choose me.
The college I’d chosen, my dream college, closed its residential program months after I enrolled but weeks before I could show. As a kind of consolation prize, they arranged a deal with Green Mountain College whereby I could use Green Mountain’s resources to pursue the highly individualized program of education they’d promised me.
I didn’t have to accept the deal, but Green Mountain’s admissions counselor assured me of its validity. They would, as my ideal college had promised, allow me to do pretty much whatever I wanted, using their resources, in exchange for money.
Here’s a room with a bed. Here’s a library. Here’s some pretty cool faculty members who you might not have heard of but who are totally chill and totally willing to encourage you while also calling you on your shit. Here’s a pretty decent rural setting where it snows a lot so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to sit under a blanket and read incredibly rich books while outside giant flakes of snow fall upon the trees and fields of a picturesque northern New England college campus. Here’s no one telling you what to study, what to read, what to write. Here’s no immediate financial obligations like food and rent. Here’s your curiosity unleashed and your ignorance upended.
Just give us the money.
Sure, I thought. Sounds fucking great.
But then something happened.
I started paying more attention to the world around me. I started noticing the environment. I started valuing sustainability over growth. I started seeing effects as multiply caused, systemic ecologies in peace and war, policies and politics interpreted through ethics, guided by the parable of the farm.
I started giving a fuck.
I didn’t choose Green Mountain College and it didn’t choose me, but Green Mountain College made me the person I am.
I met my wife at this college. I got married on the campus of this college. I taught my first class at this college, collected my first academic paycheck from this college. I won awards and set records at this college. With my friends, I left several marks on this college, legacy marks that still existed long after the students forgot our names.
And now it’s gone.
But…
I wonder what will happen to the campus.
The Troy Conference Academy opened its doors as what we would now call a high school (though it offered advanced classes that rivaled a college’s). Somewhere along the line, the high school became a junior college, then it became a full college, then it became an environmental college.
Yes, that particular legacy might be dead, but if the environmental mission of Green Mountain College taught me anything, it’s that everything leaves something behind, and that something must be put to use.
Green Mountain College was not just its mission. It was also a physical place, with buildings, books, heating systems, and toilets. It was a tastefully manicured landscape of open greens and powerful trees and a river and a farm and its barns. It was the geographical capstone of a rural village’s Main Street.
These things, that place, they don’t just disappear because the spirit of the college has passed on, and they don’t stop being haunted by the charismatic energy of all the people who ever passed through there: Carl’s Corner is a plaque in a wall; Carl’s Corner is still there; and it will be for as long as that wall is.
Who now, I wonder, will mend that wall?
People I love had their lives upturned tonight.
People will have to move from the area, important people who contribute heavily to the health and well-being of this ~3,500-person town. People who intermingle with the men and women who were born and will die in this town. People who lively up what could easily become an elderly rural community firmly set in its ways (I speak now as a homeowner, taxpayer, and father of a young child whose only home has ever been this community). People who are professors, cafeteria workers, admissions counselors, executive assistants, librarians, curriculum developers, informational technologists, farmers, mathematicians, and more. People whose children have only ever called this community home and who now have to uproot their lives and become migrant workers, moving not where they want to be but where the economy will allow them to be.
People who have dedicated themselves to a life of environmental responsibility, public service, international understanding, and lifelong intellectual, physical, and spiritual adventure — these people have had their lives upturned tonight.
In my wildest dreams, the people who love Green Mountain College would pool their resources to give it another go as a radically democratically socialist educational-institution.
The buildings are there, the farm is there, the library is there…all just waiting to be occupied.
Among us are knowledgeable and charismatic leaders, innovative and iconoclastic thinkers, policy wonks and consciously recognized bullshit artists who know how to turn it on for the old, white men in suits.
Everything Green Mountain College taught us tells us we could pull it off.
But then I remember that so many of us have so many tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay back, and mortgages to pay down, and that all of us now are debtors to creditors, and then I think about the difficulties of working with hippies, and across generations, spiced with an unhealthy dose of toxic masculinity, unrecognized privilege, and traumatic victimhood, and I remember that my experience at Green Mountain College was *my* experience and their’s was *their’s*, and the doubts set in, not to mention the legal questions surrounding the settling of the college’s debts and how that would affect the squatting nature of the occupying force, and while it’s always fun to outwit and outrun authority figures, it’s not so much fun if your child counts on you to wake her for breakfast in the morning, and the doubts pile on doubts…
But still…in my wildest dreams…
I wonder what will happen to the campus.
I wonder who will save the people of this town.
And I wonder who will mend that wall.