Tag: green mountain college

Categories
life politics

Negotiate From A Position of Power

In 2020, a millionaire named Raj Bhakta purchased my alma mater and neighbor, Green Mountain College. He didn’t know what he’d do with the old girl when he purchased it (I had some ideas), but two years later, he has a better sense of things.

According to the development papers he recently submitted to our town, he now “seeks to turn the property into a regional destination for agrotourism, hospitality, small businesses, and post-graduate food and beverage education.” He imagines that “the campus will become the incubator for entrepreneurs developing new businesses who seek to locate in a dynamic and energetic work community.”

The estimated $100 million plan has three phases to be developed over the next decade:

  • Phase 1 (2023-2026) will convert existing college dorms into a 100-room destination hotel and twenty-three new condos, turn the college’s gym into a spa/fitness/wellness center, convert the main cafeteria into a convention center and the library into a “bulk storage tasting space,” and finally, construct a new “antique small craft distillery”
  • Phase 2 (2026-2028) will see the development of a brewery/tasting room, the addition of 40+ apartments, a sports complex, an equestrian center, and outdoor gardens
  • Phase 3 (2028-2030+) will include a post-graduate education center, a roastery, sports fields, improved trails, and a walking garden

The first part of the plan requires developing a significant number of new parking lots and some new road construction (to avoid traffic on the residential terrace beside the property). They hope to shield most of the parking behind three-foot-high brick walls (similar to the walls already on campus) with “dark-sky friendly” lighting. They hope to build enough parking for 549 vehicles (an increase of 412 from what the college had).

Finally, he would like to add a helipad to the circle in front of the college. Because the property anchors the west end of Main Street, the helipad would dominate the view on Main Street.

GMCTo attract investors to the project, Bhakta asked the town in March to stabilize his property taxes for the next ten years. He argued that he already pays more taxes than the college ever did (since the college was a non-profit educational institution), and he’s not asking for a tax waiver — just tax stabilization. He suggested in a presentation to the town that he would use “his current $100,000 tax bill as a base to which a surcharge equivalent to a quarter of a percent of the development’s gross revenues would be added.”

When he made the presentation, he added a veiled threat: a religious group had contacted him about purchasing the property, and if the town didn’t back his development plan, he might have to sell to them; as a religious institution, they’d be tax exempt, so stable taxes with him would be better than no taxes at all.

About a week after the presentation, the town voted to give the select board the power to explore a tax stabilization deal with Bhakta. Still, any agreement would be subject to the approval of the town’s voters.

The tax stabilization deal is perhaps the only leverage the town has over what happens at the former college. We learned the hard way that zoning, permitting, and democracy doesn’t work. Despite the zoning board and the town’s voters rejecting the construction of a Dollar General in town, the developer had deep enough pockets to fight it in court, and the town ran out of money to keep up our appeals. The Dollar General should open at the front gate of our town any month now.

Outside of the helipad (which I’m entirely opposed to from a noise pollution standpoint), I’m not opposed to Bhakta’s plan. It supports the goals of our official town plan, which seeks to “grow Poultney’s outdoor recreational economy, support existing businesses, and encourage new ones.” With a focus on agrotourism, the renovation of dorms into a 100-room hotel, and the conversion of other dorms into condos (I’m guessing for short-term rental purposes), it could bring the tourists every Vermont town needs to survive and thrive.

I have concerns about the destruction of the trees on campus and how the added parking lots will contribute to run-off pollution into the Poultney River. I hope regulations around Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law, may help balance those concerns.

With all of that, the tax stabilization deal does give the town some leverage over Bhakta’s plan. One of my neighbors suggested the select board could use that leverage to ensure Bhakta hires a certain percentage of contractors, construction workers, and service industry folks from the local pool (however that gets defined). The town could also require he set aside a certain percentage of the 40+ apartments built in Phase 2 for low-income Vermonters. I support both of those proposals and encourage the town’s residents to brainstorm even more.

Bhakta said in his presentation that the town’s support of his development is vital to his success. If that’s true, let’s ensure (in writing) that his development contributes to the town’s success as well.

Categories
education life

An Open Letter to Raj Bhakta

 

To: Mr. Raj Bhakta
Re: Your Recent Purchase of Green Mountain College

My name is Kyle Callahan, and I am a homeowner in the village of Poultney.

I am also a 2006 alum and former writing adjunct with Green Mountain College. I met my wife on the campus, and after we graduated, she spent two years there as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping the college connect with students and teachers in the local public schools.

Later, after we married under the tree where we met on campus, my wife took a position that allowed her to work with students in both our town’s public schools. I took a position at LiHigh School, the progressive independent-school about a quarter-mile east on Main Street from where you recently invested over $5 million.

We settled in Poultney not just because of the professional opportunities that opened up to us, but because we love this community. We love knowing the people who grow our food. We love the community engagement that gave rise to the Slate Valley Trails bike system, the local chapter of the Vermont Association of Snowmobile Trails, and the new REclaimED Maker Space. We love the community involvement on display at Chili Fest, Maple Fest, and our town-wide yard sales. We love the teachers and students we work with every day. We love sitting on our lawn chairs and watching our daughter run through our neighbors’ backyards with her friends.

This month marks our eighteenth year in Rutland County (fifteen of which were spent in Poultney) and our eighth year as homeowners in the village. My wife is now an English teacher in the middle school. Along with still teaching, I’m now the Operations Manager at LiHigh. Our young daughter is now a student in our public elementary school.

Vermont Public Radio reported that you “hope..to resurrect [on the GMC campus] a new kind of school that will benefit students and the local community.”

You’re quoted as saying, “It’ll probably be a work college.” The article continues, reporting that for you, “it can’t just be hands-on farm or tradecraft that’s taught[;] entrepreneurial skills [will be] equally crucial.”

According to the article, you admit your full vision for the campus is not quite clear: “the students of the college are part of the producing of the products that are growing from [Bhakta Farms], that we’re selling that they’re also learning how to sell. In turn…we’re…paying for their school.” 

In other words, an apprenticeship type of school where the students graduate as skilled professionals without any debt. 

The question, I guess, lies in what kinds of apprenticeships your new school will offer.

Clearly, you are a capitalist. Your vision seems to involve generating and selling agricultural products and using the profit to cover the cost of the free labor the students will provide in your agricultural fields and/or your sales and marketing division.

You’ll have to house the labor, educate and train the labor (ideally with skills that will carry over after they graduate), and cover the health and nutrition of the labor. But if the labor works as well as envisioned, your investment will pay off and each laborer will depart after however many years with the skills and credentials you promised, free at last, free at least, and ready to finally earn an income for their labor (assuming, of course, you don’t utilize financial incentives to increase the student’s output during their educational servitude). 

As a graduate of Green Mountain College in the years of its environmental mission, my guiding economic theories lean more towards the democratic-socialism side of the spectrum, but I’ve worked for capitalists my entire life, and I can appreciate the need to make your nut and still have some money to enjoy the finer things in life. From the photographs on your Bhakta Farms website and your interviews on YouTube, you seem well acquainted with the finer things in life (your current “not even a double-wide” trailer/office not included). 

A significant portion of Poultney residents, on the other hand, are not used to such things. According to the 2018-2019 Annual Statistical Report on Child Nutrition Programs from the Vermont Agency of Education (the latest year for which I could find data), over 46% of our elementary-school students and nearly 40% of our high-school students come from low-income families. Our median income, according to the U.S. Census, is $45,500 — which, for a family of four, qualifies them for reduced lunches at the school. This monthly income does not provide enough for food, rent/mortgage, electricity, oil, gas, auto repairs, medical bills, dental bills, clothing, Internet, etc., let alone a $250 bottle of fifty-year-old brandy.

Rutland County, as I’m sure you know, has also been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and we have reached that point in American history where the children of some of those addicts are in our school systems, not to mention the children of our county’s alcoholics, domestic abusers, and child abusers (emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual).

According to the 2017 Study Of Vermont State Funding For Special Education, the “increased demand and limited capacity for community-based mental health and social services has shifted responsibility for providing these services to schools. In the face of their own capacity limitations, schools have responded by either contracting with private providers or paying for students to attend special schools or programs outside the district.”

LiHigh, the school I labor for, is one of those special schools, so I have firsthand knowledge of how limited our community-based mental health and social services have become.

As you consider your vision for the former campus of Green Mountain College, I urge you to explore the “community school” model of education. Endorsed by the NEA and (therefore) a major element in Vice-President Biden’s education plan and (therefore, should V.P. Biden win the national election) a potential major recipient of future federal grant moneys, the model puts the campus at the center of the community. Academics, health and social services, community development, and community engagement all occur on campus.

A trade-school education results in a skilled profession, with graduates often becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, farmers, auto mechanics, etc., but a trade-school education can also result in graduates becoming childcare providers, family counselors, addiction counselors, nurses, elementary and secondary educators, and community artists and artisans. The very people most needed by the families in our community.

These professions are not traditionally considered “entrepreneurial,” but a talented entrepreneur such as yourself can teach students to navigate either the nonprofit system or Vermont’s benefit-corporation laws in such a way as to enjoy the finer things in life while also improving the community in which both our families have now invested so much.

Again, as you create what you called “a think tank of experts in education and in other fields,” I urge you to consider the community-school model for whatever you hope to build.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the still-developing vision that will, someday soon, dominate my town.

Categories
education life politics

Let’s Not Be Too Late

In Defense of an Undiscussed Idea Offered At the Most Recent Town Meeting About The Future of the Green Mountain College Campus

Last week, my town called a second meeting in as many months to discuss the future of the property currently owned by Green Mountain College. I missed the first 20 minutes because I had to take my daughter to Girl Scouts at the elementary school while the meeting was held up at the high school.

When I returned, the president of the college had already spoken, as had one of the representatives the state had sent our way. Now our town manager had the microphone.

I found my wife near the door of the crowded gymnasium, and we took two of the last empty seats on the floor, off to the side of the podium (see the picture above; props to my friend Bill for looking all relaxed and cool).

The town manager spoke about some of the ways he was trying to alleviate the financial losses that will come to the town proper in the wake of the college’s departure. He’s not the most charismatic speaker, so I found myself instead perusing the agenda.

After the introductory speeches, the moderator took back the microphone and told us about our two goals for the meeting. First, he wanted residents to recall the 30 ideas we’d conceived during the previous meeting, and to take a democratic vote to see which ideas we preferred. Second…

Hang on, we all thought, what’s the point in that? It’s not like we actually have any say on what happens to the campus. It’s “For Sale,” and there’ll be no stipulation in the sales agreement that compels the buyer to respect the democratic will of the town. If its board is willing to pay the sales price, even the evil corporation of Monsanto has every right to purchase the land.

Some among us voiced those thoughts, only to be told by the moderator that “It’s important” for the town to make its desires known. Doing so may attract an investor who shares that same desire. We might not be able to say who comes to town, but we can sure invite whoever we want.

Not everyone appreciated the answer, but the moderator made us move on.

The second goal of the meeting was to use this collective crisis to draw together those who are interested in improving the status of the town and commit ourselves to working together on some kind of shared mission.

To that end, the moderator had arranged six possible ideas, culled from the previous meeting, that his team believed the town itself might commit to, ideas that would still be sound irrespective of the outcome of the campus.

I was one of the people who didn’t appreciate the moderator’s first answer, so I could barely focus on the second goal. One week later, I wish I had.

(To read a full recap of the meeting, read this newspaper article written by one of my former students — you go, Kate!)

But back to the first question. The overwhelming desire of the town is for the campus to be used by some kind of hands-on educational institution, ideally centered on the intersection of sustainability, agriculture, and the trades. It would be a mixed age institution, with classes offered to high schoolers (both foreign and domestic), as well as college age and above (both foreign and domestic).

I love that idea, and if implemented, I would support it with everything I’ve got (especially to build a bridge between the high school where I work and the institution the college would become).

With that being said, I don’t know if another “agricultural, sustainability and environmental education institute” was the most critical idea.

The one I put forward during the first meeting (which received a number of votes at the second meeting but didn’t place in the top three) was for the campus to become the home of a public mental-health facility catering specifically to teenagers.

After the vote, I accepted the results and moved on, telling myself the process was nothing more than an experiment in wishful thinking anyway.

Then tonight, a woman I knew during my college days, offered the same idea on a forum of alumni.

Two people, both of whom live or have lived in Poultney for a number of years and who have direct experience working at and/or are partnered with an individual who has worked at the college, offered their disagreement with the idea.

I just so happened to be in a chatty mood (as I so infrequently am) and decided to engage with their good-faith arguments against what I still considered to be my idea. While doing so, I became disappointed in myself, not because I was arguing on Facebook again, but because I missed my chance to defend the idea in person.

Prior to the vote, the moderator asked anyone in the audience if they wanted to speak out in support of any of the ideas on the wall. Several members did. But for some reason, I did not.

One of those reasons was the exhaustion I feel at the end of every workday. I spend six hours a day working with students between the ages of 11 and 22, 100% of whom require extra supports when it comes to their mental and emotional health. It’s a school that is not only working as hard it can to support the students who come through our doors, but to support the teachers and staff as well (as if there were a difference between our teachers and staff). Additionally, because of a continuous increase in the demand for our services, I also work as hard as I can to grow the school in every way, shape, or form, not to increase my pay, but to satisfy needs of the crisis that exists not only in the nation and the state, but also in my own town, where, despite a stable population of residents, we feel the struggle of the increase in mental and emotional health disorders among teenagers.

Every day, as rewarding as it is, is a hard day, and every day leaves me exhausted.

So I didn’t have the energy to stand up at a town meeting and tell everyone that it’s our kids — not the state’s kids — who need the support of a mental-health facility that caters specifically to teenagers.

In my years of being married to an educator in the local public schools and my years of working as an educator in the town’s two private schools, I’ve spoken of more times than we like to admit “the Poultney Wing” of the Brattleboro Retreat (one the state’s few public, residential mental-health facilities with a floor dedicated to teenagers).

It’s sometimes called “the Poultney Wing” because…

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who take regular medication for anxiety or depression or some form of psychosis?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who are so addicted to their smartphones that they suffer from withdrawal symptoms every time the device is taken away, leading to all kinds of familial and educational crises?

How many people in my town have kids or grandkids who have cut themselves just to feel a different kind of pain?

How many children in my town have retreated from their social lives due to the effects of bullying?

How many children in my town live with the trauma of parental addictions; emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; the ramifications of an ugly divorce; a parade of wanna-be step-parents; hunger and poverty; inadequate healthcare; etc.?

How many children in my town have attempted or have regular ideations about suicide?

The national increase in mental and emotional health disorders is not a statistic. It’s a fact that my wife and I face everyday on the front lines of our schools.

Our kids need help.

Why not do everything we can to give it to them?

This town should become the first investor.
Whatever we can give, let’s give, and then let’s see who joins us.

Categories
life

Our Real Town Meeting Day

In Vermont, Town Meeting Day is officially March 4th, and on March 4th, my small town of Poultney officially met and cast our ballots on all of the issues before us.

But with the yearly budgets passed and the officers elected, it was time to hold our real town meeting to discuss the long-term future of our town.

With the impending dissolution of Green Mountain College as a legal entity, we have lots of concerns about how our town of roughly 3,500 people will survive and thrive without the millions of dollars the college deposits into the town each year through property taxes, water and sewer payments, mortgages and rents, grocery checks, restaurant bills, hardware supplies, cups of coffee, four packs of beer, etc.

It’s a scary moment, and we need help, which was why representatives from the state of Vermont, various Federal agencies, and a variety of non-profits came to the meeting as well: because people genuinely want to help.

We scheduled the meeting for 10:30 AM on a Thursday, not the most opportune time for anyone with responsibilities, but roughly 200 people still found time to walk away from their jobs and depart from their routines, and show up.

I left the meeting feeling incredibly inspired.

Nothing got decided, and lots of questions remain unanswered, but the sense of democracy I experienced left me inspired.

The youngest attendee was in diapers, and when she started crying, her mother brought her into the hallway, but the mother then stayed by the door, helping others to hear while still trying to listen.

The oldest was…well…suffice to say, I sat next to at least a few great-grandmothers and fathers.

But there was also everybody in between. Recent and not-so-recent college alum (such as myself) who elected to settle in the community. Recently arrived retirees concerned with the health and wealth of the land they’ve chosen to call home. Lifelong townspeople with businesses, political offices, and seats on the chamber of commerce. Radically polyamorous twenty-somethings. Hardworking middle-aged tradesmen. Powerful women of color. A man whose first public thought for the campus was to create a safe-haven for refugees. An orange-blazer wearing member of the select board with a long list of entrepreneurial ideas. A green-flannel-wearing pseudo-intellectual with more dreams than he knows what to do with. A working mother, tasked with cleaning the room after we’ve gone, standing with us, listening and having her say, because she too is one of us.

We started with the challenges.

We asked ourselves, what are some of our biggest concerns? I shared my concern about the vibrancy of the community being diminished without the constant rejuvenation of newly arrived students and deciding-to-stay graduates, let alone the joy dee vivray brought in on the tongues and talents of professors and masters of the cultural arts (I didn’t say it quite like that).

Other concerns were more concrete: who’s gonna mow the lawn once the college is gone? Who’s going to ensure the security of the buildings and prevent them from becoming a haven for vagrants, especially in this area, where we too feel the pressures of the nation’s opioid crisis? How are we going to cover our town’s financial obligations without the influx of the college’s money? How much control do we actually have over the future of our town if anyone can come in and purchase what amounts to a core part of the town’s identity?

Next came the suggestions.

Speaking as a representative of the town’s local therapeutic school, I highlighted the state’s dire need for residential mental-health facilities dedicated to serving our youth.

Others suggested a veteran’s care facility; a federally funded school for nurses that would serve as a pilot program within Sen. Sander’s nationwide call for free colleges; a multi-use facility with a community farm, rooms for rent to (say) graduate students who are looking for an idyll location to finish their dissertations in peace, or to (say) religious groups for retreats, or to (say) small tech companies looking to increase their footprint without dramatically increasing their overhead, or to (say) etc.; the establishment of a new town center with offices and seminar rooms to rent on a regular or even hourly basis, not to mention a town-wide dining hall, a nondenominational chapel, an ample-sized theatre, an indoor basketball gym, a state-of-the-art fitness center, a public pool, a large solar array, etc.

And so many more great suggestions, some more realizable than others, some more radical than others, but all of them exciting, all of them different, and best of all, all of them good intentioned.

We listened to all the good people who want to help.

We ended the meeting by inviting the representatives of the various state and federal agencies, as well as the contributing nonprofits, to share their reflections on what they’d heard. To a person, they declared their optimism for what lies ahead of us, provided we keep an open mind and enter into the process with our hearts and our heads in the right place.

Nothing I experienced at that meeting suggests we will do otherwise.

And so I left inspired, and feeling good about calling this place my home.

Categories
education life

The Existential Threat

I mentioned last week that my alma mater (and former employer and one of the largest employers in my region), Green Mountain College, announced it will cease to exist in about six months’ time. In response, a group of alumni (myself included), current students, friends of the college, and parents declared our intention to #SaveGMC and began a fundraising effort to do so.

Green Mountain College is between $20 and $25 million in debt, and it runs on a deficit of about $5 million a year. Even if the college shrunk its faculty to just 18 members and its enrollment to just 300 students (a scenario the administration considered and dismissed), the college would still run a deficit of roughly $1 million a year. At this point in time, financially speaking, Green Mountain College (as a business) makes no sense.

Now, the biggest donation Green Mountain College has received from a living person is roughly $100,000. To buy the college out of its debt, the SaveGMC group will have to replicate that record-setting donation at least 250 times…in less than six months.

In addition, the group will have to convince at least some members of the staff and faculty to stop planning for their employer’s sure demise and focus instead on keeping it alive, against all of the odds and without the promise of future employment even if it stays alive.

And then there are the students. Where will they come from? A large part of the reason the college is closing is because of a lack of young people graduating from high school within 150 miles of the campus. Data shows that 58% of high-school graduates choose a school within 100 miles from home and that 72% choose a school within their state. In Vermont, however, 64% of high-school graduates elect to leave the state (the highest rate nationwide).

That’s not a number local colleges can afford. As Vermont’s governor made clear in his most recent inauguration speech, our public schools educate “about 30,000 fewer K-12 students than we [did] in 1997—that’s an average loss of three students a day for over 20 years. And that trend continues.”

So if not from our local schools, where will Green Mountain College’s future students come from? It doesn’t make sense for an educational consumer to risk tens of thousands of dollars on a college that has not only been detached from life support, but abandoned by its responsible parties. On top of that, why would an accreditation agency risk its reputation on a college whose economic future rests on a foundation of wishful thinking?

Saving Green Mountain College means overcoming a number of incredibly tremendous challenges and doing so in an incredibly short period of time.

I can’t help but notice the irony.

In the late nineties, following the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, Green Mountain College focused its entire curriculum on the existential threat that is human-caused climate change.

Despite the best advice of scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and poets, the rest of the world virtually ignored the threat, and each year, humanity (myself included) moved (and moves) closer and closer to our ecological extinction.

If we are to survive the already-here and still-oncoming storms of extensive prolonged droughts, death-creating cold snaps, lung-suffocating heat waves, massively raging wildfires, city-destroying floods, and throat-choking pollution, then humanity has to overcome a record-breaking number of incredibly tremendous challenges, and it has to overcome them in a very short period of time.

I don’t know that either of us — SaveGMC or humanity — can do it, but as a Poultney resident and a member of the human community, my continued existence requires giving it a shot.

Categories
education life

My Alma Mater Died Today

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.