Barbara Vacarr was certainly a nontraditional student. How fitting that she finds herself at the helm of Goddard College, an institution that has long appealed to adult students and those who want a different kind of education.
Dissatisfied with the education she was getting in high school, Ms. Vacarr left at age 15 to get her GED. In college, she says, she also felt confined by and disconnected from the curriculum, and she dropped out 12 credits shy of getting her bachelor’s degree.
But feeling that she had unfinished business, Ms. Vacarr later returned to college after she was married with children. She went to Lesley University, in a program that was influenced by an adult-education program that started at Goddard. And this time, the progressive approach was different from what she was used to.
“The first questions that I was asked were, What did I care deeply about, and what did I want to know?” Ms. Vacarr says in a podcast with The Chronicle. “The question of being asked what do you care deeply about in an educational setting is itself a disorienting question for those of us who have gone through fairly traditional education.” Usually a school or college tells you what you need to know, never mind your interests.
In time, she was hired by Lesley as an adviser for adult students and moved up the ladder to eventually run the doctoral program. Then one day she got a letter from a search consultant who was looking for a president for Goddard.
“I looked at the letter and thought, Hmmm, I wonder if this is a mistake,” she says. “Because it was clearly not in my career trajectory.” The search consultant told her that there may have been many college presidents who had never aimed for a leadership position, yet made very good presidents anyway. Ms. Vacarr says she approached the position much the way that she had approached the best aspects of her education: seeing it as an opportunity to learn something new and to satisfy a curiosity.
But it also arms her with an empathy for the adult learner that might be uncommon among college leaders. “I understand the vulnerability of this kind of learning,” she says. “I understand the risk it takes to put everything you have built your life on as an adult into question, as you engage in learning where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be and where it is going to take you.”
That kind of education is the sort of thing that the country needs dearly right now, she adds: “That is the kind of learning that develops human beings, that develops moral thinkers—thinkers that become compelled to act on their learning because it is so meaningful.”
