Barbara Mossberg has resigned as president of Goddard College after a rocky tenure that continued the Vermont institution’s history of warfare between faculty members and executive leaders.
Ms. Mossberg, who became president in 1997, told the college’s Board of Trustees on Sunday that she would step down in August to become a senior consultant with the American Council on Education. Still, her four-year presidency will have been longer than those of her predecessors at Goddard, which had gone through a half-dozen presidents in a decade when she arrived.
In her statement to the board on Sunday, she thanked the trustees for their support. “The message is that strong leadership can succeed at Goddard, and that leaders can survive and flourish,” she said. “The college has made it possible to believe that a successful Goddard presidency does not have to be an oxymoron.”
The board’s chairman, Paul Blanc, praised Ms. Mossberg for her accomplishments as president, including helping to increase donations and enrollments and to create new academic programs. “She has proved that Goddard is capable of attracting and sustaining strong, transformational leadership,” he said.
Ms. Mossberg’s resignation surprised some faculty members, since the board last year had extended her contract for five more years, despite formal complaints about her leadership by professors, students, and staff members.
They accused her of excluding them from decision-making, and Goddard’s faculty members in November 1999 voted “no confidence” in her presidency. The professors also criticized the high turnover rate among senior administrators at the college.
But Mr. Blanc, the board chairman, attributed the complaints to union sympathy and tactics, since the faculty became unionized in 1998 and was beginning to negotiate a contract. The professors disagreed, and accused the president and the board of using the unionization as an excuse to diminish the faculty’s role in governance.
The board voted this past weekend to approve the faculty’s first union contract, said Mark Greenberg, a humanities professor and the faculty-union president. The three-year contract ensures binding arbitration of disputes and covers issues like job security, salaries, and bonuses, and it allows the union to reopen salary negotiations next year.
“It’s a very fair contract,” Mr. Greenberg said. “As we got toward the end, there was a feeling that both sides of the table were working in a collaborative spirit.”
During the past year, he said, Ms. Mossberg had become “less and less of a presence” on the Goddard campus. “People sort of forgot about her,” he added. He and other professors were pleased to hear of her announcement Sunday that she would leave. “We need better leadership that is more in tune with the spirit of the college, that is more collaborative and democratic,” Mr. Greenberg said.
Despite the statements by Mr. Blanc and Ms. Mossberg about Goddard’s ability now to sustain strong leadership, Mr. Greenberg said that professors still wanted a leader who was willing to share governance in a nontraditional way, in keeping with the college’s early experiments in participatory democracy, and would most likely push for that in the next presidential search.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
