The Experiment Boom: 1960's and 1970's

The Experiment Boom: The 1960's and 1970's

Goddard history since that December day in 1959, when the college first celebrated its accreditation, has been anything but monotonous.

In 1963, the college organized its Adult Degree Program, the prototype of the current Intensive Residency model. It was the first program of its kind in the country, and a direct outcome of a 1959 grant from the Ford Foundation that underwrote a six-year experiment in "curriculum organization."

Other new programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels followed throughout the 1960's and 1970's. Goddard became a hotbed of radical thought and experimentation with a variety of learning formats, each planned for a special student population. Thus, as programs proliferated, so did offices and officers, and separateness among what were perceived as independent student-teacher communities. Goddard seemed a small university rather than a college. College enrollments expanded at a dizzying pace throughout the innovative 1970's at Goddard and elsewhere.