PLAINFIELD, Vt. – Goddard College’s Board of Trustees welcomed three new members at its March meeting.
Retired professor and researcher Dr. Christopher W. Lovell; writer, empath and conscious channel Paul Selig; and nonprofit executive and former chief nursing officer Dr. Gloria J. Willingham-Touré join 14 continuing members of the College’s governing board.
Christopher W. Lovell, PhD, discovered Goddard College in the late 1960s “after choking on the standard intellectual fare offered by a couple of conventional colleges.” He graduated from Goddard in 1974, from one of the limited residency undergraduate programs of the time (Goddard Experimental Program for Further Education), where he received what he often calls the “green light” to plan what he wanted to study, select his own resources, and evaluate his own learning. The result was a senior study titled “Building Helping Relationships in the Adult Education Setting.” After graduation, Lovell worked for a few years in Goddard’s Admissions Office before earning a master’s in education from the University of Vermont and PhD in Counseling and Development from the American University. Lovell held a succession of teaching and research posts at Norwich, American, and Old Dominion universities. In 2004 he returned to Vermont to work part time at Marlboro College (where his wife, Ellen, was president) and at Union Institute & University, where he advised students completing the dissertation phase of their doctorates.
Paul Selig is a writer, empath and conscious channel. His breakthrough works of channeled literature, I Am the Word, The Book of Love and Creation, The Book of Knowing and Worth and The Book of Mastery (Tarcher/Penguin) have quickly become the most important and celebrated expressions of channeling since A Course in Miracles rose to prominence in the 1970s. Selig’s workshops have won a growing following around the world for their depth, intimacy, and psychological insight. He serves on the faculty of the Esalen Institute, the Omega Institute and the Kripalu Center, and his work has been featured in the documentary film Paul & The Word, the BIO channel series The Unexplained, Fox News and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. Selig received his master’s degree from Yale. A noted playwright and academic, he served on the faculty of NYU for more than 25 years and is the former director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
Gloria J. Willingham-Touré, PhD, is the chief executive officer of Afram Global Organization Inc., a nonprofit charitable organization based in Southern California, and the founder of its Village P.r.o.j.e.c.t.s., which seeks to create environments in which persons from diverse circumstances and experiences can come together and co-learn with each other in a way that bridges the opportunity gaps, retains the respective cultures, and ultimately benefits society. Immediately prior to this role, she was the interim provost and senior vice-president at Fielding Graduate University. In her first career, nursing, Willingham-Touré retired as the chief nursing education and research officer at the Long Beach Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare Systems. She later became a member of the faculty at California State University-Long Beach, where in addition to classroom and community-based teaching she led processes which resulted in increases in the integration of service-learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate nursing students. Willingham-Touré has a PhD in Education from the Claremont Graduate University.
Continuing Board Members: Jill Mattuck Tarule (Chair), Lucinda Garthwaite (Vice Chair), Mark R. Jones (Vice Chair), Avram Patt, Hubert Tino O’Brien, Danielle Boutet, Mario Borunda, Nicola Morris (Faculty Trustee), Manuel F. O’Neill (Staff Trustee), Joseph Orange, James C. Ross, Richard Schramm, Nicolette Stosur-Bassett (Student Trustee), Claudia Turnbull.
Caleb Pitkin (BA ’80) informed Mattuck Tarule that other commitments require his resignation from the Board. Pitkin is presently a sugarmaker, timber harvester, and beef farmer in Cabot, Vt., and the grandson of Goddard’s Founding President Royce “Tim” Pitkin.
About Goddard College
Goddard College is a liberal arts institution offering low-residency bachelor’s and master’s degrees from its campus in Plainfield, Vermont, and its educational sites in Port Townsend and Seattle, Washington. Constituted according to the ideals of democracy and principles of progressive education developed by John Dewey, Goddard’s curriculum is centered in the problems of choosing and deciding—students decide their areas of study, they determine which resources they will use, and they devise how they will measure what they learn. The College was founded in 1863 and moved to its Plainfield campus in 1938. It is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc., through the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. Visit goddard.edu.
