A week ago, a super majority of Goddard College staff unanimously took a vote of no confidence in President Dan Hocoy’s leadership and a separate vote to authorize a strike. Staff from across the campus – from kitchen workers to financial advisors – participated in person and via Zoom to take part in this historic vote.

At issue is the very mission of Goddard College, which is to enable “imaginative and responsible action in the world.” Faculty have included visionaries such as Murray Bookchin, who advocated for systems that were non-hierarchical and democratically controlled by all stakeholders. The College was founded in the 1930s to explicitly fight fascism and authoritarianism.

However, when it comes to running Goddard, Dan Hocoy, the current President, represents a significant departure from Goddard’s progressive roots. At issue is a modest cost-of-living adjustment of 3%, which Hocoy and management have thus far refused to grant for almost a year unless staff surrender their right to negotiate on working conditions. In other words, management is saying that staff must exchange any semblance of workplace democracy – which, again is at the core of Goddard’s mission and ethos – for the barest amount of financial relief in these times of runaway inflation (the current inflation rate is 6.4%).

Rather than work with their union and respect the staffs’ vast experience and input, the College has spent its money on anti-union lawyers, spending upwards of $40,000 thus far in its fight to make Goddard more like other corporatized institutions: top-down, hierarchical, authoritarian. Several months ago GCC was cited by an NLRB administrative law judge for failure to bargain in good faith over COVID safety as well as illegally terminating a staff member and alumni after ordering him to move from Florida to Vermont with his ailing parents in the middle of the pandemic.

The strike authorization vote enables the bargaining committee to call for a strike should there continue to be no progress in negotiations or in protest of unfair labor practices. Goddard’s students and faculty begin arriving for Goddard’s residency program this week.