In “Kind of A Miracle,” Vermont author Doug Wilhelm shares the unlikely story of CCV. Emerson Lynn, editor emeritus of the Messenger, wrote the book’s introduction.
ST. ALBANS — In 1970, to bring new opportunity to a mountain state struggling with isolation and poverty, a few Vermonters decided to reinvent from scratch what a college could be.
Because they did, today’s Community College of Vermont may be a model for the college of tomorrow.
That’s the contention of the new book “Kind of a Miracle — The Unlikely Story of the Community College of Vermont.”
“When you think about the future of higher education,” CCV President Joyce Judy observes in this 19th book by Weybridge author Doug Wilhelm, “it isn’t sitting and waiting for people to come to you. It’s reaching out and providing pathways.”
That’s the core, says “Kind of a Miracle,” of what CCV has been doing since it was first created as a college without a campus, offering courses — at first for free — that were taught by volunteer teachers in communities around the state. The aim was to bring higher education to adult Vermonters who couldn’t travel to or afford a conventional college.
Almost no one in higher education thought such a radical approach could work. Yet CCV thrives today as a community college that still has no central campus and no full-time faculty, where community members teach their expertise and classrooms bring together students with a wide range of age and life experience.
“Doug Wilhelm’s ‘Kind of a Miracle’ is perhaps less a story about how the Community College of Vermont came to be,” writes Emerson Lynn, longtime former editor and publisher of the Saint Albans Messenger, in the book’s introduction, “than it is about the power of people who refused to give up — people whose thirst to turn the educational model upside down could not be quenched, and people who prevailed when all others told them they were wrong, or they did not belong.”
The author, a former Vermont reporter for the Boston Globe, tells much of CCV’s story through the words of people who were part of it. There’s drama in the college’s decades-long struggle to survive and win respect. There’s also humor, as when the brand-new college’s first Brattleboro coordinator recalls meeting with the local Chamber of Commerce:
“At the end, the chair said, ‘You want a vote of confidence?’
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘Well, you didn’t get it.’”
The college today has Vermont’s second-largest student body and least expensive tuition — and “I think the future of higher education looks more like CCV than it does like traditional institutions,” observes Tim Donovan, former CCV president and former chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges, in “Kind of a Miracle.”
The community college “never assumed that going to school is the defining element in a student’s life,” he explains. “You have to make college fit into their defining elements. Those might be geographic, they might be financial, they might be family, they might be work.”
Published by Long Stride Books of Middlebury, “Kind of a Miracle” is available through Vermont booksellers and online retailers. For more information, visit longstridebooks.com.
