New Book Says CCV’s “Unlikely Story” Has Meaning for Higher Ed’s Future

The newly published book Kind of a Miracle, The Unlikely Story of the Community College of Vermont, is the half-century history of a college that genuinely grew out of communities — and in the process may have found a key to making higher education more relevant and accessible to many more people.

“When you think about the future of higher education,” CCV President Joyce Judy observes in this 19th book by Weybridge, Vt. 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 in 1970 as a college without a campus, offering courses that in the beginning were tuition-free, taught by volunteer teachers in communities around the state. The aim was to bring higher education to adults who couldn’t travel to or afford a conventional college.

At the time, almost no one in established higher education thought such a radically unusual approach could work. Yet CCV thrives today as a community college that still has no central campus and no full-time faculty, where 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 editor and publisher of the St. 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, with extended quotes accompanying the narrative in “oral history” style. Brief profiles recall often-colorful key characters, and there’s drama in scenes that were pivotal in the college’s long struggle to survive and win respect.

There’s also humor, as when the just-born 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 present-day community college, with Vermont’s second-largest student body and least expensive tuition, has won that confidence. It even presents a model, Kind of a Miracle suggests, for how higher education today can reinvent itself to meet the steep challenges it faces.

“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, he explains, “never assumed that going to school is the defining element in a student’s life. 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.