As Goddard College celebrates the 150th anniversary of its incorporation this month, the future of the small school in Plainfield remains uncertain.

For sure, the school’s faculty, staff, management and board of trustees should be proud of the milestones that have been accomplished along the way. And certainly this weekend’s festivities paid tribute to many incredible people, as well as the ripple effect many of those people have gone on to have elsewhere in the world.

But with the imminent departure of Barbara Vacarr later this year, the school is once again in that all-too-familiar pattern of conducting a search for a new leader. In the last 25 years, the school has had 15 presidents. The median tenure for a president has been three years, and an average of 3.2years. That does not suggest a problem; it suggests dysfunction.

One has to wonder why the school continues to chew up the visionaries whose intentions, for the most part, have been to make the college sustainable first and excellent second. Are the internal politics of the school so polemic and territorial that there is no room for change or compromise? Presidents leave frustrated and often demoralized.

Vacarr, who has served the last three years, has been widely criticized on campus for her tough stands aimed at bringing up-to-date processes and methods into a system that proudly and openly rejects such edicts. Yet, she has stated time and again that Goddard must adapt in order to compete in the cutthroat world of higher education. She built a management team — all