Mark Doty/Goddard

This is how Mark Doty describes Goddard College, in his memoir Heaven's Coast:

"[A]n entertainingly eccentric little liberal arts school which occupied the grounds of an old sheep farm. The woods and fields around the grand but derelict old manor house were dotted with examples of what the catalog called 'organic architecture': student-and-faculty-built concatenations of found windows, salvaged beams, decks and balconies mounted one atop the other, full of little hiding places and tiny round windows of colored glass and plastic which seemed to suggest particularly welcome spots for the occupants to hang out on mescaline or LSD."

"The school -- one of the few academic institutions in the world which offered tuition rebate to gay couples, so that a teacher's 'spouse equivalent' could enroll for free -- had boomed in the early seventies, almost died in the eighties, and was gradually finding its way back to a kind of small-scale intensity. With its emphasis on embracing one's own way of seeing things, it offered a squirrelly, lively community for writers and young artistic spirits of sundry unclassifiable sorts."

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