{"id":219,"date":"2013-08-07T20:25:54","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T20:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ccvhistory.wordpress.com\/?p=219"},"modified":"2013-08-07T20:25:54","modified_gmt":"2013-08-07T20:25:54","slug":"david-buchdahl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/2013\/08\/07\/david-buchdahl\/","title":{"rendered":"David Buchdahl"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Coordinator of Instruction and Advisement, Regional Director, Academic Dean,
\n<\/strong>Director of Institutional Research and Planning<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were no computers.\u00a0 There were also no deans, no financial aid counselors, and no site office managers.\u00a0 It was 1983, and I was starting a new job as a Coordinator of Instruction and Advisement (yes, CIA) in St. Albans.\u00a0 Like all ten other CCV sites (Rutland hadn\u2019t opened yet and Winooski was brand new), we had a secretary (the now legendary Maryellen Lowe) and two other coordinators who taught me everything I needed to know about my new job \u2013 Pixley Tyler Hill who was the first coordinator hired in St. Albans and Joan Kaye, one of five Student Service Coordinators hired to teach the first Dimensions of Learning classes which had been created just a couple of years earlier as a special course for CCV\u2019s adult students, then about 90% of our student population.\u00a0 Plato\u2019s \u201cRepublic\u201d was already part of the standard reading in Dimensions, and Joan\u2019s classroom, a dark-paneled windowless room in the back of our site was aptly called \u201cthe cave\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was one of two classrooms in the site — the other an open space, also with no windows, was where we taught Degree Planning Seminar, a one-credit course where students were asked to demonstrate how their CCV learning contributed to competence in ten different areas, including self-awareness, mechanical competence, and moral \"david12<\/a>reasoning.\u00a0 Ah, those were the days!<\/p>\n

The site itself had most recently been a women\u2019s clothing store, so the only windows were in the large lobby, formerly the \u201cshowroom.\u201d\u00a0 My office, separated from Pixley\u2019s by pieces of particle board nailed to 2-by-4s, had been a changing room.\u00a0 It was four by six, and it was there, that I began to learn how much students needed and desired what CCV had to offer \u2013 local, affordable, accessible higher education.\u00a0 We take it for granted now, then it still seemed like a miracle!<\/p>\n

It was a simpler organization in those days.\u00a0 As I said, no computers and many fewer positions than exist today.\u00a0 Sites had a secretary and one, two or three coordinators, and there were about a dozen other people who worked in the central office on the second floor of a bank building in Montpelier before we moved to Wasson Hall in Waterbury where we stayed for nearly 30 years. \u00a0\u00a0When we registered someone, we filled in the information on those old multipage carbon forms \u2013 with a white one for the student\u2019s file, a green one for the business office, a yellow for financial aid, orange for the registrar and pink for the student.\u00a0\u00a0 If you could remember which color went where, you were qualified to be a coordinator!\u00a0 We coordinators wrote down the cost of all the courses \u2013 about $30 per course, added the $10 registration fee and told the student to go pay at the front desk.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m sure there was financial aid available, but I have no recollection of how students went about getting it.\u00a0 \u00a0Seemed to me most students scraped together the $50-$100 they needed for the semester, but no doubt my memory is faulty.\u00a0 My first week on the job (January during registration \u2013 yes, the practice of CCV starting new employees during registration is an old one) \u2013 I got caught in a snow bank delivering course lists to stores up and down Routet 7 from Milton to Swanton and back to St. Albans.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we mailed course lists in those days \u2013 it seemed easier to have new employees who didn\u2019t know how to do anything else go and deliver them.\u00a0 And I got to sell books, too.\u00a0 I drove down to Milton High School where we offered some of our classes. (There were almost no classrooms in CCV buildings in those days.\u00a0 We thought it was a virtue to save taxpayers and the state of Vermont money by utilizing public school classrooms in the evening when they were not in use.\u00a0 It severely limited our ability to offer daytime classes, but that didn\u2019t seem like a problem at the time, and there was nothing we could do about it anyway. )\u00a0 So I sat in the lobby of Milton HS with boxes of books that I lugged in from my car, and as students came in looking for their class I intercepted them, told them I could sell them the books they needed and where there classroom was.\u00a0 It all seemed to work fine, except when I couldn\u2019t make change.\u00a0\u00a0 Then I\u2019d arrange to meet the students during their first break, having run in the meantime to the closest convenience store to get the change I needed.\u00a0 Nothing to it.<\/p>\n

Among my most enjoyable memories from my earliest days at CCV were regional coordinator meetings, when coordinators from the northern region or the southern region would get together to discuss a variety of issues.\u00a0 Remember there were no computers, so no e-mail, and no way to easily transmit information unless you wanted to rely on the US mail, which of course required that someone laboriously type a document, and have copies made and mailed to a site, where a circulation tab could be attached to it and then handed to the first person expected to read it and so on until it was read by everyone in the office.\u00a0 As you can imagine, not much mail ever got sent.\u00a0 So the way we were kept up on the things was to attend a regional meeting once a month where we would sit around a table and hear from our regional director about whatever we needed to know.\u00a0 And because some of us were driving considerable distances to attend the meetings, they tended to last all day \u2013 beginning around 9:00 and ending around 3:00.<\/p>\n

The atmosphere of those regional meetings when the college was still young and restless was an odd mixture of encounter sessions, laugh-ins and deep seriousness.\u00a0 Most of us coordinators were relatively new to our jobs (the longest-serving was Kathi Rousselle who had started the CCV site in Newport in 1975) and we all had a very real sense that we were making everything up as we went along.\u00a0 So we argued about everything, laughed constantly, trusted that we couldn\u2019t fail, and had a sense of ourselves as continuing the revolution of the Sixties in the hills of Vermont.\u00a0 We were the rebels tunneling under the walls and into the halls of the higher education establishment, filled with the promise of educating all the Ritas of the world for whom CCV offered liberation and enlightenment \u2013 out of the caves of illusion into the light of knowledge.\u00a0 Ah, what a glorious mission we shared!\u00a0 And if we had to drive through blizzards to attend these regional meetings, well, all the better to prove ourselves worthy of our great and noble cause. We\u2019d stumble into the back rooms of local restaurants, shake off the snow, pull off our boots, and take up the business of creating a college that could change the world.\u00a0\u00a0 We would talk and talk and talk and then drive home still absorbed in the ongoing topics of conversation\u00a0 \u00a0There were no computers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former Coordinator of Instruction and Advisement, Regional Director, Academic Dean, Director of Institutional Research and Planning There were no computers.\u00a0 There were also no deans, no financial aid counselors, and no site office managers.\u00a0 It was 1983, and I was starting a new job as a Coordinator of Instruction and Advisement (yes, CIA) in St. … Continue reading “David Buchdahl”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.ccv.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}