On a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the 2024 spring semester, author Laurie Foos, a fiction instructor in the Goddard College low-residency MFA program in creative writing, received an e-mail stating that the eighty-six-year-old college in Plainfield, Vermont, would shut down for good in August.
“There was absolutely no warning,” says Foos, noting that all of the approximately ten faculty members of the program, founded in 1963, have lost their jobs. The closure was also “hugely disruptive” for the roughly two dozen students in the program. Those who still had coursework to complete before graduation have been offered opportunities to transfer to other schools, while graduates were left feeling cheated. “They were very angry about the fact that they had spent all this money and all this time on a degree that they felt would become meaningless,” says Foos.
The shutdown of Goddard is one of several creative writing MFA programs that during the past year announced they were closing, including the Red Earth MFA at Oklahoma City University as well as programs at Purdue University and Georgia State University. This follows
