Uncovered history

I continue to be amazed at what is buried out there on the Internet, and what emerges by chance. Lost and forgotten little pieces of one's own life story! E.g., for some time I have been having trouble accessing a particular resource that is available to me as an alumnus of Brown University. Called "Library Resources,' these are huge data banks like JSTOR, which contains 1000's of articles in academic journals. I have been getting messages for some time that I needed to update my "browser." I usually use "Safari" or sometimes "Firefox," though that has had its own problems. But recently I installed Google Chrome which is a more recent browser. Suddenly, things work that haven't worked for a while. One of those Library Resources is called Hathi Trust. It accesses a completely differnt kind of thing from JSTOR, and when I did a search of my own name, which I do sometimes, what should come up but testimony I gave back in 1979 at a Hearing of a Congressional Committee: The Sub-Committee on Post-Secondary Education of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The hearing was not in Washington, it was in Burlington, VT. Vermont's lone Congressman at that time, James Jeffords, was a member of the committee. I was there because I was at that time the Executive Director of the Vermont Higher Education Council, an Independent, non-profit organization representing all 23 of the higher education institutions in Vermont, public and private. I worked with the Presidents of those 23 institutions. Perhaps more than anyone in the state, I had a comprehensive view of the role higher education played in Vermont. I had, for example, initiated a study of the economic impact of higher education in Vermont. There were perhaps 20-25 thousand out-of-state students studying in Vermont colleges and universities. They were spending money in Vermont that would not be spent if those colleges did not exist. And that was just one part of the economic impact of higher ed. I also had a lot of responsibility for both the chartering and the accreditation of higher-education institutions in Vermont. So I had a wide and thorough perspective and I presume that is why I was asked to make a presentation at this hearing. The specific topic was Title I - a federal program that provided seed money for new programs in colleges and universities, especially those that created some kind of relationship with organizations in the local commmunity. I was not an expert in Title I, but I was very familiar with it, and I knew a lot about its importance, especially in smaller colleges, which were the majority of the colleges in Vermont, There were two things in the record: the paper I submitted, and a transcript of my actual testimony. The first is the more acccurate, although I said a few things off the cuff that are not in the paper (such as mentioning that I had lived in Anamosa, Iowa, for the benefit of the Iowa Congressman on the committee). There are also numerous errors in the transcript - things I said that were not understood properly (a machine was probably making the transription). So here is the paper:

You may notice that I mention that I had intimate knowledge of a particular Title I program. That is because Shirley was the Director of that Program, which was a joint project of Windham College and the Brattleboro Women's Crisis Center. This was before Shirley became a pastor at the Guilford Church - about 1975-76.