Education: Town-Meeting College

Walter Hendricks had a good, secure job, teaching English and the humanities at Illinois Tech; he had been there for 25 years. But he had always had another kind of college in his mind's eye: a small one, about town-meeting size. Hendricks thought he knew just the place for it.

For 15 summers, he had spent his vacations on a farm high on Potash Hill, in the nearly deserted Vermont hamlet of Marlboro. Marlboro had once been a flourishing center, but its industry and population had gradually dwindled until three years ago even the postofice shut down. Now a few houses, clustered...