The death of Hampshire College and the life of dreams
This week brings layers of heavy heartbreak as I learned that Hampshire College, my alma mater, is shutting down. It’s hard to process the waves of different emotions of grief, unmooring and something almost akin to relief that have absolutely overwhelmed me in the last day.
I had some really unique experiences there (as did everyone). I was an active student, an activist for alternative education on campus and an elected Student Trustee in 2007-8. As I hold the remains of my experiences I’m lit up with questions, so many question about idealism, radicalism, institutions and collective work, trust and sustainability. The writing was on the wall 20 years ago, and the fact that it finally came has me contemplating the crushing burdens that we all face as we pursue dreams and ideals of a better and more just world. I feel compelled to write and maybe capture some of the ephemeral things in this reflective moment. This might be messy, because I'm trying to dredge up 20 years of feelings in the stream of life before I pick up my child from kindergarten, so thanks in advance!
Ideals
On some levels, Hampshire was truly an idyllic place, a small liberal arts college nestled in between the towns and farms of the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts amidst a consortium of colleges. It was born out of the search for radical new modes of education in the late 1950s and ‘60s and opened its doors in 1970. I’m not going to tell Hampshire’s whole story — you can get that elsewhere — but a portion of it is important to me and how I left the institution especially in light of today’s news.
When people talk about the alternative education model at Hampshire and its idea of self-designed majors and independent study, the part that tends to get missed is the historic root of this experimenting ethos. The founding sort of philosophical document was The New College Plan and its core argument was (in my opinion) an economic one. It was responding to the growing influx of students from lower financial means into the college system in the 1950s probably from the growth of the American middle class, and the G.I. Bill. It asked how more students could be served with fewer resources, and the pretty radical answer at the core of it was “to enable students to educate themselves, develop independence, and take responsibility for their own education.”
In striving for this idea, Hampshire was a haven; it was a beautiful place for so many people, and so many amazing things came out of it. Everyone’s course of study was unique and everyone finished a year-long thesis project of their own devising. Arts and beauty and weirdness and social actions were constantly bubbling up, year after year. My own fond memories include circus performances, blacksmithing, stressed all-nighters with friends, student publications, chalking the campus with lovecraftian horror, Deathfest (the 120-person D&D tournament) and so many bright and brilliant people who have gone on to do amazing work. Alumni are joining together on different platforms sharing memories, love, tears, planning meetups and all the things you do when something that touched a community deeply dies.
It was fraught as well. We struggled with the administration, with the faculty. We fought to hold on to some shred of student-driven determination for the school, this promise of a collaborative education that was eroded time and time again. The first years of Hampshire in the 70’s included an all-school meeting where faculty and students had equal votes. When that was restructured and disempowered the students, law professor Lester Mazor apparently exclaimed that “Democracy died at Hampshire college.” So it wasn’t just the students — some of the faculty we looked up to were also intense visionaries and radicals. And it felt like others were trying to pull the rug out from under our feet.
My first year, there was a new first year program that stripped two independent projects out of the course of study because, basically, they were hard. A student response in the form of the “Reradicalization of Hampshire College” movement that made some gains but each one was hard fought. Down the line, surveys and reports coming out of the capstone project showed a struggle for some students to engage in rigorous independent work, and faculty reported discovering problems that students had told them were coming four years earlier.
It was a lesson in trust, something of the early promise, the early ideal that was fading or gone by the time I entered Hampshire, 34 years after it opened.
Structural challenges
Economics continued to turn against the college. By the time I got there, it was struggling with years of differed maintenance. When I entered it was $45,000 per year for tuition, room and board at a residential college (very few people lived off campus) and by the time I left it was close to $60,000. I was so lucky with grants and financial aid and some family money, I walked away $25k in debt, and I managed to pay it off in less than 10 years by living so poverty-line frugally and paying double the rate. I was never a donating alum.
I have to talk about the Board of Trustees. The 30,000 foot birds-eye view fiduciary trust mostly comprised of older alumni who got mildy rich or successful in some way and wanted to give back. It was absolutely weird structure of US higher education governance that especially ironically in Hampshire’s case enforced a big structural disconnect between students on the ground and the school’s administration that was fighting to keep the school open and alive, and kept them trapped and flailing in the patterns and structures of a suffocating higher education institutionality.
When I sat on the Board, we were voting to raise prices by 2.5% each year, with no clear plan to divert from this path. As an elected student trustee, while paying tuition, I was pressured by the board chair to donate so they would have 100% participation from board trustees for specific grants. It was, quite honestly, an impossible and coercive situation for a student to be in that was uniquely unsupported. Rather than working to support the opportunities and overcome the challenges this kind of position offered, I was told that we were fortunate to have this position, that other colleges didn’t have it at all.
It was known on the board in 2008 that a demographic crisis was coming in a decade, that they were going to struggle to bring in large enough student body by 2018 — I remember the presentation from the director of Admissions. We saw a crisis happen in 2018 where the college president tried to give the school over to Umass Amherst because the future looked unsustainable. Lots of people pitched in and pushed back, the deal was undone, Hampshire was held open and limped along until now — and rumors are that it simply can’t get enough students and can’t serve them well anymore.
I remember learning these projections and having a conversation with some of the board members at the end of my term. I told them that we knew this was coming and we knew that the tuition was unsustainable. My pitch was to open it to the students, to explain what was going on, to try to find innovation and new ideas, experiments, structures — exactly the thing we asked of students. I got back deer-in-the-headlight looks from the older men who asked me what my solutions were.
There are lots of stories like this, lots of struggles with the institution. We would often ask for more effort to develop the vision, the dreams, the promises of Hampshire, and we were often told that Hampshire had more than our peers. We were more flexible than other colleges. We had a fully voting student trustee position, where other colleges didn’t. As a student in these conversations, it felt like it had long stopped being an inquiry into how we could improve what we were doing with our own indicators for success. It was blindness to the ideals and goals, I think in fear of the challenges of the unknown, of loss of control, of letting go of a learned institutional hierarchy.
I honestly think the obsessive drive to be recognized as a normal college in competition with other colleges was one of the nails in the coffin. Another, stemming from this, from my perspective, inability to really self analyze, was a fundamental lack of trust in the institution’s own students. The foundation, the promise was broken years ago. It was still a special and unique place. People made the best of it anyway. But for years I also held a feeling of betrayal and that’s where my feeling of relief stems from today.
(Edit like 1 hour later: I need to say that the current tuition is now much higher, one of the more expensive schools in the US - but not the most - this rising cost is an endemic problem among US colleges. This is a structural problem, but it seems to me that Hampshire's institutional approach was to try to play the game rather than to really try to find another way.)
I have to step aside and caveat this. Hampshire was probably the best place I could have gone in the pretty restrictive ‘all kids go to college’ culture of my secondary school education. I gained a lot from the college and I treasure my time there. I built my first career as a blacksmith in the Center for Design. The things I learned about social justice and social good led me into my second career in international peacebuilding at Build Up. My third career as a performer also has a foundation in the theater and circus work I did at Hampshire. Many other friends also had intensely positive experiences, and for many, the institutional failings weren’t as visible, were easier to brush away. I had a particular view into the administration, but also I’m just me and I’m a bit of a combative soul to begin with. In my first year, a final-year philosophy major looked at me and declared, “Jacob, I think you’re an anarchist.” I did go to Hampshire with educational fight in my heart, and it's always hurt a bit to think about the school because of the combination of love and disappointment – in the school, in myself, in the price of dreams, I'm not sure.
Trust & Cooperation
It’s easy to throw rocks and easy to have hindsight, but I will stand by my position that these conversations were happening 20 years ago, and the fact that we’re here now, today, with one less piece of beauty in the world leaves me feeling shaken, ungrounded and fractured. And it should give us pause. This institution knew and acted like it was in an existential struggle for decades, and it was ultimately unable to change course. I’m filled to the brim with questions.
I’ve worked in cooperative, trust-based institutions since my time there, and it remains a dedicated part of my life. But I didn’t learn how to do it well at Hampshire. (For example, I highly recommend reading about how Build Up is a collective and what that means(https://howtobuildup.medium.com/build-up-is-a-collective-what-does-that-mean-6047d2b8031a)). I’ve wrestling for years with the questions of how we build organizations that are grounded in principles and practices that match our vision.
I truly believe we must build collective organizations and institutions that are rooted in affirming our humanity and self-determination that are dedicated to uplifting us and setting us free, especially in a world as harsh and unequal as the one we inherit today.
And watching Hampshire slowly fall apart, slowly grind off its most unique and independent parts in order to try to save some kind of core has me asking how we can do this against the tides of conservatism and calcification, how we can persist and sustain our efforts and be uncompromising in our boldness at the same time. How can we build spaces of learning and community where trust is a core practice and foundation for success? Regardless of its eventual failure, regardless of all our challenges, Hampshire was a bastion of safety for half a century of weird and alternative kids to grow flourish. We need more spaces like this, not less. For all its challenges, Hampshire’s closing is the loss of a real treasure in our world, and we have to ask how we can do even better next time.
Today, I’m grieving. Tomorrow, I’ll return to my own ways of building a better future, strong in the ways that Hampshire taught me, both in its success and its failures. Hopefully we can light a new way and plant new beauty along the path.
RIP Hampshire. Non satis scire, to know is not enough.
