I am so sad to hear the news today: the incomparable Hampshire College is closing.
As a philosopher-ethnographer of higher education, I have long looked to Hampshire as a model. Founded in 1965 after years of its founders studying learning, it broke the mold of conventional college. It was not alone. It was a period of intense fermentation, and quite a number of other institutions of higher education were founded at the time.
I read about it. I wrote about it. I used it as the first example that came to mind when I wrote and spoke about various alternative assessment approaches, with its sole use of narrative evaluations. Other notable institutions also used them, but I always mentioned Hampshire first.
I believe they claimed to be the first contemporary liberal arts college to have a farm. (In the olden days, they all had them, because they had to….um….raise food.) Quite a number have them now.
One of my children went there, and I was able to experience it as an ethnographer-parent.
It was not perfect. It never had enough funding. The older buildings were…in need of attention. The faculty were overworked. Many of the students struggled to finish, or they had various challenges. The students who chose Hampshire tended to have rebellious tendencies, and to have chafed against conventional school. It may be that the lack of strict control, which they sought, did not serve them all well.
But even so, their model of student-directed curricula, culminating in an independent creative or research project that occupied the entire fourth year (”Div III”), advised by at least two faculty, matched my vision of how to create meaningful learning experiences within a conventional four-year structure. Start with student interest. Add guidance. Add courses as needed. Stir, and taste the broth.
Twice in the last decade or so they’ve sought a new president, and twice I thought about what that job would be like: leading the vision of highly innovative higher education? Or overseeing restructuring, debt refinancing, and finally closing it entirely?
Dodged that bullet.
In today’s era of hypercompetition, credentialism and transactionalism, return-on-investment thinking, a gentle model like Hampshire’s may not, and clearly has not, attracted enough paying students and benefactors. It is also possible that students like those who attended Hampshire in the past are not in school, or are finding a way to muddle through even in the unfriendly confines of credit-point-credential learning-management industrial education. (Yes, there are many gentler and more student-centered options now, as well.) The attacks from people like Ron DeSantis who single-handedly dismantled the New College of Florida, a cousin institution, have corporate and conservative activist support.
Some new enterprises, like the University of Austin, are focusing on different values. They boast that your test score is the only credential for admission, to ensure the absolute objectivity of the “meritocracy.”
Higher education has many flaws: it is expensive. It is perhaps harkening back to old models of learning. Students do well in classes and have no “transfer.” It is “inefficient.” It is exclusive. Or too many people are engaged in it, so the credential is less valuable, leading to “credential inflation.” Maybe there’s “grade inflation” or “grade compression.” Students may be too stressed, or too distracted, or too transactional. There are plenty of complaints to go around (some of them perennial).
I have been a critic, too, at least in “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College and Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning.
But I also retain an idealistic belief in the value of a period when students can focus on growth in conversation with others, of deep and broad learning, of going beyond what they could do on their own even with all the online resources available so readily.
This vision is waning, in our society. The vocation-preparation focus makes sense when it’s hard to get a secure job and when most people are a paycheck away from a medical or financial disaster. Students in highly selective colleges gain networking and a quick link to security. Students in state universities and community colleges may for good reason enroll in classes that will lead them to their first-next job, with legible credentials. (It’s more complicated than that, of course.)
Maybe the dream of a student-centered education, freed from focus on points for every single action in order to pursue something bigger, more complicated, is not in sync with our Zeitgeist.
I do know that.
But I mourn the loss both of the dream and of the specific reality that Hampshire College tried to make possible for thousands of students over its half-century of understanding that “to know is not enough.”
I’m keeping the dream alive.
Where will it pop up next?
