Last month’s sad announcement that Hampshire College would be closing its doors this fall came as no shock to many who have followed the college closely in recent years. Its problems with maintaining enrollment and balancing the budget while delivering a strong, vibrant and diverse interdisciplinary curriculum have been well known over the past decade. This slow process meant that there were opportunities for Hampshire to build a sustainable relationship with a larger, more established institution. Unfortunately, the failure of this system speaks to the need for more intra-institutional flexibility and the poor consistency that exists throughout higher education. Its closure is not only a pain for those who are part of the wider Hampshire community; it is something that all of us who support the higher education system in the United States should mourn.
Hampshire College, founded in 1965, is in many ways the best-known member of the third wave of small, progressive, experimental colleges that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s including Prescott College (1966); my institution, Evergreen State College (1971); and College of the Atlantic (1972). Previous waves in the mid-1800s (when Antioch, 1852, and Berea, 1855, were founded) and early 1900s (Deep Springs College, 1917; Bennington College, 1932; Black Mountain College, 1933) corresponded to periods of rapid political, social and technological change.
These colleges aren’t just quirky; in each of these periods, they push the boundaries of what education is, for whom and how it should be taught. These institutions were research and development labs in the Ivy League and beyond. They have helped develop and legitimize interdisciplinary fields, such as environmental science, indigenous studies and media studies. They welcome students to campus who have traditionally been overlooked in mainstream institutions.
Over time, the innovations of these colleges gradually entered the American higher education sector, making it more effective than the more concentrated programs in Europe, for example. Career colleges, such as Warren Wilson College, have promoted a number of internships and informational education programs. Goddard College’s low-income housing program, which began in the 1960s for working mothers, led to mass imitation. Perhaps more recently, the rise of “redundancy” is building on the testing methods created by institutions such as Hampshire and Evergreen, which have never had grades.
Although Hampshire had experienced internal turmoil, in recent years faculty and students had doubled down on the college’s teaching responsibilities while reorganizing the curriculum in exciting and promising ways. The community designed new partnerships around pressing social issues and continued to emphasize the importance of relationship counseling. In the end, however, these changes were not enough to significantly change the declining enrollment trend.
There are courses on this, both at colleges like Hampshire and more traditional institutions.
Another criticism of colleges like Hampshire is that students today are more concerned about career outcomes and mounting debt than the—often privileged—students of decades ago. This is a fact and simplification that misses many of the nuances of how students choose colleges now.
At Evergreen State College, students are still drawn to us because we are different; we ask them to learn about various collectives that build community and creative ways of asking. But we’ve also found that by simultaneously offering certificate programs in areas like behavioral health, climate policy and practice, and marine natural resources, we’re giving students a way to define their learning to better prepare them to enter the workforce. Instead of getting into a debate about whether we should focus on the liberal arts or career development, Evergreen emphasizes that the liberal arts are career development. Our enrollment has increased by 26 percent over the past three years, and undergraduate enrollment has increased by 31 percent, suggesting that our students agree. This was an intentional, campus-wide way to show students the value of an Evergreen education and help them use those degrees to explore their futures.
At the same time, however, as all higher education faces rising costs, declining populations and a hostile federal government, there is a need for institutions to think creatively about how they can support each other. Early reactions to some of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education, such as joint litigation and “mutual defense” agreements, suggested that such cooperation was possible, but as some of the direct threats to institutions receded, so did much of this cooperation.
Another challenge here is that integration and collaboration are challenging in terms of programming, and are often not considered until it is too late. The biggest problem, however, is the expansionist mindset that many higher education institutions have adopted, suggesting that the only way to deal with financial instability is to increase student enrollment. This has contributed to the failure of institutions to strengthen their own objectives, as many try to be everything to everyone. Is the modern “Mega-University” able to support the goal of a niche, or does its scale require dangerous compromises that prevent experimentation?
The irony here is that Hampshire and other junior colleges know exactly what their jobs are. Many of them continue to innovate, at different institutional levels. The fact that institutions with successful enrollment trajectories have not been able to find a way to support or integrate Hampshire’s unique mission speaks volumes about the current, dangerous consensus in higher education.
In my moments of optimism, I think that perhaps we are entering this period of political change and social upheaval that will produce a new cycle of progressive, experimental colleges, like the Unbound College, or new institutions that are more open to sharing institutional resources, like Adrian College.
However, in the meantime, if we continue to allow our most interesting and experimental institutions to fail according to the management scale, we will find ourselves with a higher education system that is large, very efficient and completely lacking in shaking many other countries that strive to imitate it.
