The fall of Hampshire College
The first time Davis Bates visited Hampshire College, he was technically trespassing.
With only a backpack and a sleeping bag, the high school senior had hitchhiked from his hometown of Sudbury, Massachusetts, to Amherst to see if the private liberal arts school might, as his guidance counselor suggested, be a good fit. Bates arrived well after dark to the rural campus. With no place to stay, he found his way into an unlocked lecture hall and decided to sleep there until he could explore on his own the next day. In the middle of the night, he awoke to the bright light of a security guard’s flashlight shining over him. The guard laughed and left Bates to go back to sleep. “That’s when I decided to come to Hampshire College,” he told me, a fellow alum, when I met him in May.
We were back on campus for the college’s annual commencement ceremony—its last. Earlier this year Hampshire succumbed to declining enrollment and other financial pressures and announced it would be closing its doors after fifty-six years. Though some students close to finishing their degrees would be able to do so during a limited “teach-out” in the fall, the grand pedagogical experiment that began in western Massachusetts more than half a century ago was coming to an end. “We live in a system that is not as kind to an idea of Hampshire as the system was when Hampshire started,” Bates told me. With its passing, he added, “It’s just really, really sad to not have this incubation space for people who create and for people who don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Hampshire was always unique in the landscape of higher education. Students were the architects of their own education. With faculty approval, you could do art, write a book, spend several months brokering corporate tax credits, or study spermatogenesis in cockroaches. There were no grades, only narrative evaluations. In the words of its founders, the college saw itself as “a vehicle for the realization of self in society.” As Archibald MacLeish, a poet and playwright, said at an event marking the school’s opening in 1970, these men saw higher education as a means of healing “troubles in the culture itself, in the civilization, in the state of civilization.” To them, these were not problems that could be healed through government intervention or, for that matter, even revolution.
