Hampshire and the Need for Experimental Colleges (opinion)

Last month’s sad announcement that Hampshire College will close its doors this fall was not a shock for many who had been following the college closely in recent years. Its troubles with sustaining enrollment and balancing a budget while delivering a rigorous, vibrant and unique interdisciplinary curriculum were well-known over the past decade. This slow process meant there were opportunities for Hampshire to forge a sustainable partnership with a larger, more stable institution. Unfortunately, the failure of such an arrangement speaks both to the need for more internal institutional flexibility and the unfortunate conformity that has set in across higher education. Its closing is not just painful for those who are a part of the extended Hampshire community; it is something that all of us who support a vibrant 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 started in the late 1960s and early 1970s including Prescott College (1966); my institution, the Evergreen State College (1971); and the College of the Atlantic (1972). Previous waves in the mid-1800s (when Antioch, 1852, and Berea, 1855, were founded) and the early 1900s (Deep Springs College, 1917; Bennington College, 1932; Black Mountain College, 1933) coincided with periods of rapid political, social and technological change.

These colleges are not just quirky; in each of these eras, they pushed the bounds of what education is, who it is for and how it should be taught. These institutions have been the research and development labs for the Ivy League and beyond. They helped develop and legitimize interdisciplinary fields, such as environmental science, Indigenous studies and media studies. They welcomed students to campus who were traditionally marginalized at mainstream institutions.

Over time, the innovations of these colleges slowly moved into the mainstream of American higher education, making it more vibrant than more centralized systems in Europe, for instance. Work colleges, like Warren Wilson College, inspired countless internship and experiential education programs. Goddard College’s low-residency program, started in the 1960s for working mothers, led to countless imitations. Perhaps most recently, the rise of “ungrading” builds on approaches to evaluation created by institutions like Hampshire and Evergreen, which never had grades.

While Hampshire had faced internal turmoil, in recent years faculty and students had doubled down on the college’s pedagogical commitments while redesigning curricular structures in interesting and promising ways. The community designed new learning collaboratives around pressing societal issues and continued to emphasize the importance of relational mentoring. Ultimately, however, these changes were not enough to significantly change a downward enrollment trajectory.

There are lessons in this, both for colleges like Hampshire and for more traditional institutions.

One of the criticisms of colleges like Hampshire is that students today are more concerned with career outcomes and growing debt than those—often more privileged—students who attended in earlier decades. This is both true and a simplification that misses much of the nuance of how students are selecting colleges now.

At Evergreen State College, students are still drawn to us because we are different; we ask them to study in interdisciplinary cohorts that build community and creative forms of inquiry. But we have also found that by simultaneously offering certificate programs in areas like behavioral health, climate policy and action, and marine bioresources, we give students a means for articulating their learning to better prepare them to enter the workforce. Instead of succumbing to the debate over whether we should focus on liberal arts or career development, Evergreen insists that the liberal arts are career development. Our enrollment has increased 26 percent over the past three years, with undergraduate enrollment up by 31 percent, suggesting that our students agree. This has been a deliberate, institutionwide approach to demonstrate to students the relevance of an Evergreen education and to help them use that degree to navigate their futures.

At the same time, however, as all higher education confronts rising costs, a demographic cliff and a hostile federal government, there is a need for institutions to think more creatively about how to support each other. The early response to some of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education, such as joint litigation and “mutual defense” pacts, suggested that such cooperation is possible, but as some of the most direct threats to institutions receded, so did most of this cooperation.

Some of the challenge here is that mergers and partnerships are logistically challenging, and often not considered until it is too late. A bigger issue, however, is the expansionist mentality that many higher education institutions have taken on, suggesting the only way to withstand financial instability is through rapid enrollment growth. This has contributed to a failing of institutions to reaffirm their own missions, as many try to be everything to everyone. Is the modern “Mega-University” capable of sustaining a niche mission, or does its scale require a dangerous conformity that smothers experimentalism?

The irony here is that Hampshire and other small colleges know exactly what their missions are. Many of them continue to innovate in nuanced ways, at a variety of institutional levels. The fact that institutions with more successful enrollment trajectories were not able to find a way to support or integrate Hampshire’s unique mission says much about the current, dangerous conformity in higher education.

In my more optimistic moments, I think perhaps we are entering this era of political change and social upheaval that will produce a new round of progressive, experimental colleges, like College Unbound, or innovative institutions that are more open to cross-institutional resource sharing, like Adrian College.

In the meantime, however, if we continue to let our most experimental and interesting institutions fail in favor of administrative scale, we will find ourselves with a higher education system that is larger, more efficient and entirely devoid of the vibrancy that so many other countries are struggling to emulate.