On April 14th of this year, Hampshire College announced that they would be closing this fall semester. The college cited “the financial pressures on the College’s operations” that were “compounded by shifting external factors” as one of the reasons for closing. The closure had left an entire community in a state of uncertainty and distress. Students very quickly had to transfer to new schools. Faculty and staff had to find new jobs. As a result, there has been a new wave of transfer students and a staff member from Hampshire College coming to Bennington.
I took on this article partially because of how big Hampshire College was in my life. Growing up in the Connecticut River Valley, Hampshire was a huge institution in my childhood. I remember doing arts and crafts at the Eric Carle Museum and making Goat Cheese at their local “Farm and Garden Camp” as a kid. So, this topic hits close to home for me. I’m not putting in these details to tug at your heartstrings. I mainly want people to understand my positionality in this article. My feelings around this college’s closure may inform my coverage, but they do not compare at all to the destruction of many students’ education. My life wasn’t upended by Hampshire College’s closure, but many students’, staff, and faculty members’ lives were.
Aoife, a senior transfer student, noted, “[The school] just emailed first, then assembly. “The email was, I want to say around seven, then assembly was by, like early afternoon.”
“The students and staff and faculty all found out at the same time,” said Grayson Connery, Associate Director of Campus Safety and Transportation, “I had been there for 4 and a half years at that point…Hearing that its closing just after all of the work that everyone had been doing took a hit for a hot minute.”
Ren Kreiswirth, a third term transfer student, said, “I woke up at around 8am to someone in my hall yelling very angry…And then I checked my phone and there was an email saying ‘Hampshire College Closure Announcement’…It was a lot at 8AM.”
Bennington College was one of the first colleges to introduce a landing page for Hampshire College Transfers. Bennington College’s education model is very similar to Hampshire’s. Hampshire has a “Divisional system,” (or Div, colloquially) much like “The Plan” here. The first year, Div I, is dedicated to experimentation, and where you write a reflection on what you tried out. It’s very similar to the First Year Essay. Division II is your second and Third Year. These years have you dive more into your interests after you flesh out a “Division II contract” much like a Plan essay. Then, in your senior year, you enter “Division III” where you take on a big project, similar to a senior thesis. Both Hampshire and Bennington are also grade optional, prioritizing narrative evaluations. These similarities make the transfer from Hampshire to Bennington a lot smoother than other other colleges.
“Its very similar to Hampshire in a lot of ways. It hasn’t been a huge transition for me,” said Ren. Grayson had a similar feeling, saying, “[The transition] was definitely smooth just in terms of being able to come over in the summer, kind of learn as I go before everybody got back.”
That being said, transferring to Bennington is anything further from easy. These colleges are two different institutions, and the expectations in the Division system can be drastically different from the expectations in the Plan. Phoenix Caldwell, a senior, had to completely reimagine what its Division III might look like.
“It’s like a senior thesis, except to a much greater degree than what Bennington would do, because seniors at Hampshire would only take one class a semester and the rest of their time is focused on this project. So it basically dominates the entire time for the rest of the academic year. I had put in a request for a committee to revise for this project. I had not officially heard back, but I had been told by professors that they did want to work with me…I had everything in place for that next year. And then there was this announcement.” said Phoenix, “It’s definitely really frustrating for me. I had a really big plan for what I wanted to do, and I was feeling inspired by friends who were a year or two older than me and hearing about what they were doing. And then I come here, and it’s kind of like…I have to scale everything back…and it has to be a much smaller plan. And, I’m even feeling like I have to choose a different topic that is a little bit smaller and more manageable for the way that it’s structured here.”
Aoife, a senior Hampshire transfer, also had to redirect her expectations. “It’s been weird ‘because I already started researching my stuff, like I already started a year out,“ said Aoife. “I actually told this to my advisor, Carol. I was like, ‘I wasn’t supposed to be taking any classes. I thought I was done with this. Like, I don’t know what to do.’”
It’s also important to note that even if Bennington and Hampshire were one-to-one academically, these students didn’t choose to leave Hampshire. They did not want to leave their community to be here.
“I feel like…almost spiteful about having to be here,” said Phoenix, “I didn’t really want to be a part of this community…the reason I decided to be here was because my sibling went here.”
This is not a typical transfer situation. Leaving the Hampshire college community isn’t a risk they could weigh before making a decision, because the decision was already made for them. These transfer students’ decisions were finishing their degree somewhere else, or not finishing it at all.
Ren had to wrestle with this decision as well. “When the closure announcement happened for Hampshire, I immediately was like, I’m dropping out. I can’t go to school. I give up. But you know, my parents’ really wanted me to go to college…and my girlfriend committed to Bennington, and I was like, I might as well give it a shot.”
Throughout all of this, students and staff are also thinking about the future of higher education. Ren positions the closing of Hampshire college as a bell toll. “Because Hampshire’s model was so unique, it’s very symbolic, it shutting down, of where the world is heading right now.” There is something very terrifying about Hampshire College closing down, which is its similarity to Bennington College. Is there even going to be a place in our culture for Bennington in our future?
Grayson brought up a shift that higher education may have to go under in order to preserve itself. “I think in higher ed, it’s always kind of uncertain with the policies happening and the administration of the country,” said Grayson. “I think finding that sustainability within the institution itself rather than seeking the outside also just goes a lot farther for the students, the staff and faculty.”
Even with finding sustainability within the institution itself, students still can identify a sense of doom for higher education in general. As Ren, very succinctly noted, “Unless something really good happens, it’s going down.”
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