Small liberal arts colleges face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise. The casualties are staggering, with an estimated eighty-nine colleges closing or merging since 2020 alone and forecasts that a quarter of the nation’s private colleges and universities are at risk in the coming decade. With a shrinking domestic applicant pool (the so-called “demographic cliff”), international students spooked by Trump’s immigration policies, rising costs and rising tuition, a terrifying job market exacerbated by AI, lingering fallout from the pandemic, plummeting interest in the humanities, and so on, even relatively comfortable institutions have had to rethink their priorities to stay afloat. And yet the shuttering of Hampshire College—which announced on April 14 that it finally couldn’t attract enough students to pay its debts—feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education in the US.

Since its founding on farmland outside Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1970, Hampshire was the most visible exemplar of a tradition of “experimental” higher-ed that reached back to the 1930s and the founding of schools like Bennington (radically overhauled in 1994) and Black Mountain College (closed in 1957). It was an approach that combined John Dewey’s ideas of experience-based education with hands-on practice in the arts and a cosmopolitan take on the world. The confluence at Black Mountain of émigré artists like Josef and Anni Albers with homegrown mavericks like John Cage and Buckminster Fuller (who constructed his first geodesic dome there) marked an early flowering of this mode of learning, which was still in fine health decades later. When Hampshire opened I was at the Putney School, another 1930s experiment, with its working dairy farm staffed by students and its arts-heavy, gradeless curriculum.

Such experiments often began with a clearing of the ground, as though a college’s main function should be to get out of the way of the natural creativity and intellectual curiosity of its students. As Charles Longsworth, an early president of Hampshire and a crucial figure in its formative years, summarized the college’s founding ideas in a 1992 article for a volume celebrating twenty-five years of the Five Colleges Consortium (I wrote the article on Mount Holyoke): “No class attendance requirements, no credit hours, no intercollegiate athletics, no honorary degrees, no grades.”¹ In lieu of grades (so inflated at most colleges today that they’re meaningless anyway) faculty were required to submit lengthy narratives about each student’s progress.

An appetite for change was not widely shared among the existing four colleges in the neighborhood (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts) when a new college was first proposed. These ancient schools—the youngest, Smith, was founded in 1875—were “successful, prestigious, conservative, and happy,” Longsworth notes. Amid the complacency, however, there were stirrings among students, faculty, and, perhaps surprisingly, some forward-thinking presidents, a shared suspicion that there might be better ways to teach than lecturing within the old disciplinary divisions, and that “traditions should be challenged and broken.”

Finding their own institutions resistant to change, the four presidents felt that maybe a new college could jazz things up. They solicited a proposal from a faculty committee in 1958. Impressed with the plan, the Ford Foundation pledged $6 million, roughly $67 million in today’s dollars, if the sponsoring schools could match it. And there the dream languished, as three of the four presidents moved on by 1961, until the Amherst alumnus Harold F. Johnson, an investing partner of his Amherst classmate Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch (father of the poet James Merrill, another alum of the school) approached Amherst’s president in 1964 to see if there was any life in the scheme. The Amherst president asked his assistant, Longsworth, to look into it, and the project took off.        

Those who were there at the origin never forgot the heady excitement of the place. My older brother turned down a Yale scholarship to enter Hampshire’s second class in 1971, where he read Chaucer, built a pottery kiln, and took off after a year for a trip around the world before becoming a prominent molecular biologist. I got a feel for Hampshire’s interdisciplinary mode of teaching when I collaborated on a book about Emily Dickinson’s family with Jerome Liebling, Hampshire’s legendary photography professor, matching word and image under Jerry’s penetrating eye attuned to Bauhaus and Shaker aesthetics. When I taught at Hampshire a couple of times over my three decades at Mount Holyoke, I noticed that nearly every student was passionate about something—jazz (the great Yusef Lateef met his students in the office across from the one I was assigned), dance, poetry slams, Ultimate Frisbee—and a professor could build on that. I heard things I’d never expect anywhere else (“I can only read Kerouac when I’m stoned”); in a class I taught on Black Mountain College, a student played (or rather didn’t play) a version of Cage’s 4’33” on the bassoon.

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Once Hampshire, their unruly lovechild down the road, was on its feet, the other institutions mostly returned to their hidebound ways. Amherst College didn’t admit women until 1976, six years after the founding of coeducational Hampshire. Since Hampshire had superb offerings in photography and film production, with teachers like Liebling and Joan Braderman and students like Ken Burns and Lupita Nyong’o, the other four schools had an excuse to take those arts less seriously. Over the years, many of the ideas that originally contributed to Hampshire’s distinctiveness were adopted, in watered-down form, by other colleges. What liberal arts college today does not boast of “active learning,” community engagement, interdisciplinary studies, entrepreneurship, and social justice, all hallmarks of a Hampshire education?

Meanwhile, as Hampshire aged it too became set in its ways, nostalgic for the founding, flourishing years when the school was among the most selective in the country. A series of capable presidents tried to make changes amid declining enrollments and revenues. One wanted more structure for first-year students. Another proposed a “cultural village” around the campus, selling land to the National Yiddish Book Center and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and hoping to build a one-hundred-room inn and conference center. A third, appalled at the school’s shaky finances, tried to find a “strategic partner” to share the burden. The judgment I heard from older faculty about pretty much any suggested change was a variation on “They just don’t understand Hampshire.”

What’s to be taken from this sad story, which has left students and alums bereft and faculty and staff abruptly unemployed? One reason for hope is that bad times, when there’s seemingly nothing left to lose, sometimes give rise to good schools. That’s what happened in the 1930s amid the devastation of the Great Depression. So many things had clearly gone wrong with the economy and the culture that bold experiments (the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority) got traction. A recent Yale report assigned higher-ed institutions themselves much of the blame for their declining status, as The New York Times reported the day after Hampshire’s announcement: “High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.” Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to clear the ground for a new college again.