Experimental college survives, with a bit more conventionality

Left for almost dead a year ago, the quirky liberal arts experimenter Hampshire College appears to be making a rebound, thanks to a bit more conventionality.

Long known for students expected to create their own majors, with examples that include magic and frisbee, Hampshire hit hard times last year.

Its president at the time, Miriam Nelson, said that Hampshire probably needed an outside merger partner to stay alive, could not risk enrolling an incoming class in the autumn, and needed to cut staff.

One among only a dozen members of the Consortium for Innovative Environments in Learning (CIEL), a collection of alternative-oriented liberal arts schools, Hampshire’s apparent demise seemed to affirm an era preferring sober job training over personal enlightenment and fulfilment.

But a year since he replaced Professor Nelson as president, Edward Wingenbach is furiously crafting a different end to this story.

Hampshire accepted 130 freshmen for this autumn, with the aim of getting that number back to its normal range of about 350 next year. It has also met about a quarter of Professor Wingenbach’s $60 million (£45 million) fundraising goal, and is gradually bringing back academic staff on terms friendly to the institution.

“There are some significant challenges, and continue to be challenges,” he conceded. “But we’ve got better strategies to address them.”

In part, the explanation for Hampshire’s curiously rapid turnaround has to do with matters of reality versus image.

For one, the 50-year-old college in the hills of western Massachusetts never was as whimsical as it may have appeared. The lyrical frisbee major of the 1980s, John Dwork, took courses in physics, marketing and psychology, setting him up for a career largely spent producing public festivals of music and other performances.

And while Professor Wingenbach avoided any criticism of his predecessors, and acknowledged the accumulation of structural problems they faced, he described alumni and friends of Hampshire as quite willing to help once asked.

“People who cared about the college responded really quickly,” he said.

On the academic side, Professor Wingenbach spoke even more carefully. Hampshire continues to allow and invite students to craft their own majors, and to figure out the courses necessary to make that happen.

But it is doing more to help students narrow their options, with faculty defining some specific public challenges – in such areas as global health, economic inequality, and sustainable design – that the professors identify as especially good career choices.

The changes, Professor Wingenbach said, also include new “seminar experiences” and activities in the first year designed to give students a better idea of the project-based educational model awaiting them at Hampshire.

And while Hampshire remains committed to providing students “this radical process of finding their own creative projects”, it is also doing more to demonstrate real-world value in the job market, Professor Wingenbach said.

The message he hoped that it sent to prospective students and parents was: “This is not just a place where you go because you don’t know what you want to do.”

It is not unlike some of the changes being seen among other CIEL members, said the consortium’s director, Noah Coburn, associate dean for curriculum and pedagogy at Bennington College.

That may reflect a realisation that experimental colleges such as Hampshire were handing students too much responsibility to figure out their own education, and needed to rebalance a bit, Professor Coburn said.

At the same time, he said, many US colleges have begun allowing students wide discretion to design majors if they choose. “I think there’s been a change in higher education,” Professor Coburn said, “where actually the field has moved closer to us than we have moved to the field.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com