The R.W. Kern Center Hampshire College

Hampshire College, RIP

A Bit of Hampshire College History

Ten years ago with great fanfare and hope for the future, Hampshire College opened the R.W. Kern Center, the first certified “living building” on an American college campus. Constructed from repurposed wood and non-toxic materials, the building generated more energy than it consumed, harvested rain water from its roof and treated the waste from its toilets. Designed in consultation with the faculty, students, staff and alumni, funded principally by a graduate and built during a period of crisis by a member of the college’s founding class, the Kern Center was meant to be a symbol of college’s commitment to the future and a demonstration of the method and philosophy of Hampshire pedagogy in action.

The living building is still alive but the college that it is part of has just died, announcing this week that it will close after the upcoming fall term, 56 years after admitting its founding class in 1970. A sad epilogue for a college that began as a book.

Many of the oldest American colleges and universities such as Harvard and Yale began with the donation of private libraries. A number of other colleges such as Bard and Bennington were conceived in accord with manifestoes of educational reform. But Hampshire is the only institution that began with a systematic study of what might be required of colleges in the future. The Making of a College: A New Departure in Higher Education, was published in 1965. It drew on proposals drafted in the late 1950s by a forward-thinking committee of educators from Smith, Amherst, Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts. With multi-million dollar grants from the Ford Foundation and an Amherst alumnus, Harold F. Johnson, the new addition to the Four College Consortium sprang up on an 800-acre tract of old apple orchards and cow pasture just north of the bucolic wooded hills of the Holyoke Range.

Named after its county in western Massachusetts, Hampshire aspired to be an influential “force for redefinition and innovation” in liberal education. The central idea was that students would be taught to teach themselves. Guided by faculty, they would design their own course of study, not choose entrees from standardized academic menus. They would receive written evaluations in lieu of grades. There would be areas of concentration instead of majors. A thesis-like final project. For professors, no tenure; no traditional academic departments. If curiosity led students across the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines, so much the better. The byword of the new college was “interdisciplinary.” Its Latin motto Non satis scire meant “to know is not enough.”

All the methods of the past were open for review. Among the early innovations was a brochure mailed out by the admissions office in the form of an audio recording that applicants could play on a turntable.

As it happened, the chance to help make the college envisioned in The Making of a College struck a chord and when the first class was gathered in 1970, Hampshire was one of the most selective schools in the country.

Over the decades the college evolved in ways that its founders did and did not anticipate. The general prediction there would be many more students than places for them in American colleges was way off. Hampshire’s deans quickly discovered that teaching students to teach themselves required more time and involvement from the faculty, not less.

The founders had envisioned that Hampshire students would be “distinguished most by a strong reach for maturity.” While this was true for many students the college would in time find itself battling a constantly-changing set of unflattering stereotypes that cast it as everything from a hippie haven of basket-weavers and frisbee-players to a hyper-precious sanctuary of “safe-spaces” for narcissistic disciples of political correctness.

Some of Hampshire’s image problems resulted from the chronic college-campus tension between scholarship and activism. Despite Hampshire’s essentially libertarian-conservative pedagogical structure which emphasizes independence, individual autonomy and responsibility for one’s self, the college’s founders had advanced the idea that Hampshire undergraduates would be committed to pressing for progressive social change. The very motto of the school — Non Satis Scire, To Know Is Not Enough — implies that knowledge for its own sake is insufficient; knowledge compels action. What action exactly, and how effective it might be, have always been open questions. With some 1,400 students, it was often said that Hampshire is not the archetypal academic ivory tower, but rather 1,400 separate ivory towers, with each student bringing his or her particular interests and priorities. Intent as it was on fostering progressive social change, Hampshire never had an easy time making common cause as a community. Activist agendas were as likely to fracture the campus as unify it.

Driven by activist students, Hampshire in 1977 became the first college in the country to divest its endowment of securities in companies that supported apartheid in South Africa. Over the years students organized protests against nuclear power plants, the Israel occupation of Palestine and sought to confront systemic social justice issues of racism, sexism, homophobia and gender-discrimination.

Students also sometimes demonstrated against the college itself. Campus protests flared over seemingly minor issues such as whether to name an academic building for Emily Dickinson or Emma Goldman and over broader allegations that the structure of Hampshire — the administration, the board of trustees, financial aid policy etc. — reflected all the systemic ills of mainstream American society. While criticism of the college and its methods have always been a staple part of a Hampshire education, the fervor of student criticism and what sometimes seemed the accent on activism at the expense of scholarship prompted one administrator to wonder: “Are we an educational institution with a commitment to social justice, or a social justice organization with an educational wing?”

It’s no surprise then that Hampshire in its first half-century survived a number of perilous periods and more than a few self-inflicted wounds. Perhaps no time, until the past year, was as dicey as the mid-1980s when enrollment plummeted during the conservative years of the Reagan Administration. Worried the college was heading for bankruptcy, then-president Adele Simmons cut operating costs and raised the selectivity of Hampshire admissions by dropping the student population from 1200 to 800.

By the time Jonathan Lash, a brown-haired 67-year-old former environmental lawyer, was inaugurated as Hampshire’s sixth president in 2012, the mission of the college, its reputation, its economic viability and the caliber of its students, were once again in question. Lash had come to Hampshire from Washington DC where he’d been president of the World Resources Institute and the co-chairman of Bill’s Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development. At his inaugural Lash wore regalia made of fabric spun from bamboo and recycled plastic bottles. His friend, environmental champion and former U.S. vice president Al Gore, delivered the keynote address. The world-wide issues Lash had focussed on in Washington — how to sustain environments, food sources, economic opportunity — he now found himself challenged to solve in the microcosm of a teetering liberal arts college that had not fully recovered from the Great Recession of 2009.

“I was hearing all these rumors from alumni and prospective parents that Hampshire was going to close,” he recalled. “There was a long-time culture of scarcity here. People believed in what we were doing but they had no optimism — the college had done nothing to define itself as a unique educational opportunity. We hadn’t built anything new on the campus in decades. A key part of my job, the president’s job, was to establish that anything might be possible and that what we were doing here was unique and valuable.”

He quickly laid out an agenda. He launched a study of current students who in the view of professors were thriving at Hampshire. He reformed the college’s admissions policies when it was demonstrated that high school test results couldn’t be correlated with Hampshire student success. And he revived an idea that had been broached by the previous president, the classicist scholar Ralph Hexter who two years earlier had wanted to move the college’s Admissions Office from its isolated location to the center of the campus, but managed to provoke three days of protests by faculty and students who didn’t want to be displaced or thought the college should have other priorities. Lash considered the possibility that maybe the best way to move the Admissions Office was to build a new one. How he might pay for it was why in the spring of 2012 he arranged to meet a Hampshire graduate named Bill Kern at a Greek restaurant in mid-town Manhattan.

For an institution that proposed a “major departure” in pedagogy, the physical campus of Hampshire College that initially emerged over three years from 1968 to 1971 was remarkably conventional. Any architect would have been in a difficult position trying to come up with a design that expressed “in every possible way the distinctive social and educational character of Hampshire College” if only because it was still anyone’s guess what the distinctive social and educational character of the new college would be.

John Boettiger, one of the founding faculty members who would teach one of Hampshire’s signature courses (“Dimensions of Consciousness”) noted the bind of designing a campus based on abstractions. “In a sense, I suppose, Hampshire is building too early, before its collective personality is manifest,” he wrote in a memo. “But then the campus will grow with the college, and later buildings might reasonably be expected to take on more clearly — more integrally — the life of those who will give it character.”

The man who won the problematic job was the prominent Boston-based architect Hugh Stubbins who worked with landscape architect Hideo Sasaki. Stubbins was known for designing buildings at Harvard, Princeton and University of Massachusetts. Later he would add the Citicorp Building with its refulgent angled roof to the New York City skyline, and then spend some desperate hours holed up with the building’s engineer in Frank Sinatra’s old room at the Waldorf Astoria trying to figure out an emergency fix to keep the cantilevered structure from toppling over in a high wind.

What emerged from Stubbins’ drawing board at Hampshire was a set of serviceable but undistinguished brick and concrete structures in the style of watered-down mid-1960s Brutualism. With its red maple woods, winding drives and walkways the new campus could have easily been mistaken for the corporate headquarters of one of the many American companies setting up shop in exurban office parks outside New York City. The long entrance driveway ended in an oval turn-around that President Jonathan Lash decades later would condemn as a “fossil fuel spear in the heart of the campus.” Stubbins’ designs for the The Harold F. Johnson library, the Merrill and Dakin house dormitories, the Franklin P. Patterson academic hall and the Cole Science Center seemed conceived not to reflect Hampshire’s social and education innovations but to shore up its institutional gravitas and to counter any parental concerns that the new college might be a fly-by-night tent show of faddish ideas that would wither and die when the ferment of the 1960s subsided. Even the student figures Stubbins penciled into his sketches had a solid, conservative look, more like debonair extras from the cast of Mad Men than the raffishly long-haired, blue-jean-wearing exponents of the counterculture who actually showed up when the school opened. The one architectural novelty that impressed many parents dropping their kids off in 1970 and 1971 was the co-ed bathrooms in Dakin House.

Over the next two decades Hampshire added three more dormitories, a gym, a second academic building, an arts complex and assorted smaller structures. But generally speaking, aesthetics took a back seat to economics as the college sought to grow on the cheap. Among the most notably unimaginative additions was The Charles and Polly Longsworth Arts Center which made an early effort to capitalize on solar power and energy efficiencies but came out looking like a repurposed self-storage facility from an arctic mining town. A review in the college newspaper Climax of Hampshire’s new athletic complex, the Robert Crown Center, noted: “From a distance [it] looks like a munitions plant. It looks the same way up close.” And for the most unattractive building on a campus that the architectural prigs at Travel + Leisure magazine consider one of the thirteen ugliest campuses in America, it’s hard to find a bottom lower than the design nadir of Greenwich House, a set of 1970s modular dormitories better known as “the donuts.”

“We had a fire there recently when a student put a sweater in a microwave,” Jonathan Lash told me. “Unfortunately the sprinklers worked.”

Now ten years later, the postscript has been written. What fire couldn’t do, demographic trends and cultural change have brought to pass. I entered Hampshire in 1971 as member of the college’s second class. For those of us who were part of the founding generation, drawn to the excitement of a college conceived as a departure from tradition, it is strange to discover we have outlived the innovations, and mourn the very tradition and idea of continuity we once were so happy to dismiss.