On the closing of Hampshire College
The email arrived this morning.
Jenn Chrisler, the board chair, and the chair-elect signed it together .. the way you sign a thing that you want no single person to own. After the Fall 2026 semester, Hampshire College will close. Seven years after the community demanded that the college stay independent and true to itself, the Board has concluded that independence and truth are no longer affordable.
I entered Hampshire in the Fall of 1983. My kid entered in 2010. I taught there for a year, worked in the admissions office, gave money, and kept giving money. Hampshire made me into the kind of physician, teacher, and builder I’ve tried to be ever since.
The root cause of Hampshire’s demise is not the discount rate. nor the pandemic, nor the demographic cliff, the cost of small-college operations, the restricted endowment, or even the limited marketing effort. Those are symptoms. The root cause is simpler and harder to say out loud.
Hampshire’s identity ossified.
The institution became unable to change the thing it sold, to whom, and at what price, at a rate that kept pace with the world it was selling into. The financial picture is just what the balance sheet looks like when that happens for long enough.
Being Different became more important than being a great education.
A college is a business
A college is, among other things, a business. An organization that charges money for a product that people purchase is, to some degree, a business. Hampshire charged a lot of money. Roughly $70,000 a year, all in. Families wrote those checks. Students took on that debt. In exchange, we sold a product: a particular kind of education, credentialed by a particular kind of degree.
Those in higher education prefer not to talk this way. We talk about mission, pedagogy, community, values. All of that is real, and all of it is what made Hampshire Hampshire. But the phrase I learned years ago from a nun who ran a hospital applies to a college too: no margin, no mission. Without margin, the mission eventually ceases to exist.
Jenn Chrisler’s letter is proof of that.
What I wrote in 2019, and what I think now#
Seven years ago, when Miriam Nelson moved to shop Hampshire to a partner and the community rebelled, I wrote on this blog that I could see the anger but didn’t share it. I wrote that product-market fit had not been achieved. That administrative overhead needed to get much leaner. That some faculty would not stay. That the college needed to become the positive choice for students who would flourish in it, not the negative choice for students who didn’t fit in elsewhere.
Predictably, this was unpopular.
I also wrote that we were too focused on the asset we had (the current faculty, curriculum, and structure) and not the one we needed.
I believed those things in 2019. I believe them more now.
What happened between then and today is a good example of what happens when an institution tries to solve a product problem with a fundraising campaign and a rebrand. The community chose independence. I supported that, and still do. But choosing independence without choosing fundamental change is just choosing slower decline.
The seven intervening years included heroic work, real innovation in places, and a sincere effort to hold the line. They did not include the one thing that would have actually mattered: a willingness to build a materially different Hampshire. One better aligned with what 17-to-23-year-olds (and the parents writing checks for them) actually want from four years and a quarter-million dollars.
That unwillingness is what I mean by ossification.
It’s not a moral failing. It’s an organizational condition. Every small institution with a strong, beloved identity is vulnerable to it, because the same identity that makes the place worth saving is the identity that makes it hardest to change.
Hampshire’s identity .. no grades, narrative evaluations, self-designed concentrations, Division III as thesis-as-adventure, Non Satis Scire .. was never the problem. The problem was the delivery of that identity. Faculty, curriculum, administrative footprint. All of it calcified around what existed in 1983, not 2026. The frame didn’t bend.
Radical, or effective?
In 2023, I made a donation and got back the usual thank-you. It included this line:
Commitment to a radical approach to education can be genuinely transgressive. It is uncomfortable, disconcerting, and iconoclastic … Hampshire’s mission is to transform higher education. Our graduates’ mission is to transform reality.
I wrote back to Jenn Chrisler directly. Some random feedback from a random alum. Two points.
One. Radical? No. This should never be the priority. It may be a consequence of innovation, but it is never the reason for it. Hampshire was created because traditional approaches to higher education weren’t effective. The alternative to tradition is to innovate. Innovation isn’t radical. It’s actually a science. There is a method and a process to it, and “be radical” isn’t part of it. When the marketing starts celebrating “radical” as the value itself, something has slipped. Hampshire’s present had become more focused on BEING RADICAL than on BEING EFFECTIVE. If there are components of traditional education that work, adopt them so that students learn well. Radical for the sake of being radical is a waste of time, resources, and (yes) our money.
Two. Transform reality? Oh please. It’s time to get back down to planet Earth. Our graduates can and should and must transform many things. Reality isn’t one of them.
I don’t reprint that note to score a point. I reprint it because it’s the best short illustration I have of what I mean by ossification. The institution had started treating its adjectives as its purpose. “Radical.” “Transgressive.” “Iconoclastic.” Those are the consequences of doing the work well. They are not the work. When the marketing copy is the last thing to change, you are already in trouble.
The Hail Mary#
Last week a friend sent me a Hail Mary plan for Hampshire. He was sincere and generous and creative about it. The kind of thinking Hampshire alumni do when we love a place and can’t stand watching it die. He pitched a radical pivot toward lifelong learners: old farts like us, mid-career reinventors, people looking to build skills and contribute to the world.
I wrote him back the same night and we have a follow-up scheduled. I had two concerns, and they’re the same two I’d levy at any plan arriving at this hour.
First, the debt. The letter from the board is unsparing on this point: short-term debt tied to land assets means that even a favorable sale wouldn’t change the long-term trajectory. A recurring structural deficit is not a gap to close once. It’s a tax that compounds. Any plan that doesn’t start by naming that number, and doesn’t say where new capital comes from to absorb it, isn’t a plan. It’s a wish. If Hampshire were to dissolve as a legal entity and a successor institution were to acquire the assets, the debt problem could in theory be handled. But that’s a very different proposition from “pivot the college.”
Second, product-market fit. Lifelong learners are a real market, but they are not a market that funds a 600-acre residential college in western Massachusetts. The money in higher education still sits with 17-to-23-year-olds and their parents. What those customers are telling us, in every enrollment trend line I can find, is that they want something that visibly prepares them for a life and a livelihood. A Hampshire that doesn’t clearly answer “what does my kid do after this?” is a Hampshire that doesn’t get checks.
You can debate whether that’s what higher education should be about. You cannot debate that that’s what the market is paying for.
The sentence I ended the email with, I’ll repeat here, because I mean it.
No pivot == dead Hampshire.
Today’s news is, sadly, validation of my prediction.
What I take from this#
I’m grateful. Hampshire gave me a growth mindset before Carol Dweck had named it, and equipped me for a career in medicine, health care, technology, and investing that a conventional college would not have. That gift doesn’t expire with the institution. The alumni network, the pedagogy, the stories, all of that keeps going. Chrisler’s letter is right that the quality of the academic program was never in question.
The lesson for every small, values-driven institution, in education, in health care, in the nonprofit world, is the same one. Your identity is not what you teach, or how you teach it, or who teaches it. Your identity is the set of outcomes you produce for the people who rely on you. Everything else (the faculty lineup, the curriculum, the admin structure, even the buildings) is implementation detail. Treat it as precious at your peril.
Ossification is the form failure takes when you confuse the scaffolding for the soul.
“Save this dying College” was never going to work as a fundraising pitch. I wrote that in 2019 and it’s still true. The pitch that might have worked was “invest in this reinvented College so that the world will be a better place.” We never quite made that pitch, because we never quite made that reinvention.
Non Satis Scire. To know is not enough.
In the end, it wasn’t the knowing that failed us. It was the doing.
Jacob Reider, Hampshire College F83, P10.