The fact that Hampshire College is closing is not a shock. But it is a disappointment.
I remember the dark and rainy morning in July 2021 when our family first visited the Amherst campus. We had been staying at a timeshare in western Massachusetts. My wife decided that the Daughter needed to start at least looking at colleges.
So we left at 8 a.m. (!) on a Saturday (!) to travel for 90 minutes on a bunch of back roads to this campus, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Even with the precipitation outside and the windows up, as we approached, I could smell the farmland, if you know what I mean.
Initially, I figured there was no way my kid was going to go here. But after a number of sessions, some with parents but most without, she was at least somewhat interested.
The rest of the summer and into the autumn, our daughter, with one or both parents, visited at least a dozen colleges. If I were a betting man, I would have wagered on her going to Hofstra, which she saw with me a couple of months later.
Our daughter had a very systematic, color-coded system in which she weighed a variety of factors (curriculum, distance, price, accessibility), and before her last high school semester, she was focused on Hampshire.
Money problems?
At some point after she had been accepted but before classes began in 2022, the family was there. Some rumors about Hampshire’s financial viability were swirling. (Indeed, a guy from our church thought the school had already closed.) My wife spoke with someone from the college – I remember we were in a cafeteria – and she felt reassured.
We had packed up the car in late August when my daughter was feeling a bit off. She took a COVID test and tested positive. In due course, I and then my wife also presented. So instead of getting there a week early and participating in the orientation rituals, we arrived on Labor Day, three days after classes began.
I don’t know if it was the late start or going through the last half of high school in COVID-related mode, but the start was a bit rough, not just scholastically, but socially. However, she eventually found her rhythm.
It helped when she started taking classes at a couple of the other schools in the Five College Consortium, which also includes the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Amherst. She learned to navigate the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority system before getting a car for her final year.
The news
We were all in the afterglow of her wonderful art show when we got The E-Mail from college president Jenn Chrisler, plus the chair and chair-elect of the board. “Seven years ago, the Hampshire community presented the College with a powerful mandate: to maintain independence and remain true to Hampshire’s deepest-held values. Since then, we have all worked together toward those goals…
“Despite this herculean effort, the financial pressures on the College’s operations have become increasingly complex, compounded by shifting external factors… We worked aggressively to increase enrollment, refinance existing debt, and realize new revenue via the sale of a portion of our land… We are faced with the clear, heartbreaking reality that progress on each of these three key factors has fallen far short of what we had hoped.
“As a result, the Board of Trustees voted to permanently close Hampshire College following the Fall 2026 semester.”
The good news is that the Daughter will have graduated by then. But as someone whose K-9 school, Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton, was razed, she’s already feeling sad about the change.
The Globe
There are some interesting takes on this situation. (Some are behind paywalls.)
What is the Five College Area with only Four Colleges? Hampshire College’s upcoming closure poses an existential question. By Brooke Hauser, Boston Globe, April 20, 2026.
“Especially for Hampshire alums who still live in the area, the idea of their alma mater falling off the map is disorienting. “It’s a little bit like, ‘Oh, you were from that village on the river, but it got washed away in the flood,’” said Jordi Herold, who founded Northampton’s legendary Iron Horse Music Hall in 1979, four years after graduation. “You have your memories, but it’s not there anymore.”
Hampshire Announced It’s Closing. Will Other Small Colleges Follow? by Lee Gardner, the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2026
The loss of Hampshire is a loss for the higher-education ecosystem, said Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. “Losing even small colleges diminishes the power of our sector as a whole,” she said. The consequences for the sector, she added, are that it will become “more homogeneous, with fewer choices for students, and less diverse in terms of location and kinds of students served.”
NYT
“Hampshire is the alma mater of the filmmaker Ken Burns, who made his first documentary movie as a student there. ‘This is an extraordinary loss for those of us who went there,’ Mr. Burns, who graduated from Hampshire in 1975, said in an interview… The school, known for experimentation in classes and methods, offered ‘sort of medieval guild-like tutors and apprenticeships,’ he said.”
Other notable alumni include actors Lupita Nyong’o and Liev Schreiber.
As noted, the Daughter will soon be a proud graduate of Hampshire College. But it’s a situation that has made not only the Daughter but her parents surprisingly melancholy.
