This week’s point was written by Nick Juravich, Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies. As always, The Point represents the views of its author and is not the official position of the FSU.
When the news broke earlier this month that Hampshire College would be closing, few people expressed surprise. The college nearly closed in 2019, and while it staved off that initial crises, the threat of closure led to a vicious cycle of falling application numbers and financial hardship. The college will run one final semester in Fall 2026 before shuttering its Amherst campus for good.
Hampshire’s end is, of course, not unique. The Hechinger Report counted nearly 300 college closures between 2008 and 2024, and just this year, two other Massachusetts colleges, Anna Maria College and Labouré College of Healthcare, have also announced their demise. Many reports on Hampshire’s closure cited deleterious long-term trends, including a decline in the overall college-age population (though not nearly to the extent that the language of a “demographic cliff” would have us believe) and a decline in the percentage of those students attending college. These trends – and panicked coverage of them, which impact everything from student choices to bond ratings – have put enormous pressure on schools that depend on tuition dollars to keep the doors open (and the current administration’s chaotic directives on student aid haven’t helped).
Still, Hampshire’s loss hit me hard; I grew up in Amherst, where Hampshire has been a beloved part of the local community for over half a century. Friends’ parents worked there and let us run around the grounds as kids, to the amusement of the students. As we got older, we raced cross country at the annual high school invitational (a great use of a beautiful campus), attended talks, exhibitions, and performances put on by Hampshire’s brilliant, idiosyncratic students – who, famously, all designed their own programs of study – and watched some of our friends become students there themselves. One of my high school teammates has coached the cross country and track and field programs at Hampshire since 2016; they just competed in their last-ever track season.
The nostalgia many of us feel at Hampshire’s closing is undeniable, but it can also be paralyzing. “In an era when students increasingly expect colleges to offer a career-focused education that funnels them toward the work force,” wrote the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Hampshire swam against the tide.” An op-ed in Inside Higher Ed mused that Hampshire’s model, while still “academically sound” would not “save a beloved, quirky institution from the dustbin of history” on account of the changed political economy of higher education. These are not hostile pieces, but they, like many, treat the Hampshire model and experience as a relic of bygone years of plenty, when countercultural institutions thrived and the hard edges of today’s economy had not yet grown so sharp.
Hampshire is, indeed, a unique institution, but the ideas that animated its creation were not. The college emerged following the publication, in 1958, of a “New College Plan” created jointly by the three small colleges in the area – Amherst, Smith, and Mount Holyoke – and the University of Massachusetts, itself all of eleven years old at the time. Demand for higher education was soaring, and educators believed that new pedagogies, curricula, and organization could better serve some of those in this widening undergraduate population.
UMass’s involvement in Hampshire’s creation is particularly relevant on our campus, because system administrators had Hampshire in mind when they created UMass Boston’s College of Public and Community Service (CPCS) at UMass Boston in 1972. Some personnel even overlapped; Hampshire’s first president, Franklin Patterson, joined UMB as a political science professor in 1971, and later served as interim president of UMass. The contrast between a commuter school for working-class Bostonians and a leafy, hippie Western Mass campus might seem high, but both institutions were animated by the idea that students deserved, and would respond to, educational models that met them where they were and took seriously their ability to direct their own learning. The idea that “experimental” higher education could deliver both knowledge and opportunities to a very wide range of students flourished in these years, from the Antioch network to the new “career ladder” programs created at the City University of New York after student and community organizing won open enrollment policies and a dramatic expansion of CUNY.
My first year at UMass Boston coincided with the last official year of CPCS, and there are many on our campus who can speak to its virtues and legacy far better than I can. My knowledge of CPCS comes, primarily, from teaching in our Labor Studies program, which was created within in CPCS in 1979. Alumni of our program took me aside, as a new faculty member, to share how transformative the CPCS model was for them. The competency-based credit system allowed workers with experience as shop stewards or bargaining team members to direct, and demonstrate, their own learning without taking a course in something they already understood better than any professor. Night classes at the Park Square campus incubated a new generation of progressive labor leaders; labor studies founder Jim Green described one, in his book Taking History to Heart, that contained four future local presidents (and one future Labor Resource Center administrator, Wally Soper). Susan Moir, who earned her BA in labor studies at UMB and later returned to the labor studies program, made sure I understood that CPCS “welcomed people on welfare,” including her, in the 1970s, a decade when attacks on social welfare programs and those who needed them were reaching a fever pitch (one from which our meager social safety net has never recovered).
It would be reasonable, at this point, to note that CPCS predeceased Hampshire by seven years, a victim of many of the same pressures in higher education. Our colleagues at Lesley University are on a two-day strike as I write this (you can support them here), fighting for a contract in the face of uncertainty at their institution, which has long prioritized hands-on learning and creative pedagogies for future educators. As our retired colleague Maurice Cunningham wrote earlier this year, the UMass System is now considering three-year degrees as a way to fast-track students into the workforce, a vision that seems oceans away from the New College Plan or the founding of CPCS.
In spite of these depressing trends, I would argue, there is real value in keeping the lessons of Hampshire, CPCS, and other such experiments out of the dustbin of history. We hear regularly of the “loss of trust” in higher education, which, however manufactured such narratives may be, seems to have contributed at least somewhat to the declining enrollment of college-age students (the far larger factor, of course, is the cost of higher education, exacerbated by uncertainty about access to loans and grants). Promises of three-year degrees are framed as a way to lure uncertain students to college, but they only go so far when the job market into which students are being rushed is deeply unstable.
Moreover, as critics of the “demographic cliff” narrative have noted, it relies on data about traditional college-age students (18-22 year olds). Worse, one of its leading progenitors assumes racial disparities in educational attainment to be constant demographic factors, not dynamic problems to be addressed by, or in, higher educational institutions.
During a period of economic and social upheaval half a century ago, Hampshire, CPCS, and other “experiments” believed that making students agents of their own education offered a way forward. They intentionally welcomed non-traditional students: older people who went straight to work, or into military service, or raised a family (or all three) out of high school, students who had been denied educational opportunities earlier in life on account of segregation, racism, patriarchy, and class expectations about their future (one colleague in history, a UMB alum herself, still recalls the student who showed her the slip on which his high school guidance counselor had written, years earlier, “you are not college material”). Experimental education was not envisioned to compete for traditional students in a marketplace, but to reach not served by such competition.
Hampshire may be closing, but the generations of students it trained still put its ethos to work in their own teaching, as Jason Read and Touré Reed discussed on the Breaking Culture podcast earlier this week. CPCS may be gone, but many of us at UMass Boston still believe in meeting students where they are and allowing them to direct their own learning. In my short time here, I have watched countless colleagues design assignments, independent studies, and capstone projects that allow students to put their particular skills and unique knowledge to work in service of credit. That, far more than a headlong dash to a degree, seems like a compelling way to make a case for public higher education.
The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.