Submit All our Hampshire memories, good and bad; and what comes next.

Submission form now live!

posthampshire.org/submit/

Letter to a traffic engineer A lot of ink has been spilled over the Reid Overpass proposal. For those who don’t read the news, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation aims to replace the crumbling brick structure that carries Memorial Drive traffic where the road intersects with the Boston University Bridge. The designs... The post Letter to a traffic engineer appeared first on Cambridge | Somerville Independent.

Letter to a traffic engineer

This is my subjective experience with an extremely complicated place. Beauty, joy and disappointment all wrapped together. But it feels like something inside fractured with the loss and we have a lot to learn so we can do it better with more trust and more resilience next time.

ngl it's very surreal & heartening to see how many people with no personal connection to my weird little alma mater in the woods are treating its closing as a Major Event

My friend just pointed out Hampshire College has been around for longer than Amherst College has been co-ed 🤢

The lifespan of Hampshire College (1970-2026) almost perfectly maps onto the timeline of a Gen Xer eventually crushed by conformity and capitalism.

I have mixed feelings about my undergrad but it was a unique place, and the world of higher ed will be a little lesser without it. Sad news to receive this morning.

Summer 2002: 17 y.o. me on college tour, telling my dad “I want to go THERE” when learning from a horrified Amherst guide that a pack of Hampshire students stole the American flag from their 9/11 “patriot rally” and burned it.

I’m now married to an Amherst grad 😭

Hampshire, you will be missed!

As a Hampshire alum this hurts. I wouldn't be who I am today if it wasn't for Hampshire - the college gave me opportunities I never even dreamed of.
In a world that feels darker and more chaotic every year, Hampshire embodied a kind of radical optimism - it sucks to see that flicker out. 1/N

On Hearing of Hampshire College’s Closing ….End of a Hopeful Progressive Era?

My college, Hampshire College, is closing, and it makes me tremendously sad. #toknowisnotenough.

Truly. Everyone I know who went to Hampshire is smart and weird, and I worry-- for this and many other reasons-- that we are building a version of higher education that simply has no place for the smart and the weird.

Hampshire College to close after years of financial struggles Hampshire College will close after fall 2026 due to ongoing financial and enrollment struggles.

I’m absolutely heartbroken to learn that my alma mater is shutting down after nearly six decades. Hampshire College was one of the most innovative institutions in higher education.😢

I owe Hampshire College everything, nearly all of it good. It was a beautiful thing, and we're losing too many of those.

My wife & I both went to Hampshire, & we both ended up getting jobs teaching at Dartmouth, an anti-Hampshire. I have incredible students here. But I was more challenged at Hampshire than this "elite" Ivy's system even allows for.

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

The Omen alumni farewell issue?

I am broken-hearted at the terrible news that my alma mater, @hampshirecollege.bsky.social, after 56 yrs, is closing. Its death is a victory for conformism, for corporatism, for higher education's dull love of hierarchy & status. It's a grievous defeat for imagination & experimentation.

The College Archivist told me that they literally did not have a wind down plan which was maybe the most optimistic take I heard from non-leadership. And then his position got eliminated two years later

In 2021-22 I overheard Writing Center faculty saying they that the felt the plan to increase enrollment felt way too optimistic. After graduating pretty much every decade+ tenure staff left

Oh and a certain alum reached out to me asking about a certain paper, making clear that he was NOT acting in his capacity as a trustee. And he didn't want to alarm current students by reaching out directly. Hm.

Unfortunately the death spiral was pretty obvious from the inside. I checked current student chatter maybe twice a year and it looks like turnover was accelerating, work study hours were being cut to 10 hrs/wk, all non-academic positions had consolidated into 1 department with maybe 2 staff

Welp, that's the end of my Alma Mater :/