We Hampshire College faculty emeriti are both heartened and concerned by the college’s newly created President’s Options Working Group, self-described as “an independent group of alumni, parents, and former trustees who have had experience in business and education.”
Indeed, it is good to know that individuals with a commitment to the college and business expertise are willing to donate their time and skills to help address Hampshire’s significant fiscal challenges.
We worry, however, that this group, appointed by President Miriam Nelson, subject to receiving information filtered through the president, and working under a rushed deadline, will have a tough time forging an “independent” path.
Furthermore, we are concerned that this committee will serve to give cover to the administration’s road map to a fire sale, ensuring that Hampshire can only “survive” by emptying the campus of its students, staff and faculty.
The Options Working Group’s initial letter to the community (summarized in the Gazette on March 27) is not wholly reassuring. Its language zigzags, asserting members’ experience with mergers and acquisitions before asserting their shared love and appreciation for the college and its mission.
Although the committee calls for collaboration, it also positions itself — having engaged in a three-hour “deep dive” into the college’s finances — as more cognizant than many of the college’s fiscal realities.
Similarly, addressing a context where top-down decisions and profound nontransparency have become the norm, the Options Working Group letter goes on to criticize the Hampshire community for circulating “rumors, attacks and speculation.”
The Working Group may be unaware of the hard evidence, not rumors, that contradict the president’s narrative. In addition, blindsiding the Hampshire community with her Jan. 15 memo, which set the college on a path to relentless downsizing, Nelson has done nothing to establish inclusive decision-making and rebuild trust.
No one doubts that the college’s financial challenges are steep, and they are now severely worsened by the refusal to admit a fall 2019 class. What we doubt is the administration’s willingness to truly collaborate to find a solution.
Whether complete financial data were provided to the president’s Working Group in its three-hour finance dive is unknown. We do know that repeated requests for financial data from Hampshire’s official Budget and Priorities Committee, the AAUP, and the Re-Envisioning Hampshire Coalition have received little or no response.
Yet the Options Working Group’s letter implies a lack of due diligence on the part of the faculty, alums and the Re-Envisioning Coalition, many of whom are economists highly capable of understanding finances.
We also know that instead of encouraging the entire community to work together, over the last 10 weeks the administration has discouraged existing students from returning to Hampshire next semester, appointed more siloed, hand-picked committees, and insisted that members “have the fortitude to make difficult decisions” rather than, as an alum suggests, “deploy the skills and independent thinking capacity to arrive at solutions that are not immediately obvious.”
The larger point to be made here is that the public announcement on Jan. 15 that the college might forego its next entering class, a unilateral decision made by the leadership, was not the only option available.
In response, two robust proposals have emerged: the Hampshire 2020 plan, formed by a subgroup of trustees, and the ” Re-Envisioning Hampshire” project https://sites.google.com/view/revisioninghampshire/, an exciting, well-grounded alternative for an independent Hampshire, proposed by a coalition of students, staff, faculty and alums.
We urge the Options Working Group to undertake a full study of the financing required to postpone layoffs and sustain the college through a genuine deliberative process. We then encourage the Working Group to hold private working meetings with both Hampshire 2020 and with the Re-Envisioning Coalition, in order to formulate a sustainable financial model for preserving Hampshire and its pedagogical vision.
Given the Working Group’s stated commitment to the college’s founding mission, we urge them to utilize their combined creative and financial know-how, drawing on their Hampshire-esque talent for embracing risk and thinking outside the box, in order to preserve and extend the college’s life and its essential role in higher education.
Hampshire cannot afford panicked, reactive, top-down decision-making that sacrifices 50 years of commitment by faculty, students, staff, parents and alums, and leads the college into a death spiral.
To quote a recent video featuring prominent Hampshire alums (Ken Burns, Rhys Ernst, Jon Krakauer, and Lê Thi Diêm Thúy) “Is this how our story goes? This story is not working. This is not a film I want to make. This is not a book I want to write. It doesn’t have to be written. Let’s change the ending.”
This column was signed by 26 retired faculty and deans at Hampshire College. In addition to Breitbart, they are: Carollee Bengelsdorf, Joan Braderman, Bill Brand, Ellen Donkin, Penina Glazer, Deb Gorlin, Lynne Hanley, Betsy Hartmann, Jackie Hayden, Constance Hill, Baba Hillman, Frank Holmquist, Paul Jenkins, David Kelly, L. Brown Kennedy, Jill Lewis, Judith Mann, Laurie Nisonoff, Robert M. Rakoff, Mary Russo, Stan Warner, Larry Winship, Barbara Yngvesson, Susan Tracy, and Fred Weaver.