Letter to the Editor: On Hampshire College’s Reality

Dear Readers of the Amherst Student,

Hampshire College is alive and well. Its annual auditors report, which suggested a deficit in Issue 15 of The Student on Jan. 28, tells only part of the story of Hampshire’s progress and the challenges it faces as a very young institution. I’d like to elaborate on the context surrounding the situation Hampshire is currently facing.

Every college faces financial challenges. Even Amherst, with its substantial endowment, must carefully watch its annual expenses. Just 17 years ago Amherst saw its endowment lose a quarter of its value. The college responded by freezing salaries and reducing its staff by 40 positions, and the president took a pay cut. Even today, with its substantial endowment, Amherst College must carefully watch its annual expenses.

But Amherst has at least one financial asset that Hampshire will acquire only with the passage of time: alumni who die and remember their college in their wills. Hampshire’s very oldest alums are just now in their early 70s, and, to date, its alumni deaths and bequests have been few compared to what its four parent institutions receive each year.

Give it time, and that will change. I am an Amherst alum, and when my will is opened and read, both Amherst and Hampshire will benefit, although I hope that’s quite a while from now.

To an Amherst student today, Hampshire College has always been here, but that was not the case when I was an Amherst student. I helped to plan Hampshire College’s inception, and was its treasurer when it opened to students in 1970 and its interim president in 2019.

Hampshire’s founders knew that it would have its challenges, but thanks to the intellectual and emotional, though never financial, support of its four parent institutions, Hampshire began then to do what it still does today: blaze new trails in higher education. We knew that some of those trails would lead to dead ends, but that others would show the way to change how information is created, transmitted and absorbed, and how higher education might evolve and improve. Hampshire’s first president predicted that it would always undergo “successive approximations,” and so it has.

Hampshire’s students experience an education that’s more like the way the real after-college world works than any other college I know. I’ll be glad to help anyone learn more about Hampshire, its past, present, and what it can expect its future may bring. Just ask. 

Ken Rosenthal ’60