Emphasis on Innvation
Hampshire College offers a non-traditional model of interdisciplinary education
By Jon Marcus
AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS
LONG-HAIRED STUDENTS in
colorful loose clothing and bare feet
navigate a campus of brick-and-precast-
concrete dorms and classroom buildings,
the walls and windows papered with
handmade posters advertising poetry slams,
a string folk trio and a lecture on the prospects
for disarmament. Some of these notices
are adorned with peace signs, others
with obscene gestures promoting a rock
band.
One-third of the student body has just
returned from a demonstration in Washington,
where several were arrested. Students
also have organized a successful local
non-binding referendum calling for the
legalization of marijuana. An editorial in
the campus newspaper denounces the influence
of multinational bankers, and stories
that mention the president or faculty
refer to them by their first names as, in
fact, does everybody else.
Men and women are officially allowed
to live together in dormitory rooms, some
of which are assigned according to mutual
interests. For instance, there’s a suite for
vegetarians, one for allergen-reduced living,
and another for women interested in
spirituality. Bathrooms are also coed. In
the gym, Frisbees fill a wire bin meant for
basketballs. In another building, students
in coveralls are developing an alternative fuels
tractor powered by vegetable oil.
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Environmentally minded Hampshire College students try to make a farm tractor run on
vegetable oil. The tractor smells like french fries. |
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The tractor, which smells like french
fries, is tested on a campus farm where,
today, local children have been invited to a
“wake up the earth” festival. Students
wearing rough-hewn fairy wings impersonate
flowers, while giant puppets lead a
parade through the fields to the accompaniment
of a fiddle and spoons.
Flashback to the 1960s? No. Throw back,
maybe. What distinguishes Hampshire
College in rural western Massachusetts
is not only the iconoclasts it tends to
attract, but the thing that has been drawing
them here for 30 years: a radical 1960s
model of interdisciplinary education without
conventional grades.
It is a model that is suddenly both in
and out of vogue. Citing the aversion of
graduate school admissions committees to
long narrative evaluations, some of Hamp-
shire’s few remaining alternative
counterparts—the University of California
at Santa Cruz foremost among
them—have announced they will
return to traditional grades. On the
other hand, as careerism and the high
cost of tuition drive more students to
design their own majors, many
mainstream universities are suddenly
discovering interdisciplinary education—
though their definition of “in-terdisciplinary”
usually differs from
Hampshire’s.
“I pick up and read the competition’s
brochures, and they’ve really
found the truth, which is all to the
good,” said Hampshire President
Gregory Prince, Jr., a former associate
dean at Dartmouth College. “But
they can’t really do it. What they mean by
‘interdisciplinary’ is team teaching, or a
double major, or an independent study for
honor students, which all universities offer.
What’s radical here is, we believe it’s the
most transforming means of education for
any student, not just the ‘best’ students.”
Faculty at established institutions are
not likely to encourage students to take
courses in competing departments especially
when resources are based on en-rollment—
contends Lynn Miller, a Stan-ford-
educated biologist who was one of
Hampshire’s first professors. “What we did
here was throw away the department
structure,” he said. “We have thrown away
that old Germanic model of the university.”
It was, in fact, four traditional institutions
that created Hampshire: Amherst,
Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges, and
the University of Massachusetts, which
appointed a committee of faculty beginning
in 1958 to do nothing less than reexamine
liberal arts education. Prince describes
it as “one of the boldest acts in the
history of higher education, if not the boldest.”
The faculty committee didn’t mince
words. “It is a widely held conviction
among liberal arts faculties that our system
of courses and credits has got out of hand,
and that our students are capable of far
more independence than they exercise in
present college programs,” their report
read.
They called for the development of an
entirely new school, which they tentatively
called New College. “We propose a college
which frees both students and faculty from
the system which makes education a matter
of giving and taking courses to cover
subjects,” the committee wrote.
“In the ’60s there were a lot of these
innovative colleges going up,” recalled Miller,
who sports a trademark string tie and
chews an omnipresent stogy. “There was a
whole generation of faculty who were totally
fed up with the way things were going
in higher education.” With the flood of
government grants for science, in particular,
which suddenly became available
after Sputnik, separate well-funded graduate
divisions sprang up. “What that meant
for a lot of us was that you no longer had
contact with undergraduates,” Miller said.
Meanwhile, according to Raymond
Coppinger, a Hampshire professor of biology
who then taught at Amherst, “students
wanted more of a say in the curriulum.
They didn’t want to take Latin any
more.”
The discussion soon became more than
academic. In 1965, a wealthy Amherst
alumnus donated $6 million toward the
founding of a new college, and the Ford
Foundation contributed a matching grant.
In somewhat unromantic fashion, a shell
company called Tinker Hill Associates
secretly bought up 800 acres of dairy farms
and apple orchards on the
edge of the town of Am-herst,
in the shadow of
Tinker Hill, and, with incredible
speed, Hampshire
College opened to
great promise and much
confusion 30 years ago
this fall.
“It was both exciting
and unformed,” said Penina
Glazer, who was
then a young history
professor. While the 250
remarkably gifted entering
students were as signed
to ponder the
concept of relevance, the
faculty, according to
Glazer, coped with other
questions: “Never mind
relevance. Where do we
put the pencil sharpeners?”
Nor had the complicated
system of student directed
study been entirely
worked out. “It was exci-
ting, but also very rough,” said Aaron Berman,
one of those first students, who now
is dean of the faculty. “We had to reinvent
what a transcript was.” The long written
evaluations that supplanted grades were
prohibitively long. “It very quickly became
apparent that these things, while they may
have been comprehensive, were much too
thick for anyone to read,” Berman said.
“So we made them shorter.”
“We” meant students as well as faculty
and administrators. Rather than a student
government and a faculty senate, Hampshire
has a community council of students,
faculty and staff. Even promotions—
Hampshire doesn’t offer tenure are decided
by a committee that includes two
students and five faculty.
“When people say it was an exciting
adventure to start a new college, that’s
true,” said professor Coppinger. “For me,
it was confusing. Everything was happening
at once in those days. The emergence
of the women’s movement, civil rights all
of these things were incorporated here. We
were probably the most politically correct
place in the world. Still are, sometimes
stiflingly so.”
A laboratory scientist and field biologist
who specializes in the study of the rare
New Guinea wild dog, Coppinger says he
was required to undergo sensitivity training
before beginning to teach. “When I talked
to people, I was supposed to keep my head
lower than theirs so they wouldn’t be intimidated,”
he said. And while he says the
original faculty was enthusiastic, Coppinger
recounted that “if there were 18 ideas
on the table, there were 18 positions. If
there was a mistake we made in the early
days, it’s that we tried to do too much. You
had to go to every damn meeting. There
were meetings to plan the meetings.”
Hampshire’s hyper-democratic structure
attracted more than its share of nonconformists.
One of the lecture halls that
first year was still unfurnished when the
students showed up, so they sat on the
floor—and liked it so much that they continued
to sit on the floor, even after the
desks and chairs arrived. In 1972, the head
of health services was compelled to ask
students and faculty members to refrain
from smoking cigarettes or marijuana
during classes, as it was distracting to those
who did not smoke.
Taking a cue from other universities’
anti-apartheid investment strategies, students
successively demanded that Hamp-shire
not invest its endowment in compa-nies
that produced nuclear, biological and
other weapons; operated in countries with
serious human rights violations or unfair
labor practices; discriminated on any
grounds; engaged in harmful environmen-tal
activities; marketed unsafe or impure
products; or had markedly inferior records
of occupational health and safety. Exas-perated,
the school’s trustees finally begged
the students to let them simply limit the
college’s stockholdings to companies considered
“good corporate citizens.”
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| Hampshire College geology professor John Reid and student Ivana Petrovska examine rocks
and slides in Reid's office. |
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“Some of the faculty here are still living
in the ’60s,” said John Reid, a geology professor.
“They’re against anything that
smacks of authority.” In fact, bumper stickers
in the parking lots read “Question Authority”
and “Free Tibet.” There was a big
flap over banning pets on campus, and
when the local newspaper ran a spread on
campus fashion trends, the Hampshire representative
was a man—modeling a designer
skirt and matching pumps. By the
1990s, one national college guide was describing
the school as a haven for “Birken-stock-
wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking
vegetarians.”
What really set Hampshire apart, however,
was its approach to education: an
individualistic system without majors, requirements,
examinations or even depart-ments,
successfully forestalling inter-de-partmental
competition for courses, stu-dents
and resources. Instead, there were
four schools: humanities and arts; language
and communication; natural science; and
social science. Those have since evolved
into the current five schools: cognitive science;
humanities, arts and cultural studies;
natural science; social science; and
the catch all school of interdisciplinary
arts.
In their first two years, a period
known as Division I, Hampshire
students do work in at least three of
these five schools, by either taking
courses or conducting independent
research, in something similar to
the core requirement of other liberal
arts colleges.
Division II, which normally begins
in the second year, represents
the start of the “concentration,”
roughly equivalent to a major. The
student selects two professors to
serve on his or her concentration
committee, and drafts a “concentration
statement,” or plan of attack,
for the following two or three
semesters, when he or she will write
papers or compile a portfolio relating
to the concentration
Division III, the final year, is
often a more in-depth look at a
specific aspect covered in Division
II. It consists of advanced courses, seminars,
assistant teaching, field research and a
project, which can be a written paper, a
film, an art exhibition, a performance or
some other final product.
Students also are expected to do community
service, which can range from participating
in the college’s governing council
to volunteering in a nearby mill town.
There is also something called a “third-world
expectation” (soon to be renamed
the “multiple cultural perspectives expectation”)
under which students show that
they have studied a third world or minority
issue.
One student concentrating in American
literature, for example, satisfied this expectation
by writing a paper on the Harlem
Renaissance. Another student, who is
planning to go to law school, researched
the experiences of minorities in the U.S.
justice system. And a student concentrating
in art history studied the depiction
of black women in French art. (Hampshire
itself has an enrollment that is ten percent
minority, lower than the 15 percent average
at New England colleges and universities.)
One of the greatest benefits Hampshire
offers its 1,160 students is the right to take
courses at Amherst, Mount Holyoke,
Smith and UMass, which together comprise
the Five College Consortium (collo-quially
known as the Five Colleges). Together
the five schools list more than 6,000
courses taught by 1,900 faculty; Hampshire’s
faculty numbers 92.
“In a sense, it doesn’t matter what we
offer because there’s always enough of
what you need at the Five Colleges,” President
Gregory Prince said. Professor Miller
added: “The reason we haven’t folded is
that if there’s a bright student here with an
interest in a particular thing, there might be
a faculty member over at Smith who’s good
at that.” In the last complete semester, 450
Hampshire students were enrolled in a
total of 725 courses at the other schools; 98
percent take at least one in their career,
and the average is six.
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Hampshire College President Gregory Prince, Jr. joins students in a campus lab.
Prince believes interdisciplinary education works for all students. |
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Within this structure, students mix academic
disciplines in extraordinary new
ways. They might use both genetics and
philosophy to study human gene therapy,
for instance, or combine biology and technology
to develop new technological
means of composting, or merge physical
anthropology with geology to learn what
teeth tell about nutrition, or combine conflict
resolution and dance to determine
how body language changes during medication,
or use physics and photography to
study the effect of different lens shapes.
“In the real world, things don’t follow a
catalogue of courses. They’re a mix of
things,” said Leslie Cox, Hampshire’s farm
manager. “Students can see that an interest
of theirs doesn’t have to be a major.”
Other schools have interdisciplinary
study, Glazer said. “It’s just different than
the way we do it. It’s in newer fields in the
sciences, for example, but it’s still very
respectful of the departmental model.”
At Hampshire, faculty from different
fields are forced by their students to collaborate.
“Some go into it kicking and
screaming, but often the faculty emerge
more changed than the students,” Prince
said.
That’s what makes it fun, according to
geology professor John Reid. “I have
gotten lured into research projects I never
would have been confronted with,” he
said. “It’s a lot more interesting if you’re
both trying to solve the same problem,
rather than just leaning on the shovel while
the students are doing the digging.”
Jessica Berube, a fourth-year student,
has combined history with environmental
studies to learn how humans relate to land
changes over time. “It’s been nice to be
able to combine them,” she said. “The
people who stay and are successful here
don’t want to be tied to a major.”
But Berube and others add that Hampshire
is not for everyone. “You can come
here and not know what you want to do,
just like at any college,” Berube said. “You
have to be very motivated to seek out the
specific area of study you want to follow. If
you come to Hampshire, you need to
know ahead of time that you have to motivate
yourself, and know you’re going to
have a lot of passion for it. You may not
have a test every couple of weeks, but you
need to be thinking ahead. If you run out
of time, you’re out of time.”
Thirty-three percent of Hampshire students
drop out. The national average is
about 26 percent.
“It’s meant for the independent thinker,”
said Kyle Bloomstein, who graduated
last year. “Nobody tells you to do your
homework. And that’s hard, because in
high school we were spoon-fed everything.”
Danny Holt, a second-year student and
gifted pianist who played Carnegie Hall at
the age of 19, chose Hampshire in spite
of its small music department after
attending the Interlocken Arts Academy, a
boarding high school for the arts. “After
doing that for three or four years, I had a
profound understanding of this little piece
of the universe, but there were a lot of
things I didn’t know about anything else,”
said Holt, whose studies combine cognitive
ethnomusicology with piano performance.
“I fell in love with the idea, with the freedom
and the flexibility. For me it really
worked. It doesn’t (work) for everybody.”
Some critics have derided the extent of
Hampshire students’ freedom. In 1984, a
student named Jon Dwork graduated after
submitting a Division III thesis entitled “A
Career in the Field of Flying Disc Entertainment
and Education.” The topic became
the subject of widespread ridicule,
but by the time the media had moved on to
the next story, Dwork had a job as a
Frisbee product development and
marketing consultant. He has since
authored several books, and today
has his own company, producing
concerts.
Not all Hampshire students have
such unconventional interests.
Nicole Brown, who graduated last
year, was originally visiting nearby
Smith College when she stumbled
across Hampshire, where she
learned she could immediately do
laboratory science work. “Hampshire
is known for its hippies and
those earth people, but it does have
its share of normal people,” said
Brown, who studied biochemistry
and molecular biology, and plans to
do research. “I’m one of them, and
I love it because it allows you to be
independent.”
Fourth-year student Sarah Tungstall,
who plans to become a doctor,
also found herself at Hampshire by
accident. “I always heard it was the
Frisbee school,” said Tungstall, who
grew up in the area. “I never had
any concept I was going to go here.” Then
she became a subject of a Hampshire
student’s Division III study of teenage girls.
“I went home and told my mother, ‘I’m not
going to Harvard. I’m going to Hampshire.
’ I was bored in high school. I never
read the books I was supposed to. I read
the books I wanted to. It’s easy to get
sucked into working for the grade. It’s
harder to think for yourself.”
Now Tungstall is applying to Harvard
Medical School. She hopes her Hampshire
record “sets me apart from the 6,000 other
people trying to get in. Whether that’s
good or bad, we’ll have to wait and see.”
That question is on a lot of Hampshire
students’ minds. The school’s official sample
transcript covers 25 pages, compared to
the two pages of a traditional university’s,
and the issue of whether graduate school
admissions committees bother to read such
long evaluations has already led some
counterpart schools to return to grades.
(Even at Hampshire, admissions officials
say, the most common inquiry they hear
from applicants is about graduate school
acceptance.)
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| Charlene D'Avanzo, a professor of ecology at Hampshire, and fourth-year student
Mika Matsui feed the fish at the campus aqua culture facility. |
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The faculty senate at UC Santa Cruz,
for instance, voted last February to reinstitute
mandatory letter grades after 23
years without them, effective next fall.
Critics who pushed for the change said
written evaluations take too long to write
and too long to read, and attract slackers—
“less-ambitious students who hope, not
without justification, that their mediocre
academic performance will be concealed in
a fog of verbiage,” according to the faculty
leader of the grades campaign, biologist
Lincoln Tiaz. He said the system gave the
university a reputation as “a flaky back water
of ’60s wannabes,” and compared
the narrative evaluations to the “embalmed
corpse of Lenin that had outlived
its revolutionary usefulness.”
Santa Cruz was not entirely typical.
Enrollment had grown to 10,000, with
plThe faculty senate at UC Santa Cruz,
for instance, voted last February to reinstitute
mandatory letter grades after 23
years without them, effective next fall.
Critics who pushed for the change said
written evaluations take too long to write
and too long to read, and attract slackers—
“less-ambitious students who hope, not
without justification, that their mediocre
academic performance will be concealed in
a fog of verbiage,” according to the faculty
leader of the grades campaign, biologist
Lincoln Tiaz. He said the system gave the
university a reputation as “a flaky back water
of ’60s wannabes,” and compared
the narrative evaluations to the “embalmed
corpse of Lenin that had outlived
its revolutionary usefulness.”ans to add another 15,000 over the next
ten years, and narrative evaluations had
become unwieldy anyway. Still, its defection
leaves only Antioch University in
Ohio, Evergreen State College in Washington,
and Hampshire from among the
original group of alternative programs,
along with a branch of the University of
Redlands in California, and Reed College
in Oregon, which uses a mix of grades and
evaluations. Kirkland College in New York
has affiliated with Hamilton, and New
College is now part of the University of South Florida.
“When you start talking about the Antiochs
and the Hampshires of the world,
you’re talking about excellent institutions
with reputations that precede them,” said
Jules LaPidus, president of the Council of
Graduate Schools. Still, he added, “You
have graduate admitting committees that
are swamped with applications, and they
are looking for more efficient ways of
doing this. So people tend to look at standardized
test scores and undergraduate
grade points. One- or two-page transcripts
along with test scores and letters of recommendation
are a lot easier to go
through than 25-page written evaluations.”
Nicole Brown, the Hampshire science
student, experienced this first-hand when
she applied for a summer internship at
Rutgers University. “[The advisor] just
looked at me when I told him that I didn’t
have any grades. He sat there for a good
five minutes, completely stunned. Then he
listened to me and was really impressed.”
Hampshire graduates last year went on
to Harvard, Yale and Columbia. The college
ranks 16th in the country in percentage
of psychology Ph.D.s, and has out-performed
New York University and
UCLA in the proportion of its alumni in
the entertainment industry. In all, 56 percent
of the school’s alumni have graduate
degrees.
Hampshire’s mere 8,650 graduates
include one Pulitzer Prize winner (Edward
Humes, then of The Orange
County Register, for his reporting
on the southern California military
establishment), 15 Fulbright and
two MacArthur genius grant
recipients, three Academy Award
winners and 15 Oscar nominees.
Among them are documentary
filmmaker Ken Burns, playwright
Naomi Wallace, producer John
Falsey, producer and director
Barry Sonnenfeld, and Jon
Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air.
“Hampshire isn’t for everyone,”
said Krakauer, who hitchhiked to
the campus when he was in high
school. “You have to have a great
degree of self-direction and
curiosity. But it suited me, and I
thrived there. People aren’t going
to lead you by the hand through
life, and Hampshire teaches you
that very early. You figure out how
to motivate yourself.”
Another alumnus, Aaron
Cohen, went on to get an M.B.A.
from Columbia and now builds
Web sites for what he calls
“communities of passion.” Two
fellow former ultimate Frisbee teammates
from Hampshire are on his management
team. Another, who designed a snowboard
for the disabled while at Hampshire, now
works as assistant product manager for
step-in bindings at Burton Snowboards.
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Student James has designed stairs and a grate that can be used to train
puppies that will later serve as guide dogs. |
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The snowboard—like the vegetable oil
tractor—was developed under the Lemelson
National Program in Invention, Innovation
and Creativity, which is based at
Hampshire and was endowed by the late
Jerome Lemelson, a prolific inventor of
everything from Hot Wheels cars to components
for laser-guided machines. A
foundation left by Lemelson, whose son
and daughter-in-law attended Hampshire,
has so far provided $4.5 million to encourage
inventiveness by university and
college students nationwide.
Prince sees this as a metaphor. The
Hampshire system “is an entrepreneurial
process,” the president said. “We’re asking
everybody to invent their education.”
(Something of an entrepreneur himself,
Prince helped negotiate the deal with Lemelson,
under which patents to the resulting
inventions are owned by the college,
which in turn gives Lemelson’s foun-dation
five percent of any royalties.)
Characterizing Hampshire as entrepreneurial
is at odds with its sometimes exaggerated
reputation.
“There’s a subset of the population that
is skeptical, and you have to overcome
that,” said Audrey Smith, admissions di-
rector. “When somebody sees Hampshire
as this flaky place, we have to communicate
to them that for a significant majority
of our population, this is a very serious,
rigorous institution.”
On the other hand, Smith said, “We are
so distinctive that Hampshire automatically
stands out. If you’re fundamentally
different, people are going to explore you,
and some people are appropriately going
to reject you when they learn how different
you are.” Fewer than ten percent of high
school students who ask for information
about the school actually apply—about
half the national average. (Though standardized
test scores are not required, those
students who submitted them last year
averaged 603 in math and 656 on the verbal
section of the Scholastic Assessment
Test (SAT).
Smith says the historic reticence to apply
has faded as the college has grown
older. “Increasingly, the parents we’re
dealing with are parents of the ’60s and
’70s who fully appreciate what Hampshire
can do,” she said.
Still, in a world where students are obsessed
about careers (and heavily indebted
for their college education including at
Hampshire, where annual tuition, room
and board is $31,606), some people see at-tending
a college like Hampshire as a risk.
“I think it’s gutsier to come to Hampshire
now than it was in 1970, because then the
outside world was more supportive of alternative
ideas,” said Berman, the dean of
the faculty. “I think we live in a more conservative
time. There’s no question that
higher education has been profoundly influenced
by the fact that parents and students
look at it as an investment. They want
to know what the payoff is going to be.
Even some supportive students gripe
about a lack of preparation for work.
“That’s my only complaint,” said recent
graduate Kyle Bloomstein. “I have no
marketable skills. It took me a long time
to put together a good resume out of
here.” After studying filmmaking, sustainable
agriculture, and ecological design,
Bloomstein worked as a supermarket pro-duce
manager and a landscaper, and now
plans to go to law school. “You have to
pay back the loans that demand the
career,” he said. “It’s not Hampshire’s
fault; it’s society’s fault.”
As faculty see it, another drawback is
that they have neither sticks nor carrots.
Said Glazer, “Your most obvious catalyst is
gone: that if you don’t get it in on time, it’s
going to affect your grade.”
Hampshire’s other major problem is financial.
While other, older institutions routinely
collect on bequests, Hampshire has
no alumni over 48 years old. Its endow-ment
is only $24 million, and in the past
there have been periodic salary cuts for
faculty and staff. A 25th anniversary campaign
raised $25 million, and another cam-paign
is planned but unannounced; most of
the money raised is to go into the endowment.
But Prince, who had just finished hosting
a weekly “breakfast with the president,”
at which he fielded appeals from
students for a campus center, said he sees
Hampshire as an ideal, and wants to
“Hampshirize” higher education.
“It’s what I think education ought to
be,” he said. “The energy of the ’60s is
preserved here. I’d rather be here with all
the challenges of an under-endowed institution
than at a highly endowed institution,
trying to move it in this same direction,
which I think many other schools will
ultimately do.”
