Hampshire College

I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in...

I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in love with Hampshire College, and I can’t imagine being anywhere else right now. I can’t even describe how cool and eye-opening this place can be if you let it. Maybe I say that because I am not jaded by the whole thing yet, but that’s what I’m feeling right now.

I liked Hampshire. It made both my...

I liked Hampshire. It made both my mind and soul richer. Hampshire, at its best, is about rejecting both individualism or conformity in learning, displacing both in the spirit of the creative, cooperative generation of knowledge. And if you decide to go there, keep in mind that it is part of your implicit learning experience to try and understand this, and defend it with all your might, so that there can remain one more place among the few in America where knowledge is bound to soul, and we are not given the false choice between doing as we’re told and doing what we want. Instead, we are expected to lose ourselves in creating knowledge, and the purity of that is an experience any real student must have at least once so they can understand, with mind and body and spirit, the true power of honest thought and work, undertaken in a supportive community, against the barbarous lies that populate and govern our nation today.

I have very ambivalent emotions...

I have very ambivalent emotions about Hampshire College. Sometimes I love it, and sometimes I love hating it. I have often wished to be some place else because of the numerous problems of a school trying to be unconventional in unconventional ways. But then I realize, too, that there is a lot to love about Hampshire. I don’t know of a conventional school where the students take their class discussions to the dining hall to debate the issues with their friends from all sorts of other fields in order to get a deeper and clearer understanding of what they are learning. I don’t know of a conventional institution where sexuality is so demystified that there are unisex restrooms everywhere and an overall respect for sexuality and sexual orientation. I don’t know of a conventional institution where you address your professors by their first names, not because you consider yourself their peers, but because you share a mutual interest and respect for what each one brings to the learning table.