Hampshire College Conference

On June 13-15, 1966, the Officers of Hampshire College assembled The Hampshire College Conference, a small group of educators, artists, and intellectuals, at the Amherst College alumni House to discuss plans for the educational program of Hampshire College. Report written by Peter Schrag.

Excerpts follow. The full document is available in the Hampshire College archives.

The Quandary of Freedom
A commission to launch a new college, defined only as a coeducational liberal arts institution devoted to high quality instruction at the lowest possible cost, appears to be--and in fact is--a magnificent opportunity to begin without the overwhelming encumbrances, the overhead of tradition and vested interests, and the mortgage to time, alumni and ancient practice that affect all existing institutions. And Hampshire College, planned for 800 to 1200 students in the Connecticut Valley, begins not only with that freedom, but also with the promise of academic support--and therefore with at least some reflected prestige--from the four neighboring institutions, Amherst, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. It begins, furthermore, with a generous pledge of $6 million, with an attractive rural site of 450 acres, located roughly equidistant from the supporting colleges--and this in close proximity to a lively academic and cultural community--and with two proposals, the New College Plan of 1958 and the Hampshire College Advisory Committee Report of 1966, each of which provides ideas as starting points for discussion and planning.

Hampshire, however, is not necessarily committed to implementing either of the two proposals, or even to using any part of them. In fact, the college may choose whatever course its staff and trustees wish to follow. It is, literally, a new creature, free to choose or adapt from any existing educational ideas, or to invent new ones of its own. And since it is committed not merely to being experimental, but to experimenting, it has assumed what may be its greatest, and certainly it most basic responsibility: to be fresh, to be daring, and to develop as a continuing source of new ideas for itself and other institutions...(p. 2-3)

The Matter of Social Relevance
What kind of human being does Hampshire wish to produce? In one way or another, that question, asked early in the conference, continued to underlie the discussions. And despite disagreements about particular applications, there was also an assumed, though not always explicitly defined answer. In essence Hampshire must produce a human being who can come to terms with his culture without being its creature, who can be, as we were often told, "a man of his age," hopefully in the same sense that Newton or Beethoven were men of their respective ages. This means that he has a mastery--or better, has a sense of mastery--over the culture and society in which he will live--and that means well into the 21st century. We were almost unanimous in our concern about--and disdain for--the despair of alienation, the human being who assumes a posture of hopeless distance as a surrogate for genuine understanding, who has denied himself both the optimism that a genuinely rich life demands and the understanding and information necessary to relevant criticism and creativity...(p. 3-4)

As a consequence there was, throughout the conference, a continuing sense that the College must, in every respect possible, make itself part of the world--an open institution whose students and faculty are personally acquainted not only with the academic languages currently in vogue to describe the universe, but with the activities, and the major day-to-day problems that compose the contemporary world. No college, said Jerome Bruner almost at the outset, can be self-sufficient any more; each must be composed of people who hold some sort of dual citizenship. We thus came to the concept of teachers and students as performers, a concept that includes not only the familiar idea of the scholar-teacher, but also the relatively novel notion of the professor as composer or performing artist or--perhaps even--practicing politician; and of the student as a social activist and human entrepreneur. Such a notion would, for example, lead to the encouragement of students to gain experience in community action programs, in the Peace Corps or Vista, in business or political organizations. It might also lead to a reversal of the way the culture is studied, beginning, not, for example, with great literature, used, as someone said, to beat the contemporary society over the head (for its shallowness or its failure to produce Homeric heroes), but rather with the culture as it exists. Underlying such ideas was a general, though hardly unanimous, feeling that Hampshire College must offer programs and opportunities rooted not necessarily in traditional disciplinary organization, but in the central ideas, movements and problems that reflect the experiences of contemporary society and on which various methodologies can be exercised. (p. 4-5)

The Tent--And What Should Be Under It
The basic intellectual theme had to do with what was defined as developing "connectedness"--that is to focus the intellectual enterprise on the ability to generalize and synthesize, to put things together. Clearly such connections--between ideas, between pieces of data, between data and ideas, or perhaps even between feelings and information and ideas--cannot be made exclusively by teachers and books. Ultimately the student must be in a position to make these connections for himself. He may learn by watching a teacher make them, or even merely present them; that is, by being a spectator to good thought. But presumably he will learn more--as in almost every other situation--by making connections for himself. No one suggested a course in "connectedness." What was proposed, and generally accepted, was a style of approach operative within whatever courses and programs were established.

But perhaps the central feature of the tent proposed was, as already suggested in the previous section, a hospitality to contemporary life. It will be hard to forget Sister Jacqueline's statement that many contemporary academic institutions, in their implicit, if not specific, hostility to the existing culture, may become the cloisters of the modern world. We heard Ulysses Kay describe the idea of a staff musicologist as "absolutely deadly," heard him suggest a music staff composed of composers and directors and performers; heard Arthur Penn's description of the possibilities of writing a "novel" with a motion picture camera, and heard Charles Eames speak of the great creators of other ages as men who were creatures of their time. Benjamin DeMott suggested a program rooted in a study of mass culture, with advertising, films and pop music, each examined to achieve an understanding of what gives it appeal, to what purposes it is used, and how it is used. There was discussion of--and sympathy for--the use of machines, whether TV cameras or computers, in the functions of the college, not for the purpose of training technicians, but simply to give students a sense of the possibilities of the devices so often condemned by the critics of the society. A person fascinated with the technology of a gadget, suggested Jerome Bruner, can turn that device into a toy and then, conceivable, into an art form. (p. 6-7)

Program
There were more differences among us regarding program and structure than on general emphasis. A great deal of discussion took place regarding the degree of freedom of choice that students should be allowed. How much should undergraduates be involved in the development of academic programs and policy, not only regarding their own academic careers, but for the college as a whole? Clearly students should participate in their own education; the question is, should that participation come only at a personal intellectual level, or also at a policy level. We were confronted, furthermore, with a far more serious problem, and that was the question how to structure the institution in such a way that its program and attitudes would not harden into a new orthodoxy, a new "experiment" that would remain unchanged for as long as the institution shall live. Hampshire, we felt, should be a "deciduous college"--perhaps not even conceived as anything permanent and certainly not erected, as are so many others, as a monument, safe against the changes of time.

Whether conceived as permanent or not, Hampshire was inevitably pictured as organic rather than mechanistic, fluid rather than fixed, and we all assumed--despite differences on detail--a great deal of student choice within the program...Concern about producing a new kind of rigidity led to agreement that there should be no academic departments or even divisions that could eventually grow into vested interests; to a proposal for perpetual "institutional psychoanalysis," that is devices producing a constant flow of objective information whereby the college can evaluate itself; to a suggestion that tenure be tempered with turnover, and to a strong plea for a hortatory view of administration--an administration that provided an academic overview and direction, and did not leave all academic direction to faculty committees...(p. 8-9)

There was, perhaps, one general apprehension, though never articulated, and that was a fear of institutionalizing anything too definitely or permanently...There were similar apprehensions about defining the age or type of student who should be recruited, except perhaps to say, as did Charles Eames, that Hampshire should seek students who were "nuts about something," that is people with the ability to commit themselves fully to an enterprise...(p. 9-10)

Summary
Much was never discussed at all. Hampshire's task is, among other things, to offer high quality education at the lowest possible cost, and to utilize, where possible, the resources of the four cooperating colleges. Neither of these considerations received very much attention except for Professor Barber's assertion that the 20-1 student faculty ratio contemplated in The New College Plan was probably unrealistic. There was little consideration given to the problem of assessment and evaluation--to the matter of deciding just when, and on what basis a Hampshire student would qualify for a degree...At the same time there was, despite the diversity of views, a remarkable unanimity against almost all forms of academic dogma, a willingness to risk being incomplete for the sake of being consequential--to trade on a faculty and student sense of urgency--and a desire, almost without exception, to take a chance on students, to trust their ability to make connections, and to run the college to facilitate that process. Perhaps the most powerful impulse was the confidence in the perfectibility of education and in the ability of students to respond to it. (p. 10-11)