The Making of a College

Some of the most important founding documents of Hampshire College are collected in the book The Making of a College, which was published by Franklin Patterson in 1966. The Making of a College is (as of 2003) out of print but available in electronic form from the Hampshire College Archives.

President Ralph Hexter wrote The Making of a College 2.0, which is a separate document.

Excerpts
I present the following Report to the trustees of Hampshire College as the main outline of policies and plans that I wish to recommend at this time...

In my previous professional work, I had thought about schools and colleges from many points of view, but I had never faced head-on the whole question of what a college in this era should be and do. Suddenly, at the beginning of the summer of 1966, I found myself deeply involved in such a confrontation.

The experience was exhilarating and consuming. It was also more than a little humbling, as I began to realize the full reach of the question and the extent to which it had been treated in discourse and research. This realization grew as I became more familiar with the careful planning that had gone into the conception and revision of the New College Plan from 1958 onward. It increased as I talked with faculty and administrators from Hampshire College's sponsoring institutions Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It was compounded by consultation with other scholars, artists, scientists, foundation officers, government officials, and architects. And everything that I read in the literature of higher education confirmed that the question of undergraduate liberal education was, to put it mildly, an open one. Out of all this, in two short but enormously full months, came the Report's discussion and its framework of basic policy recommendations.

The preparation of the Report would not have been possible without the unstinting and constantly thoughtful assistance of my colleague, Charles R. Longsworth, Vice-President of Hampshire College. His counsel and ideas are reflected throughout the Report's recommendations. (p.v-vi)

As the summer began, I found that the question of making a college, in the case of Hampshire, must be asked in three different, principal ways. One needed to ask again, even though eight years earlier The New College Plan had given an answer: what should Hampshire College be as an undergraduate institution? One needed to ask further: what should the Connecticut River Valley complex of Massachusetts institutions be, and what role should Hampshire College play within the complex? And because the new college would inevitably affect and be affected by its non-academic environment, one needed to ask: how should Hampshire College participate in the changing community life around it?

The Report seeks to answer the basic question as it is asked in these three ways. It recommends that undergraduate liberal education at Hampshire College be even more thoroughly restructured, in terms of ends as well as means, than The New College Plan of 1958 suggested. It recommends that, as Hampshire College is established, the four sponsoring institutions and Hampshire take a giant step forward in interinstitutional cooperation, so the Valley complex may become one of the great coordinated centers of higher education in America. And it recommends that Hampshire College play an active part as a corporate citizen in contributing to the quality of life in the developing community of the Valley.

Taken together, these recommendations of the Report present a model for a total enterprise in higher education. They are designed not only to enlarge and strengthen higher education in the Valley, but to provide a major demonstration which would contribute to educational development in the New England region and the nation as a whole.

A bold demonstration of this order is sorely needed. Undergraduate liberal education in the United States faces social, curricular, and financial pressures that will not be denied. The fiscal base and academic viability of the private liberal arts college are everywhere precarious. Except for a few institutions whose endowments and achievements still insulate them, the independent colleges and many of the university undergraduate colleges are as much in curricular disarray as they are in chronically difficult financial shape. Strong, coherent interinstitutional collaboration--perhaps the main hope for adequate quality, balance, and fiscal efficiency in higher education for the era just beginning--lags far behind what is needed in the last third of the 20th century. And colleges and universities are only beginning to participate effectively as corporate citizens in modern community life.

The major demonstration recommended by this Report is directed at these needs. The design for Hampshire College calls for a redefinition of the purposes, structure, and operations of liberal education, to bring it in line with the needs of a new era. The College will explore ways the private liberal arts institution may regain a full relevance in American culture generally and higher education in particular, and do so within its own economic means. The design recommended for greatly increased interinstitutional cooperation in the Valley complex is capable of being adapted and used to advantage elsewhere. And the vigorous demonstration of a civic role for institutions of higher education could encourage similar initiative by colleges and universities in any community. I am convinced that Hampshire's pursuit of answers about its own proper role as a college, about the nature of cooperation among Valley institutions, and about institutional responsibility in an urban society may be of service to higher education as a whole.

The establishment of Hampshire College, and the demonstration I have touched upon, means that a host of practical problems must be met and solved. The range of these problems, in their size and complexity and number, is very great. Meeting and solving them will test the full resources of initiative and imagination that a new Board, a new faculty, and new administrative leadership can bring to bear. More than this, establishing Hampshire College and such a joint demonstration will test the meaning of interinstitutional cooperation in the Valley. There is always the possibility de Tocqueville wrote of, that men may "refuse to move altogether for fear of being moved too far," that they may not make, "when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose." The establishment of Hampshire and the strengthening of the Valley complex will require many hands and much time. Most of all, it will require in the beginning "a strong and sudden effort" by men and women who are convinced that such a venture is worth the boldness and energy it costs. (p.vii-ix)

What emerges is as accurate an approximation of Hampshire College as its present leadership can manage. I regard the word approximation as essential to emphasize, since the Report is not a precise blueprint, but one in a series of successive approximations of what Hampshire will be and do. Other approximations will follow, as the faculty and staff of the College grow, and as experience further informs its planning. The College cannot be given a static definition, since it will embody, as well as speak for, change.

Hampshire College, as the trustees intend, will be built on a campus of 450 acres of land in South Amherst, Massachusetts. The Report recommends that Hampshire be a coeducational undergraduate institution of approximately 1440 students and 90 faculty. It will be residential, but, as the 1958 New College Plan suggested, it will have neither fraternities nor sororities. It will have ample provision for intramural sports and recreation, but it is not likely to enter into intercollegiate athletics. Its academic program will be distinctive in its ends as well as in its means. And it will demonstrate that, through innovation, it is possible for a new private undergraduate college to achieve high quality without a continuing subsidy of its operations. (p.x)

The vision of liberal education taken by Hampshire College is one of hospitality to the possibilities of contemporary life: the task of the College is to help its students learn to live their adult lives fully and well in a society of intense change, immense opportunity, and great hazards. As the third chapter suggests, the College should: give students, for whatever use they themselves can make of it, the best knowledge new and old that we have about ways man may know himself and his world. This means that the College must help them acquire the tools with which it looks as though men in the future may be most likely to be able to build lives and a society they consider worthy. The most continually experimental thing about Hampshire College will be its constant effort, in collaboration with its students, to discern what these tools are and how best they may come to fit one's hand.

The College is committed to a view of liberal education as a vehicle for the realization of self in society. To this end, it will try to help each student gain a greater grasp of the range and nature of the human condition, past, present, and possible future. It will aim at assisting each student toward a greater sense of himself in a society whose meaningfulness and quality depend in significant degree on him. It will seek to strengthen his command of the uses of intellect to educate and renew himself throughout life. And it will try to enhance his feeling for the joy and tragedy that are inherent in life and art, when both are actively embraced. The total college program through which Hampshire will pursue these ends emphasizes intellectual inquiry, artistic experience, engagement with the non-academic world, and a college culture that will support these things. (p.xii)

As its main constituency, the College community will seek students of diverse backgrounds who are as able as those attending the other major institutions of the Valley. Hampshire will be an innovative, "experimenting" place, giving its students an approach to liberal education that emphasizes understanding self and society through fields in which inquiry and expression are the central concern of study. The College's intention is to equip students as well as possible to handle their own education and their own realization as people. Such preparation cannot usefully be given in wholly abstract terms. From the beginning, therefore, students at Hampshire will have a good deal of experience with self-direction in their studies and campus life. They will face, in consequence, the responsibilities that go with increasing degrees of freedom for a mature person. While Hampshire will be innovative, innovation will not be an end in itself, and its students will not be those who are simply attracted by "experimentation" for its own sake. Hampshire's students will have to be abler to handle responsibility, abler to learn discipline of self in study and campus life, than most students at most colleges are expected to be. At their best, they will be like the best of American students today--neither privately disaffiliated "achievers," technocratic conformists, nor deviants. I hope they will be questioning themselves and the society they find themselves in. I hope they will look for honesty in the values of society, be contemptuous of fraud when they are sure that is what it is, be willing to go down hard roads that make genuine sense, and be unafraid to laugh.

Hampshire will build a faculty devoted as much to teaching in the terms the College stands for, as to scholarship and art. The Hampshire faculty will have, as its largest group, very able young men and women who are still relatively close to college age themselves. The second largest group will be senior faculty members, men and women of professor's rank, with mastery of their fields and a right to the title of master teacher. The third and smallest group will be faculty in mid-career, similarly in touch with the frontiers of their fields and with teaching, their fullest years yet ahead of them. Faculty salaries, tenure, and similar matters will be governed by standards comparable to those at other undergraduate institutions of high quality. Within the College's general framework of purposes and its accent on the centrality of method in disciplines of inquiry and expression, faculty will have unusual freedom to teach in terms of their own principal intellectual or artistic interests.

The organization, government, and administration of the College will be committed, as will the campus design, to building an academic community where intellectual and artistic discourse is as easy and natural outside the classroom as it is inside. The College will be guided by the basic policy decisions of its trustees and the leadership of the president, who serves at their pleasure. But the internal governance of the College will be shaped by all of the community's constituencies. The major governing bodies of the community will be few, but students will have representation on each of them. Faculty will have at least as much voice in shaping the academic affairs of the College as they have at Hampshire's sister institutions. Over-administration, as well as over-committeefication, will be avoided like the plagues they are. Presidential leadership will not be equivocal, but will articulate alternatives, project goals, and mobilize the energies a vigorous institution requires.

The community of the College, not only in residential terms but in many academic and administrative ways as well, will be decentralized. The design of the College will feature a series of residential-academic clusters, each of about 360 men and women students, grouped loosely around a central College and library complex. These clusters will be known as Houses. Each will have its unique identity in architecture and in the qualities given to it by students and faculty. Each House cluster will combine student residential units with related academic facilities, including individual office-studies for at least sixteen faculty members from the four Schools. The House in each case will have a Master, a senior faculty member provided with a commodious residence, who will give approximately half of his time to administrative responsibility for the House. Each House will have, as well, a full-time Proctor or executive associate of the Master, also with a separate residence. Provision is made in each House cluster for the separate residence of two younger faculty members and their families.

Master planning of the whole campus is currently being done by Hideo Sasaki, a noted landscape architect, and his colleagues in the firm of Sasaki, Dawson, and DeMay. The design and development of the House clusters and the central College complex are in the hands of Hugh Stubbins, one of America's most distinguished architects. In addition, the trustees and the College administration are advised on general architectural questions by Pietro Belluschi, former Dean of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I trust that we may create a campus that will not be a walled tower but an open city, that will allow for individuality, for unity, for urban intensity and rural serenity, for a sense of connection and a sense of detachment. Among other things, we want to create a campus which will respect the great natural beauty of the land as the setting of its human community. (p.xvii-xx)

The financial projections for Hampshire College, and for a rapid strengthening of the cooperative institutional environment in which the College will be set, are presented in the ninth chapter. From these it is apparent that given support to meet its capital requirements and initial operating deficits, Hampshire College could thereafter manage on its own. In doing so, it would demonstrate the proposition put forward by the 1958 New College Plan: that a private institution of academic excellence can be organized to function on its tuition income. It is also apparent from the projections what would be required to demonstrate the advantages of active, serious collaboration among an important group of public and private institutions.

These projections together make clear the dimensions of "the strong and sudden effort" which I recommend as the proper course for Hampshire College and the institutions which have helped bring her into being. The delivery of the College into the world is not an event discrete from the needs and purposes of the Valley community of institutions. As the conception of the New College in 1958 was an expression of the linked interests of institutions, the birth of Hampshire College is a time to strengthen the family of which it is a part.(p.xxii)