Hampshire College accepted me wholly in a way so unique and precious that it deserved preservation.
Instead, today, I mourn its loss.
Hampshire College was the only institution to ever give me grace. Every crack I could have slipped through was patched. Every plea for help answered.
I wasn't coddled but I was supported in a way that I had never felt before.
When I applied to Hampshire I was already a college dropout with no prospects and I said as much in my application essay. I wrote about how Hampshire was really my only hope at a higher education and that being there was what I wanted most. The admissions office did everything in their power to make my admission plausible. They listened to my case. They let me interview twice. They made reasonable accommodations for my unique circumstances and didn't make me feel weird about asking for them.
Hampshire has always been painted as a weirdly brilliant place full of weirdly brilliant people but there for the first time in my life I felt normal. I felt comfortable. I felt like I belonged flaws and all and I think alot of my peers felt the same.
Hampshire students had a solidarity unlike anything I had ever seen. We were all vastly different with our own obsessive fascinations but we shared an ethos that spanned generations. We wanted to do things our own way and the only expectations we would be crushed by were our own. Each Div III submission a testimony to a collective drive unmatched by any other student body.
Hampshire was never a school for cowards. Enrolling was either an act of bravery or foolishness with no beaten path to walk on. You could get lost. Many did, but many more found their way out better off for it.Our social contract was something other students at nearby schools could never quite understand. Even for new students and faculty it was hard to grasp. We saw ourselves as equals amongst eachother and our faculty and staff. We respected our professors and their expertise but would never call them, "professor", outside of formal introductions. That was something only visiting students from the other four colleges seemed to do.
As the college closes or is somehow miraculously resuscitated a second time I'm finding comfort in the writings of people who were there. It helps to remember that others may know what it was like to spend a warm spring day reading amongst the bees and blossoms in the cherry tree outside of Merrill, or how it felt to hear the steady stream of bass grow closer as you wandered further along a trail of glowsticks into the woods on a moonlit night. Did you ever borrow a book from Lynn Miller? Did Jim the postmaster know you by name? Did you ever ring the Div III bell in a burnt out haze with your parents smiling in every photo?
I met the love of my life outside the yurt. Rainbow chalk streaked down their face as they sketched along the paved path under the shade of the trees on a hot late summer day. I know I'm not the only Hampshire student to fall in love along that path but I'm devastated that I will be among the last.
Hampshire gave me so much that I can't quite accept that it won't be around to change the life of another like mine.
Did you ever use one of Donna Cohn's carts? Or stay late past Lemelson closing time without Glenn noticing?
Do you remember the sound of Lee Spector laughing at one of your corny jokes during a lab meeting?
Has Herb Bernstein ever called you a d-bag? Have you ever asked him, "Herb, why do you have to be such an a**hole", only for him to reply, "Yeah... why do I have to be such an a**shole?".
Did you see Ken Hoffman's arboretum? Did David Kelly ever mislead you with misinformation about the number 17?
Were you ever impressed by how Sarah Hews seemed to be able to do it all or how Geremias Polanco Encarnacion would take all the time in the world just to teach you something he thought you really needed to know.
Did you ever notice how incredible Joan's notes were for every School of Natural Science meeting? Or how she knew all of the students who walked through Cole by name without the need for an introduction?
Remember the first time you happened to run into an alumni in the coolest of places? Doing the coolest of things? What about the second time? The third? The fifth?! Wasn't this college supposed to be small??
Did you ever just roll up to a conference eight friends deep after sharing the same janky lodging for the night just for a chance to hangout with the authors of your favorite paper?