My erstwhile colleague Gordon Snyder has a thought-provoking piece in the wake of the announcement of Hampshire College’s closing. It’s a call for repurposing it as an engineering school, using the same pedagogical approach that Hampshire College has used since its founding.
For those unfamiliar, Hampshire allows students to direct their own education on the theory that when they find the thing they care about, rigorous exploration and learning will follow. It has long been both selective and respected, even if it was somewhat overshadowed by some of the others in the Five College consortium.
(Although the timeline doesn’t work for it to be true, I’ve long enjoyed the rumor that the Scooby Doo gang was based on the Five Colleges. Amherst was Fred, Smith was Daphne, Mount Holyoke was Velma, Hampshire was Shaggy and UMass was Scooby. The rumor lingered as long as it did, I think, because it contained a kernel of truth.)
Pedagogically, there’s much to be said for the model. Snyder echoes a complaint I’ve heard from engineers I’ve known that new graduates have been trained to solve given equations, but engineers in the field have to solve messy problems that require them first to decide how to define the problems. Making the leap from problem sets to actual problems poses a challenge for people who have been selected for their ability to solve problem sets. It’s a variation on the difference between teaching to a test and helping students create.
If someone took Snyder up on the idea, finances and accreditation would pose immediate challenges—as his piece concedes—but those are fairly pedestrian concerns that could be addressed by locating a similar program in another institution. Academically, I’m not sure how a major with so many necessary prerequisites could unstructure itself without setting students up for disaster. Yes, self-direct if you want, but make sure to get multiple semesters’ worth of calculus, chemistry and the like, all in order and all in time. After checking the necessary boxes, the self-directed path starts to look a lot like the original one.
From a community college angle, though, I have to pause at the implied picture of the students.
For a relatively unstructured, project-based approach to work, students would need considerable time, continuity and personal attention. In practice, that would often mean students who start there as full-time first-years and go straight through. That has been the profile of Hampshire’s students, historically. I don’t mean to bash that cohort—I was a full-time first-year student myself, decades ago—but it’s a small and shrinking population, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. That’s part of what Hampshire was up against over the last several years.
I’ve been in enough transfer-focused conversations with four-year colleges over the years to know how they usually unfold. They’re all about matching checklists. The receiving college looks for courses that match their own, preferably in the same or similar order. Courses that don’t fit don’t get accepted for credit. That puts a real ceiling on interdisciplinary or exploratory courses at the two-year level, since they carry a disproportionate risk of not transferring.
When paths are more idiosyncratic, transfer becomes that much more fraught. How do students know what will carry over? For students of lesser economic means, the downside risk of taking a flier on something can be prohibitive. Those students are our core constituency. As Sara Goldrick-Rab likes to point out, they’re increasingly the core constituency for most of American higher education. For them, clarity registers as safety more than as constraint.
I’d love to see a political economy in which students generally can be economically secure and confident enough to take risks like these. The postwar boom era for higher education reflected an economy like that. But that’s not where we are, and it doesn’t seem at all like where we’re going. I’ve written before that public higher education in America is suffering because it was built to generate a middle class for a country that has forgotten that middle classes have to be created. The recent desiccated job market for new graduates puts an exclamation point on that idea. The students who can afford massive and expensive risks in this setting are few and far between.
Snyder’s idea has real merit academically and would save a beloved, quirky institution from the dustbin of history. But I’m afraid it requires an economy other than the economy that exists. Just ask our students.
