Amid news of its upcoming closure, some Hampshire College alumni are balancing mourning with sharing memories of their unconventional alma mater.
The Amherst, Mass., school announced this week that it would cease operations after its fall 2026 semester
WAMC spoke with graduates who span the school’s history – all describing an institution that broke new ground in higher education, but also had plenty of obstacles to face in its final years.
“I'm devastated,” says 23-year-old William Kisiel of Groton, Massachusetts. “I mean, I knew about Hampshire's financial issues, but … it was just the perfect school for me and what I wanted to study, and just specifically the community of it…”
It’s been a rough week for the students, faculty and alum of Hampshire College, not to mention recently-accepted students, like Kisiel.
It was early Tuesday morning when the campus community learned that, after almost a decade of trying to regain its financial footing and boost enrollment, the college would be shutting down permanently.
It means an end to the school’s unique takes on experiential learning, mentorship and connections to other members of the Five College Consortium, like UMass Amherst and Smith College: a system Kisiel was hoping to take advantage of as he transferred from Middlesex Community College.
“I'm interested in quantitative approaches to psychology and neuroscience, and I really feel like Hampshire was the best option for me and my goal, as I'm looking to get into a PhD program,” Kisiel explained during a phone interview with WAMC. “Hampshire, which is such a strong academic environment… I feel like, through the Five College Consortium, I could knock out all the [prerequisites] and have letter grades for a PhD application, and … work on Division 3 and interdisciplinary work at Hampshire and really contribute something and not just take classes…”
Kisiel says he’s now looking into other private, liberal arts schools like Bard College or Sarah Lawrence College, but after making it as far as attending “Accepted Students” day at Hampshire, he says he’s still processing grief over its closure.
Him, and much of the campus community, including about 750 current students and numerous alumni like Charles Hobby, who came to the school in 2012.
“I didn't really understand the concept of it until I went. I transferred in when I was 26 and it just … changed my life in so many ways,” Hobby told WAMC Tuesday, describing a campus that let them dive deep into creative writing and other areas. “I think for me, it was the first educational experience where I didn't feel like I was being judged or erased or coerced into something and the professors there were my colleagues and friends: helping me grow on a project.”
After feeling discouraged at the larger, busier Boston University, Hobby says Hampshire’s emphasis on portfolio and project-type work, deep diving into student-picked subject matter and more meant not just completing the program, but wanting to continue learning well-afterwards.
Nowadays, Hobby says they are back in school to become a teacher, something they attribute to Hampshire and its approach to learning in general.
“Hampshire is doing something that is incredibly different and, to me, is actually the purpose of education and it's really sad that we're losing one of the few places that seems to care about education as a concept and as a reality that shapes the world,” they added.
As alum like Gary Hirshberg tells WAMC, the world-shaping goes back to the school’s first classes in the early 1970s.
Hirshberg, a co-founder and former CEO of Stonyfield Organic, first set foot on campus as a student in 1972, not long after the college fully-opened, with some of its groundbreaking hallmarks already in action.
“It’s well-known [that] we had no requirements, no credits, no grades, no majors - so … you proceeded/matriculated through the process by contracting with individual committees of faculty who would agree to sponsor your idea, and then you were inventing it as you go,” he explains. “What that means is that if you didn't apply yourself, nothing got done. It wasn't a question of meeting their expectations: it was a question of driving your own bus.”
He says those faculty committees could be brutal, but that they also helped laid the foundation for student success of all kinds.
Hirshberg himself was focused on climate change as a student – a time when a pivotal "Inadvertent Climate Modification" study had just come out and, through the consortium, students could be put in contact with major researchers in the field, some of which went on to co-found the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Hirshberg says he took full advantage of that and related-courses. It was a path that would lead him toward organic farming and, ultimately, co-founding one of the largest organic yogurt companies in the world.
He, along with other alums like award-winning documentarian Ken Burns, would also go on to spend years supporting the school one way or another.
The support was needed, too: despite an early $6 million gift in the 1960s and other donations, Hampshire largely lacked the kind of large endowment many liberal arts colleges rely on, Hirshberg recounts.
“I've joked with some of my fellow alums … that Hampshire's greatest challenge is that not enough of us have died,” he said. “What I mean by that is… many other schools have benefited from generations of endowment-building, but Hampshire… I'm in the oldest group, and we're still in [our] early-70s.”
For context, Hampshire’s endowment was often in the tens of millions of dollars towards the end of its history – a significantly low figure compared to most colleges, especially the endowments valued between $1-3 billion at older, larger schools like Mount Holyoke and Smith.
Hirshberg would co-chair fundraising efforts for Hampshire and contribute heavily himself, especially in the wake of 2019, when the school’s financial situation seemed to reach critical mass.
A year prior, school leadership had reportedly been exploring the idea of a merger or partnership with another university (such talks involved UMass Amherst at one point).
It was a potential solution to hefty operating expenses (about $60 million in 2019) and student population that was steadily slipping, even before freefalling during the pandemic.
Vocal opposition to such a plan would emerge, presidents would change and turnaround efforts would go full-steam ahead, including a campaign to raise $60 million that was nearly reached before Tuesday’s closure announcement.
As alumna Judy Herrell of Herrell’s Ice Cream recounts, some significant reputational damage was done during the 2019 chaos, though there were reasons for optimism after major restructuring efforts and staff reductions.
“What [the college] had to do was monumental and to me, I could see that… it wasn't just money, it was returning back to the basics and that was going to be tough,” she said in a phone interview. “I was very, very hopeful that they would be able to do what they needed to do, and I think for the most part, they did. I think that the restructuring went well, I think looking for capital went well. I know the alumni basically stood up and tried to help as much as they possibly could,” she said. “I think the problem comes when you're in the news, and it looks like you may not be completely organized, even though they were. I think that what happens is people get this idea in their heads that, ‘Oh, I can't apply there: they don't have their acts together, I'm going to have trouble graduating,’ and I think that there was some of that, and that's one of the reasons they weren't getting as many students as they had been prior to the problem.”
Herrell also posits that over the years, Hampshire also had to deal with what she believes were misconceptions of what goes into a student’s time at the college, and how its unique take on “majors” and fields of study was seemingly misconstrued in the media and beyond.
“I also think that a lot of the news media mischaracterized what Hampshire is or was… is - I'm going to say ‘is,’ in the hopes that something turns around … but comments … about [things like] Johnny Dwork graduating with a degree in frisbee, which is not true - yeah, he played frisbee, and he used frisbee as an example of something - that kind of gave people this idea that Hampshire was a playground and it really wasn't,” she continued. “I've never been to a place that had such serious work going on all the time in my life. It was the place for people that were really serious about the work that they did, the changes they could make in the world, and how they could structure their lives … for continued change.”
She says her own studies honed in on not just food science, but also animal behavior and more. Her time as a student included learning from preeminent experts in their fields, like Raymond Coppinger, who's work included a massive, long-term study based out of the college, focused on livestock dogs and their behaviors and development.
Herrell tells WAMC that at the end of the day, the school’s heavy emphasis on faculty mentorship, its vast farm and livestock facilities in rural Hampshire County and other offerings led to an alumni network studded with award-winning researchers, artists and entrepreneurs.
All the while, the college broke new ground for colleges across the country.
“I think what they've lost is the Albert Einstein of education - the person who isn't perfect and starts off as a patent clerk and ends up developing an equation for relativity - if you know what I mean. The loss is going to be great … it’s going to affect generations to come, and I think that that's going to be a great loss for the world.”
It's a sentiment shared by Paul Bockelman, the Town Manager of Amherst where Hampshire is situated.
He tells WAMC that, for now, the town remains committed to working with the college, finding ways to support students and staff while also keeping tabs on what will happen to the nearly 700 acres of pastures, woodlands and other properties the college maintains in the town.
This, as he too mourns the loss of his alma mater: a college that convinced him to stick around in the area after he left his childhood home in Ohio to attend Hampshire: a school focused, in-part, on learning how to learn.
“I think the model of individualized education was not the norm when Hampshire started: it is more the norm now and, I think, at other institutions of higher education,” he told WAMC. “Probably the most important thing in my experience at Hampshire was… building my own education, [putting] me in great stead for graduate school because you have to do that more in graduate school on your own. Their motto is [Non Satis Scire] ‘To know is not enough’ … the goal is to learn how to learn."
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A shortened version of this story aired on Wednesday, March 15, 2026.
