An Open Love Letter to Hampshire College

Here’s to the future home of the Thriver. A student who “outpaces their own learning” in a “solitary race without clocks or other contestants,” seeking a path that defies incremental career progression in favor of aiming big.

My love affair with Hampshire is not unique to me. My wife Patty Huff Solomon (F78) and her Facebook are blowing up with remembrances, stories, and perspectives. I look forward to diving into that gusher of a manifesto. Here are mine:

As with many Hampsters, my bond with Hampshire exceeded its label as a small New England liberal‑arts college. It mattered more than projected salaries, professional networks, or the rarified spoils of a BA. Hampshire was the longing glance I cast at its catalog when I was ready to flee the rote rituals of high school, the mercurial cruelty of a stepfather, and the suburban trappings of my parents’ deferred ambitions. I had no map, but native Long Island was already in the rearview.

Flash Forward #1

April 14, 2026 — four hours after the official announcement. Students, the president, board members, staff, and alumni gathered under a heavy emotional cloud that soon split into grief and the anger of betrayal. The one moment of unbridled applause was in appreciation of the faculty for their talent and the sacrifices they’d made, which surged through the room and amplified the outrage. Later we learned many faculty had waived retirement benefits in their contracts — another postponement of an inevitable cost.

I had no plan after Hampshire beyond serving some nascent horizon‑gazing project that defied an incremental career progression. Would I have embraced Hampshire as fully had I come from a more nurturing domestic scene? I hadn’t yet learned that outpacing my own learning is a solitary race without clocks or other contestants. I wouldn’t have traded that time for a conventional track. I found a self‑designed curriculum that was not a canned alternative to traditional majors but a rallying cry, an explicit rebuttal to bell‑curve thinking and the cattleprod of standardized academic norms. It justified aiming big and carving a path outside well‑worn career tracks.

Institutional Missteps

Hampshire never fully capitalized on its promise as an academic haven for self‑directed learning. Its uniqueness was marginalized and co‑opted by peer schools who allowed students to declare a major supported by course work. Independence framed by Hampshire meant that each student was responsible for all curricula – the full package. This uniquely Hampshire approach wasn’t fully realized in Hampshire’s own marketing. Why did the sauce remain secretive? Focusing on Division-immersed students and their committees was a first-mover leadership advantage. Instead it reads to me in retrospect as a missed opportunity to engage the independent learners who would thrive at Hampshire.

That botched advantage wasn’t limited to academics. There were the group dynamics of the shared housing arrangements that played out in one of Hampshire’s three modular communities. The makeshift support structure of the mods was another notable interpersonal asset of Hampshire that would have been alien to the dorm life of most schools.

Flash Forward #2

But Hampshire mods were never treated as catalog items or marketing assets. That’s curious considering Jenn Chrisler’s tearful observation in the Crown Center announcement of the school’s closing that it’s “always been about the people.” That extends to the lifelong friendships we share as Hampsters. This includes the generous chunk of attendees who never graduated but are counted as alums regardless.

Her poignant comments also served to divert our attention to the non-people assets of the college and the auto-pilot state of the campus infrastructure. The core legacy buildings (Franklin Patterson, Johnson Library and Cole Science) are all long-delayed makeovers. The grounds will always be hallowed but the grounds-keeping remains neglected. We had the living building (the Kern Center) as our beacon of hope, if not solvency. We will always cherish the ugly Bauhaus architecture that anchored the campus.

Post‑Hampshire Trajectory

When I left Hampshire in 1984, my future focus shifted to the 1985 job market, not to legacy, mentoring, or stretching my meager income beyond the coupon book of student loan payments. I would have called you a euphoric trust fund fraud if you had told me then I’d be a reliable phone bank volunteer on future capital campaigns.

Like most of you, I am despondent about an outcome that was always looming but pushed aside by blind optimism (the most efficient of all wishful delusions).

Hampshire has long carried a strain of hard‑left determinism. At times, that outlook proved prescient — its early‑1980s push for divestment from South Africa is a good example of anticipating the broader arc toward justice. Certainly the contemporary parallels of the Netanyahu government reflect these same collective actions. Lately, however, that same impulse has often narrowed into signaling, focused more on performative observance than on structural change.

The willful surprise at Hampshire’s collapse rested on three assumptions:

First, that same beacon of self‑directed education that once attracted generations of graduates would continue to draw a steady stream of independently minded iconoclasts.
Second, that the college could rely on robust fundraising from those like‑minded boomer alums.
And third, that some hard-headed financial maneuver, selling land, restructuring debt, etc. would bridge the cash gaps. At least until the estates of the early‑seventies classes (the original, true believers) could come home and bolster the school’s meager endowment.

Resolutions for Life

On a personal level, we’re all quite saddened and even a little chastened. Coming of age in the doubtful seventies turned out to be perfect preparation for a Hampshire education: question everything, resist convention, and bring skepticism to problem‑solving rather than to resignation. It’s a bitter reality that, at a moment when those habits are most needed, we’re losing institutions built to cultivate them.

It’s also true that Hampshire never carried the prestige that smooths a résumé in the corporate hierarchy. A Hampshire degree never inspired confidence in any hiring manager I encountered. But once inside the door, there was never a broken process, an unexpected obstacle, or a choice between two bad options that left me feeling unprepared. Especially where there was no authority, no budget, and no clear structure. Maybe that’s what Ken Burns meant when he said he learned “everything” at Hampshire.

That expansive assessment traces my path and the virtues lauded in Division II and III. I never thrived in roles that asked me to replace the last person and reproduce a menu of pre-qualified outcomes. When others see a daunting problem, I think, “I got this” – so long as there are no unbending rules, barricades, class attendance requirements, or competitive scoring of grades. Those are the moments I step into shoes no one has yet walked. I learned that situational confidence from my people: my Hampshire professors and peers.

Flash Forward #3

I fully expected to spend my retirement years in the service of protecting and extending the Hampshire dream to what the school’s former CMO, David Gibson, referred to as “The Thrivers.” Those rare minds for whom Hampshire isn’t a fit but the only sensible choice. I wanted to spend my retirement years in support of strengthening the Hampshire mission.

The best outcome for preserving Hampshire ideals is to embed them in the redoubling of commitment to the liberal arts. That’s not about addressing the bleak business concern of declining enrollments. That’s about a future where independent thinking is valued over wholesale acceptance of automated commands and synthetic suggestions. That’s where a love for Hampshire lives on beyond the world we will know.

Hampshire’s Emergent Focus on Merit in the Post AI Era

Why the College’s consequential model of independent inquiry and world‑building is one answer to higher education’s looming obsolescence.

As higher education confronts its AI-driven future, the outlook is increasingly sobering. Classrooms are grappling with rampant plagiarism, while graduates enter a job market where traditional academic skills are becoming obsolete. Because Generative AI can now pass standardized tests and write high-level essays, the old markers of success — high test scores and GPAs — are being exposed as little more than “word probability parlor games” rather than reflection of any true human capacity for problem-solving.

Reclaiming the Human Element: Intelligence and Resilience

Noted social observer David Brooks argues that elite institutions have become engines of social alienation by treating IQ as a measure of “inherent worth”. This narrow focus on raw intelligence creates technocratic managers who excel at closed-system puzzles but lack cultural relatedness. When self-worth is tied exclusively to these standards, a fragile identity crumbles once machines outperform humans in traditional “status” tasks like writing code or summarizing briefs.

Hampshire College serves as a vital counterpoint by prioritizing perspective-taking and self-discovery over standardized metrics. In an AI-integrated world, this distinction is essential. While AI can synthesize data at an infinite scale, it cannot replicate the social and emotional intelligence required to understand the “why” behind the “what”. Hampshire students derive their worth from their ability to pose unique questions and forge their own paths, seeing AI not as their ghostwriter or threat to their ego, but as a tool for deeper exploration.

From Compliance to Collaborative Problem-Solving

A second failing of the traditional meritocracy is the assumption that school success translates to life success. Elite colleges often produce “excellent sheep” who are masters of individual compliance but lack the hands-on resourcefulness required for complex societal problems. In these competitive, zero-sum environments, collaboration is often viewed as a risk, leading to a culture of teaching to the test.

Hampshire’s grade‑free curriculum and its focus on urgent challenges—such as the climate crisis and a post‑truth future—act as the structural antidote to this rigidity. By removing the pressure of a GPA, the college cultivates a community of resourcefulness where students learn not just to confront large‑scale problems, but to world‑build within them. In this environment, students treat AI as a generative tool for exploration rather than a final, unassailable answer. They recognize that while AI can frame data, it cannot supply the moral clarity or community‑rooted empathy required to design trustworthy human systems—systems that must ultimately be imagined, constructed, and stewarded by people, not algorithms.

The Division III Engine: Inventing the Test

The cornerstone of the Hampshire experience is the Division III process, a uniquely rigorous capstone that defines the college’s intensive concentration. While traditional “ivory towers” reward students for clearing hurdles designed by others, Division III requires students to “invent the test”. This depth of sustained inquiry is precisely what is missing from elite models where students fixate on grades while remaining disengaged from their own learning.

For an entire final year, Hampshire students sit fully in the driver’s seat, steering a project with no template and no inherited roadmap. This demands discipline, negotiation, and the ability to run a startup of the mind, which is why the college consistently produces entrepreneurs and independent researchers.

In a post‑AI world, this becomes a genuine advantage: because the culminating work must be original and self‑directed, AI remains a tool for research rather than an uncredited author. Hampshire’s model is, in this sense, a natural fit for a transitional era that no one is instinctively prepared to lead, precisely because its unprecedented nature requires learners who can chart their own course.

Conclusion: A Harbinger for Higher Education

The rise of generative AI is a final warning: if we continue to prize only testable intelligence, the machines have already surpassed us. Hampshire offers a different vision. One where independent thinking is non‑negotiable and human‑machine collaboration is guided by the curiosity and creative intent of the learner.

Despite its financial precarity, Hampshire remains a necessary counterweight to the conformity of traditional elite education. Thriving in an automated future requires models that cultivate clarity, empathy, and the courage to think beyond inherited scripts. The qualities that keep us stubbornly, brilliantly human.

Hampshire’s model is, ultimately, a natural fit for a transitional era that no one is innately prepared to lead, precisely because its unprecedented nature demands a new kind of educational imagination.

Buy Out the Empire: Making an Offer He Can’t Refuse

(Taking Up) The Collection

An Exit Strategy for Trump 2, Year 2

Taking Up The Collection

The Collection is a collective action to disrupt and dethrone the Imperial Presidency by gamifying dissent and offering a massive, 24/7 “Exit Jackpot” to reclaim the American republic.

Deal Making as a Rite of Passage

As the presidency transitions from a public office to a luxury brand, the opposition must stop reacting and start negotiating. Welcome to “The Collection,” a high-stakes digital series that frames the “Imperial Presidency” as a distressed asset ripe for a corporate buyout.

This isn’t a fundraiser for television ads; it’s a live, 24/7 “Exit Jackpot” offered to the President in exchange for his immediate resignation. By contrasting “Royal Spend” pageantry with the systemic gutting of the American safety net, the show gamifies dissent. It transforms the public from passive victims into active shareholders, making an offer no “man of the deal” can ignore.

Speculative Repair List

To win, the opposition must control the narrative by treating “The Collection” as a high-stakes spectacle. This isn’t a standard fundraiser; it is a strategic “priming of the pump” designed to maximize both viewership and capital through collective action.

Trump will likely sense the trap. The Collection weaponizes ridicule, exposing his thinning skin while highlighting the massive national debt – the “Royal Spend” – accumulated under his watch. Unlike traditional protests, he cannot simply shout over this format. As he retaliates with legal threats and censorship, the opposition should double or triple matching funds, using his aggression to fuel the jackpot.

If his desire for vengeance leads him to suppress the event, that very interference should trigger the endgame: a final “Priority Vote” where the public instantly earmarks and distributes the funds.

How would that work?

Enter The Imperial Ledger

Pilot Episode 101: “The Cost of the Crown” | Date: Immediate Future

CUE 1: A high-contrast, “Late-Night Noir” aesthetic. The HOST stands before a massive digital screen – The Ledger – scrolling with gold-on-black text and ticker tape numbers.

HOST: Good evening, citizens. Welcome to the first edition of The Imperial Ledger, the only accounting firm authorized by the reality of your own bank accounts.

Since the Restoration began in January, we’ve been told we’re living through a “Golden Age.” But gold is heavy, and someone has to carry it. Tonight, we look at the balance sheet for the 47th Presidency as we closed out 2025.

CUE 2: A 3D rendering of the White House displays The East Wing highlighted in red, then dissolves into a pile of digital rubble.

White House East Wing demolished as Trump moves forward with ballroom construction, AP photos show, Darlene Superville; Jacquelyn Martin, Associated Press, October 23, 2025

HOST: Item one on the Ledger: The Demolition of History. In October, the President decided the East Wing – a fixture since 1902 – wasn’t “ballroom” enough. He tore it down. In its place, we’re getting a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot “State Ballroom.” It’s designed to hold 999 people – because 1,000 would be “ostentatious,” I’m sure. The White House calls it a “National Security” priority. Apparently, our primary defense against foreign threats is a really, really big dance floor for donors from BlackRock, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and Amazon.

Billionaires at Trump’s inauguration hold wealth equal to 1/3 India’s GDP, Vasudha Mukherjee, Business Standard, January 21, 2025

CUE 3: The Ledger scrolls to a list of names: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

HOST: Next, the Branding Fee. As of late December, the Kennedy Center is officially the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” Because nothing says “Performing Arts” like a hostile takeover by the Chairman of the Board. The new gold signage is still fresh. It’s the ultimate Participation Trophy: President Trump didn’t win a Grammy, so he just bought the building.

CUE 4: The Ledger shifts to the “Repair List” for the common man. Numbers start spinning rapidly.

Quiet Over Trump’s Kennedy Center Grab Risks Capitulation, Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beat, February 13, 2025

Three Repair Worthy Collections

Some viable candidate causes include:

A. The Nutritional Safety Net (Repairing Food Security)

The Fix: Funding “Community Granaries” in the 2,000+ counties most affected by inflation and benefit rollbacks.

With the administration’s proposed $300 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), an estimated 16 million children face reduced access to food.

HOST: But let’s look at the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” While you were busy getting your $25,000 tax deduction on tip income — if you’re lucky enough to make that much in tips…

#	Impact Area	Measurable Change & Outcome
1	Medicaid Funding Chasm	Bans “provider taxes,” stripping states of $340 billion in revenue used to draw down federal Medicaid matches.
2	SNAP Benefit Erosion	Cuts federal food assistance by $187 billion (20%), forcing a 30–50% surge in demand at local food banks.
3	Admin Compliance Surge	Forces states to build IT systems to track 80-hour/month work requirements for millions of Medicaid/SNAP recipients.
4	State Revenue Drain	Automatic tax conformity is projected to slash state revenues by $100M to $1.2B per state (e.g., Colorado, Arizona).
5	Healthcare Churn Risks	CBO predicts 11.8 million people will lose coverage, increasing “uncompensated care” costs for providers by an estimated 15%.
6	Work-for-Benefits Mandate	Requires 80 hours/month of work or community service for Medicaid/SNAP recipients (ages 19–64).
7	Medicaid Cost Sharing	Implements co-payments of up to $35 per service for ACA expansion adults (income 100–138% of FPL).
8	Graduate Loan Caps	Limits federal borrowing for Master’s degrees to $20,500/year, forcing students to seek private loans for excess costs.
9	SNAP Exemption Removal	Subjects 300,000+ veterans and formerly homeless individuals to the 3-month benefit time limit.
10	Coverage Loss Forecast	CBO projects 10.9 million people will lose health insurance by 2034 due to eligibility and subsidy changes.

That’s the trade: You get to deduct the interest on your new car loan, but your neighbor’s kid doesn’t get lunch. That’s the “Imperial” exchange rate.

CUE: Proportion of Elon Musk’s stock options that would cover the SNAP shortfall…

Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America, Rebecca F. Elliot; Jack Ewing; Reid J. Epstein, New York Times, November 6, 2025

B. Healthcare Restoration (Repairing the Safety Net)

After the only town hospital closed, a North Carolina city blames politicians: There’s no help for you here, Amanda Seitz; Allen G. Breed, The Independent, May 20, 2024

Current budget projections include a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid over the next decade. This is estimated to leave roughly 10 million to 11.8 million Americans uninsured.

The Fix: A “Mobile Health Corps” specifically for rural areas where 1 in 4 residents currently relies on Medicaid for primary care and birth coverage.

HOST: “Last month, 12 rural hospitals in the Midwest closed their doors due to the Medicaid ‘Efficiency Purge.’ Tonight, your Priority Vote can move $50 million of the Collection’s interest directly to these facilities. You have the power. You have the funds. Don’t just watch the empire rise. Fund the restoration. Take up the Collection.”

The Jackpot is growing. But while the President waits for the right number to step down, the clock is ticking for the rest of us.

CUE: Somber, black-and-white footage of a closed rural medical clinic. A small child sits on the steps. A countdown timer appears in the corner.

C. Small Business Tariffs Relief (Repairing the Bootstrap Work Ethic)

Trump’s First Year Back, in 10 Charts, Steven Rattner, New York Times, December 27, 2025

Recent trade barriers have hiked raw material costs by an average of 22%, leaving local manufacturers unable to compete with subsidized global giants. Projections suggest 15,000 small-town family businesses will shutter by year-end without immediate intervention.

The Fix: Direct “Bridge-to-Build” grants for businesses hit by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” trade policies. Provide immediate liquidity and supply-chain pivoting funds for domestic businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

HOST: Which brings us to why we are here. The President knows he is bored by the price of housing. He’s not focused on the cost of healthcare. He’s above the concerns of the majority of Americans that come from more modest roots and less favorable gene pools. And he loves a deal. And we know he loves to move on when the price is right.

Trump Attacks Obamacare Without a Health Plan, Dean Baker, CEPR, October 6, 2025

CUE: The host points directly into the camera:

So, it’s time for the Final Collection. If the cost of his “reign” is too high for the Constitution, maybe it’s just low enough for a buyout. We are opening the “Self-Removal Fund.” A golden parachute so large, so beautiful, so massive that even he can’t say no to a private retirement in Mar-a-Lago permanently.

“Look at the Ledger. Look at the ballroom. Look at our neighbors. Then, look at your phone. Take up the Collection. Contribute to the Jackpot for his early exit. Let’s make him an offer he can’t refuse – before there’s nothing left of the People’s House but the gold leaf.”

Why “The Collection” Works Where Politics Fails

Conventional political channels – courts, legislation, and traditional protests – rely on norms that the current “Imperial Presidency” has already discarded. These methods are too slow, predictable, and easily ignored by a leader who controls the narrative through sheer media saturation.

“The Collection” succeeds by moving the battlefield from the ballot box to the balance sheet. By treating a President with a 36% approval rating as a “distressed asset,” it converts abstract frustration into a tangible, ever-growing Buyout Number to cap his insatiable temperment. This format strips the leader of his narrative dominance, relegating him to a mere contestant whose only move is to quit. It traps a “man of the deal” in his own branding, forcing him into defensive, damaging optics that traditional politics simply cannot achieve.

Heading Trump Off at the Institutional Standoff Corral

Institutional Capture: Legislative and judicial checks are increasingly slow or neutralized by executive overreach, making “legal” resistance feel like a theoretical exercise rather than a functional one.

The Attention Economy: Traditional protests are easily framed as “partisan noise.” “The Collection” uses a high-stakes, “Jackpot” format that the media cannot afford to ignore, forcing the administration to respond to the public’s terms.

The Language of the Deal: The current administration views the country through the lens of corporate ownership. By framing the presidency as a buyout opportunity, the opposition speaks the administration’s only fluent language, making the “Golden Parachute” a psychological trap that bypasses ideological gridlock.

Turning the Corner

By prioritizing personal grudges, Trump undermines his own leverage as a negotiator. His brand is no longer just threatened by his erratic behavior, but by something more damaging: predictability. This growing boredom may be exactly what allows America to regain its collective focus.

To succeed in 2026, the opposition must “flip the script” by choosing humor, consensus, and accessibility over the reactive whiplash that defined 2025. We cannot reverse history; we can only change how we move forward.

New World Order: Art of the Deal vs Art of War, Tang Meng Kit, Asia Times, April 30, 2025

Out Loud

A smattering of a gathering for trying anything once and repeating on the most promising of failures.

A Better World Than We Entered · Conservative Arts and Liberal Sciences

An Open Love Letter to Hampshire College

April 19, 2026
A Better World Than We Entered · Conservative Arts and Liberal Sciences

Hampshire’s Emergent Focus on Merit in the Post AI Era

March 28, 2026
A Better World Than We Entered · A Declaration of Digital Independence · Birth, Death, Taxes, and Fundraising

Buy Out the Empire: Making an Offer He Can’t Refuse

January 1, 2026

The 2026 Deadline: Why Democrats Must Fix the Primaries Now

ABOVE:
Reddit: r/PoliticalCompass |
“My Prediction for the 2024 Democratic Primary.”

Democrats Must Reclaim the Primary Stage — Before It’s Too Late

August 11, 2020: The first and last time Biden reached out to Harris for acceptance.

Once upon a time, the primary season was a civic ritual — a scheduled airing of ideas, disagreements, and democratic sanity. It was a moment when political parties opened the floor to the people, inviting them to shape the future by choosing their next standard-bearer. But in 2024, that tradition was shattered.

Faced with the looming specter of another Trump presidency, Democratic leadership made a fateful decision: to close ranks, silence dissent, and rally behind President Biden without a contest. We were told the stakes were too high for debate. That democracy itself might not survive another Trump term. But in doing so, the party suspended the very democratic process it claimed to defend.

This wasn’t just a broken campaign promise. It was a breach of trust. A deliberate sidelining of voters who expected to vet their next nominee. What followed was a chaotic defense of the status quo, a strategy so brittle it cracked under pressure. And now, as we look to the post-Biden-Harris era, we see a leadership class —

Senate Leader Schumer,
House Leader Jeffries,
Justice Kagan, and yes,
Even #44 Obama…

— unwilling to confront the damage. They tinker at the edges while the opposition bulldozes institutions with Project 2025 as its blueprint. The blue wave of 2025 cannot be readily addressed as a precursor to the mid-terms of ‘26 without a reconciliation of the recent past.

Is it any wonder the party feels adrift? The ship is taking on water, and the captains are eyeing the lifeboats. Meanwhile, the rest of us — rank-and-file wilderness Democrats — are left wondering how to turn heads, let alone tides, in a post-MAGA America.

Let’s be clear: hashtags, disembodied texts, and ad buys won’t save us. As David Brooks recently noted:

“There are more human beings in America eager to be offended than there are those who are eager to offend.”

No More Small Donor-funded TV Ads

But what about those of us who are eager to act? We’re not just losing committee seats. We’re losing health care, food security, and for many, the basic freedom to move through this country without fear.

It’s time to stop licking our wounds and start speaking with purpose. And that begins by reclaiming the democratic process we were denied in 2024.

Let’s stage the primaries that never happened.

Imagine it: a 2026 Democratic Primary season that isn’t just a procedural warm-up, but a full-throated forum for the ideas, frustrations, and hopes of a fractured base. A signal to Democrats in red states that their voices matter and they’re not alone. A platform for grassroots energy that’s been ignored for too long. A public reckoning that the party in power — so allergic to dissent — can’t stomach.

Harris Walz spent $1.4 billion in ad spending in battleground states and lost all seven. Still want to pony up for the next merry-go-round?

The Work Ahead

Food Fights to Come

Will it be messy? Absolutely. Will it produce a tidy consensus? Not a chance. But it will be real. It will be democracy. And it will be ours:

A credible voice of opposition,
A democratic mechanism to amplify that voice, and
A spectacle of spirited debate that exposes the opposition’s disdain for actual debate and competitive races.

To my fellow civically-starved Democrats: shake off the timidity bred by weak leadership and performative outrage. We’ve grown tougher. The fight ahead demands less choreography and more courage. Less spin, more substance. Less fear, more fire.

Let’s light that fire in 2026. Let’s make the primaries a proving ground. Not just for candidates, but for the soul of our party. Let’s march through all 50 states with the energy of a movement that refuses to be silenced again.

The time for passive resistance is over. The time for (large D) Democratic revival is now.

Why Hampshire? Why Now?

In mid‑October, 500 members of the Hampshire community gathered for a timely symposium on AI, authoritarianism, and Hampshire College, highlighting the college’s civic role. Filmmaker‑historian Ken Burns ’71F, AI researcher Gary Marcus ’86F, and AAC&U president Lynn Pasquerella P’08 laid out urgent challenges and practical responses. These notes distill the panel’s key insights and make the case that Hampshire’s experimental, community‑centered pedagogy is not grounds for nostalgia. It’s a call to action that models how higher education can help repair the fraying social contract between leaders, institutions, and citizens.

October 18, 2025:

Tending to our founding seeds

The Home Court Advantages of Immersive Education

The most empowering message was delivered by Ms. Pasquerella. It was the writ large reinsertion of the humanities into the desired skills in an AI-infested job market. Not only a self-evident observation, but an actual home court advantage for Team Hampshire. Understanding the motivations for change is a first-mover advantage for building a healthy tolerance for risk, and robust and disciplined experimentation. That kind of trial and error comes with the uncharted turf of a Hampshire degree. It’s that deeper connection to purpose that connects to internships, community service, work study, and field work.

Perhaps these are some of the reasons why the study abroad bandwagon is coming home to roost in the surrounding Pioneer Valley community. It’s the local impact of real world change that gives our farm center students a laboratory the size of the bountiful Connecticut River farm delta.

This kind of hands-on experience in climate adaptation and planting methods are a benefit that extends our body of academic work from curriculum to discovery to the benefits shared with Hampshire’s neighboring communities.

Hampshire’s small size and under-the-radar positioning is another advantage. Freed from the pressures of ranking‑driven branding and donor expectations that shape many A‑list colleges, it can iterate pedagogically, take curricular risks, and center marginalized voices without needing to conform to prestige metrics. Less visibility means more freedom to prototype education models, to fail fast, and to scale what works, producing innovations that larger institutions later adopt. In short, Hampshire preserves and advances the democratic promise of higher education–to cultivate independent thinkers who can invent new forms of knowledge and public service–precisely because it operates outside the spotlight and forces that constrain academic purpose.

AI Communications Skills: Conflict Resolution 101

**As told by a deep fake: The counterpoint to faith is not doubt. It is uncertainty.**

With AI, those softer skills of emotional intelligence, the resolution-seeking nature of conflict resolution are evolving into harder skills. Harder because the substitution of AI for companionship is the first in a steady succession of ill-advised uses of AI in the mid 2020s: a word probability parlor game now positioned as the cornerstone of the American economy. It will take the forceful presence of human agents to impress upon a distracted and shallow marketplace that the faking of relatedness doesn’t justify the harm posed by…

1. Extortion-friendly deep fakes

2. Synthetic friendships, and

3. Fabricated term papers

As Mr. Marcus intimates, AI in its infancy deserves better responses than stuffing genies back in bottles or moving fast to break things.

One wish I do have for my future Hamsters is a warming to the idea of tolerance and not to see the world of ideas as either a shooting gallery or an excuse for retreats to safe spaces. Hampshire students are traditionally a questioning folk, sometimes bordering on obsessional. Why not take that unflinching curiosity to the next level? Why not reimagine an as-yet unformed social space that privileges emotional intelligence above moral crusading

Look at distrust in the face for its name is uncertainty. Commandeer what makes us so relentless and apply it to the hearing out of conflicting ideas.

“Are you insane?” you’re thinking by now. A decidedly lefty school as a force for social moderation. A bulwark against the flagrant refusals of those in power to return the favor. Are you kidding me?

What’s truly transformative isn’t merely the act of changing our minds – or challenging those who unsettle us. It’s the moment our perspectives expand through genuine engagement with voices beyond our own lived experience. This is where Hampshire students learn to apply Socratic questioning across contexts rather than only within short dialogues. Our modes of inquiry are less about errors in logic and reasoning and more about synthesis and problem‑solving

Today that lens is a pretense of an online discourse that mocks, cancels, and fabricates with impunity. Tomorrow it can become the shared space of conversation – where the tone, gesture, and presence of direct encounter – where higher education finds its way back to open civic engagement.

Whether the questioner is Zohran Mamdani or the late Charlie Kirk, the pursuit of empirical truth demands more than retreating to staked out positions. It demands perspective-taking, active listening, and perhaps not leaping to long-settled conclusions. As Ken Burns reminds us in his latest work on America’s founding, there’s profound anchoring power when people drop their rhetorical armor and admit, “Wow, I had no idea.”

Dialog is not a serviceable experience in texting. Dialog is not dialed into the echoing reinforcement of news feeds. Dialog has no sway in the cultivation of holding grudges and exacting revenge. However, seizing on these opportunities produces the certainty of being heard in places our voices would otherwise be drowned out. A lasting, and yes awkward way out of our age of untrammeled self-expression. A chance to change history. And what is history, except the shaping of a consensus formed from looking back on the uncertainties of earlier times?

**What the level above righteous indignation looks like.**

Social Capital as Endowment: Hampshire’s Core Resource

Hampshire College cultivates a rare communications culture built on trust – the willingness to respect others’ right to speak and to listen without immediately reducing debate to winners and losers. In an era of polarized, us-versus‑them rhetoric, trust is the single resource that rises above performative persuasion and factional posturing. It is not merely balancing two sides; it is protecting the liberty to speak across political divides and resisting the pressure to sort people into preordained camps.

The most intense test of that trust comes in battles over First Amendment freedoms, where majorities often feel tempted to silence dissent. Hampshire’s approach treats those moments as opportunities rather than threats. Engaging with dissenting views trains students to hold disagreement without demonizing the other person, and to treat free expression as an elective practice, not a weapon of first or last resort.

Here’s how that could play out in a Hampshire curriculum:

Two Channels of Communication: Hampshire students learn to speak in two complementary voices: the authentic self – personal, accountable, and engaged – and the independent observer – evidence‑driven, inclusive, and open to changing course.

Together these channels create credibility: a voice that is honest about its commitments while willing to follow where the non-performing facts lead.

A Counter to Algorithms: This method stands in direct contrast to seeking out extreme positions and then using technology as a rhetorical crutch to validate them. Credibility rejects that sycophantic script. The real skill is holding opposing ideas in mind simultaneously – a human strength that outstrips AI capacities and that serves public health, civic life, and collective well‑being better than marketplace competition.

Civility as Strength: The deliberate practice of addressing two opposable views with seriousness and restraint. Partisans may deride it, but speaking across differences is both difficult and powerful for amplifying the role of cooperative arrangements, a long-maligned tool of social contracts. The aim is not to declare the final truth or mete out justice; it is to deflate existential threats, reduce escalation, and create space for constructive action. This is a communication skill worth teaching, practicing, and defending.

Hampshire College is uniquely positioned to incubate and pilot alternative approaches to social conflict. Will the college rise to the challenges of our times?

**Let Div Free both ring and resonate!**

Conclusion: Embracing the Unknown

Hampshire’s survival strategy is simple and urgent: focus what works, do it superbly, and discard the rest. As Ed Wingenbach urged, aligning ambition with resources isn’t retreat – it’s concentration: sharpening the college’s strengths so its mission endures.

The antidote to performative certainty is credibility – a disciplined, evidence‑based stance that resists the showmanship of confident authoritarianism. Credibility doesn’t deny authenticity; it steadies it. It asks students to tolerate uncertainty, test assumptions, and accept the risk of being wrong as the price of genuine learning.

That practice lives in Hampshire’s Division III: sustained inquiry rooted in lived experience, public engagement, and creative risk. When students design, build, and defend their own work, they learn to challenge systems rather than submit to them.

That freedom isn’t just academic; it’s an on-ramp to re-imagining the world, much like a Hampshire degree itself.

If higher education must counter conformity and false bravado, Hampshire’s model is timely and practical: train people to think independently, act transparently, and rebuild public trust through rigor, not rhetoric. Before most college graduates are handed the wheel, Hampshire students are placed in the driver’s seat. That’s a tradition worth flexing. No pledges, no litmus tests. Just the freedom to be brave, experimental, non-conformist, and yes, a little obnoxious.

“Hey grad with the decorous honors,” the Hampster says: “You studied for the test. I had to invent the exam.”

**Our not-so-secret sauce: The marathon race towards the Hampshire Diploma.**

Commencement as Transition

When we attended, Hampshire people joked about it being an experiment. Do people still say that now that Hampshire is more than 50 years old?

Reflections on Hampshire’s Changing of the Guard

PART ONE:
Ed Wingenbach Leaves the Hampshire Stage

Since we live just a few miles from our alma mater, we usually go to the Hampshire College Commencement Ceremony. We gaze up at the banners hanging in eves of the big white tent. Can we find our years… ‘78 and ‘80? That was a lifetime ago.

The place is packed with people we don’t know. We have no connection to the graduating class or their parents- who are mostly younger than us. Even the faculty and staff who were a part of our experience have departed. What draws us here? Love of the place itself and many happy, crazy, distraught, meaningful memories, for sure. But we also share a deep feeling that our Hampshire experience shaped who we are and set us on our life path that might have been very different otherwise. The two of us share a love for this unique institution.

When we attended, Hampshire people joked about it being an experiment. Do people still say that now that Hampshire is more than 50 years old? And is it still growing and changing to rise to the challenges of our world? We hope so.

At its best, higher education anticipates crises, interrogates them, and builds systems that transcend inherited limits. At its worst, it retreats into privilege, shielded by endowments and exemptions.

Ed Wingenbach, Hampshire’s outgoing leader, championed disruptive art, inclusive communities, and the recasting of global crises as a launch point into the Hampshire academic experience.

Yet on May 17, 2025, graduation day passed without invoking those ideals. Their urgency went unspoken, and no one claimed Hampshire’s role as a proving ground. Perhaps it’s because Hampshire has been facing down an existential threat throughout President Wingenbach’s term.

The Parting of the New College Transfers

In Wingenbach’s final Commencement address, he might have well been describing his own turn at the helm when he described many of these ranks as having taken a “leap into something fragile and unfinished.” He was referencing Hampshire grads who accepted his invitation to transfer from the New College of Florida, an early casualty of culture war attempts on the right to derail progressive values.

Ed’s brinkmanship offered NCF students two stark choices:

A) Hampshire’s self-directed curriculum tackling diversity, misinformation, climate change, and critical race theory in pursuit of justice.

B) The new pedagogy at New College: A more monastic scholarship rooted in tradition, canon, and individual restraint.

Both institutions see themselves as radically independent. Both demand students chart their own course. But here’s the catch: true inquiry isn’t progressive or conservative — it follows evidence, not ideology. At times students at Hampshire may provoke the system, which gives them agency to ask their own questions and come up with their own viewpoints rather than being led blindly into one camp or another.

To Ed’s lasting credit, he left behind a renewed manifesto — one that distilled the expansive questions this class first dared to ask into a coherent, compelling vision. This change reinvigorated the Hampshire experience for entering students and highlighted a unique difference between Hampshire and traditional schools.

The Exit Interview

Ed Wingenbach’s legacy goes beyond rescuing a faltering institution. With a $50 million campaign nearly complete, Hampshire is no longer on life support.

He reaffirmed its capacity for reinvention but left the task of confronting the relentless pace of today’s disorienting changes to his successor. His address favored timeless lessons over timely engagement, and the ceremony offered reflection without reckoning.

Left unsaid was what the future may hold for Hampshire. If Hampshire aims to lead in rethinking education, it must do more than adapt—it must engage, interrogate, and act. Reinvention demands relevance.

In the past, Wingenbach often cast Hampshire as a site of radical experimentation. But on graduation day, that vision felt distant—more concept than reality. Unspoken were the mounting pressures on progressive ideals, which may have shaped his decision to continue his work abroad.

PART TWO
Leading from Strength:
Traditions Worth Celebrating

If Hampshire is always reinventing itself, what anchors remain? The tradition of self-directed study is more than a badge of nonconformity. Over Hampshire’s 50 plus years it has proven to be a life changing form of higher education for its 19,000 alumni.

Our personal experience attending recent graduation is that these ideals hover—present but unspoken. There are no models. Only stories. The unique group experience of the graduating class is on full display as it should be. However the special connection between the grads and their academic process is not. We don’t hear the innovative Hampshire approach described or celebrated.

The power of Div III when it’s truly unleashed is when a student refuses passive submission to the systems that shape us, and instead uses experience, creation, and connection to understand and challenge them.That freedom isn’t just academic; it’s an on-ramp to reimagining the world, much like a Hampshire degree itself. As we know, Hampshire alumni have gone on to be trailblazers in many fields.

The Rally Cries of Commencement

At the 2025 commencement, a question that hung in the air was, how important was the student/faculty relationship to these graduates? Oddly, acknowledgements by the student speakers did not include faculty.

A tradition begun in the 2010s continued: honoring a staff member as a pillar of campus life. This year, Post Office Manager Jim Patten received a heartfelt ovation — the ceremony’s most poignant moment.

The only faculty member to speak was Jina Fast, slated to deliver the faculty toast. Instead, she delivered a lecture on a past urban tragedy, the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia.It wasn’t a toast to the students. It was a polemic to no one in particular.

Keynote speaker Manuel “Manny” Castro 02F shared a powerful immigration story, but offered little reflection on how his Hampshire education shaped his path to becoming NYC’s Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. His unique vantage — as a former undocumented immigrant and current policy leader —was left unexplored.

The one voice that rang true came from grandparent and trustee Julie Schecter 71F GP22:

“[T]his awful moment we are in is what Hampshire grads were made for. . . . [W]e aren’t going to get out of the war that we are in right now [against all we hold dear] by doing what we’re told. And you only succeeded at Hampshire by being brave, scared, experimental, and occasionally obnoxious. . . . We need you.”

Harkening back to our own experiences, close working relationships with our faculty advisors informed our post-Hampshire engagement with our workplaces. Their guidance on our Division Committees was the heart of our learning experience.

At a campus event in March of 2024, Ken Burns asserted similar views as he reflected on his work with Jerome Liebling. In our view, Burns wasn’t being nostalgic. He was pointing to what makes Hampshire unique, sustainable, and ultimately indispensable as a place of higher learning.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Hampshire is headed for an important transition as a search is on for Wingenbach’s successor. While attention to the bottom line remains critical for Hampshire’s future, we also need someone who will champion the radical act of owning one’s education.

We have seen what happens when this is left to chance. It happened in 2019. We were all there. Jonathan Podolsky has been following the current search, Read his thoughtful article on moving Hampshire forward here. Jonathon refers to our tradition of community input and transparency. We too will be exploring a revitalized expression of enduring Hampshire themes in future posts to Searching Out Loud.

Ed Wingenbach’s tenure was about saving the institution — not about maximizing its true potential. Perhaps someday Hampshire College will have a president who went to Hampshire, who can speak about the power of a Hampshire Education from first hand experience rather than as an abstraction.

We salute you, Ed, for keeping the flame alive. We look forward to new leadership to light the path ahead.

Jimm Chanson: A Panegyric

This is not an obituary or a discography or some abstracted highlight reel to showcase the lucid brilliance of James T. Erickson (1962-2025), pen name Jimm Chanson. This is one friend’s appreciation. And there’s no mistaking the size of my gratitude with any proportionality of completeness in the writing of Jimm’s story.

The closest I’ll come to a definitive framing here is that Jimm was the superbrain. An encyclopedic recall coursing through the imagining of plausible fictions. And in the evidentiary world, the reckonings of a relentless polemicist.

If his body was the home of his soul on earth, it could be said that he really lived full-time in the attic, wandering out only to get to the office and occasional family visits. Most of us surround ourselves with other people, chores, appointments, and what we do to get by. We’re the casting director of the event calendars we keep. Little of this concerned Jimm. He was mostly surrounded by a vault of literature and history and his own illustrious pages.

Jimm retreated into his own library stacks. Certainly, much of that immersion was spent in the service of feeding his superbrain appetite. Another reason could be the need to stockpile the patience he’d reserve to engage in routine interactions. It was not always natural for Jimm to break down his arguments in a size digestible for less-than-voracious intellects. His humility was not always a given, and was likely tested in the catering of affairs outside his mental neighborhood.

That didn’t make him a snob or a hermit. He was an awesome teacher to his colleagues. He was generous with his legal counseling. He not only tolerated but applauded the many helping hands that were required when his health faultered. When Charlie Nieland, J.M. Dobies and myself visited him earlier this summer, he was proud to salute his country of choice. And her name was California. His magnanimity extended to the team play in his workload. Even when commanding his firm’s lion’s share of cases, one surmises its portfolio was more a reflection of James T. Erickson’s billable hours than by the collective experience of the other attorneys.

He’s… (So Reclusive)

Jimm lived nearly every day and night at a second floor walk-up on the outskirts of the Santa Clara University legal program he graduated from in 2006. There was no community outside of work. But he was solitary by choice. And there were few if any unresolved matters attending his attention to others, or even his own rock operas, novels, and poems.

There was no to-do list for putting such ephemeral affairs as song titles or play lists in order. But that’s where the satisfaction of closure ends. The unfinished pages of Jimm Erickson could fill several lifetimes of entire creative teams. He was weary from the compromises of an artist doing the bidding of a full-time attorney. His body would not let him forget the neglect inflicted for living in that mental attic of his all these years.

But he fought and wrestled and swore through his sagging teeth and halting breath that he wanted more of this life. The very one he would have continued to live free of cirrhosis, tumors, and bodily eviction notices: you maladies work things out amongst yourselves. I’m just going to plunge into the out-of-print section of my reading piles.

Learning Jimm (Student Edition)

I didn’t bump into Jimm. We were never properly introduced. Rather I was lured into an aura by a song. He was singing with his dorm room door open as if he was listening to his own soaring voice for the first time. Jimm was shot into Hampshire College out of a canyon of his own gleeful creation. The classroom had been impervious to his superbrain appetites for rarefied knowledge. Now in the wilds of self-directed discovery, he was freed from the demands of mandatory course loads. Jimm was ebullient. His muse was in full command. He was surrounded by other contrarians, misfits, and his own whimsical intuitions. Formal education had no claims on Jimm’s first semester.

The Answer was the cannon ball that Jimm pointed at the blank canvas of posterity. The Answer was a band of underdeveloped musicians that performed his unfolding songbook with varying degrees of accomplishment. The recording was equally unrefined and every overdub was served up with generous backdrops of tape hiss. Core to the project’s grandiosity: the premise that simple exposure to the band’s sonic elocution by chart-bound talent scouts would lead to that first recording contract. And as for band chemistry? We had never actually played together. We promised to rehearse more once some offers could be entertained.

The audacity of it all was fueled by three things: (1) our reverence of the musical heroes we were targeting with these Maxell 90 cassettes, (2) Jimm’s surging song catalog, and (3) the nascent arranging and recording chops of Charlie Nieland, our lead bassist, guitarist, and chief Jimm collaborator. What did we all hear in the uniform silence to our “unsolicited demo?” That is a testament largely to the raw creative gumption of untested youth.

While the bidding war to sign The Answer never ensued, the desire for acclaim and recognition shadowed Jimm throughout his life. There were never any benefactors, agents, or licensing arrangements. The practical business side of Jimm was seemingly walled off from his industrious muse. Speakeasy, one of his crowning achievements, was an historic novel about police corruption that never would have made it to press without the diligent assistance of his brother, Bill.

In 2013 JM Dobies, another former bandmate, a.k.a. Mal Thursday, pitched the notion of a catalog re-creation with an assemblage of session hands who could give Jimm’s melodies, chord structures, and middle eights the polish justified by the quality of his songwriting. Jimm wrote back that Mal’s intentions resonated with that same hunger for recognition:

I imagined Bob Dylan phoning Elvis Costello and saying, “WE both were inspired by Gravity [Suicide, the Novel, whatever] — this poor guy is completely unknown — let’s get some other people who were into it [here, name anyone I admire], and record a tribute album!” And I was able to sleep, ha ha, visions of sugar plums and so on. So that was a random thing, and the next day you [JM] wrote.

The Art of Remembrance

The biggest challenge for paying tribute is not about parsing an artist’s complexities, time-stamping their inventories, or crediting their authorship. It’s not in the curation of a collection. It’s in the excavation. The deeper soul dive that unearths and preserves the essence of birthing the artist’s own creations.

I first experienced this in forming a memorial scholarship fund to honor my mother, Ruthellen Pollan. How do we keep her memory alive? We do it in the service of supporting young artists that come through the program she spearheaded.

With Jimm there’s no interviews to transcribe, paintings to hang, or film to screen. But there is the writing and the music, as half-finished in its capture as it is rich in its composition. There is the vast reserve of a restless dynamo. There may well be a dormant community yet to live through this realization of Jimm’s creative experience. Jimm even fancied cutting a future profile as a cult figure. Who’s to say his obscurity is set in stone?

The raw building materials for this are exemplified by a gentleman named “Nelson.” Now I don’t know Nelson. Nelson isn’t sure he ever met Jimm. But from a brief introduction, it sounds like Nelson nurtures some wanderlust for stumbling onto Jimm’s sub rosa empire of unscratched gemstones. Here’s how another former band mate John Lebhar describes Nelson on the periphery of that excavation:

After I shared the news of Jimm’s passing he [Nelson] had heard so many things about Jimm that he felt he knew him although they never met. As he put it, everyone I ever played music with in the [Pioneer] Valley had a story about Jimm. It’s true that his musical legacy is bigger than life and certainly bigger than it ever manifested itself into as recordings and more importantly shareable media. I hope all of his friends can help to make that happen. Thinking about all the heavy hearts and for some reason Jimm’s crazy ripped up bell bottoms!

We all did have our one agenda item for that last visit in June. Mine was in crediting Jimm as the lightning rod for aligning our respective destinies into a creative path that carried well past our time together at Hampshire. For Jimm it was the pride he felt for gracing his signature to our personal copies of Speakeasy. That signature serves as an engraving for all things worthy of our collective debt implied in the treasuring of Jimm’s creations.

Returning again to the not-small-matter of incompleteness, I hope this early foray into the consequential nature of Jimm’s life might inspire other friends and his family to broker a broader understanding of The Jimm story on their own terms.

The ease of delivering this invitation does not always resonate with the most welcoming of memories, as former school chum, neighbor, and bandmate, David Karlin can attest. Hopefully the estrangement takes a backseat to the outstretched role that the Erickson household played in shaping Jimm, as well as his oldest friend. Some historians are determined to get to the bottom of the dilemmas they unearth. This one seeks a resolution.

Reconstructed Works (A First Stab)

The richness of his legacy was reflected in his writing discipline. He was able to meet his own self-imposed deadlines if not the broader social moments he was addressing through his illustrious excursions into…

Hot Rhetoric, Cold War: Me and God at Yale (1988): Jimm’s third of five rock operas and the only one memorialized through the studio recordings of The Answer’s first and last band reunion in 1988. A diatribunal laying siege to the underhanded smugness of W.F. Buckley with an unapologetic shout-out to Gore Vidal. (Collection alert: You can access the complete opera through Charlie’s Dropbox folder here).

Porn Industry Intimacies: Weak and Willing (1993): The one screenplay of the collection features the sin wages of a male sex worker in the pioneering days of the early eighties, preempting PJ Anderson’s Boogie Nights and the birth of Viagra by three and five years respectively. I recollect sharing the manuscript with Garo, another lifelong chum and Doubleday literary editor. Let me tell you: nothing surfaced Jimm’s mercurial tendencies faster than the marked up rewrites of a detached editor.

Thirty Wild Songs from Fame, Fleas, and Fox Sisters: Typhoid Mary Sessions (1997-98): Jimm’s last collection of songs were unsparing and explosive in their long-form exhaustion. One cut, The Typhoid Mary Sweepstakes (Ship of Fleas) runs 10 minutes without a refrain. Most of us fans can’t help but reflect wistfully on his songwriting retirement at age 35. Jimm shared not this sense of longing and lost interest in most music once he stopped composing. (Collection alert: Charlie has the tapes and will revive these recordings digitally in the coming months).

From Milwaukee’s Streets to Jim Crow’s Heartland: Speakeasy (2011): Jimm’s seminal work and manifest gift to the field of historical fiction features Judson W. Minor (Milwaukee’s first black police officer) as its protagonist, hero, and upholder of the virtuous dragnet inside the corruption and counter-punches of the city’s Gin Alley district. (Collection alert: You can order on Amazon or Strand Books).

Domestic Unrest Through Radical Spyglasses: The Center of Attention (2016) An espionage saga told by gold coast hippies. Pay phones, roach clips, muscle cars, and the ghost of Dennis Hopper set the stage for Jimm’s own unique re-staging of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. A bulging bill of federal offenses handled in the true William Kunstler tradition. (Collection alert: To be released as an e-book by Bill in the next year or so).

Unrequited Rejection: Eros and Thanatos and So On (2020-22) This project arose from the deep funk that corralled Jimm when he developed long haul Covid at the onset of the pandemic. Much of this outpouring is inspired by his unresolved reflections on past relationships. The collateral damage of these romantic incursions are not for the feint of heart, intellect, or levity of spirit.

New Collection: (2024-2025) Jimm composed 37 additional poems in between medical interventions and hospital visits. Mostly grappling with mortality and the smouldering embers of his unfinished pages. Here is his last, presented as grand master ironist, in its original form:

PANEGYRIC

I will sleep with myself tonight
as though I were at once a beautiful woman,
witty and intelligent; loving towards
me too.
I will sleep with myself
tonight as though I were a “raging”
genius, whatever that is, in a white
heat of anger and paranoia.
I will
sleep with myself tonight as though
time were not passing, and I
were a ghost, observant and communicative,

tapping on tables to give warning of my

resentment at the quick, who never know
quite what to say in response. I will sleep
with myself tonight as though I were
a poet, too precious for words (so goes

the cliché, the cliché that comes

to mind), my mind focussed on things
like whether I begin too many lines
with conjunctions or … what else
is it I avoid? I will sleep,

I know I will, with myself
tonight, as though it
were tonight, as though
it were over, which it is.
Jimm Chanson,
February, 2025

The Bucket List of Frank Marchand

Introduction

I know Frank Marchand because he has been my plumber and neighbor for many years. He has always had a soft spot for going the extra distance. Now after eight continuous years of working and fighting stage four colon cancer full-time, he’s bringing his community into that same extra distance. Frank conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in Now I Can Die Happy, an original performance that Frank summoned to life at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls MA on August 30th. Too close to home to be theatrical. Too elevated a theme to be slice-of-life. Now I Can Die Happy is lived out on the most personal terms in the most revealing of ways.

Frank doesn’t say. But I imagine he was first visited by the idea of a one man autobiographical show in a long, contemplative moment. Perhaps during chemo?

Many chemo trips removed from the original diagnosis, Frank has outlived many of the crew in the same Cooley Dickinson treatment program. This includes former teachers, customers, and local folks that had been receiving their infusions alongside Frank.

This prompts Frank’s insertion of the “why me” directed to a higher power. You don’t need religion or infusions to appreciate the pay grade above where this question lands.

Frank answers back his why me voice without anger, guilt, defiance, or passive acceptance. His response is an ardent and clarion call to action. He has given himself over to the world of need. A world that defines tangible need as the privileging of one’s own concerns.

Big Digs in Own Backyards

Here’s the Frank I knew in B.C. (“before cancer”) times: A guy who took his professional calling seriously. Himself? Not so much. His work ethic was insatiable. Big jobs, small jobs. His answering machine played the same steadfast loop for decades: “I pick up my messages every hour.” He promised to return every new request by the end of each work day. Didn’t matter how overbooked he might be.

On the job, he was a swirl of activity and patter. The channeler of once troubled waters into the basin of stability. A chatterbox of wisdom. Behind every valve and fitting – a story and sometimes… a lesson.

The dedication, the range of problem-solving, and the self-effacing humor all conspired to build trust that Frank would unscramble whatever our steeply-pitched 150 year-old Victorian home could spray his way. It was a down payment. Not for curb appeal but infrastructure. Now our rickety Victorian would see an engine room facelift. Preventative medicine. Newly assembled sets of permeating radiators and plumbing bones. Nothing much had stirred under its floorboards until Frank descended into the foundation. Now our matronly manor was going to see another fifty years.

He emerged weeks later, a six foot mole caked in the abrasions of his craft. Our own bonafide big dig under Chestnut Plain Road, adjacent to the recently relocated Whately Milk Bottle edifice and neighbor Frank’s home. It was a pathway adjoining the 19th to the 21st centuries over the protestations of the accumulated neglect of past owners. Of course I wrote that check to Frank. Of course it’s the biggest check I ever wrote to another individual before or since. I took his word on every itemized entry in that invoice. And why wouldn’t I? I trusted the iron works and the PVC in the architectural details to the master cobbler of heating systems. My friend and neighbor, Frank.

Divorced Dads Night Out

Fast forward to 2000. Frank and I are sharing some bowls of All You Can Eat popcorn in South Deerfield before the waitress at Wolfie’s appears with our orders. We both find ourselves in the league of divorced dads with visitation weekends. It’s not exactly in our respective road maps of where our lives were once headed in the sleepy hamlet of Whately Center. Frank tells me of another neighboring family that’s split since: “Must have been in the water,” he reckons.

It was that hazardous backstretch around the turn to forty. So, so many marriages never make it past those bends. We see the stranger across the table from us and what have we got besides our vows, debts, and a shared history? The empty miles that distance us from the future we once called family.

Years later Frank tells Karen Brown that it was his ability to correct misbehaving water flows at the age of 12 which drew him into plumbing. Ms. Brown is both a Frank customer and an NEPM reporter whose radio portrait of his survival saga goes viral on national NPR. However, this form of troubled water was nothing Frank could fix. I clinked his beer glass to reaffirm my own limitations in this area. We go back for popcorn refills. Our unwritten chapters are no longer blank slates.

Full-time Schedule

I’ve been remarried, twice actually, since our last dinner date. My fourth marriage in 2015 coincided with Frank’s cancer diagnosis. He delivered this news the following year when I rang him in to prep a bathroom for the pending sale of my wife’s home. I can’t say it surprised me at all that Frank was dug in for the fight of a lifetime. What threw me off at first was the realization he was fighting what sounded like a war on two fronts.

At first I didn’t understand how his trade was actually an ally in this battle. Rather than attempting to protect his marshaling forces, he refused to draw any distinction between Frank the plumber and Frank the cancer patient. Others may have retreated into the shadows, of rejection and denial, or an even wholesale withdrawal from the business of living. Frank doubled down on it. His greatest nemesis wasn’t the disease or the prognosis. It’s the number cancer does on an idle mind preoccupied with the harm-seeking disruptions that lie ahead.

Rather than catastrophize, Frank chose to inhabit the solution-seeking sanctum of his problem-solving nature. He opted as Paul Simon described in song, “to dominate the impossible in his life.” That chemo treatment was another slot to fill in an already answered-for calendar of running toilets, clogged pipes, and vanity installations.

But the jammed calendar was never just to remain in motion. In “I Can Die Happy Now,” Frank implores us to step back from our own autopilots. He wants us to absorb the bigger picture so we can take in what’s truly life affirming in our daily practice. There’s nothing stoic or guarded or kept in reserve for later going on here. But the pep talk isn’t coming from fevered piety of sweeping judgments. That’s what we’re used to: Painted on thick with the broadest of brushes.

Smiling Statues

On a summer evening, my wife and I went to see Frank’s show at the Shea Theater. It stars its director, writer, and stage manager Frank. It co-stars Frank’s secret friend. There is no show program. But if there was, it might have been a single urgent message: Spend down our emotional debts.

As my Uncle Stephen Pollan wrote in Die Broke: A Radical Four Part Financial Plan, the last check you write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce. From very different angles, Frank and my Uncle are imploring us to empty our pockets of regrets. But emotional debts, come again? These are the I.O.U’s that carry us through our daily graces. We come to know this as the kindness of strangers. Paying it forward. But Frank turns the tables. What if we’re the strangers and the kindness must come from us?

Frank isn’t evangelizing from his throne. He’s locked in battle. We’re the ones fleeing the scene and he’s the one calling unsolicited attention to this. Our strength as a community comes from engaging, from the providing and receiving of kindness and empathy. Not the protective shell we often grow to seal us in from the suffering all around us. Not the veneer of privacy that insists on scheduled interventions only.

Frank’s not having that. He pushes on the margins of emotional availability. On its fringes labors the panhandler who carries the shame of pity over the unfilled isolations that hold the awkward dread between the haves and the what-have-you-gots: I admit it, Frank. I haven’t any more to give.

And yet. And yet!

Knowing the pulse of gratitude that brims over Frank, we sense a towering waterfall of connection. A reservoir of feeling waiting to be shared. “Waiting for what exactly?” the man at stage four for the last eight years is asking us. As if we’re asking for our souls back from the places we’ve been hiding them. We can’t hide from Frank at center stage.

The Curtain Comes Down

The crowd is one part sorry-it-had-to-be-you, Frank, and another part frozen smiling statues. That’s when Frank goes one step further. He introduces back to his secret friend, a.k.a. alter ego that’s arrived to comfort and cajole him through the trials of his life. The secret friend has seen Frank through the perils of his solo missions. In the first act, the friend provided a comic foil when young Frank couldn’t get out of his own self-imposed obstacle course.

The friend is also cast as the keeper of Frank’s own bargaining with his maker. It’s an existence of light and energy that can only be shaped into action and outcomes in the fleeting expanse that this natural force inhabits a human body. The desire to bend events in our favor requires the gripping of hands, the stepping of legs, and the flexing of muscles commanded through our vast neurological circuits. Where our heart stops is not a curtain call. It’s not a thunderous ovation. It’s musical chairs where the music cuts out. That’s the theme song of Frank’s requiem.

Frank is not engaging us around the protective custody of angels and bugle corps. He’s bargaining with us where we live. At ground level. That’s where we leave no sincere praises on the table. We spend lavishly and don’t wait for Frank’s funeral. Or our own.

Think about it. The eulogy is off-limits to unkind words. There’s safety in the protection of legacy. It’s as timeless as the keeping of the flame. But what would happen, I hear Frank saying, if we let these praises escape through the mundane discourse of an ordinary day? Then we wouldn’t wonder if the dead could hear because they would bear actual witness to the appreciations they inspire. They would actually come to know the meaning of the lives they’ve touched in these overlapping lifetimes.

That is a world we can share. This is the do-it-yourself instructions for saving your own soul. No waiting is required. You can go right in. And thank you, Frank Marchand, for helping me to see and live that.

The Botched Democracy Offensive in Philly

Biden’s case for democracy was too grouchy, partisan, tone deaf to Trump, and an underestimation of his own strengths.

“Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles,
you will never be defeated.

When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself,
your chances of winning or losing are equal.

If ignorant, both of your enemy and of yourself,
you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”

– Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Last week at Independence Hall I wasn’t expecting eloquence. I was hoping for a spirited defense of democracy from the Commander-in-Chief. But the speech lacked inspiration along with an effective understanding of his adversary.

It was especially painful to hear the focus-group tested applause lines against his opponent’s gift for authentic speech. The sense that his predecessor is incapable of reading a room through a teleprompter because his gut can process in real time. It’s uncanny how the former President can access the darkest recesses of our animal spirits with the slightest sneer of accusation.

The simple act of calling out Donald Trump puts President Biden at an immediate deficit. That’s how fast Trump can deflect a punch and tank the voice of reason.

Flashback to September 29, 2020 and the debate stage in Cleveland. 1.2 million ballots have been cast. Biden is scribbling some zingers outside the margins while Trump flaps his predatorial wings and pounces on the dead air of Biden’s hesitations. His facts are inventions and his opinions never stay in one place long enough to be his. But it’s all personal. From the constant interruptions to the name-calling, who could doubt the sincerity of his own self-regard? What could be more convincing than that?

Nothing changes after the shouting ends. There is no advantage in scorecarding the lies or slow-rolling the swamp hypocrisies. That fans more oxygen for feeding his bull-charging aggression. It certainly doesn’t come from wresting the national stage away with investigations and court rooms. His own insatiable preening for fame remains to be paraded at a time of his choosing.

All the more solemnity here for the moment two years later when Biden goes on the offense. It falls flat. His rejection of “MAGA Republicans” sounds canned, shrill, and yes, divisive. He comes out swinging with the Labor Day bravado of a machine boss. He manages a left hook at the inviting target. It lands nowhere and connects to no one.

Why?

The Speech That Missed Its Mark

First there was the defense of democratic ideals. Biden’s delivery was devoid of the semantic honesty of democratic-republic ideals. It may not be true majority-wins democracy. But it the actual audience Biden was trying to reach with his affirmation. It is the system worth defending.

The grandeur of a national address was undercut by the melting pot of deplorables Biden was inclined to frame: Our fellow American opposition. There were no bargains being struck, bargains being weighed, or channels cleared opened. Was this yet another “let’s-just-be-reasonable” overture from the political center/left? Was democracy-or-bust a white flag shot full of holes?

There was no middle ground when Obamacare passed the Senate in 2010 without a single GOP vote. There was no prior expectation of a public healthcare system, so “reasonable” was never on the table. And how did that work out for us? How did his opponents respond to Obama’s assertion that universal healthcare is the right thing to do? Did they propose a truce? Aahhh … nope. They called in the calvary.

A dozen red states rejected Medicaid expansion as if those federal funds were minted in Act Blue donations, and not Treasury greenbacks. In fact, the free and fair elections of 2010 and 2014 suggest otherwise. Democratic voters sat on their hands while the Tea Party seethed, the dark money flowed, and the Federalist Society played the long game.

Remember the midterm shellacking that elevated Mitch McConnell to Senate Majority leader? Biden’s memory is challenged in this way: McConnell’s obstruction strategy was the procedural expression of a status quo-rejecting red wave that made little distinction between its radical fringes and mainstream figures.

All this was but preamble. Elevator music. It was the trailer before the theatrical release of the main feature. Cue Trump’s step onto Golden Escalator for a rough and tumble ride into an America hellscape of black crime, brown illegals, freeloading Western allies, and unguarded borders. The other GOP candidates were soon swallowed, stage makeup and all, by the imposing pulpit-shaped mouth of America’s leading personal brand influencer.

Many Americans may harbor strong feelings about Biden’s Presidency – while remaining somewhat indifferent to the many himself. Trump, on the other hand, has developed a personal relationship with every voter. So strong, that many may have been non-voters in the Bush and Obama years. No one turns voters out quite like Trump.

No one’s making the case that there’s no point in voting since they’re all the same. The point may be obvious but it’s rarely acknowledged: Having a personal relationship with Donald Trump is not based on reverence or contempt of the former President. It just is.

– God’s wrecking ball?

-Dumpster fire in a suit?

Either way, two aspects of the Trump Presidency stand out:

Superpower: His ability to crowd reporters, arguments, and adversaries off the political stage is unprecedented. No neutral referee will dim the limelight on Trump’s facial highlights. Who invited them anyway? The cameras are his escorted guests. They gawk up this explosive spectacle. First his grievances. Now close-up on his rapid-fire condemnations, soaring above a thick, convulsing cloud of gaslighting. The monster truck of all debating strategies.

Achilles heel: His unfitness for the Presidency is only more true today than when the Electoral College rolled the dice in his favor six years ago. He had a full term to grow into the stature of the office and he diminished it. He went from being unqualified and ticked off, to clueless and livid, and ultimately, to a disengaged, chaotic, and ineffectual leader. He was by all accounts from competent members of his own branch, a colossal administrative failure.

The Speech Biden Should Have Made

Why Biden decided to call out Trump with no acknowledgement of his foe’s considerable strengths and weaknesses is unpardonable.

He could have played the greatest sucker punch known to the waging of all winning campaigns – the charm offensive. Once showing himself to be the more respectful, calmer, and reasonable of the two geriatric adults, Biden could play to his own strength, landing a blow where Trump is least equipped to counter-punch. Why? Because there is no defense for his record at the helm of a centralized government as its unitary executive. Unless… your goal is to do irreparable harm to that institution.

Here’s what Biden could have said:

Donald Trump is a reality TV star that used his run for office in 2016 to elevate his brand. His skillful use of broadcast and social media led to his unexpected win over Hillary Clinton. It was a victory that Mr. Trump himself did not see coming. During his time in office he continued to dominate headlines, talk rings around his opponents, and ran his White House much like his own business operations.

To this day he never quits. His tenacity is awesome. He remains a tireless fighter. For his own interests. Priority number one for our elected leaders are to enact policies and programs that help our fellow citizens. Priority number one for this guy isn’t pay forward. It’s payback. It’s retribution. It’s about settling scores with any elected official on either side who places the act of effective governing above personal loyalty to him.

81 million Americans expressed this through the power of the ballot. They understood that he was not interested in their healthcare, their safety, their roads, and their future. Policies and programs bored him to tears. Serving all Americans was off the table. A reality TV superbrand and influencer did what all showmen do. He put on a show. And I think we can all agree. It was a remarkable performance.

To this day, many of our citizens find Mr. Trump a dazzling performer. There are numerous platforms capable of hosting Mr. Trump and reinforcing the strong connection with his many followers. That arrangement, my fellow Americans, has nothing to do with running a country. And we would be well-advised for Mr. Trump to express his influence as a star entertainer, not in the conduct of an office he was never prepared for, or even interested in assuming.
Joseph R. Biden,
46th President of the United States

Could a more gifted orator still disarm Trump with some softer rhetoric? Railing public support against future fascist-like leaders may enlist arguments that can bypass pride-constrained men like Trump completely.

Who knows?

With some poise, and some pauses to anchor us, we could arrive at the obvious but unstated defense Biden was mounting:

I’m that guy. I’m that competent, boring head of a bureaucracy who can deliver us back to the cadences of stability. Not because the future is docile and predictable. Not because I even know what to say but because I know how to listen. I have the capacity to change minds, including my own. And the conflicts we face are not to be conquered but brokered by someone who understands when the government steps in and when it stands down.
This Political Moment

Polite Media Part III– The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion

The Reckoning

The closing section addresses the transition of the corporate workplace from a security to a social model. Will the discretionary controls of a need-to-know policy be replaced by a more transparent one? Open access is required in the sharing and distribution of enterprise social networks. Do business and pleasure need further introductions? Can they shake hands on open networks within their own enterprises?

6. Left to Our Own Devices, Literally

There are many wrinkles in the emerging social formulas. It’s true that some of that lies in the gray zone between first-hand experience and the conformist pressures of affiliation. Some of it is flat-out trolling. All of it is distracting from the work priorities that support the operational and business success of the enterprise host.

What happens when the engagement becomes so pervasive, so ongoing, that it removes the employer as the cornerstone of employee experience? That doesn’t mean people confuse posting on the network with their real jobs. It means they expect the crowd sourcing to produce the resolutions they seek whenever novelties are introduced into their problem-solving.

Will they complain about the answers they’re getting only to condemn the system that offers them? That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. How many of our new hires are sold through the onboarding screen a set of expectations for how to handle all the social tools, information sources, and data resources they’ve been provided? In most enterprises, that’s not an HR-brokered conversation.

In a prepandemic world we were told to show-up. Whether our appearances added value or sparked discussion was not the trigger here. The focus was reserved for our absences not escaping the notice of supervisors. The doghouse as limelight. In a social-mediated workplace we now have the news menus of staff meetings with the option of using this same medium to engage with our peers.

Implicit in this dialog is the intimacy and trust required for active listening and inclusive participation. We’re seeing these trust factors play out in groups that can’t be easily defined as communities of interest or practice. They are both. They’re professional in their approach to problem-solving and information sourcing. They also pride themselves in personable contributions of their welcoming and approachable members.

Ultimately there is a golden rule of social media that doesn’t just bear repeating. It embodies any communication or failure to communicate across a screen conferred by mutual acceptance of network membership. If you are personally offended or upset by a post to your feed, respond to the flawed process, the underlying conditions … the issue at-hand. NOT to the character of the person sending it.

7. Permission Statements

Nothing tests the boundaries of a distributed workforce more transparently than enterprise social networking, a.k.a. Corporate Facebook. Turns out the protection of an employer-based firewall is not just a safe zone for selfies but a sanctuary for discourse. Turns out that working for the same outfit remotely transcends the traditional barriers posed by office politics, territorial skirmishes, and most importantly, network security — that Achilles heel of all organizational networks.

Permissions management is the key chain of network security. It is the access controls behind every server, application, and file folder, (land and cloud). However, in their zeal to protect, the network security folks took their eyes off one basic consideration. It’s one thing to tackle internet-launched security threats. It’s another thing to keep them so guarded that they’re not put to actual use.

For instance, in the case of enterprise networking, it turns out that the opportunity for personal branding exceeds the risk of identity theft. Oh wait. That’s not on me. That’s our firewall which handles malicious attacks. How is it then that a sometime knowledge worker has evolved into a full-time knowledge in-mate? Today’s intranet contains a virtual prison yard of electronic directories, lists, and libraries in perpetual lock-down. These are the underlying conditions that contribute to large-scale organizational IT stumbles such as…

- Knowledge Gaps: Not knowing what we know,
- Information Silos: Losing track of who would know,
- And back by popular demand,
- Flustered Users: Wondering of it’s just me (or did a decade of IT changes land on my screen before arrival of the next Covid variant)?

8. Promises Kept

Outside of work, our consumer selves were never given the chance to opt-out of one-way social networks that surveil every step in our digital lives. The culprit turns out to be network security protocols; specifically, the notion that the employee relationship to corporate information exists on a need-to-know basis. If it’s not essential to the job, it’s not available to the user.

This policy runs counter to most of employees in pursuit of most information. We’ll call this the like-to-find-out policy. Those are the conditions knowledge workers find themselves. This is true in making informed decisions and on finding authoritative answers. It’s evident in the service of our most soaring aspirations and most routine of tasks.

We’ve all heard the familiar denunciations:

- Hide: That’s hoarding!
- Go seek: That’s one crap load of search results!
- Still seeking: That person’s no longer here to let me in!

This time lost chasing access-resistant corporate assets pales in relation to the larger loss of trust that happens when you don’t see what I see. How can you and I be on the same page when clearly we’re not accessing the same app, function, image, or file on our screens.

There simply is no justification for need-to-know access in a post-pandemic world espousing transparency, equity, and the full participation of co-located, remote, and hybrid teams. Enterprise social networking platforms like Yammer, Slack, and Zimbra channel news feeds on an intended want-to-find-out basis. When governed and managed effectively, they enable self-organizing groups to collaborate across the familiar silos of departments, lines of business, and regions.

More importantly, their openness and vibrancy parade an undeniable affirmation that this is a welcoming workplace. Not with its basis in one big unified corporate family but an unforced reflection of a workplace containing the voices of its workers, managers, and executives. This is a new chapter with an established roadmap: A return to the pre-firewall promise of social media.

Corporate enterprises are served well to put as much thought into building their communities as they spend dollars on buttressing their fortresses. It’s that kind of thinking which will retain and attract the best talent in the post pandemic culture to come.