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.
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.
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 wasa 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.
50th anniversary scenes and takeaways of Hampshire’s return from the brink.
The College Turns 50 and Learns What It’s Grown Up to Be
Mounting the comeback without staples.
Last weekend my wife Patty (F78) and I attended Hampshire College’s 50th Anniversary celebration. We live one town out from where we first laid eyes on the future, long before we realized our marriage is what that future needed to be fully lived in. We went expecting some chance encounters with a few peripheral acquaintances and a newly untangled neck lanyard. What we left with was the renewal of hope that the future not only required but could insist on the continuation of Hampshire College. The grandiosity was unexpected. But there is much to celebrate.
We arrived with guarded, pensive questions:
Is the existential crisis of prepandemic times only visible in the rear view? Is Hampshire back for good?
At age 50, is Camp Hamp ready to declare itself the institutional grown-up in a crowded room of fat elites, insulated by their liberalism?
Does such emancipation lend authority to the traditional school fight song? The one calling out the injustices that now masquerade as the business of the usual?
Davis Bates F73 retells the story of the Div Free Bell: “You go out into the world and Division 4, 5, and 6 will find you.”
Paraphrasing President Ed Wingenbach here, few colleges can fall back on its social justice legacies without resting on its quixotic laurels. The Hamp he inherited didn’t have that financial luxury. What it did have was a devoted alumni community that considered Hampshire their academic soulmate. Not some option on a roulette wheel of school rankings but the only choice for them. An improbable mix of trust fund spoils, interdisciplinary modalities, and the pioneering spirit of the self-initiated.
By the Skin of Our Whims
Where else could you build a degree based on the skin of your whims? Where else could you demonstrate the value of your education was not clocked to your classroom hours but to the more expansive view of independent study. Not learning for its own sake, but for putting it to work — the fruits of your Hampshire labors.
The culmination of this remains the Division III — a thesis-like concentration anchored by academically-chaired committees and assembled by …
the Hampshire student as both messenger and focus of their purgatorial scrutiny.
Hampsters in contemporary habitats.
The committee assessed the merit of the proposed Div III contract against the abstracts of the thesis. Often within the experience of delivering their realization through scientific, literary, musical, cinematic, and theatrical expression.
It’s fortunate for the college and our community that these yardsticks for graduating Hampshire remain in place 51 years later. It’s this blending of freedom, support, and guided trial that binds the real-world fortunes of alumns to their original and enduring premise for attending Hampshire. It’s true that the process still carries this dogmatic insistence:
1 Div III completion = one liberal arts degree
Perhaps that’s the price for being left in our post graduate bassinets at the entry ramp of the professional freeway? But at least the generosity inspired by these rites of passage allows us to host these spirited disagreements for another day.
Hit the Ground Solving
There were the four schools that bracketed Hampshire’s academic offerings across the liberal arts spectrum of its founding: Cognitive Communications, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The portfolio was reshuffled with the great re-imagining of Hampshire’s relevance and differentiation from other endowment-challenged small liberal arts colleges.
This urgency pares the precarious state of four evolving social problems with Hampshire’s own comeback from the abyss of the dim ‘Mim days of F18-S19. In practical terms this means that the first arrivals no longer dabble in Div I level flirtations. They jump into the furies of the current spasming century with both skidding feet, be it…
Confronting climate change,
Escorting white supremacy out the door, or
Defining truth in a post truth world.
Average White Male Band
The supremacy part of hitting-the-ground was especially apparent in reliving the grainy splendor of Hampshire Video. The only hue starker than the black and white test patterns was the white maleness of the crew and cast. At the time I think most of the Infinity crew considered themselves more as outcasts — even by Hampshire freak-flagging standards. But fast forward to today and it’s undeniable. That’s not a reason to pay an apology forward. What would today’s Hampshire students want or do with such a misdirected misgiving?
A more sincere gesture would be to mentor these new voices and encourage their own shaping and discovery. That we were afforded the same pathways is the institutional memory that bears preservation — not the memories themselves. I thought of that when I heard Lisa Napoli’s virtual presence of her eighties curation segment. Lisa was lamenting the loss of her Hampshire video legacy. I almost interrupted her virtual voice by challenging her familiar lament with actual evidence.
Recently I excavated a sketch where I cast Lisa in her future real-life role of reporter on the antics of Wind Shields. The interview concerns celebrity journalism and the fortunes of Brooke’s fictitious younger sister. In retrospect, the script is sophomoric. Like so many Infinity sketches, it deserves an obscure death. But at least I was trying to venture out of my hermetic maleness. And never had such inside baseball risen this close to the surface of my personal Infinity history.
Roger Mellen (S72) introduces John Bruner (F94) who guides us through a virtual tour of today’s Studio G.
Once and Future Infinity
My favorite 50th Anniversary ceremony was the Infinity & Beyond viewing and discussion of Hampshire Video. Full disclosure: I had no hand in the assembling of the program or curating of the artifacts. Yet I got scooped into the eighties reels like so many unwashed sweaters with their drying cycles set to a mod kitchen microwave:
Former spouses,
Long dried-up mod spills, and
Distant combustions of drug-induced creative angst.
All living in one throbbing continuum of a continuous metallic oxide salvage mission. What could be more legacy than that? A big pile of donations, that’s what!
Failing big windfalls of liquidity, John Bruner is the proud and capable keeper of the Infinity flame. The torch he carries was passed to him by the legend known as Gunther.* We learned from Bruner that it was John Gunther (F84) who executed the monk-like preservation of Studio G as a streaming channel on YouTube. **
* Also, thanks to John Gunther for looking the other way when those of us on security detail let interrupted the slumber of the editing suites in the early morning off-hours. As my Div III collaborator Andy Morris-Friedman (F80) attests: "Maybe you could crank out a 3 minute rock video within your 3 hour allotment. But not a feature-length documentary."
** As a second footnote, Bruner provided some homework to the time-rich and cash-strapped Infinity partisans. It's assigning times, places, collaborators, titles, etc. to the smoldering collection of orphan videos now stored in this YouTube-hosted vault. Please contact John for the QR scan you'll need to access.
Many alumns I remain pals with harbor a lost treasure buried in the metallic shadows of this vast, untamed archive. I look forward to providing the door, secret handshake, and instructions for crowdsourcing this reconnaissance mission.
Tom Giovan (78F) shared the insight that Infinity itself was always about the framing, the queuing, and the segues. He figured the folks who wanted their mugs to appear on Intran would emerge from the shadows as the weekly “programming” destination. It was the “glue” between segments that the Infidiots that anchored whatever submissions had gathered in the backlog. I can confirm from the era immediately proceeding Tom’s that the glue formed its own standalone destination, whether it was introducing the news, entertainment, or bastard of both.
Unwritten Histories
The existential flash point of Miriam Nelson’s ten interminable months as the school’s president may have been the shock to the system that we never got from prior leaders. Maybe her predecessor would sooner fall on his sword than his board to balance capital improvements with lagging enrollments and budget realities. In either narrative, “Mim” held the carving cleaver in the role of the grim reaper. In the overtures to her would-be suitors, she saw in Hampshire’s buildings, property, and infrastructure something that no graduate could envision or tolerate: the seeds of an extractive business.
Februry 2019 | Cole Science Center: The winter of our discontent and the seeds of our revival.
The collective rejection of this was on full display at this weekend’s celebrations. $10 million in federal rescue funds have yet to be touched. Plan B is in place and may not be needed. Is this Hampshire’s books we’re talking about? We’ve got the vision thing and the business side playing on the same team? Amazing!
Curiously, there were teary-eyed farewells to former President Jonathan Lash curated in the 2010s reel. Yet there were no postcards from the predatory aggression or student-led brush-back against the administration in the dim, grim Mim times. John Bruner explained this as so much footage trapped in so many phones that never found its way to an arching meta treatment of this epic and ultimately heroic battle.
Any alumn Netflix producers out there?
A vulture capitalism carve-out script awaits only your filming rights. Either way, the diffuse nature of digital artifact collecting is a major challenge to a technology that remembers singular images contained in a visual lock-box in the casing of a SONY videocassette.
Next Chapters
We all left campus with a pocketful of sounds, pictures, a crumpled enrollment packet, and the exuberance that comes with believing the is a vital force for social change in a world gone to shit on our watch.
Can Hampshire cure climate change?
No and sorry but wrong question.
Can we nudge it back to health?
Better question.
Patty and I will soon depart our unglamorous work lives as salaried people. We will exchange commutes and Tupperware with a surplus of time and experience and shower them on a Hampshire community that supports the future as a nurturing place. One supporting its inhabitants on the earnings of their humanity alone. A market at the service of its citizens. It starts with a generosity still scarce in these times of perceived loss and imposed transition. Tomorrow’s Hampshire is the nesting place.
