Category: Conservative Arts and Liberal Sciences

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.

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.

No chances © Marc Solomon 2024

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.

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?

(c) blog.experientia.com

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.

(c) Marc Solomon, 2022

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.

(c) Marc Solomon, 2022

Polite Media Part II– The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

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

PART II: Employee Engagement Finds its Voice

Part two of our three part series on workplace-based social media addresses the use cases and tangible benefits of its adoption. Key to that success are the underlying trust factors. It’s this sense of belonging that enable participants to contribute in both their work roles and as members within these communities. Employee retention tops all success factors.

A Three Part Series on the Reimaging of Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
A camera on the meeting screen is now a seat at the table. (c) yektafurniture-com

3. Scaling the Firewalls

Before the pandemic, the choice was simply toe the line or leave. There was no shared social history that lived outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Anyone attempting to step outside it was greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalized the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal actions.

There still is no safe public harbor for the trading of these untold white collar war stories. A half-century of employment laws and workforce reductions are not to reverse course in deference to the opening of our local chapter of corporate Facebook. In fact, management’s legal stranglehold on corporate labor is one of the galvanizing forces for instilling civility and cooperation in ways completely alien and largely absent from advertiser-driven social media.

In fact enterprise social networking is a valuable opportunity to reimagine the social media conversation. Shedding the conflict-seeking grandstanding of the agitator is both good for bonding and the bottom-line. Realizing the limitations of social media for resolving disputes is another part of that rethinking. Locking horns on screen is another reason to close potentially explosive and incendiary posts so that cooler heads intervene, arriving at an “offline” resolution.

Finally, the toxic mingling of obsessive behavior and competitive bargaining is another regrettable piece of recent social media experience. Its removal is supported by the need for greater cross-enterprise cooperation. No vanity-induced campaigns for the most winks or fewest unsubscribes.

Promoting a healthy participation rate includes generous helpings of member counts and feed interactions specific to the full potential of each group. No need to pit them against one another or in side-by-side comparisons. Remember, social metrics that support cooperation are not those sports league betting formulas used to measure external success.

4. Where Is the Conversation Headed?

What happens when the voice of the employee gets a seat at the table?

Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned. What you hear later is a stilted reconstruction of rationales used to justify the impact of events no one saw coming.

So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to weigh transparency against a fair return on shareholder capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?

So, who is our expert witness here? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning.

They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems go unaddressed when your firsthand witness decides to jump ship.

Maybe in a pre-jaundiced view of social media, there would be a pooling of internal webs. This is a rally cry for collective action to scale the firewalls not high enough to hold us in.

Here are three such expressions of this initiative:

a) War Stories:

Develop success cases told around a communal fire through open discourse and courageous debate.

b) Knowledge Metrics:

Use enterprise social networking analytics to quantify the involvement of network communities in opportunity gains and cost containment, i.e. employee self service.

c) Process Guidance:

Provide support to energized and often less-seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage guidelines and sequential learning in the practicing and mastery of new skills.

(c) blog.hubspot.com

5. We’re Waiting for the Desks to Settle

The long sidelined promise of social media is when it’s conducted within the decorum of what used to pass as polite society: Keep your politics, religion, and money separate from your daily discourse with others. From a First Amendment perspective, we’re treading into ulcer-inducing territory. It’s a form of personal discretion best left to AI-guided robots.

The argument goes like this.

In an age where visceral anger meets instant gratification, the noise of the mind has replaced the din of the public square. Therefore we humans are too authentic to suck it in a reserve of uncomplaining stoicism. In fact, emotional repression has never fallen out of favor inside the corporate realm. What’s more, a shared belief in a reliable pay check inspires the self-regulation missing from the toxic undersides of Facebook and Twitter. This politeness factor breeds big trust under a big tent, consisting of tens of thousands of employees. All with access to their colleagues’ posts, likes, and follows.

Perhaps the ultimate business value of a trusting social network is that the benefit of the doubt is extended to people we’re meeting on social media for the first time. These are no longer complete strangers. They’re former teammates of a current colleague. They’re newly hired to plug a hole we’re tired of fixing. They overheard that we’re onto something and it sounds a lot like the missing piece in their pursuit of what comes after the problem we’re resolving:

Degree of separation meets self-organizing teams.

A Three Part Series on the Reimaging of Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
(c) ideas.ted.com

This was always the promise of a network effects. Now it’s landing squarely in the post-pandemic wheelhouse of the distributed workforce. It’s a workforce that could just as easily move to some other enterprise should they not feel included in this one.

Next week: The Reckoning

Polite Media Part I: The Reemergence of Corporate Social Networks

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

Introduction

(c) Philip J. Britann

The notion of polite society has been pilloried in all directions. Since time immemorial, it summons an elegance and privilege shielded from the commoners and working classes. These refined rules of etiquette faded with our regard for elites and institutions. They fell in a heap, ringing down the privacy curtain that separates first-class passengers from coach.

Now, add social media to the mix. The language of the street became the vernacular of the screen. We gain gratification and followers. We sacrifice the temperance, discretion, and decorum of pen to paper, and spoken word as the primary expression of interpersonal communication.

Skip ahead a generation. Within the sanctuary of corporate networks, employees are now told that their companies reflect the virtues of a benevolent gatekeeper. Business success is no longer measured by profit alone but by private sector contributions to the greater society.

Re-enter social media. This time it’s not a destination app but a two-way communications channel:

    • The assignment? Pry open a dialog. Keep it civil in tone. Who’s involved? Everyone who wants to be.
    • What’s at stake? Shared perspectives across office, remote, and hybrid workplaces.
    • What’s being shared? Best practices, common interests, event launches, shout-outs, and no shortage of selfies.
    • How do we know they work? Look at cooperation levels between office, departments, and business lines.

Is this the workplace you remember vacating in March 2020? The shifting answer suggests that we have an opening for you well ahead of your return.

PART I: The Case for Enterprise Social Media

The opening argument in Part I addresses the crossing paths of social media with the virtual workplace and the unprecedented return to office of a largely homebound workforce. The social media factor turns on this key question. Can the same medium that bred widespread misinformation and distrust be used to build community and cohesion in post pandemic work environments?

A man holding a face mask and a woman reach to shake hands
(c) The Atlantic, 2021

1. The Socializing of the Remote Worker

I’ve met an unexpected and rewarding twist in my career as an adapter/survivor to the ways of keeping both feet in the gainful camp of the salaried corporate middle manager. The twisting is not the endless contortions made to remain employed in professions with insatiable appetites for awards, honors, certifications, and credentialing I’ve never possessed.

This world has been tone deaf to the many skills accrued in the weathering of the hire/fire rhythms that shadow its more famous boom/bust cycles. What does it mean to attain the title of Certified Cloud Practitioner? For some, it’s the beginning a rewarding corporate IT career inside an Amazon-centric ecosystem. For others, it’s the cost of staying employed. The exam answers are as perishable as last year’s jargon will be to your next passing score.

It’s a curious thing. Before the pandemic we listened in our commutes to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. What did we learn from our drive-time audio excursions? That once you go beyond the news, sports, and weather, you get a contest of wills. Not just who wins but who gets to define what victory even means. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception.

It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.

In a tightened labor market those same management controls that breed conformity and reticence are keeping a lower profile. Open debate with superiors? Whoa! No one said the open floor plan extends to a hybrid workforce of mostly full-time remote middle managers and operations staff. Speaking truth to power? Yep, still the same career-limiting move we never left.

2. On the Clock and Off the Cuff

(c) karencortellreisman.com

But the rise of the social media feed is a new form of employee expression that diverges from the top-down command-control of corporate communications. No, this isn’t an infomercial or even scripted. Neither, as the social marketers would pitch you, is it an all cast production number. True, it is a dialog across departments, regions, and subject domains.

But it’s not yet anything as tangible as a territory, or a job family, or a set of performance review and promotion-worthy metrics and achievements. It is however a warm medium that permeates cold dollar calculations. It also holds the balance between a simple cost benefit analysis of remaining with one employee or taking the promotion in pay from the higher bidder next door.

Simply put, corporate newsfeeds, a.k.a. enterprise social networking, is the glue that holds those intangibles together. It’s not just about puppies, kittens, and paranormal geeks. Channeling our personal side into teams and projects is not about bloviating. Quite the opposite. It’s involving the moving inter-dependencies of groups unified by common interests.

The result isn’t self-promotion. It’s a shared outcome of working together, regardless of rank, location, or reporting structure. With increased engagement comes a stronger sense of community. This is cohesion that gives recognition, bonding, and personality to the often faceless calculus of complying with guidelines, engineering solutions, billing, purchasing, packaging, and keeping our heads down doing these things.

It’s interesting. I serve on a panel that approves, declines, or redirects requests for new communities. At the outset, we expected two things: (1) lots of pent-up demand for groups, and (2) lots of on-the-fly learning about what constitutes a new group and what doesn’t.

Six months later both assertions are both correct and misguided. (1) The demand has yet to recede. (2) We’re still learning. In fact, it’s gotten harder to negotiate when a proposed community is unique and universal, or, when it’s too focused on a group or issue best addressed as a topic or theme.

Next week: Employee Engagement finds its voice.

Hampshire is Back

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.

No empty nests near the Johnson Library.

References:

Ed Wingenbach Letters and Speeches

Me and God at Hampshire