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.
