55th Anniversary Celebration

• Check in opens midday
   
• Afternoon talks and open houses
   
• 2–3 p.m. Living Building Tour
  Hitchcock Center for the Environment
  
  What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place? Like our R.W. Kern Center, the Hitchcock Center is a Certified Living Building. Join us to explore systems and features of the building and to learn about how the Hitchcock Center was designed to model systems in nature. Find out what makes the building a special teaching tool empowering visitors to ask what sustainability looks like in the built environment.
   
• 5–6:30 p.m. Gallery Reception for Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station
  Art Gallery, Harold F. Johnson Library
  
  Celebrating our fall show by Hampshire alum Sara Smith 90F. Smith explores questions about the physical, political, and spiritual implications of understanding humans as part of an interdependent system, with one another, with other species, and within Earth's ecosystems.
• 5–8 p.m. Dinner
  
  Go out to eat or join students in the dining commons. Guests can use tokens or pay at the door; students can use Dining Dollars. Credit/debit cards accepted.
   
• Evening Talent Share

• Check in is open all day
   
• Morning talks and gatherings
   
• 9:30–11 a.m. Miriam Slater Memorial
  Faculty Lounge, Franklin Patterson Hall
  
  The Slater family and friends invite you to remember Professor Emerita Miriam Slater as friend, colleague, historian, family member, and extraordinary person.
   
• 10 a.m.–noon Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
  This stunning 40,000 square-foot museum on our campus is loved by families, art aficionados, and book lovers alike. Alumni and families please wear your name tag for complimentary admittance; students will need their Hampshire ID.
   
• 11 a.m.–noon Reproductive Justice: Intergenerational Connections
  East Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall
  
  This intergenerational panel will bring together current Collective Power program members, alumni, and longtime leaders to explore the question: In what ways can intergenerational relationships and our memories strengthen the reproductive justice movement in the face of today’s political challenges? Panelists will reflect on their organizing experiences with Collective Power at Hampshire College. Sharing stories of past and present efforts, they’ll discuss that legacy shapes and strengthens students’ current work in the face of escalating attacks on reproductive justice and civil liberties.
   
• Noon–1:30 p.m. Lunch
  Franklin Patterson Parking Lot
  
  Local food trucks will be offering a variety of options.
   
• 1:30–3 p.m. Urgent and Unbounded: The Role of Liberal Arts Education in an Age of Rising Authoritarianism
  Robert Crown Center
  
  Increasing threats to democracy abroad and at home. Attacks on academic freedom. The breakneck growth of AI. Corrosively siloed media environments. The world that we find ourselves in is more complex and interconnected than ever, and it is impossible to approach these issues without confronting the fundamental questions that undergird the liberal arts.
  
  How do we learn to solve problems? How do we communicate across differences? What skills are needed to acquire and apply knowledge? What does it mean to think critically and question assumptions? How do we search for, create, and comprehend art and beauty?
  
  Today, a critical new question arises: How must higher education change to rise to the challenges we face?
  
  > Ken Burns 71F (Moderator)
  > Lynn Pasquerella P08, president, American Association of Colleges and Universities
  > More speakers to be announced.
   
• 3:30–5 p.m. Decades Reunion
  Charles & Polly Longsworth Arts Village, the Adele Simmons Hall lobby, and the Leo Model Gallery in the Jerome Liebling Building
  
  Gather with classmates, faculty, and staff from your era.
   
• 5:15–6 p.m. Community Bell Ringing
  In front of the Harold F. Johnson Library
   
• 6–8 p.m. Community Dinner
  Robert Crown Center
  
  Dinner with remarks from Interim President Jennifer Chrisler. Advance tickets required.
   
• 8–9:30 p.m. Hunting Yellow Pigs
  Bill Brand Screening Room, Jerome Liebling Building
  
  Screening of a new feature-length documentary film about the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, a program for high schoolers that has been ongoing since the College’s founding, directed by late Professor Emeritus David Kelly through this year. The film showcases Hampshire's student-empowering philosophy in action and the profound impact it has had on society. A Q&A will follow, moderated by past President Greg Prince and Professor of Film and Photography Abraham Ravett.

• 8:30–11 a.m. Check Out
  R.W. Kern Center
  
  Please stop by the R.W. Kern Center to drop off your name tag, room keys (if you stayed in a mod), and any unused dining tokens you’d like us to share with students, faculty, and staff.
   
• 10:30 a.m.–noon Community Memorial Service
  Yiddish Book Center
  
  Come together to remember the community members we have lost in recent years. The service will pay special tribute to founding faculty members who have died.
   
• 1–4 p.m. Celebration of Life for Lorna Coppinger
  Capulet Acres, 111 East Chestnut Hill Road, Montague, Massachusetts
  
  The Coppinger family warmly invites you to join them in honoring and celebrating the life of Faculty Associate Lorna Coppinger. Bring along a picnic lunch and gather with them following the close of campus festivities. Please RSVP to Tim at coppingerbuilders2@gmail.com.

Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station
Art Gallery, Harold F. Johnson Library

Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station is part of artist Sara Smith 90F’s larger multimedia project Inside the Breath (In Network Time), set in a future era called INT. At the heart of this project are questions about the physical, political, and spiritual implications of understanding humans as part of an interdependent system, with one another, with other species, and within Earth's ecosystems. Smith developed the core ideas of the INT world by mapping aspects of octopuses' sensory-perceptual abilities to the writings and ideas of the queer Chicana activist and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa. In INT, bacterial communication networks make our shared existence possible. Smith’s exhibition invites us to consider how we might collectively reach toward a more just, ecological, and actively interconnected existence.

Sara Smith 90F creates speculative-documentary performances and other works that explore interconnection and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Their working process is rooted in physical practices of micro-attention and relational transformation. Smith's artworks have been seen and heard in theaters, museums, studios, public parks, recreation center basements, and cloud-based platforms.