Academics

At Hampshire you’ll take responsibility for your education, customize your curriculum, and move beyond boundaries of disciplines and departments. We call this your academic concentration. It puts the emphasis on learning, not on teaching. Guided by our accomplished faculty, you’ll forge your own path, taking roads not already paved for you. In the process you’ll acquire the ability to teach yourself.

It’s more than a life skill. It’s an outlook on life.

What Questions Drive You?

Hampshire helped invent the notion of interdisciplinary education, based on the idea that questions and issues are best examined from multiple perspectives. Not only is Hampshire not organized according to traditional, single-discipline departments; our curriculum goes beyond even interdisciplinarity to embrace a wider transdisciplinary curriculum that enables and encourages working across boundaries that are often not crossed, such as thinking across the arts, humanities, social inquiry, and the sciences in the service of particular questions. Central to this mode of transdisciplinarity are organizing opportunities to pursue central questions that act as provocation for thinking about the relevance of our work to contemporary concerns.

Hampshire's divisional academic system provides a framework to guide you in building your academic concentration and completing a yearlong advanced study project in your final year. A Hampshire education is not complete until you demonstrate the ability to use your knowledge in successively more sophisticated projects of your own design. Along the way, you will gain skills to help promote the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and engage in campus activities and community-based learning that enable you to apply your skills in intercultural competence.