Jonathan Lash's State of the College Address

To know is still not enough

Jonathan Lash, State of the College, 2015

June 6, 2015

Madam chair, former presidents, current and former trustees, faculty, staff, alumni, students — all who have created, who sustain, and who care about Hampshire College, our unique experiment — dear friends, welcome. This happy gathering is a moment to honor our remarkable past, celebrate the present, and set our sights on the future.

It is 50 years since the extraordinary combination of vision, daring, and generosity that led to the creation of Hampshire College reached the point that the new enterprise was incorporated and formally launched. It is 45 years since those of you who were in Hampshire’s first class arrived at an unfinished campus for an unaccredited school to be part of an unpredictable experiment in education. Everyone involved — students, faculty, staff, and administrators — was taking a huge leap of faith. It is our remarkable good fortune that you did.

I want to start by recognizing a few of the individuals who were involved:

• Chuck and Polly Longsworth, whose energy, courage, wisdom, charm, and land acquisition skills made the whole enterprise possible.
   
• Bob Birney and Ken Rosenthal, who did so much to turn a farfetched concept into an operational reality.
   
• Adele Simmons and Greg Prince, who led the college through triumphs and hard times alike with grace, determination, and passion for what it stands for.
   
• Aaron Berman — alum, professor, former dean of faculty, Hampshire parent – the only individual who has literally done everything here. And Penina Glazer, who guided the creation of so much that works in our approach and culture. Each of them has mentored so many of us.
   
• And the founding faculty, staff, and pioneering students who turned repurposed orchards and cow pastures into a turbulent, exciting, innovative, high-profile, and profoundly influential educational experiment.

I hope this weekend leaves each of you sore from loving hugs and overwhelmed by appreciation for the many ways you changed lives, and the course of higher education. Kudos and thanks to every one of you. Take a moment to look around and feel proud.

Look around at your campus, but more important, at the people: the still inspired and inspiring faculty, the deeply committed and mission-driven staff, the hundreds of alumni who are here and the 9,000 others they represent.

This place of ours was created on the premise that if a school could shift the focus from teaching to learning the results might be extraordinary. You alumni are the proof. You imagined questions and wrestled with the maddening way that the search for answers only deepened the question. You recruited faculty to advise, challenge, and partner with you. You created an open-source education whose content was and is everywhere, not just in books and classrooms. It was in your experience as you ignored conventional approaches, experimented, failed, and tried anew. You invented ways to turn your ideas into action, and that skill, it turns out, stays with you and empowers you.

You are very good at change, able to reinvent yourselves in ways that others wish that they could emulate. Where others fear uncertainty, Hampshire alums see opportunity. You create change. You ride the wave of change.

And this is a time of change. Some call it “the great acceleration.” Technology, institutions, the nature and scale of knowledge, the way we communicate, the bio-geo-chemistry of the earth … everything is changing.

Hampshire educates for change.

Today, our strategy is titled “educating for change and changing education.” It is the product of a broadly inclusive community process and it is premised on a simple mission: to foster a lifelong passion for learning, inquiry, and ethical citizenship that inspires students to contribute to knowledge, justice, and positive change in the world and, by doing so, to transform higher education. Or even more simply: to know is still not enough.

We live this mission every day. And I’d like to take a moment to tell you how we do that by letting you know something about what’s going on here, and what’s planned.

You are aware that Hampshire students are exceptional. But did you know that in the last three years they won nine Fulbrights and three Princess Grace awards? And this year, in addition, they received two Gilman Fellowships and two Humanity in Action awards. I don’t know of any other liberal arts college with a similar record.

And the Div III’s, the amazing Div III’s. I wish you had been here just before commencement to hear their presentations. From the exquisitely sensitive “Exploration of the Art, Architecture, and Cultural Politics of the Jewish Community of Manhattan’s Lower East Side” to “The Fabrication of Nano Particles and Their Use for Toxic Cleanup” they astonish me each year. These are students who have had the privilege to work with faculty as partners in discovery and who have found their way to extraordinary insight and achievement.

At the same time, our students continue the Hampshire tradition, the imperative, of working for social change. It’s an honor to support students’ political engagement and activism, including their leadership in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the demand to divest from the prison industrial complex. (I’m proud to say that Hampshire’s commitment to align our investments with our mission and values already meant that we didn’t hold shares in the companies at issue, and we won’t.)

And a word about our faculty. Our faculty continue to experiment, introducing new programs in queer studies, game design, Africana studies, entrepreneurship, curatorial studies, food, farm, and sustainability, and ethics and the common good — an approach to ethical leadership that connects powerfully with Hampshire’s tradition of social engagement. This is a new program that has been made possible by the generosity of an alum and her sister.

In addition to a multitude of books, articles, art works, and performances, as teachers, artists, writers, scholars, scientists, and activists, Hampshire faculty have won scores of awards and competitive grants from Google to Guggenheim, from the American Public Health Association, the Smithsonian, the Mellon Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and many more.

In the last three years we have hired 21 new faculty, outstanding young teachers who have come to Hampshire because they believe in what we do and welcome the opportunity to innovate in their teaching. Fifteen of the 21 new faculty are women, a third are people of color. All are committed to Hampshire’s approach to education.

Hampshire alums: You go on to great things. Two-thirds of our graduates earn advanced degrees within 10 years of commencement and we rank in the top 1% nationwide in the proportion of our graduates who go on to get the top degree in their field, an astonishing figure. More than a quarter of Hampshire graduates have started their own organizations: social ventures, investment firms, advocacy organizations, film companies, art galleries, or creative mash-ups of those and more. They’re literally creating the platforms for putting their ideas into action, which is what landed Hampshire on the Forbes short list of most entrepreneurial colleges. Hampshire alums and faculty won five Academy Awards last year.

We remain an experimenting college centered on learners and driven by inquiry, and we are committed to telling the story of why that matters to the world. But some things are changing. Over the past year we have made a radical change in the way we approach admissions. Shedding conventional recruitment practices and the consultants that sell them, we have focused on identifying, recruiting, and supporting the students who will thrive at Hampshire. We threw out the SAT, which did not predict Hampshire success and is biased against low-income applicants. We made it harder to apply — you have to write a lot of essays to apply to Hampshire, a lot — and we communicated bluntly to applicants about Hampshire’s uniqueness and quirks. And we redirected financial aid from “discounting” to meeting more of the need of low-income students.

The result? Our yield, the percentage of students who accepted a Hampshire offer of admission, jumped from a dangerously low 18% to 29% in a single year. The entering class is, by any measure, the best qualified in years, and the diversity, at 31% domestic students of color, surpasses by a significant margin that of any class in our history. This shift, from a revenue-driven to a mission-driven approach to admissions, is right for Hampshire and it’s the right thing to do. Going forward, as we do more to tell our story and communicate our uniqueness, we believe we will see a growing impact on admissions. With your help we will do better and better at finding the students for whom this education is a magnificent opportunity. And again, with your help, we will make it affordable to all students.

Going forward in the academic program, we will increase support for faculty and student innovation, improving technology and infrastructure to foster experimentation, and adding resources for scientific research and teaching, and telling the story of our innovations to the education world. We will develop a center for community engagement and experiential learning that links programs across the campus and facilitates greater coordination of internship and experiential learning opportunities. We will create an institute for race and ethnic studies that will intensify academic programming, research, and study abroad in areas that address the histories and perspectives of underrepresented communities. We’re also working to be more intentional about culture and place here on campus.

You may have noticed some physical changes. Where we are situated right now used to be a road, bus stop, and parking circle. We took it back for people. Or, as we are fond of saying around here, we removed the fossil fuel spear that was pointed at the heart of campus. And, of course, there is some construction under way. The R.W Kern Center will house technology enabled classrooms, caffeinated social space, meeting space, and admissions. It will meet the Living Building Challenge, making its own energy, treating its own waste, gathering its own water, and built without a long list of materials whose manufacture and use damage human health and the environment. In fact, there are two LBC buildings under construction on this campus, something not happening anywhere else in the country. Our future tenant and educational partner, the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, is building its new center where you see that gigantic pile of dirt over by the farm.

We are a learning organization. Our buildings should speak and teach, and these will. Faculty are already planning courses uses the buildings themselves as teaching tools.

And we have done some sprucing up. Living spaces have been renovated. Classroom, practice, rehearsal, studio, and study spaces have been refurbished. The airport lounge has been reinvented as a flexible study and creative space, and an old horse barn has been up-cycled into the Roos-Rohde House, the new home of Mixed Nuts and myriad student activities. Through the generous help of an alum who cares deeply about science, the labs in Cole are being fully renovated for the first time in 40 years. By the end of this summer, if all goes well, we will have installed 15 acres of solar collectors that will make us virtually 100% solar for our electricity on an annualized basis. By the end of the decade we hope to replace the moldering hulks of Greenwich with structures that explore the range of what is possible with sustainable living space.

We plan other changes. Fifty years ago in The Making Of A College the founders envisioned a campus that offered facilities, support services, and academic programming that would “enable students to thrive intellectually, physically, and socially.” When the College built the Robert Crown Center adjacent to the library the concept was to place the whole person, mind and body, at the core of the education and the campus. In this time of accelerating change, multiplying stimuli, and constant connection, most students arrive at college with limited skills for achieving balance and managing stress in their lives. They struggle to cope with expanded workloads, new social demands, and the search for identity and community.

So one key element of our plan going forward is to build on the link between the library and the RCC, both physically and programmatically. The Knowledge Commons, a renovation and repurposing of all the spaces in the library building, will bring together a range of academic supports, media labs, and technology tools to house a thriving hub of intellectual activity. The adjacent Wellness Commons, an addition to a sustainably renovated RCC, will bring together all of the mental and physical health supports now scattered across campus.

In combination with the new Knowledge and Wellness Commons, we plan to create a program that integrates health and wellness support with academic inquiries into well-being and welfare and enables students to learn the practices of a balanced life. This constellation of ideas has generated significant excitement among students.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. The state of the College is good.

I’d like to conclude by telling you something you already know. You know it deeply, and I suspect it is one of the reasons you decided to spend this weekend on the grounds of this old orchard and these cow pastures.

Hampshire not only pioneered interdisciplinary, inquiry-based, learner-centered education, it created a model for community engaged learning, and became a leader in many fights for justice.

What each of you played a role in creating here is needed now more than ever. Will you join us in honoring our past by helping to secure our future?

Welcome back. And let’s keep going.