Final Spring Commencement at Hampshire College Imbued with Celebration Despite Impending Closure
On Saturday, May 16, Hampshire hosted its 56th Commencement ceremony, conferring degrees to 192 graduates. For what was the College’s last full-scale graduation event, hundreds of alumni and community friends, as well as several members of the founding faculty, joined families in the celebration.
Due to overwhelming interest in the wake of the closure announcement on April 14, tickets were required for graduates’ family and friends to gather under the commencement tent. Other guests — among them many former professors and staff — sat or stood on the lawn around it, and the library quad was brimming with those who wanted to both applaud the intrepid new graduates and to say goodbye to the beloved institution.
Campus Safety and Well-being Assistant Mike Purcell — wearing an iconic plush frog hat —officially opened the proceedings; following were welcoming remarks from Board of Trustees Chair Jose Fuentes 05F and the College’s living land acknowledgment from Assistant Dean of Collaborative and Community-Engaged Learning Javiera Benavente.
President Jennifer Chrisler began her address saying, “There isn’t really a road map for this. Not for what Hampshire is facing, and not for a commencement speech quite like this one.” She continued, “In the midst of all the complicated emotions . . . today should be about one thing: the graduating class of 2026. Because you are who we are here to celebrate. You are who we are here to cheer. You are who we are here to applaud.
“For nearly 60 years,” she went on, “Hampshire acted as a lightning rod for students who wanted to think differently about the world and about themselves. Hampshire took as a given — as simply given — that students can and should be trusted with the freedom to pursue their own interests and do something unexpected along the way. That the purpose of education is to make people more engaged with the world, not to look at it from a distance.
What you carry forward now is the living proof of why Hampshire matters.President Jenn Chrisler
“I see artists and organizers. Researchers and makers. Writers, scientists, advocates, performers, educators, problem-solvers. I see people who care deeply about the world and who are willing to engage with it honestly, even when it is difficult.
“To the graduating class of 2026: You bring me so much joy,” Chrisler concluded. “I am grateful for all the gifts Hampshire has given us. And I am grateful — deeply, genuinely grateful — for everything you have given me,” Chrisler concluded. ‘’I am so proud of you.”
Student moderator Tenzin Jobe 22F then spoke, first offering a quote from the writer and former Five College Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature the late James Baldwin: “‘The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.’ These people,” Jobe said, “all sit before me today!”
Mike Purcell returned to deliver an enthusiastically received staff toast and led everyone in a chorus of Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies Noah Romero gave the faculty toast and asked the crowd to “clap it out one last time, to remember why we do this and who we do it for — for us! For the land! For the people!”
Student speaker Samara Ternoir 22F told fellow graduates, “I honor you, for what you have made this place, for what you have made me. And as we cast our many webs and fling them into different edges of the sky, I invite you to remember this place and each other with that same passion that moves all of us to dance furiously, to celebrate loudly, to mourn publicly, to love curiously, and to live proudly. This is what will get us through anything. Doing something will always get us through, as we all know . . . which, we know, is never enough.”
Keynote speaker and Hampshire alum J Finley 00F, who is an associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College, Claremont, California, called her speech her “Div 4.”
“Hampshire College is not reducible to buildings or budgets or the ground we sit on today,” she said. “It is a set of cultivated ways of thinking that now live in its graduates, in me, and in you. Whatever institutional doors may close, what has been planted here will not disappear; it takes root wherever we go, it multiplies, and it blossoms in the work we do.
“I wrote this line in my book — it’s one of my favorites, and it was forged, no doubt, in the work I did here damn near a quarter century ago: ‘There cannot be liberation without a deep subjective (and collective) consciousness of what one desires out of the condition of being free.’ To know, to act, and to insist that the world answer back, that is what it means to be educated here, that is the kind of freedom we now carry with us.”
Harrison Blum 01F gave the alumni toast, urging newly minted alums “to find the people, places, and activities that make you feel most human, most reverent, most joyful, and go toward them. Do big and extraordinary things at least once a year, and do ordinary, soulful things at least once a week. See it, build it, share it, because To Know Is Not Enough.”
Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty Gary Hawkins then handed out diplomas to the class of 2026 as they crossed the stage; Mike Purcell closed the ceremony.
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