Hampshire College community rallies following closure announcement

A protest in support of the staff, faculty and students being impacted by the closure of Hampshire College saw a large turnout, as many passionate voices came to support the college community.
Reminder Publishing photo by Trent Levakis

AMHERST — Passion and fervor were wholeheartedly apparent when a large gathering of Hampshire College students, faculty, staff and supporters of the school rallied at the Amherst Town Common on April 23 to support those impacted by the school’s recently announced closure.

Speakers throughout the event were consistent and clear: Hampshire College administration and the Five College Consortium needed to step up and offer reasonable pathways for the college community facing the worst of the situation.

“What this means: Students should be able to transfer to one of the four colleges, proportional to their resources, and all faculty and all staff at Hampshire should be granted a one-year bridge position to tie us over until we can find new jobs,” said Sarah Jenkins, a professor at Hampshire College. “This process has been chaotic at best. The four colleges must take meaningful action to ensure none of us are homeless, without insurance or access to medication, without child care or paychecks. The Five Colleges work because we do. We love Hampshire. It is our community. It is our home.”

Speakers made up of students and staff called on Hampshire College to be more transparent when working with outgoing students, faculty and staff during this process. They also urged the college to help students, faculty and staff find new pathways elsewhere and allow all those impacted to have an opportunity to remain in the soon-to-be four-college consortium.

Hampshire College shared earlier this month that it will close at the end of 2026, marking the end of the school that was founded in 1965. The decision has left 250 faculty and staff facing sudden unemployment and hundreds of students forced to seek a new collegiate path.

The college nearly closed back in 2019 when the school explored a potential higher-education merger and was not admitting an incoming class for fall 2019. The issue was ultimately resolved after then-successful efforts to raise money for the school.

In a letter to the school community from Hampshire College, President Jennifer Chrisler and the Board of Trustees, despite that “herculean effort,” the financial pressures on the college’s operations have become increasingly complex, compounded by shifting external factors in the present day. The letter was updated with information about the closure as recently as April 21, as of print time.

“As President Chrisler has shared regularly with our community and our regulatory agencies, we worked aggressively to increase enrollment, refinance existing debt, and realize new revenue via the sale of a portion of our land. We have long known that addressing these issues is essential to establishing a stable financial foundation, supporting long-term operations and meeting regulatory requirements. We are faced with the clear and heartbreaking reality that progress on each of these three key factors has fallen far short of what we had hoped,” the letter stated.

The college said that in collaboration with the state Department of Higher Education and the New England Commission of Higher Education, the current plan for its Completion Pathway is to allow Division III students, or final year students, to complete their degrees at Hampshire College. These students will have campus housing and student support available to them for the fall semester. The school will also remain fully accredited with approved degree granting authority from the state.

There is also a Transfer Pathway offered by the college to support Division I and II students, or first through third year students, in finding a new home for their college education. Hampshire College has several institutions that have transfer agreements with the school, offering students a more streamlined opportunity to explore a new college opportunity. These schools include Amherst College, Antioch College, Bennington College, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College, Prescott College, Smith College, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Warren Wilson College.

“These institutions are in the process of partnering with Hampshire to develop specific credit mapping procedures aimed at enabling the smoothest possible transition for our students,” the letter added.

Hampshire College student Issac Zaret told Reminder Publishing that he was drawn to the college due to its unique and well-known structure, which emphasizes self-directed learning impact and real-world issues over traditional forms of education. Zaret said that losing such an institution leaves many who were passionate about what it had to offer for their education now in a state of uncertainty.

He also acknowledged the inopportune timing of announcing the closure so close to the end of the current semester.

“The alternative educational style, the culture of Hampshire, the access to resources and faculty — the faculty are everything at Hampshire College. Getting to have this personal relationship with your staff, with the faculty who are advising you and you are learning from, is really what made Hampshire worth going to,” said Zaret. “Faculty and staff, and students alike, are in an incredibly uncertain state right now.”

Although Hampshire College shared they will assist departing faculty and staff with information and support as they navigate the transition, Hampshire College professor Gaurav Jashnani called on the school’s leadership and the Five-College network to better meet the needs of its staff that is feeling left out to dry.

“We deserve a just closure. So many of us are really struggling right now. We’re overwhelmed. We found out as employees just last week, we’re all getting laid off,” said Jashnani. “I know many of you are here because you love Hampshire. You’re grieving, and what I can tell you about me is this: I’m disabled, I’m neurodivergent, I’m a queer person of color, and I fiercely believe in justice. There’s not a lot of places where I could bring even half of my full self to work, but Hampshire has been a place like that for me.”

Hampshire College is one of Amherst’s largest employers, something Jashnani said should be even more of a reason for the school’s administration and the Five-College network to step up during this time of need.

“I’ve heard people saying a lot this is really a serious issue for Amherst, the town and for our region, because Hampshire is the third biggest employer, but Amherst College is the second, and UMass is the first, and those are two of the main institutions we’re calling on together with Smith [College] and Mount Holyoke,” Jashnani told Reminder Publishing. “I’ve seen a lot of other professors and students at some of the other schools start working so hard on a moment’s notice and pouring their hearts out into helping us rally and helping us figure out how we can move forward.”

Jashnani added, “We have $7.7 billion in endowment money and a five-college consortium that is supposed to be there to support the success of one another’s institutions. They were very helpful, particularly Amherst in 2019 when there was a major crisis, but what we haven’t seen right now is leadership of the schools stepping in and saying, ‘we can do this, even for a year.’”

The staff and faculty reductions will happen in waves, according to the college, with the majority of employees departing on June 15. Every employee will receive at least 60 days’ notice.

The school has shared that it is working with elected officials and state government leaders to activate the MassHire Rapid Response, which is a free, proactive state service designed to help employees navigate reductions, layoffs or closures. The team provides on-site services, such as job placement, retraining and unemployment assistance to minimize disruption and support dislocated workers.

Hampshire College professor and an organizer of the protest, rl Goldberg, told Reminder Publishing that resources have been spread thin with the closure announcement, and while people are doing their best, they feel both faculty, staff and students have not had the resources needed to support themselves.

In response to the situation, Goldberg and fellow staff have organized Help Hampshire Workers, an effort to support each other as employees of the school, as many are on the verge of losing their position and feeling like there are not a ton of clear pathways out. The goal is to raise funding to help support the school’s workers who do not immediately have a new opportunity following this transition.

Moving forward, Goldberg said that they hope to see leadership of the institution step up and put the concerns of the college community at ease.

“I think, immediately, transparency would be helpful as soon as they have it. I know it’s not the college unilaterally making the decisions, of course, there are other bureaucratic boards involved,” Goldberg said. “I think really coordinating with the other four schools to make sure all students, staff and faculty land somewhere from here, that would be a priority.”