New Poem: 750 Lights Still On

This poem grew out of listening carefully to a public conversation about Hampshire College and the wider pressures facing American higher education. What stood out was not defensiveness or nostalgia, but steadiness, a confidence rooted in rebuilding, recommitment, and a belief that education should remain an active, unfinished process. Hampshire’s place within the Five College Consortium, alongside neighbors like University of Massachusetts Amherst, reflects a regional understanding that learning expands when it is shared rather than guarded.

They said the future had narrowed,

that fewer footsteps would come of age,

that curiosity itself was a risky investment.

But the doors stayed open.

In classrooms without borders

students sketch questions instead of majors,

learning how to hold uncertainty

without flinching.

Seven hundred fifty minds

lean into work that does not fit tidy boxes.

Faculty arrive not to deliver answers

but to sharpen questions,

money raised not to preserve the past

but to earn the right to keep experimenting.

The country debates the value of thinking,

counts enrollment like weather reports,

argues whether justice belongs in education at all.

Here, learning still belongs to the learner.

Across the valley, ideas travel freely.

A student crosses a river or a campus line

and the education widens,

not diluted, but shared.

What began in 1970 keeps moving,

not because it is safe,

but because it refuses to stop asking

what education is for,

and who it should serve.

Alive is not a slogan.

Thriving is not denial.

It is the quiet work of rebuilding,

light by light,

question by question,

with faith that a different way

is still worth doing.