New Poem: Hampshire College's Enduring Spirit

A tribute to the grit and soul of Hampshire College. Even as the ledgers groan, the experiment breathes through every alum who refuses a clean goodbye. A legacy of risk, nerve, and the beautiful struggle of learning to fail alive. 

#HampshireCollege #PioneerValley #HigherEd

Hampshire sits on rolling ground,

Eight hundred acres, soft and sound,

Where barns remember earnest schemes

And hallways echo half-formed dreams.

The sinks drip soapless, curtains bloom

With quiet mold in borrowed rooms,

The dining hall grows thin and spare,

Still students linger, stubborn there.

They walk past fields and shuttered wings,

Past broken doors and hopeful things,

Past studios where film still hums

And art refuses to be done.

The ledgers groan, the numbers bite,

Deficits pacing through the night,

And prophets murmur, heads bowed low:

“This place is fading. Let it go.”

Yet someone laughs and says, Not yet,

We're not prepared for mourning debt,

We've raised our millions, almost whole,

And land still breathes beneath the toll.

No grades, no majors, maps unmade,

Just questions sharpened, plans delayed,

A curriculum of risk and nerve,

An oddball will to not conserve.

Not Amherst's gold, not Williams' shine,

No velvet rope, no waiting line,

Just students building selves from scratch,

Lighting sparks they hope will catch.

Here filmmakers stitch the frame,

And poets wrestle truth from name,

Entrepreneurs of mind and will

Pitch futures no one's funded still.

They say the market wants the new,

That risk is something worth its due,

That in the age of thinking machines

Human strangeness still convenes.

A refuge, some have dared to call it,

When other halls grow cold and policed,

A place to stand when tides insist

That difference must be coalesced.

The past half-century limps and leans,

Scarred by plans and near-extremes,

Yet alumni plant roots nearby,

Refusing clean goodbyes.

Farmers, artists, teachers stay,

Raising children, debts, and hay,

Living proof that what was tried

Still walks the world, still won't subside.

So if the lights go dim one day,

If Hampshire's doors should swing away,

The experiment won't disappear-

It's walking, breathing, teaching here.

Because some places aren't meant to win,

Or balance books, or neatly end-

They're meant to risk, to bruise, to try,

To teach us how to fail alive.

And whether Hampshire stands or falls,

Its question hums within the walls:

What if learning isn't safe or clean,

But worth the cost of being seen?