This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.