The historian Stephen Ambrose once said more Americans get their history from the filmmaker Ken Burns — whose work includes documentary opuses on the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and baseball — than from any other source.
If that’s true, then Americans have Hampshire College to thank. The small liberal-arts institution, heavy on advising and a magnet for self-motivated people, is heralded by alumni for channeling out-of-the-box thinking and having a transformative effect on the lives of students. Burns is no exception.
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The historian Stephen Ambrose once said more Americans get their history from the filmmaker Ken Burns — whose work includes documentary opuses on the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and baseball — than from any other source.
If that’s true, then Americans have Hampshire College to thank. The small liberal-arts institution, heavy on advising and a magnet for self-motivated people, is heralded by alumni for channeling out-of-the-box thinking and having a transformative effect on the lives of students. Burns is no exception.
“I do not recognize the scared, skinny, 18-year-old boy who entered Hampshire College in September of 1971,” Burns said in a recent interview with The Chronicle. “Hampshire rearranged all of my molecules.”
Now it’s Hampshire that needs transformation.
Like many small liberal-arts colleges, the Massachusetts institution is fighting for survival amid declining enrollment and a major loss of revenue. This year, President Miriam (Mim) Nelson announced a plan to find a merger partner and accept a drastically reduced freshman class.
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The uproar over those decisions led Nelson and top board members to resign. Under the leadership of an interim president, Ken Rosenthal, the college is charting a different path. The merger has been taken off the table. An ambitious fund-raising effort has begun, with the goal of $20 million in the next 14 months and about $90 million over five years.
And Burns, nearly a half-century after Hampshire set him on the path to becoming a national treasure, is helping lead the effort. The Chronicle interviewed Burns about his senior thesis, asking people for money, and why higher education needs Hampshire. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. When I visited Hampshire in February, a professor told me that if there was no Hampshire, there would be no Ken Burns. Do you agree with that?
A. I do not know where I’d be without Hampshire. You certainly wouldn’t be talking to me. But it’s not just me. Talk to Gary Hirshberg, who founded Stonyfield Farm yogurt. That’s very different than becoming a documentary filmmaker. Talk to Jon Krakauer, who wrote Into the Wild. This is great, riveting literature. Talk to Aaron Lansky, who founded the Yiddish Book Center. This is a huge service to humanity by rescuing the physical evidence of a language that has never had a country. Hampshire is about the way in which we counter the standardization of higher education that has become almost a comic rubber stamp.
Q. Why does Hampshire matter to higher education, and why should people care about its fate?
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A. Hampshire is in the top 3 percent of schools nationwide in alumni advancing to earn Ph.D.s. So somehow this hippie school, with its de-emphasis on classes, grades, and a lot of independent study, disproportionately produces students who go on to earn advanced degrees. The admissions scandal coincidentally occurred as Hampshire is wrestling with perhaps its greatest, but not first, existential crisis. So much of higher education has become transactional. It isn’t actually about what happens to a young person as they enter the final lap of their lifelong education. I’m hoping that parents and students wake up to the fact that going to college isn’t like buying a car or a handbag. It’s about who you are and who you’ll become. If you wish, it remains transactional: College will be like a brand, like buying a Louis Vuitton handbag. But if you wish it to be transformational, there’s no better place than Hampshire College.
Q. Tell me about your Hampshire thesis, and how it helped shape your career.
A. We had a seat-of-the-pants attitude, so the faculty and students started something called Hampshire Films. We offered our services, as admittedly amateur filmmakers, to nonprofits throughout western Massachusetts who couldn’t afford to make that half-hour film about who they were. My senior project was a film called Working in Rural New England. The last image of the film is a painting of a rural agrarian setting, and the camera pans across to a mill. That last pan set up the next 45 years of my life, of taking old archives and bringing them to life. Hampshire Films not only gave me an opportunity to produce a film, but I learned how to manage a budget, tie a tie, make a presentation, give a speech. I learned how to edit, how to shoot, how to work with other people. So when I left, I didn’t go to New York and apprentice as an intern at a film-production company. I started my own with two fellow Hampshire students. Hampshire gave me the guts to try.
Q. Interim President Ken Rosenthal said that next year there might be about 600 students on campus, less than half the number at Hampshire just a few years ago. Part of that has to do with the decision to not admit a full freshman class. But even before that, Hampshire had been rapidly losing students.
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A. This represents a clear and obvious demographic phenomenon. It’s going to exaggerate at a place like Hampshire because of its unique model. Everyone is competing, and if everything is transactional, it’s the people who advertise the most who will succeed. The little brands — no matter how good or durable — are going to be squeezed. We’re trying to figure out how to take this crisis and use it not only as an opportunity to fix our financial circumstances, but also reinvigorate the original dream of Hampshire and find a better model.
Q. Hampshire’s critics might say the decline in students is the free market at work.
A. A marketplace is going to operate that way. But do we really wish to put higher education — the most important educational experience in anyone’s life — back into a marketplace or transactional equation? When your house is on fire at 3 a.m., you don’t call the marketplace to help you. When you need boots on the ground in Afghanistan, you don’t call the marketplace. I would suggest that when you need to transform young minds, if you’ve been seduced by a transactional equation, you are lost right there.
Q. Hampshire is a very young college. Half of its alumni, Rosenthal told me, are younger than 42. Given that limitation, what is your fund-raising strategy?
A. It’s very simple. It’s called “four times hurt.” When Ken Rosenthal asked me to consider becoming a co-chair of the development effort, I tried to figure out the number that I could comfortably give — that is to say, that would hurt — and I decided to quadruple it. I am not naming that figure because I want 100-percent participation. I want the person who says that what hurts is $1,000 to give $4,000. But I don’t want to limit any contribution.
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Q. You create documentaries that you’re passionate about. Now a big part of your job will be going around asking people for money. Any trepidation about that?
A. That’s all I do anyway, because I’m in public broadcasting. If I went out into that vaunted marketplace I would have a much bigger salary than I do now. But other people would own my films. Other people would control them. A donor asked me why I didn’t go to a premium service or a streaming service. They might give me the $30 million I needed to raise for the Vietnam War project, but they’d never give me 10 and a half years to make it. They would have said, “Eighteen hours is too long; 10 episodes is too long. You need to do this, or you need to do that.” Public television didn’t do that. Once I raised the money, we made the film. That’s the choice I made. So I’m always out raising money. This is not an alien activity. But it does require passion. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t care about Hampshire the way I care about my children and the way I care about my films.
Q. Many faculty members I spoke with said they wished the previous administration had explained to the community the seriousness of the situation before making announcements on the merger plan and the freshman class. Were you aware of how dire the situation was?
A. No, not until the announcements. The question is, what could we have done before? But that’s not the question, really. I’m all for going back into the past. That’s what I do for a living. But at this point, I really don’t care what’s happened before. I only know that we have a daunting challenge ahead, and failure is not an option.
Q. Is there a leadership lesson for other institutions from the events of the last few months at Hampshire?
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A. I don’t think so. In a binary world, we want to find the heroes and the villains, and we want to excoriate those who didn’t do a perfect job and bless those who did. Nobody does a perfect job, and nobody is a complete failure. I know of no one over the last several months who worked harder to save Hampshire than Mim Nelson. But at some point she felt that maybe Hampshire needed new blood. There’s no one more qualified to step in on an interim basis than Ken Rosenthal. He’s one of the earliest employees of the college, hired in 1966. He was the treasurer when I was a student. He’s thoughtful and intelligent, and the ideal person to deliver us out of this.
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.