The Hampshire administration gives out what College students have learned to call mixed signals. On the one hand, Greg Prince tells the school that we have the best education in the country, that our non-departmentalized, contractual educations are terrific. Meanwhile, the faculty of the school are clearly experiencing a boredom and unmotivation crisis common to both students and faculty. So then, on the other hand, the administration has therefore responded by making a new administrative position to reform the first year.
I suggest that the boredom crisis is so serious because those faculty have not found a structure that is prefigurative. Rather, they have put themselves too much in the role of transmitting information they already know in ways they have already decided work (only they are now wondering whether by unmodificational modifications of their methods they could solve their ``problems'').
In other words, I am suggesting that we all agree with Greg about a lot of the things that make Hampshire great. But now it is time to move forward again. It is time to make the experiences that make up those valuable contracts better. On the one hand, that means looking at the class model and figuring out what the problems with it are. There, one obvious problem is that faculty are neither aware of student's needs in a course, nor interested in hearing those needs. Faculty present their syllabus with only the limited knowledge of their own plans, most without ever having course evaluation of any kind from their students. Every student on campus has been through a time when they did an assignment simply because it was on the syllabus, knows that they did not benefit from that assignment, and knows what would have been a more appropriate activity. More broadly, a creative approach must nurture a prefigurative attitude.
There are a number of possible first steps towards improving those learning experiences. By incorporating optional contracts for courses into our classes, Hampshire could solve many problems. First of all, it would be making the teachers listen to the students. They are currently very limited by not having a method by which they receive student feedback. Additionally, this gives students the option to do the parts of a course that are most appropriate to their own needs. I have been in classes where every single student felt the teacher was not meeting their personal needs, in fact where the professor had completely different goals from the students. The contracts would counter that. Second, there must be a method for students with different needs to be able to use the parts of courses that are personally most important to them. In order to meet this need, the idea of a course as the unit of learning must be re-unlearned at Hampshire. To this end, I propose faculty to evaluate students, to the best of the faculty's ability, on what the student feels he/she accomplished that term. More concretely, this means a professor should evaluate every student who hands in a self-evaluation, on at least the things the student claimed he/she learned or participated in, even if this means the evaluation reading ``Johnny came to class and wrote one sloppy paper.'' Another possibility is mid-semester and end-of-semester evaluations of courses.
Johnston is very successful at bringing about a dialogue between students and faculty about what students would like like to learn, and how effective courses are. The Johnston model itself is perhaps not practical for Hampshire, yet Hampshire must respond to the need within its community. I am not sure how, but by thinking about one's own experiences, the need should become apparent to every reader. The Computer Science interest group has recently begun having a meeting before the beginning of the semester where faculty first introduce their courses. Eventually, they hope to also have some forum for students to advertise to faculty the areas they are interested in taking courses in.
Through contracting learning opportunities and curriculum-building, Johnston students have the opportunity to really design their own education out of the building blocks they need, rather than designing their education out of predetermined building-blocks.
Some Hampshire admirers are wont to call Hampshire an innovator. But perhaps the signs of innovation they see are in reality simply acceptance of the de facto decadence that has enveloped much of the college. Are Hampshire's new proposals for inquiry seminars really classes in disguise, the same classes that have taken up where Professors' misunderstandings of division 1 previously failed?
We must also combat the attitude problems that separate the parts of
the community from one another. What can Hampshire learn from
Johnston's experience with Community decisionmaking? I asked Noah
Wardip-Fruin, one of the Johston student ``legends'',
about how to create the kind of social and academic
community Johnston enjoys, but in a school as large as
Hampshire. ``Real student empowerment is vital. Social interaction
follows from that.''[25]
At a panel discussion with University of Redlands staff about Johnston, I was asked to decribe the main differences between Johnston and Hampshire that derive from Johnston's relationship with the University. To preface my answer, I suggested that many institutions and people around the world tend to naturally find their self-meaning as against something else. At Johnston, this tension is against the University. At Hampshire, on the other hand, it is against the administration, faculty, and even other students. Thus, Hampshire does not have a common goal, and is balkanized, in contrast to here at Johnston, where the community - the Director, the faculty, the students - are really working together, and do not feel like they are working against each other.
Johnston has had remarkable success in viewing education and living not simply at the individual level, but at the community level. This does indeed seem to stem from the structure, which inhenerently encourages empowerment of the community in forming curriculum, evaluating contracts, and ruling the living community. Hampshire's present problem -- the same one that has been tearing at the school for twenty-five years -- is that it has failed to empower the community, and only empowered the individual. Johnston's models show some definite potential for helping Hampshire achieve that community empowerment.
Johnston's solutions are of course not the only ones. Yet if Hampshire students, faculty, and administration are serious about wanting to improve our community, they must take Johnston's lessons seriously. We must recognize the faulty structures we inherited from Franklin Patterson (and adopted permanently against his advice). The contrast between the Johnston experience and the Hampshire experience suggests two essential differences that radically affect the community: Johnston's existence within the University, and Johnston's size.
Johnston, as a distinct body within the University, skims off those University faculty and students that are most interested in a communal basis for living and learning. It does this first through its admission process, and second through natural migration once students are enrolled. Interestingly, the result of this concentration of crazy characters may be similar to what Hampshire was intended to become in the eyes of the other four colleges: a school where those crazy characters would have the chance to invent their own institution without negatively affecting the established schools. However, Hampshire itself (I suspect largely because of the process of hiring and assimilating new faculty, as well as the general trend within the country) has become decreasingly experimental and decreasingly eager to engage in community-based education and living.
The concrete experiment I therefore propose for Hampshire College is the creation of a sub-community within the college, of the kind proposed by Charles Longsworth:
An RD Laboratory (not Research and Development, but Radical Departure)...``a special educational laboratory on the campus for the real wild things to be tried...where institutional or faculty reputations would not be lost; only made''.[22]
Three possibilities such an RD community (of 25-150 people) within Hampshire might explore are living together in one section of the campus (really getting to know the people who are in this learning environment), alternatives to the 13-week class, and creative approaches to community- and learner-designed graduation requirements. For example, that community might decide to keep division 2 and 3 contracts as they are, expanding the commitees to always include other students, and completely redesign division 1s. It might decide to have whole-community learning activities once a week. Most likely, the students involved would spend approximately one-half their academic time involved with learning experiences within that RD community. But I am only one individual, and I do not think that any further suggestions are wise on my part. The members of the community itself must think over the questions themslves. And they must come up with their own creative master-plans.
One criticism such a proposal would inevitably have would be that Hampshire is already so flexible that everything is already possible. Indeed, Hampshire's structure does retain incredible flexibility; this proposal, however, addresses what students actually do rather than what they could do. The creation of a formal sub-community is a method for bringing about the the quality and quantity of dialogue that is too hard to achieve in a larger community. The current Hampshire College community is a part of a individualizing tradition that comes from Hampshire and the United States. A community-based venture is the most logical response to the disabling tradition we are a part of.
Whether we can, as a community, realize the need for experimental action is for me the telling question about the the people who make up Hampshire College. Can we -- students, administration, and faculty -- support such experimentation at Hampshire College? I know what I would like to think. I hope that you will join me.