By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Hampshire College in western Massachusetts is closing its doors soon. It was founded in the mid-1960’s by professional educators who wished to foster creativity and self-expression. Students designed their own courses of study. The joke was always that you could major in frisbee-tossing if you chose. Maybe someone did. I hope so.
New Hampshire harbored a similar institution for a brief space of time. Franconia College actually started before Hampshire College and it failed before Hampshire College too. It ran out of runway in the late 1970’s. But lest you think New Hampshire is no good at this sort of thing, Ram Dass lived here too. Born as Richard Alpert, Mr. Dass got kicked out of Harvard with Timothy Leary, flew to India, wrote a book called Be Here Now, then raised consciousness with his friends and neighbors at his wealthy father’s vacation home on Webster Lake. Yes. New Hampshire once had hippies.
The people who started Hampshire weren’t hippies, though. They were grey flannel souls. Its first president had been a captain in the Air Corps during World War Two. One of his stated goals was to help students connect directly to the wider world around them; to reduce the distance between academia and regular life. He believed young people were able to contribute more than we expected of them.
Perhaps that stemmed from his army experience. America produced sixteen million soldiers during World War Two and many came home knowing they had done the most important work of their lives and they weren’t even thirty yet. Some moved on to politics and business. Others raised families and plain old worked. Others became beatniks, founded motorcycle gangs, or became famous surfers. Most of the developments that characterized the sixties came from the hopes and dreams of hardened army veterans. And a huge number of them spoiled their kids. They wanted their children to be happy. Hampshire and Franconia could only have been born in a time of peace and great abundance. They were luxury products for a well-fed world.
Looking around at a country led by a very obvious child of the sixties, that world seems gone now. We might still be well-fed but we’re also hungry, because our food’s no good anymore. If we’re happy, it’s due to either legal weed or programmed entertainment. Nor do we value art any more than we used to; nor do we value experience more, nor are we more spiritual, more generous, or more holy. That particular experiment failed.
The irony is that Hampshire and its like ended up doing the opposite of connecting students to real life. Prioritizing self-expression and creativity in academia placed those things in a protected silo, cutting off their practitioners from the rest of us. And even though Hampshire and Franconia have faded away, because they had to, because their graduates could not get jobs, because their chosen fields were not as valuable as teenagers and their guardians wanted them to be, a watered-down version of that same unrealistic dream has proven far more successful, far more remunerative, and far more dangerous. Replace self expression with group expression, and replace creativity with its shadow, which is criticism, and you get today’s Ivy League. Packing an intellectual punch but still divorced from reality. Liberalism has congealed into snobbery and snobbery has met its sad match in the evolution of Donald Trump.
I am sorry that Hampshire College is gone. I am sorry that Franconia College is gone. I am sorry that Ram Dass no longer wanders barefoot around southwestern New Hampshire. But the charm of the artistic and the creative life is stronger when melded with the quotidian life that supports it. Creativity should not be shielded. That makes it weak.
But I’m biased. I majored in an antique field that barely exists anymore. My college stashed its Geography Department in its School of Engineering, paired with the environmental sciences. I studied urban planning and patterns of economic behavior. Down the hall from me, guys with pocket protectors pored over maps of wetlands, helping the state government manage its wastewater facilities. They looked at what we did with amused tolerance while we looked at what they did with confusion. Our department’s founder had helped New York City build its reservoir system. He was an old man by the time I knew him but he always reminded me of fresh drinking water. He wore tweed suits and he walked with a cane. He looked like a poet to me.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.