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One of Hampshire College’s best-known alumni, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, has joined the effort to help the college endure financial troubles, President Miriam Nelson confirmed in a letter to the college community Wednesday afternoon. Burns, 65, and seven others are members of the newly created President’s Options Working Group, appointed by Nelson. Burns, who graduated from Hampshire in 1975, is known for documentaries including the Emmy Award-winning “Civil War” and “Baseball” series. Nelson described the panel as “off-campus community stakeholders” who would be a “sounding board for the trustees and me, conducting their deliberations independently, and a vehicle for communicating...

Hampshire College in Massachusetts has announced that it will no longer fly the U.S. flag at all in response to an incident where the flag was taken down and burned. The president of the college says that by getting rid of the flag the school will be able to focus on other issues like halting Islamophobia and promoting gay rights. The mess for Hampshire College started a week and a half ago, after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. The school responded to Trump’s victory by keeping the U.S. flag at half-staff, as if in mourning, which upset...

FULL TITLE: Hampshire College Students Demanded Obama Or Beyonce As Graduation Speakers, Freaked Out When They Got An Asian Doctor, And Demanded A Transgender Black Person Hampshire College had their graduation this weekend and it was the sh--show everyone dreamed Turtleboy’s favorite hippie college would be. Don’t know how we missed this story from a couple weeks ago, but I literally spit out my coffee and started laughing when I read this paragraph:Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash announced that the college has selected a new commencement speaker in response to students who were upset that the original choice — Dr....

As we noted in a previous post, when Hampshire College became the first institution of higher learning in the United States to shun SAT scores as an admissions requirement, the school’s president waxed rhapsodic about the diversity the change engendered. As it happens, Hampshire’s course catalogue is also rather diverse. Here is a sampling: • The emergence of literacy; • Philosophy of Education; • Intro to Tabletop Game Design; • Apprenticeship in Animal Communication Research; • The Social Psychology of Building Peace in the Context of Violent Intergroup Conflict; • Women in Game Programming; • Animal Behavior Theory; • Critical...

Last year, Hampshire College became the first institution of higher learning in the country to categorically reject using SATs as an admissions requirement. The college’s president, Jonathan Last, waxed rhapsodic about the results of the policy change in a statement which appeared on Diane Ravitch’s blog: · “Our yield, the percentage of students who accepted our invitation to enroll, rose in a single year from 18% to 26%, an amazing turnaround; · “The quantity of applications went down but the quality went up, likely because we made it harder to apply, asking for more essays; Our applicants collectively were more...

The head of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is awaiting reply from Hampshire College to his letter deploring the college’s decision to cancel a performance by an Afrobeat band because some deemed the band “too white” to play African music. Shokazoba, an Afrobeat ensemble that blends jazz, funk and African rhythms, was scheduled to play on Halloween at Hampshire. However, the band was canceled after some students voiced concerns that the band, which has a black singer but is predominantly white, was appropriating black music. The college’s Hype Committee broke the news on its Facebook, saying:...

Former Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to speak at the inauguration of Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash, which is set to start at 3:30 p.m. Friday. Gore served as Bill Clinton's vice president from 1993 to 2001, lost his bid for the presidency in 2000 and won a Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. You can watch a live stream of the event put together by Hampshire College below or follow along on Twitter by searching the hashtag #jlash.

Former Vice President Al Gore will be in town Friday as the keynote speaker at the inauguration of Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash. Gore, who served as vice president under President Clinton for two-terms, ran unsuccessfully for president in 2000. In 2007, Gore won the Nobel Prize with the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “An Inconvenient Truth,” a film about his campaign to educate people about global warming, won two Oscars in 2006. In 2005, he co-founded Current TV. Lash has been serving at the college's sixth president since July. ... The theme of the inaugural is “Educating for...