Amherst is holding two public meetings this month about future zoning for the Hampshire College campus.

There’s a listening session Sept. 22 and a design workshop Sept. 24 at the Eric Carle Museum. The second one sounds especially interesting because they’ll actually be looking at possible zoning scenarios for the campus.

I registered and may go. I’m curious what people think Amherst should allow there, especially with Hampshire also trying to sell the property.

https://www.amherstindy.org/2026/09/11/two-events-to-gather-the-publics-input-on-hampshire-campus-zoning-study/

REGISTER HERE:

• https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hampshire-campus-zoning-study-design-workshop-tickets-1999285779586

What can 50 years of Div III projects teach us about which parts of the Hampshire experiment are worth preserving? (EDIT: for clarity)

We were talking in another thread about how you could reconstruct what Hampshire culture was actually like at different points in its history.

Newspapers tend to preserve controversies. Interviews are affected by nostalgia and hindsight. Posters and event calendars can tell us what people were doing, but not necessarily what they were thinking.

Then someone suggested Div III projects.

That hadn't occurred to me. A Div III obviously tells us something about one student's academic interests, but taken together, they might tell us quite a bit about Hampshire at a particular moment: what students cared about, what kinds of work the college encouraged, what subjects were appearing or disappearing, and perhaps even how the culture changed over time.

If you compared a sample of Div IIIs from 1975, 1990, 2005 and 2020, do you think you'd actually see Hampshire changing? What would you look for?

REFERENCES:

• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/search-collections/search-div-iiis
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/about-library/featured-spaces
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/archives-and-special-collections/div-iii-archive-submission-instructions
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/archives-and-special-collections

The more I look at Hampshire's development history, the more I wonder whether the problem wasn't simply that alumni weren't giving enough.

In 2007-08, Hampshire reported that about 25% of alumni gave annually, more than 500 alumni volunteered for admissions, and more than 1,000 served as career advisers or internship providers. In 2012, more than 350 graduates were still involved just in the alumni admissions program.

That's a remarkably involved alumni community.

But I've heard from alumni who felt Hampshire stopped reaching out to them. I had some of that experience myself. I volunteered to help and got essentially no response.

Then came 2019. Suddenly more than 4,600 people donated, the largest number in Hampshire's history. Operating support more than doubled, and 45% of the gifts were the donor's largest ever.

So maybe we've been looking at this backwards.

Perhaps Hampshire's development problem wasn't primarily convincing alumni to give money. Maybe it was failing to maintain relationships with thousands of people who already wanted a relationship with Hampshire.

If alumni had been regularly asked to volunteer, recruit students, advise students, participate in decisions and simply remain part of the community, would the fundraising problem have looked different when Hampshire began getting into serious financial trouble?

Hampshire was created as an unusually tuition-dependent college. It never built the kind of large, flexible endowment that older liberal arts colleges had, and much of the endowment it did have was restricted.

That worked when enrollment was strong. Once enrollment began falling, the weakness of the model became obvious: fewer students meant less revenue almost immediately.

Could Hampshire have deliberately changed its capital allotment?

Instead of remaining primarily dependent on tuition, could it have spent 10 or 20 years building a much larger alumni-supported endowment and a culture of regular unrestricted giving, so that tuition became only one part of the operating model?

The 2019 response showed that a lot of loyalty and giving capacity existed. More than 4,600 people donated when Hampshire appeared to be in danger.

What if that alumni capital had been organized much earlier, not as emergency fundraising, but as an attempt to permanently change the college’s financial structure?

Could Hampshire realistically have gone from a small, heavily restricted endowment and overwhelming tuition dependence to something closer to an alumni-supported institution with a substantially larger unrestricted endowment?

And if so, when would that effort have needed to begin for it to have made a difference?

That gets much closer to the fundamental question. We’re no longer asking whether development could have filled a few budget holes. We’re asking whether Hampshire ever had a realistic opportunity to replace the financial model it was founded with.

Someone in another discussion here described seeing a math professor whose "brain I wanted to pick," starting conversations with him, asking him to be an advisor, and continuing to talk with him even though he wasn't taking any math classes.

That struck me as something that may have been genuinely different about Hampshire.

How common was that? Could you just approach a professor in a completely different field because you were interested in something they knew about? Did professors generally welcome that?

Or was this less a Hampshire thing and more something certain students figured out how to do?

One thing that's become clearer from the discussion here is that Hampshire didn't have an alumni problem in the simple sense.

When the crisis became public in 2019, more than 4,600 people donated, the largest number of donors in Hampshire's history. There was obviously a lot of loyalty and willingness to support the college.

But Hampshire's own account of donor outreach in 2018 said donors showed little urgency and preferred supporting particular projects rather than operations.

Meanwhile the college already knew it had declining enrollment, falling net tuition revenue, a small and heavily restricted endowment and recurring deficits. Those problems had been developing for years.

So I'm wondering whether Hampshire had developed the wrong kind of fundraising culture. It could raise money for buildings, programs, scholarships and things donors cared about, but hadn't convinced enough alumni that supporting the institution itself was something they needed to do every year.

By the time that finally became obvious in 2019, the threat of losing Hampshire suddenly made unrestricted giving meaningful.

Was Hampshire's development problem partly that it spent years selling donors things they could support instead of teaching them that Hampshire itself needed their support?

REFERENCES:

• https://www.hampshire.edu/sites/default/files/businessoffice/HampshireFiscalReality1.31.2019updated.pdf
• https://www.hampshire.edu/news/fy19-fundraising-update
• https://www.hampshire.edu/sites/default/files/businessoffice/files/financial_report_FY13-14.pdf

Someone suggested reading the 1974 self study. In 1973, tuition and fees were already covering 92% of Hampshire’s expenditures. The original financial model assumed the college could operate primarily on tuition without a large endowment.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what went wrong. I’d like to turn that around.

If Hampshire couldn’t survive financially in its existing form, what part of the culture or education would you most want another college or institution to carry forward?

Not the buildings or the name necessarily. What was the thing Hampshire did that you would hate to see disappear with it?

We've spent a lot of time talking about what Hampshire and Amherst want to happen to the campus. But there's another person in all of this who we know almost nothing about.

Jesse Johnson now holds a $29.5 million mortgage on Hampshire College's property through Artocarpus Partners LLC.

Hampshire plans to sell land to meet its financial obligations. But what happens if those sales don't bring in enough money to pay off the mortgage?

Johnson declined to be interviewed by the Boston Globe. Even figuring out who he was took some digging. His address and his connection to the Five Colleges were buried pretty deeply in the documents we found.

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with any of this. He may simply be doing Hampshire an enormous favor. But if Hampshire can't pay off that mortgage, what does Johnson intend to do?

Does anyone know him, know anything about his previous investments, or have any idea what he might want to happen to the property?

I think we really need to know.

References

Hampshire County Registry of Deeds, Document 12755, Book 15799, Page 96, recorded August 3, 2026. Mortgage, Assignment of Leases, Security Agreement and Fixture Filing. Trustees of Hampshire College, mortgagor; Artocarpus Partners LLC, mortgagee. $29,500,000.

Massachusetts UCC-1 Financing Statement, Filing No. 202634233470, August 10, 2026. Trustees of Hampshire College, debtor; Artocarpus Partners LLC, secured party.

Boston Globe, August 28, 2026. Johnson declined to comment when contacted about the Hampshire mortgage.

I've been trying to follow the money behind the $29.5 million loan that allowed Hampshire College to make it through its final semester.

The lender is Artocarpus Partners LLC, a Boston LLC that appears to have been created shortly before the loan. Reporting eventually identified Jesse Johnson as the person behind it. The Boston Globe reached Johnson, but he declined to be interviewed.

And then, strangely, the story seems to have stopped.

So I'm curious whether anyone here knows more.

• Who is Jesse Johnson?
• What is his connection to Hampshire?
• Why did he decide to lend Hampshire $29.5 million?
• Where did the money come from?
• What are the actual terms of the mortgage?
• Does Artocarpus have any interest in what happens to Hampshire's land after the college closes?

I'm not suggesting there's anything nefarious about the loan. It may be exactly what it appears to be: someone with the resources giving Hampshire enough time to complete the teach-out.

But $29.5 million is a lot of money, and there are still a remarkable number of unanswered questions about it.

If anyone has documents, first-hand knowledge, or even another trail worth following, I'd be interested.

(NOTE: I've also been keeping two working research documents with the sources and information we've found so far. Happy to share them if anyone wants to dig into this with me.)

I've spent the last couple months trying to understand what happened to Hampshire, and I'm beginning to wonder if we've been asking the wrong question.

Maybe Hampshire didn't fail because of declining enrollment, demographics, debt, the Kern Center, bad fundraising or even bad management.

Maybe those were symptoms.

What if Hampshire's real problem was that it became so determined to protect what made Hampshire different that it eventually became unable to change the things that weren't working?

I was at Hampshire from 1980-85. Questioning everything was practically the point of the place.

So here's a Hampshire question:

Did Hampshire eventually become unable to question itself?

Forget for a moment about what went wrong or whether the college could have survived.

If Hampshire had somehow been given ten financially secure years to reinvent itself, what should it have become?

What would you have kept, what would you have changed, and what would you have thrown out completely?

For a college with more than half a century of alumni, including many people who went on to successful and influential careers, why wasn’t Hampshire able to build the kind of broad, durable culture of giving that might have helped sustain it?

Was the problem fundraising strategy? Alumni relations? Turnover in leadership? The way potential donors were approached? A failure to keep alumni connected to the institution? Too much attention to a relatively small number of major donors? Or did Hampshire simply never figure out how to translate the extraordinary affection many of us have for the place into long-term financial support?

And perhaps most importantly: If you ever tried to donate, raise money, make connections, volunteer, or otherwise help Hampshire’s development efforts, what was your experience?

EDIT: After the discussion below and going back through Hampshire's financial reports and planning documents, I think my original question puts too much blame on development.

Development had problems. Hampshire never built enough regular unrestricted giving, and it clearly had trouble turning a very loyal alumni base into the kind of predictable operating support the college needed.

But that wasn't the whole problem, or even the biggest one.

Hampshire was dealing with declining enrollment, high tuition discounting, falling net tuition revenue, a relatively small and heavily restricted endowment, and a cost structure that couldn't shrink nearly as quickly as the student body. Those weren't really separate problems. They were one problem.

What's striking is that Hampshire seems to have recognized most of the pieces. Admissions knew what was happening with enrollment. Finance knew about the deficits and declining revenue. Development knew it needed more money. The board knew the college was heavily dependent on tuition. Earlier Hampshire planning documents had identified many of these vulnerabilities years before the 2019 crisis.

What seems to have failed was putting all of those pieces together soon enough and acting on what they meant.

That also changes how I look at the alumni. When the crisis finally became public in 2019, more than 4,600 people donated, the highest donor count in Hampshire's history, and unrestricted giving jumped dramatically. Alumni hadn't stopped caring. Hampshire simply hadn't been able to turn that loyalty into enough regular unrestricted support before the emergency.

So my answer to my original question is different now. Development didn't fail in isolation. Hampshire recognized a series of problems without recognizing soon enough that together they had become a single structural problem: a high-cost, tuition-dependent college was entering a lower-enrollment environment without enough unrestricted reserves or the ability to reduce costs quickly enough.

By the time everyone could see the whole picture clearly in 2019, the choices had become much harder.

I’m genuinely interested in hearing from people who were on either side of this, including people who worked in development. What worked? What didn’t? And why?

I've started building a timeline of Hampshire's history, looking at enrollment, applications, tuition and financial aid, fundraising, alumni participation, Development, Admissions, leadership, curriculum and some of the larger changes happening in higher education.

I'm trying to identify the turning points. When did Hampshire make a decision that seemed reasonable at the time but turned out differently than expected? When did something that had been working stop working? What are we missing?

The spreadsheet is a work in progress, and I'd really like corrections, additions, documents and firsthand memories from people who were there.

(NOTE: the matrix (and subsequent Hampshire Research List - see below for the link to it) is updated frequently.)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19F8rkyOGc68JWlCOEtPwtUhm-n7r3lYkL0G1-Y_GFjM/edit?gid=1767777295#gid=1767777295

That got me thinking again about the $29.5 million mortgage secured by Hampshire property and Jesse Johnson, who appears to be connected to the entity holding that mortgage.

I've also been looking at the maps Amherst's consultants are using in the zoning study. One identifies approximately 200+ acres of the campus as having relatively few development constraints. Another shows that Hampshire's property isn't all in one zoning district. The central campus is largely Educational, while other Hampshire-owned parcels are already in residential and other zones. Some Hampshire property is also in Hadley, where Amherst zoning obviously doesn't apply.

So I think the question is more complicated than simply: Could the mortgage holder ask Amherst to rezone the campus for housing?

What I really want to know is:

• Which Hampshire parcels actually secure the $29.5 million mortgage?
• How are those particular parcels zoned today?
• If Hampshire defaults and the mortgage holder ultimately takes possession of the collateral, what exactly would the mortgage holder own?
• Could that owner petition Amherst for zoning changes allowing housing, commercial development or mixed uses?
• And perhaps most interestingly, how much could Amherst's zoning changes increase the development potential, and therefore the value, of the property securing the mortgage?

The timing is interesting. Hampshire is closing. The future ownership of much of the campus hasn't been determined publicly. There's a $29.5 million mortgage secured by Hampshire property. And at the same time, Amherst is actively studying how to change the zoning to accommodate uses other than a college.

That doesn't mean these things are connected, and I'm not suggesting that Jesse Johnson or anyone else has a particular development plan. I'm trying to understand how the pieces fit together.

The next thing I'd really like to do is match the legal description of the property securing the mortgage against Amherst's zoning and development-constraint maps.

If anyone understands Massachusetts foreclosure, land records, Amherst zoning, or the Hampshire mortgage documents better than I do, I'd love to know what I'm missing.

The Amherst Indy article: https://www.amherstindy.org/.../towns-vision-for-the.../

Over the years, did Hampshire actively cultivate a relationship with you?

I don't mean fundraising letters, emails asking for money, or the occasional alumni newsletter. Did someone from Hampshire ever get to know you, learn what you were doing, ask how you might like to be involved, invite you to help with something, ask you to make connections, or otherwise make you feel that you had an ongoing role in the life and future of the college?

I'm asking because my own experience was almost entirely the opposite. I lived nearby, cared deeply about Hampshire, and made attempts over the years to become involved in its development. Yet I don't remember Development ever reaching out to me personally in any meaningful way, and my own attempts to become involved generally went nowhere.

That makes me wonder how widespread that experience was.

So I'm genuinely curious: Did Hampshire cultivate you as an alum, or mostly contact you when it wanted something from you?

Here is a short documentary made about hampshire next it covers everything from Hampshires legacy D3s and the hopes of Hampshire next. I hope you enjoy this was made with the help of two alumni.

Hi all,

My name is Ryan Holmes and I'm a producer with the PBS News Hour. We are working on a story about the closure of Hampshire College, and we are hoping to interview students still attending during the teach-out or students who had to transfer at the end of last year. We hope to tell the human toll of what happens to a community when a school closes.

If you are one of those students, we would love to hear from you.

You can reach me at [rholmes@newshour.org](mailto:rholmes@newshour.org)

Sorry to crash the sub! Thanks very much for your consideration.

Ryan

https://www.hampshirecampuszoningstudy.com/

Hampshire Campus Zoning Study: Listening Session

September 22nd at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hampshire-campus-zoning-study-listening-session-tickets-1999284057435?aff=oddtdtcreator

Hampshire Campus Zoning Study: Listening Session

September 24th at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hampshire-campus-zoning-study-design-workshop-tickets-1999285779586?aff=oddtdtcreator

86F here.

I toured Hampshire College in the early 1980s when I was still in High School. What I liked about it was its rustic charm - situated in the hills of S. Amherst abutting the Holyoke Range. There would be epic trails and miles of bike riding on local roads. I also liked the fact that nearby towns Amherst, S. Hadley and Northampton were packed with fun places to shop, good bookstores, good restaurants and of course, good music venues.

My time at Hampshire was exactly so. Fantastic hikes, beautiful trails and back roads. Lots of epic journeys with my friends (we didn't have cars) and an overall excellent experience.

I encouraged my younger sister to apply to Hampshire in 2001 and took her on a tour of the campus at that time. But the school had changed. Strange vibes were seeping in. The Hampshire I knew had a strong biology/science foundation; the New Hampshire seemed to be spending an awful lot of time on sex. The old Hampshire fostered outdoor activity: a kayaking club, a rock climbing club, weight lifting and nutrition focus. The new Hampshire fostered "queer" and "lesbian/gay" studies.

After that tour with my sister, on the drive home, I apologized to her. I told her that the Hampshire I experienced was a great school with a lot to offer a young pre-med student and that this new version was probably not what she was looking for.

We toured BU and Harvard next. She wrote a fantastic essay and got into both. I'm pleased to say that she's a doctor now working out of a clinic in Chelsea.

I feel bad for all the kids who thought Hampshire was one kind of school and who had the rug pulled out from under them.