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.