Last updated on November 21, 2025
Feb. 28 — I sat down with President Ed Wingenbach during his office hours on Thursday, February 27th, to discuss his time at Hampshire.
BP (Blaise Paine): What do you hope your legacy at Hampshire will be?
EW (Ed Wingenbach): To be honest, I haven’t really been thinking about it that way, about how I will be remembered, as opposed to what we set Hampshire up to do. I would hope maybe three things?
One is the pragmatic one: that Hampshire has come through a period of existential crisis and didn’t close, and has emerged from that in an improving—maybe not quite stable—but not at risk position, so that Hampshire will be here for there to be a legacy.
The second would be what I hope is and continues to be a renewed excitement about the idea of Hampshire as a place that experiments and takes risks with the way we understand and conceive of undergraduate education. […]
And the third would be what I see as a kind of solidifying of a set of progressive political commitments that have always been at the heart of Hampshire that could have been put aside in the face of financial challenges and resource issues. […]
One of the things we’ve done over the last six years is to always start with: “Look, regardless of what the challenges are, Hampshire has to understand itself as an anti-racist institution; as a place that is and should continue to be a place where people can express themselves in the way that they experience their genders and the way they want to think about inhabiting the world bodily, racially, and politically.” To have that space to do that is centrally important, and to make sure that Hampshire’s values around questions like ‘What should a better world look like?’ as a community are central in the way we think about our institutional body.
If we’re still doing that 10 years from now, I’ll be really happy to see that.
“You don’t do transparency for its own sake: the objective of transparency is people within a community having a baseline understanding of the reality they inhabit that can allow them to participate and make decisions.”
Ed Wingenbach, President of Hampshire College
BP: What have you learned at Hampshire that you’ll take forward to your work at the American College of Greece?
EW: I came here with a commitment not just to transparency, but the idea that transparency is about translation. To make things accessible but make them accessible in ways that are understandable. And one of the things I learned over the last several years is that even that is not enough. […]
Just making information available in multiple ways and translating in multiple ways and trying to get people to pay attention to things, that doesn’t get you to the objective of transparency. You don’t do transparency for its own sake: the objective of transparency is people within a community having a baseline understanding of the reality they inhabit that can allow them to participate and make decisions. And the gap between extensive sharing of information and processing, understanding, reflecting, is still pretty broad. And if you don’t have the resources to take that third step, that kind of intensive transparency can end up being another way in which people feel excluded. […]
I don’t necessarily have a solution to that problem other than trying to calibrate back and forth, […]how to do that in ways that build trust while inviting participation. I think I’ve got strategies for that. I think I’m doing better at that than probably 90% of my peers in presidential roles, but better than 90% when the 90% is really crappy communication, it doesn’t really get you where you want to be.
BP: Do you have any regrets about your time at Hampshire?
EW: Probably the single biggest challenge is that, between 2023 and 2024, letting the budget grow. […] That was sort of the one point over the last six years where we said “All right, let’s give ourselves a little bit of breathing room. It’s been really really hard, […] the trajectories are really good, it will reduce so much pressure if we expand a little with confidence that we’re gonna get to that enrollment target.” And we probably shouldn’t have done that. We probably should have said “I know this feels tight. Let’s stick here for another couple of years and we should be over 900 and then we can grow a little bit,” rather than growing and then hitting a sudden bump.
It’s always harder to pull back. So the work we’re doing to adjust the budget essentially gets us back to where we were a year and a half ago. But it feels really different than if we had said “We’re gonna make it work at this level.”
One thing I wish I’d been able to make more progress on is the commitments that were made by the faculty to the idea of a Race & Power requirement throughout the curriculum. […] The initial idea behind that was that white supremacy informs all of knowledge production, it forms all of our artistic judgments, it shapes everything about an academic enterprise and our teaching. And so to take that seriously, that means we we should infuse awareness of how race shapes knowledge, artistic production, and pedagogical practices everywhere. Every discipline is shaped by it, every discipline has a responsibility to address it.
And the idea was to put that as a requirement throughout all three Divisions, but also that was a step toward this larger question of racial literacy across the curriculum, to think of understanding the role that white supremacy plays in your discipline and your teaching as something as fundamental to as the way we now think of writing as core to every discipline.
It used to be—you go back 25 years—and people would say “Well, the English department teaches writing, the rest of us teach whatever we teach, and if the students can’t write it’s the English department’s fault.” Which is crazy, right? We all teach writing. The same is true of the way you think about race, power, identity, and the reproduction of white supremacy.
“White supremacy informs all of knowledge production, it forms all of our artistic judgments, it shapes everything about an academic enterprise and our teaching.”
Ed Wingenbach, President of Hampshire College
It’s not like you can have “the sociologists and race & ethnicity studies and critical race theory, they’ll teach them about race, and we’ll do whatever it is we always do.” That’s crazy. And that’s the way higher education functions. And the idea behind [the Race & Power requirement] is that we could do that. We were in a place to take that seriously.
And that hasn’t exactly stalled, but its kind of become an ambitious requirement that’s about how students understand race, and hasn’t fundamentally transformed how course content is delivered. And I wish we had been able to hold on to that. I think that idea is still there, but I think we’re a long way away from realizing it. And there’s a variety of reasons why, and if there was an alternative timeline Hampshire 2, I would have wanted to figure out a way to focus more attention or time on helping support faculty in realizing that ambitious vision. It would be so good for Hampshire, it would be so good for higher education, which needs an example of how we take this stuff seriously. Putting it off on the side, take a course and learn about race—that ain’t it.
BP: I think there’s a really encouraging history of Hampshire being an early adopter of policies and approaches that grow to be common in higher education.
EW: […] This is one of the ways Hampshire kind of got in trouble between 2005 and 2009 is that practices that had made Hampshire really unique became best practices. By 2005, “Yeah, I could do that at Hampshire, but I could also do that at 10 other places.” So you gotta find the next thing. I don’t know if this is gonna catch on, but the decision to move student affairs to be an extension of commitments to justice, equity, and anti-racism—that’s a pretty dramatic and singular institutional shift. Nobody else has done that. […] If you want a community that takes anti-racism and equity seriously, then the place where students spend most of their time—which is out of the classroom—has to be oriented towards that.
And you often see a big gap between the way student affairs professionals, nationally, think about questions of anti-racism and equity and how the academic and administrative enterprise thinks about it. And to put student life under the people who have the most clear and articulate commitment to the kind of institutional transformations that would be necessary to make an anti-racist institution meets its values. I think thats really important and really promising if we can make that work. That might be something that people start to adopt.
The classic question of the student affairs administrator, “How do we mitigate racial conflicts and help everyone feel like they belong?”, that’s a very different question from “How do we change our institutional practices and policies to disrupt [the] inequities that create those conflicts and disadvantages in the first place? It’s a very different question that you only ask if it’s at the forefront of your mission.
BP: Where do you think Hampshire is going in the future?
EW: […] Hampshire will increasingly be one of the few places that doesn’t shrink from what is going to be a sustained assault and intimidation of the values that are most important to education—and frankly, from my point of view, what could be best about America.
Lots of places are going, “lets hide, lets change everything, lets give up in advance.” Hampshire’s not going to do any of that. And if we did, we wouldn’t be Hampshire.
So that sense of a place that will continue to be committed to values and institutional practices that are under attack—and that, turns out, a lot of places only appeared to care about, but as soon as they got the opportunity said “Oh, we don’t really wanna be doing any of that stuff,” I think that’s the heart of what makes Hampshire such an exciting place to be at.
And I think more and more people will want to, and need to, be here for that.
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President Wingenbach’s term as president of Hampshire College will conclude on July 1, 2025.
REVIEWED BY: Ryan Nivus, Axen Wetzel, Verne Gulley
