Princely vision: Hampshire College's Greg Prince weighs in on the hauteur of higher ed, the survival of liberal arts education, and keeping an educational experiment alive in the current economic climate - Interview

University Business, Jan, 2004 by Katherine Grayson

So you're innovative when it comes to PR, but how innovative are Hampshire operations?

It's demanding because there is an expectation the students have that they're going to be at the center of everything; every decision has to involve them. And it's tremendously demanding on the faculty. They do the teaching, they do the research, they do the kind of community service needed, and then they start the educational process with these negotiations and by creating these contracts. But it's a very accountable system. What you do is very visible. We don't give grades but [as an instructor], my comments on papers or at the end of the term are likely to end up in a portfolio, and that portfolio is going to end up in the hands of three faculty members. And when they see that the student took my course, they're going to evaluate me as much as the student. You have to really show that you helped the student do something, learn something. That's accountability. It's not only a high level of accountability and assessment, but it also leads to the kind of professional development model that is perpetual because every time three faculty members are brought together, the student has really initiated that relationship. So, when a student comes to me and says, "I want to do dance and conflict resolution because I think body language matters," suddenly a dance faculty member and I are working together for a year. At the end of that year, the faculty are more changed than the student is. At the end of the year, I know more about dance than I've ever known in my life. And the dance faculty know more about conflict resolution.

You bring up an interesting point, because one of the complaints about traditional higher education is that faculty get very set in their ways, and do not grow the way they're expecting students to.

Faculties want to grow and want to have that intellectual excitement, and for us the proof of it is that the faculty like to stay here--and we don't pay as much as others. One reason I think we keep the quality of faculty that we do is because they absolutely value the intellectual freedom, stimulation, and change that they gel to go through. Then too, when you're in a consortium and can share those resources, you have more flexibility in moving people around and allowing that stimulation, and when you don't have departments, you even have more freedom.

Your five-college consortium means that students can take courses at Amherst, UMass, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke, but does it also mean that Amherst professors come here to teach?

Yes. We hire back and forth, and Amherst students come here as well. We export more than we import, but every year I've taught my course, I've had at least two of the four other institutions represented. Most of the time, all four.

What about competition from honors colleges? Aren't universities creating alternative colleges that attract the same kinds of students you are, here?

Yes, some have tried to do that. [There was] Arizona International College. And it survived about three years and was absorbed by the University of Arizona. And there is the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I've worked with it, we support it, and it's competitive. It just means that citizens of Massachusetts have more choices for the kind of education we believe in. So, we celebrated and cheered the creation of it. And I hope, with all the budget pressures it has, it survives, because it's a statement about what education really can be, and it's an affirmation of what we are. In the end, that helps us even though it competes with us.