When sustainability fails

Paradise Dormitory, Sterling College, Vermont. Photo by Jeff Titon, 2013.

In 2019 I wrote about Hampshire College (Massachusetts) and Sterling College (Vermont), both experimental, progressive colleges under financial stress. Now I'm sorry to report that both private colleges have announced that they will be closing this year, due to costs exceeding income, with no foreseeable future improvement in their circumstances and not enough donations and grants to enable them to keep going for a while longer. 

Hampshire opened in 1970, formed as an offshoot of the four distinguished Pioneer Valley schools (Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts) where students were encouraged to pursue their intellectual curiosities, without the normal foundation and distribution requirements. Instead of grades, students were given detailed prose evaluations of their work by their professors. Hampshire students worked closely with their professors, far more so than in most colleges and universities. Among their graduates was the film maker Ken Burns. 

Sterling, founded in 1958, offered an education primarily in environmental studies and ecology, not merely in abstract course work but also hands-on fieldwork including a working farm where students were responsible for doing all the work that resulted in their food. It was a very spartan operation but perhaps too specialized to survive at a time when environmental studies, global warming, climate change and science itself are being challenged by an increasingly powerful group of corporate and political operatives, whose opinions, backed by substantial funding, have created skepticism among the general public and put the field of environmental studies itself into some danger. Colleges like Unity College (Maine) have transformed themselves from primarily environmental colleges to something else; colleges like the College of the Atlantic (Maine, also an environmental-emphasizing college) are under pressure; and Sterling, unfortunately, is no longer able to survive. 

Ironically, perhaps, one of the themes of the Sterling curriculum was sustainability. Both Hampshire and Sterling have been blamed for not adjusting to the current challenges and showing more resilience, but sustainability for them would have been impossible without compromising their integrity. They are case studies where sustainability falters.