NPR’s Leila Fadel speaks to filmmaker Ken Burns, an alumnus of Hampshire College, about the school’s plan to permanently close at the end of the fall semester.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts says it will close after the fall semester due to declining enrollment. The college’s mission was to radically reimagine liberal arts education. It has no majors and students design their own curriculum. The news is part of a trend. The Huron Consulting Group predicted more than a quarter of private, nonprofit, four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closing in the next decade. When students in the second-ever class at Hampshire arrived on campus in the fall of 1971, among them was Ken Burns, not yet the prolific documentary filmmaker he would become. And Ken Burns joins me now to talk about what this means. Thank you for being here, Ken.
KEN BURNS: Thank you, Leila.
FADEL: What was your reaction when you learned your alma mater will close permanently?
BURNS: Well, it’s just astounding grief. It’s just been funereal and appall, and I’ve reconnected with dozens of people. I think it’s lovely the way you do at a funeral. But there’s a great sadness. I do not recognize the person who entered in September of ’71 and the person who came out in the spring of ’75. It just rearranged all my molecules. And the Hampshire model of experimentation is so profound, and it was just as exhilarating an experience as I’ve had in my life.
FADEL: And that says a lot with the life that you’ve lived and you are living. I…
BURNS: Well, I don’t think I would have had that life without it.
FADEL: And you made your first documentary at Hampshire.
BURNS: Yeah.
FADEL: How did your time there shape you?
BURNS: Well, I think the fact that Hampshire placed a lot of emphasis on interdisciplinary work, the connection between all the disciplines, and so we were taught by artists, but they were also humanists. And there was a great deal of kind of humanist sense of responsibility and return. And so there’s an extraordinary list of accomplishments among Hampshire graduates. But often you find it’s a school teacher in Colorado doing something that’s helping people in a kind of, you know, silent way, but more effective than any of the loud voices among us. And I’m so proud to have been and so sad that other people aren’t going to have that chance.
FADEL: That school teacher in Colorado, the other alum, you – are you the legacy of your school?
BURNS: The legacy will always be there. It will be in the transformational energy that Hampshire developed. It’ll be in its innovation. It’ll be in all the ways that it challenged ordinary assumptions about what higher education was about. And I’m sorry that that energy won’t be around to help, particularly in this moment of dire need, this wonderful thing that we have, which is higher education, the envy of the entire world, but is now being assailed from different positions for different reasons, from within, from without. And I am not exaggerating when I say there isn’t a day in which I am not leveraging something that was inculcated at Hampshire in my daily life.
FADEL: How are you reflecting on this loss more broadly, the broader declines in college enrollment, universities cutting their humanities programs and the government canceling grants for the arts?
BURNS: Well, all of these are – they’re coming from different directions. And so one of them is a very simple demographic thing. And then you’ve brought up other things that there are – assaults, the political stuff, the disappointing decision that we should move more into STEM and not understand that STEAM, the addition of the arts to that, helps fuse and make more grounded. And yet the humanities are at the source of human wisdom and progress. And if we think it’s just going to be a one or a zero, we’ve missed the incalculable calculus that one and one sometimes equals three. You can’t build a house if one and one isn’t always two or airplane or a bridge. But in our life’s work, we actually are looking for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.
FADEL: Filmmaker Ken Burns speaking on Hampshire College, his alma mater, which will be closing after the fall semester. His latest work is “American Revolution” on PBS. Thank you so much for your time, and I’m sorry for your sadness in this moment.
BURNS: Thank you.
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Leila Fadel 2026-04-16 08:43:38
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