Ed Wingenbach became the president of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2019 at a time when the future of experimental private institution appeared to be in flux. His predecessor had resigned weeks earlier after a much-criticized effort to resolve the college’s financial troubles through layoffs, pausing admissions, and pursuing a strategic partnership. In January, Wingenbach announced that he too would leave Hampshire this June after six years of working to turn around its fortunes and stabilize its path forward. As he prepares to become head of the American College of Greece in Athens, Wingenbach spoke with WAMC about the work he’s done and what remains ahead.
WINGENBACH: Back in 2019, after my predecessor had decided not to take a class, and Hampshire was in some real distress. And I have always admired Hampshire, I’ve modeled the way I think about what is best in higher education on what Hampshire does and had employed those practices and worked in institutions that looked to Hampshire as a model, and so when I saw what was happening, and I felt like I was at a position at that point in my career where I might be helpful, I was kind of, I was distressed, right, that Hampshire, this incredible and incredibly important institution that's so essential to the way we think about education in the United States and really the world, was in danger, that I volunteered to try to help the institution recover and thrive. And I was lucky enough to be selected and a very quick process, and came in the August of 2019, now six years ago, and jumped right in. And it was a really challenging and exciting first year or two, and then we hit COVID six months later, which made things even more complicated, but we've come out the other side of that, and Hampshire is in a sustainable place in doing lots of great work and growing rapidly.
WAMC: Break that down for us, that original mission to come in and help turn around Hampshire- How would you grade yourself and your own performance over the last few years as you prepare to move on to this next chapter?
Well, I'll remind you that Hampshire doesn't do grades, so I'm going to avoid that. We do narrative evaluations for all of our students, so you can get really authentic feedback. And I would say my assessment of the last six years has been, A, the most important thing that we did was, as a community – the faculty, the staff, the students and alums, the parents, right – to recommit to the core mission of Hampshire as an experimenting institution, right, that the job of Hampshire is to try to invent the future of higher education and come up with ways of conceptualizing undergraduate education that other institutions are unwilling or unable to do. I'll remind you that the purpose of Hampshire, the reason it was founded, was in part because the other four colleges here in the Five Colleges wanted to see innovation and experimentation and change, and were concerned that these very old, established industries couldn't do it right. And Hampshire has held on to that mission now for 55 years, and it needed to be reinvigorated. I think we've done a great job of that, of re-orienting the curriculum around the most important challenges and questions of our time, of re-imagining the ways that project-based work integrates into all elements of a student's education, recognizing and wrestling with the ways that white supremacy is reproduced in a curriculum and helping students understand the interplay of race and power again throughout the curriculum. So, all of those elements of doing the kind of most interesting and exciting work that you can do in higher education, that drove the success. So that's one. Two was a real focus on rebuilding enrollment, and that's where Hampshire has been unambiguously successful, right? So, we were –after the decision not to take a class and then the pandemic, which really impacted the ability of the next year to bring students in – we got as low as 460-some students in, I think, 2022. And this year, this fall, we were at 840, and we expect to be over 900 next year, and in the range of 1,000 the year after that. So that ability to attract students who want and need what Hampshire has was also really important. Then the last part of it was just, and maybe this is the most important organizationally, was helping people at Hampshire understand that the valuable mission we pursue has to be done within an economic framework that is sustainable, right, that we have to recognize what our realistic resources are and make principled, mission-based choices about how we use those resources so that we can pursue Hampshire's mission over the next 10 years and 50 years- And we've been able to do that as well. And so now we're at a point where enrollment has grown dramatically and continues to grow, the budget is approaching a balance between expenses and revenue, and the reputation of Hampshire as an innovating institution is widely viewed,
Now, last year, the college did cut back staff benefits citing ongoing financial problems. Can you speak to that thread in all of this- Is Hampshire during this turnaround era going to be as good to its staff as to the students it's trying to serve as it attempts to right the ship, so to speak?
Sure, I mean that that is part of the challenge of making difficult decisions about where you prioritize your resources around your mission. And the other element of that is we were, had been on a trajectory of enrollment growth that we thought was going to get us to 1,100 to 1,200 students by 2027. And we were on that path, and so, we were building our budget alongside that. And then last year, with the FAFSA, the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] problems, which really hit us hard, because we've also made a deep commitment to economic diversity- Almost 40% of our students are Pell Grant eligible. And so, when there was all of this debacle around the federal financial aid and uncertainty about whether people would be able to even get things like their Pell Grants, that really impacted our ability to attract students last year. And so, for the first year since 2019, we had a slight dip rather than a growth in our entering class. And that meant we had to rethink our trajectory, right? We weren't going to get to 1,200 students in 2027, we were going to be able to get to 1,000 or so. And that means adjusting the expense growth right to match that. And so, the work we had to do last in the last summer and early fall was largely about adjusting that trajectory so that at 1,000 students in a couple of years, our expenses and expenses and revenues would match, because we weren't going to get to 1,200 anymore. And we're back on that path. We are currently, we have a record number of applications. We have more applications than we've had in over a decade. So, last year clearly was a blip rather than a pattern, and we're back on the trajectory of growth that we'd been on since 2019, but it's still not good enough to get us to that the original goal of 1,200 by 2027.
