Blog / Our America

Prove TINA Thought Wrong

April 6, 2019 - By Jim Hicks

So… I got the news yesterday, while listening to my car radio, and then almost drove off the road.

I immediately pulled over and checked my email: two of my friends from Hampshire College had already written, and a third would soon after. Like them, though mostly for them, I felt as if an unseen weight had suddenly lifted. I’m not by temperament pollyannish, and I do realize that the most difficult, the real work begins now. Nonetheless, the resignation of the Hampshire College president and several key members of its Board of Trustees makes that work possible, and the appointment of Ken Rosenthal as interim president seems an ideal solution. The way is now clear for Hampshire College to do what it does best: to reinvent itself, and, by doing so, to reboot liberal...

Our America: All Life's Matter

March 8, 2019 - By Marya Zilberberg

Ever since the walk that Saturday, the modest but set-with-care-into-the-lawn homemade sign has haunted me, its simple black font on a rectangle of white foam core. I couldn't believe what I had seen, didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

It stood in my neighbors’ yard, the same neighbors who on the day following the election had raised a flag, a thin white polyester rag with blue letters spelling the name of the winner. It stayed there for a few months, but had to come down, its cheap cloth and flimsy manufacturing no match for our winters. It was the same neighbors who on weekends collect crushed Budweiser cans and plastic iced tea jugs, emptied and hurled onto the sides of the roads of our small rural town out of careening pick-up trucks. They toss them along...

One Hampshire Story

February 24, 2019 - By Jim Hicks

"Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” 

                                    -- John Milton, Areopagitica

Warning: This shit gets personal.

As everyone here in Massachusetts’s Happy Valley—and much of the rest of academia—has heard by now,...

To Hampshire College Faculty

February 15, 2019 - By Members of the Mount Holyoke College Faculty

Open Letter from Amherst Faculty to the Hamphire College President

February 5, 2019 - By Members of the Amherst College Faculty