Hampshire College accepted me wholly in a way so unique and precious that it deserved preservation.
Instead, today, I mourn its loss.
Hampshire College was the only institution to ever give me grace. Every crack I could have slipped through was patched. Every plea for help answered.
I wasn't coddled but I was supported in a way that I had never felt before.
When I applied to Hampshire I was already a college dropout with no prospects and I said as much in my application essay. I wrote about how Hampshire was really my only hope at a secondary education and that being there was what I wanted most. The admissions office did everything in their power to make my admission plausible. They listened to my case. They let me interview twice. They made reasonable accomodations for my unique circumstances and didn't make me feel weird about asking for them.
Hampshire has always been painted as weirdly brilliant place full of weirdly brilliant people but there for the first time in my life I felt normal. I felt comfortable. I felt like I belonged flaws and all and I think alot of my peers felt the same.
As the college closes or is somehow miraculously saved a second time I want to write more about it with people who were there. Reporters, well wishers, rubberneckers, and armchair analysts could never do justice describing what a beautiful place it could be.
They don't know what it was like to spend a warm spring day reading in the cherry tree outside of Merrill, or how it felt to hear the steady stream of bass grow closer as you wandered further along a trail of glowsticks into the woods on a moonlit night. They never borrowed a book from Lynn Miller or had Jim the postmaster know them by name. They never rung the Div III bell in a burnt out haze with their parents smiling in every photo. They never met the love of their life outside the yurt. Rainbow chalk smeared across their face as they sketched along the paved path.
Hampshire is irreplaceable. If Hampshire had closed while I was there I would have never finished school. How could I go back to something so uninspired after being so enlightened?
From the moment I set foot on campus I knew it was the only place for me and that I could never go back a world of tests and GPAs. There were so many more important things to do and learn and discover and love. My only regret is not spending more time there while I could.
Now that same grace and opportunity that was afforded to me will never be afforded to someone like me again.