Ten years ago, I was waking up in Enfield and sitting down at my desk to write for my daily hour. I was distracted by a lot of things that Jan term – the five roommates roaming around downstairs, a sewing project at the kitchen table, angst about an old relationship, the very beginnings of half marathon training. But for at least an hour, each day, I made sure I was focused on writing. Page by page, bone by bone, I assembled the full skeleton of what would become my Div III that January.

Now, in January 2021, I just went on a run and now I’m sitting at my kitchen table, next to a high chair, looking out at snow falling in a city that you are barely aware exists. I’ve been thinking about all of the things I could say to you, and now that I sit to write I feel rusty, not sure how to begin. 

I am wondering how to count the value of my time at Hampshire. Is a liberal arts education worth it? Or, more to my point, is a liberal arts education like the innovative kind I got at Hampshire worth it? My heart says, yes, of course! But when a high school senior sits in my office now, poring over financial aid award letters, looking at an option that would be free and comparing it to an option that would leave them with 100,000 in student loans? Can I really say it is worth it? And worth it for who – only the privileged few? 

It’s also hard to pinpoint which lessons I learned during those four college years that came from the “liberal arts education” part, or life in general. It’s kind of like looking at glass slides, each with intricate paintings on them, which then layer on top of each other to create one, bright, amazing, messy whole. 

There’s the slide built out of people. I remember the anticipation of walking to bright green E1 hall in Dakin as a first year, to visit the peers who I was forming more deep friendships with than I had thought possible. I fingerpainted happily across that slide, intoxicated by the bright colors. Like most finger paintings, this slide would eventually get very messy. I remember long, up and down trail runs on the side of a mountain with a friend, talking about everything and nothing, and understanding that running can keep you going through just about anything. I remember sitting in my mod’s stairwell, and a roommate gently pointing out that it was probably time to stand down, that there is a point when anger can hurt you more than anyone else around you. 

And there’s the slide built out of the Five Colleges, and the Pioneer Valley. I remember so many PVTA bus rides – out to dance in Northampton, back to campus side by side with an imminent argument, alone at night wondering if my learning would be less lonely transferring to Mt Holyoke, out to another class invigorated by the writings of Camus and Niebuhr and Eula Biss, and, over and over, out to Amherst Coffee, for that heavenly poppyseed bread and the too-bitter fancy coffee, the local band playing lilting strings every Sunday morning. 

Then there’s the slide for the Hampshire classes, for the intellectual growth, for the freedom to think and learn and follow my brain for four years straight without constraints of grades and requirements. Total luxury. To dance between five colleges as I pleased, to drive all around New England for fieldwork, to use the turns of phrases I so rarely use anymore: critical ethnography, literary journalism, reflexivity. My deep listening germinated at Hampshire. My courage to go into unknown places took root. 

But it is hard to separate the learning I did at Hampshire from what came after, from what I learned in a cramped legal clinic in Washington Heights, in a deeply segregated 4th grade classroom in Brownsville. When I think about the people I met while researching my Div III, I think as much about that bunk bed I slept in at Bellows Falls and that wild Revelation pageant at the wedding, as I do about what came after for them, for those who left. The young woman who went to school to become a dental hygienist, and the young couple, who were married under the eyes of Yeshua and, holding hands, made the leap out into the rest of the world. These aren’t my stories to tell, and I only know a few details anyway, but I think about them, still. I have to trust that something else is germinating from all of that thinking, growing out in my actions and the words I speak.

It’s also hard to separate my education from the glass slide of those two summers at Ghost Ranch, in between my years at Hampshire. Ghost Ranch made me more bold, more adventurous, more sure of myself, and I carried all of that growth into my final two years at Hampshire.

It’s even hard to separate my education from the smell of my burgundy dishoom uniform after a dinner shift at SAGA — the wet, rotten, finger-wrinkling smell that never quite came off. 

Now I’m just waxing poetic. I haven’t played with words in an awfully long time. I miss doing that at Hampshire.

Back to my question: the value of a liberal art education. I’m sure if I didn’t go to Hampshire, I’d have a whole different glass slide deck to look through. And certainly, there are a lot of barriers in higher education we need to break down, and there IS a cost that would cost too much. But I do, truly, believe in Hampshire.

More personally: let me tell you that Hampshire will be a launchpad to a whole new education. Your fingerpainting will develop into more graceful brush strokes. The luxury of diving into fieldwork and into religious theory will be a thing you treasure, just as you treasure how far your thinking has come since then, and how much more critically you question your thinking. Ten years later, you will hold that slide deck in your hands, and, for all of its messiness, feel peace.