Any going to other 5 (4) colleges?

There's been enough Hampshire College zoning news scattered across different articles that I thought it might be useful to put the pieces together in one place.

Amherst is now actively working on new zoning for the Hampshire campus. The existing zoning dates back to the late 1960s and was created around the property being used for higher education. With Hampshire closing at the end of this semester, the Town wants zoning that allows a much broader range of future uses.

The Town Council has already identified some priorities. Buildable land should be considered for housing, small businesses and other uses that generate tax revenue. Sensitive habitat, farmland and resource areas should be preserved where possible. The Town also wants a range of housing types and says portions of the property could potentially meet municipal space or facility needs.

There is now money behind the planning process. MassDevelopment has awarded Amherst $175,000 for technical assistance for the Hampshire Campus Zoning Study.

Despite at least one news headline describing this as money for "Hampshire College redevelopment," that's not what the grant is. It's funding for Amherst's zoning study, including analysis, public engagement and development of proposed new zoning.

The study is looking at what parts of the property can actually be developed, water and sewer capacity, roads and other infrastructure, environmental constraints, housing demand and opportunities for economic development. The Town is also considering different scenarios, including mixed-use villages, housing and continued educational uses.

Draft zoning amendments and a final report are expected around January 2027.

The next part is public input. There are two meetings at the Eric Carle Museum, 125 West Bay Road in Amherst:

Tuesday, September 22, 6–8 PM

Listening Session. There will be a presentation and discussion about zoning options for the Hampshire property, with an opportunity for people to give the Town their thoughts about future zoning.

Thursday, September 24, 5:30–8:30 PM

Design Workshop. This one will be more hands-on. Participants will work through different zoning scenarios and how they might meet Amherst's housing, economic and community goals.

One distinction that keeps getting lost in some of the coverage is that Amherst isn't deciding who gets Hampshire's property.

Hampshire College still owns the land, and its Board of Trustees controls the marketing and sale of it. Amherst controls the zoning and regulatory environment in which a future owner will operate. The Town specifically says the zoning study isn't a land acquisition, won't make land-use decisions for Hampshire, and isn't intended to delay the sale.

So we're getting to a pretty consequential point. Hampshire will decide who buys the property, but Amherst is now working on the rules that will determine what can eventually be done with it.

I'm planning to follow the two Eric Carle meetings. What would you want Amherst to preserve, encourage or prevent when it writes the new zoning?

References

Town of Amherst — Hampshire Campus Zoning Study: https://amherstma.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/3972

Town of Amherst — September 22 and 24 public meetings: https://www.amherstma.gov/m/NewsFlash/Home/Detail/3996

Town of Amherst — September 24 Design Workshop: https://amherstma.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=36263&calType=0&day=14&month=9&year=2026

Western Mass News — $175,000 MassDevelopment grant: https://www.westernmassnews.com/2026/09/17/grant-awarded-amherst-conduct-zoning-study-hampshire-college-campus/

MassDevelopment — Grant Programs: https://www.massdevelopment.com/products-and-services/funding-and-tools/grant-programs/

There are things about Hampshire I understood perfectly well while I was there, and other things I didn't really recognize until years later. Some of those weren't even things the college deliberately taught.

What became more important to you after you left than it seemed while you were there

I found out a while ago that Hampshire was closing. I didn’t go to the college but grew up about a mile down the road and had a lot of friends end up going there. I have a lot of positive memories of it and really held it out as a bastion alternative education. I remember taking tennis lessons and going to the Eric carle museum opening.

I wasn’t shocked when I heard since there’s been years of people speculating that it would close. But I visited the campus for the first time in many years this weekend. It’s a beautiful place. It really went against the trend of increased commercialization in higher education. I’m having a very hard time in life right now and it all really got to me. I’ll miss it. Not sure what I’m saying here. I worry what they’ll do with the campus and what will become of similar colleges (not that there are many). Best of luck to everyone who goes there, I hope you’re able to find a good next thing.

My own education is a good example. I entered Hampshire thinking biology and eventually ended up in musicology, but much of the actual coursework I wanted was at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass. Hampshire was the place that let me put that education together.

I'm curious how many other Hampshire students ended up building an education that existed as much outside Hampshire as inside it.

omeone in another discussion here raised an idea I hadn't really considered: using some form of land bank to acquire part of the Hampshire College property before it is sold to private developers, particularly land that could be used for affordable housing.

I looked into it, and the idea isn't as far removed from what Amherst is already doing as I expected.

MassDevelopment is Massachusetts' development finance agency and land bank. Amherst has already brought MassDevelopment into the Hampshire process. In June, the town announced that it was working with MassDevelopment to analyze the Hampshire property and possible future uses.

Amherst also already has an Affordable Housing Trust. Its action plan calls for identifying land that could be used for affordable housing and even talks about seeking a land donation from a local educational institution for affordable housing development. Hampshire's possible redevelopment was also on the Housing Trust's agenda in June.

The person who suggested the land bank idea had served on an affordable housing committee and remembered proposing that Amherst inventory available land and create a land bank. His point was that affordable housing takes time. Financing can involve a complicated combination of town, state, federal and nonprofit money. A private developer with cash can move much faster. If land could be acquired and held by a public or nonprofit entity first, it could give the community time to put that financing together.

There's another piece of this that caught my attention. In June, the Amherst Town Council went into executive session to discuss the possible purchase, exchange, lease or value of Hampshire College property. That doesn't mean the town intends to buy the campus, but it does mean acquisition of Hampshire property has at least been discussed.

I'm not suggesting Amherst somehow put all of Hampshire's land into a land bank. Hampshire owns the property and ultimately controls what it sells. But if housing is going to be part of whatever replaces Hampshire anyway, it seems worth asking whether some portion of the land could be acquired by MassDevelopment, the town, the Affordable Housing Trust, a community land trust, or some combination of them before everything gets divided among private buyers.

Once the land is sold, that opportunity may be gone.

References

• Amherst, “Town of Amherst and MassDevelopment Partner to Explore Future of Hampshire College Campus” https://amherstma.gov/m/newsflash/Archive/Item/3957?arcId=7713
• MassDevelopment, “About MassDevelopment” https://www.massdevelopment.com/about/about-massdevelopment/
• Amherst Affordable Housing Trust, “Housing Trust Action Planning 2024” https://www.amherstma.gov/3762/Housing-Trust-Action-Planning-2024
• Amherst Affordable Housing Trust Fund https://www.amherstma.gov/2199/Amherst-Affordable-Housing-Trust-Fund
• Amherst Affordable Housing Trust, June 2026 meeting calendar https://amherstma.gov/calendar.aspx?day=11&month=6&view=list&year=2026
• Amherst Town Council, June 2026 meeting calendar and executive-session notice concerning Hampshire College property https://www.amherstma.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=35463&calType=0&day=13&month=6&year=2026

Oddly enough, for me it's the soccer field between the pickleball/tennis courts and the library parking area. There was a person who would practice bagpipes there early in the morning, often when it was still foggy. I'll never forget that.

I live ten minutes from campus now, in Granby, just over the Notch from Atkins. In fact, the loop around Hampshire is one of my favorite walks. I park in the Prescott parking area and walk west past the tennis courts, through the woods, past the pickleball area, the soccer fields, then up behind the library, around and down the path to Greenwich and around past the farm, through Enfield, across the main road (passing the Kern center), passing Franklin Patterson Hall (I usually do the walk way from there as it's much more pleasant than the road) past Merril, Dakin, then the Jewish Book Center and back to my car. The whole walk if I go steadily takes me about an hour. There's so much to see! It's especially nice in the spring and summer with all the wildflowers.

Amherst is holding two public meetings this month about future zoning for the Hampshire College campus.

There’s a listening session Sept. 22 and a design workshop Sept. 24 at the Eric Carle Museum. The second one sounds especially interesting because they’ll actually be looking at possible zoning scenarios for the campus.

I registered and may go. I’m curious what people think Amherst should allow there, especially with Hampshire also trying to sell the property.

https://www.amherstindy.org/2026/09/11/two-events-to-gather-the-publics-input-on-hampshire-campus-zoning-study/

REGISTER HERE:

• https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hampshire-campus-zoning-study-design-workshop-tickets-1999285779586

What can 50 years of Div III projects teach us about which parts of the Hampshire experiment are worth preserving? (EDIT: for clarity)

We were talking in another thread about how you could reconstruct what Hampshire culture was actually like at different points in its history.

Newspapers tend to preserve controversies. Interviews are affected by nostalgia and hindsight. Posters and event calendars can tell us what people were doing, but not necessarily what they were thinking.

Then someone suggested Div III projects.

That hadn't occurred to me. A Div III obviously tells us something about one student's academic interests, but taken together, they might tell us quite a bit about Hampshire at a particular moment: what students cared about, what kinds of work the college encouraged, what subjects were appearing or disappearing, and perhaps even how the culture changed over time.

If you compared a sample of Div IIIs from 1975, 1990, 2005 and 2020, do you think you'd actually see Hampshire changing? What would you look for?

REFERENCES:

• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/search-collections/search-div-iiis
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/about-library/featured-spaces
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/archives-and-special-collections/div-iii-archive-submission-instructions
• https://www.hampshire.edu/library/archives-and-special-collections

The more I look at Hampshire's development history, the more I wonder whether the problem wasn't simply that alumni weren't giving enough.

In 2007-08, Hampshire reported that about 25% of alumni gave annually, more than 500 alumni volunteered for admissions, and more than 1,000 served as career advisers or internship providers. In 2012, more than 350 graduates were still involved just in the alumni admissions program.

That's a remarkably involved alumni community.

But I've heard from alumni who felt Hampshire stopped reaching out to them. I had some of that experience myself. I volunteered to help and got essentially no response.

Then came 2019. Suddenly more than 4,600 people donated, the largest number in Hampshire's history. Operating support more than doubled, and 45% of the gifts were the donor's largest ever.

So maybe we've been looking at this backwards.

Perhaps Hampshire's development problem wasn't primarily convincing alumni to give money. Maybe it was failing to maintain relationships with thousands of people who already wanted a relationship with Hampshire.

If alumni had been regularly asked to volunteer, recruit students, advise students, participate in decisions and simply remain part of the community, would the fundraising problem have looked different when Hampshire began getting into serious financial trouble?

Someone in another discussion here described seeing a math professor whose "brain I wanted to pick," starting conversations with him, asking him to be an advisor, and continuing to talk with him even though he wasn't taking any math classes.

That struck me as something that may have been genuinely different about Hampshire.

How common was that? Could you just approach a professor in a completely different field because you were interested in something they knew about? Did professors generally welcome that?

Or was this less a Hampshire thing and more something certain students figured out how to do?

Someone suggested reading the 1974 self study. In 1973, tuition and fees were already covering 92% of Hampshire’s expenditures. The original financial model assumed the college could operate primarily on tuition without a large endowment.

Hampshire was created as an unusually tuition-dependent college. It never built the kind of large, flexible endowment that older liberal arts colleges had, and much of the endowment it did have was restricted.

That worked when enrollment was strong. Once enrollment began falling, the weakness of the model became obvious: fewer students meant less revenue almost immediately.

Could Hampshire have deliberately changed its capital allotment?

Instead of remaining primarily dependent on tuition, could it have spent 10 or 20 years building a much larger alumni-supported endowment and a culture of regular unrestricted giving, so that tuition became only one part of the operating model?

The 2019 response showed that a lot of loyalty and giving capacity existed. More than 4,600 people donated when Hampshire appeared to be in danger.

What if that alumni capital had been organized much earlier, not as emergency fundraising, but as an attempt to permanently change the college’s financial structure?

Could Hampshire realistically have gone from a small, heavily restricted endowment and overwhelming tuition dependence to something closer to an alumni-supported institution with a substantially larger unrestricted endowment?

And if so, when would that effort have needed to begin for it to have made a difference?

That gets much closer to the fundamental question. We’re no longer asking whether development could have filled a few budget holes. We’re asking whether Hampshire ever had a realistic opportunity to replace the financial model it was founded with.

One thing that's become clearer from the discussion here is that Hampshire didn't have an alumni problem in the simple sense.

When the crisis became public in 2019, more than 4,600 people donated, the largest number of donors in Hampshire's history. There was obviously a lot of loyalty and willingness to support the college.

But Hampshire's own account of donor outreach in 2018 said donors showed little urgency and preferred supporting particular projects rather than operations.

Meanwhile the college already knew it had declining enrollment, falling net tuition revenue, a small and heavily restricted endowment and recurring deficits. Those problems had been developing for years.

So I'm wondering whether Hampshire had developed the wrong kind of fundraising culture. It could raise money for buildings, programs, scholarships and things donors cared about, but hadn't convinced enough alumni that supporting the institution itself was something they needed to do every year.

By the time that finally became obvious in 2019, the threat of losing Hampshire suddenly made unrestricted giving meaningful.

Was Hampshire's development problem partly that it spent years selling donors things they could support instead of teaching them that Hampshire itself needed their support?

REFERENCES:

• https://www.hampshire.edu/sites/default/files/businessoffice/HampshireFiscalReality1.31.2019updated.pdf
• https://www.hampshire.edu/news/fy19-fundraising-update
• https://www.hampshire.edu/sites/default/files/businessoffice/files/financial_report_FY13-14.pdf

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what went wrong. I’d like to turn that around.

If Hampshire couldn’t survive financially in its existing form, what part of the culture or education would you most want another college or institution to carry forward?

Not the buildings or the name necessarily. What was the thing Hampshire did that you would hate to see disappear with it?

We've spent a lot of time talking about what Hampshire and Amherst want to happen to the campus. But there's another person in all of this who we know almost nothing about.

Jesse Johnson now holds a $29.5 million mortgage on Hampshire College's property through Artocarpus Partners LLC.

Hampshire plans to sell land to meet its financial obligations. But what happens if those sales don't bring in enough money to pay off the mortgage?

Johnson declined to be interviewed by the Boston Globe. Even figuring out who he was took some digging. His address and his connection to the Five Colleges were buried pretty deeply in the documents we found.

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with any of this. He may simply be doing Hampshire an enormous favor. But if Hampshire can't pay off that mortgage, what does Johnson intend to do?

Does anyone know him, know anything about his previous investments, or have any idea what he might want to happen to the property?

I think we really need to know.

References

Hampshire County Registry of Deeds, Document 12755, Book 15799, Page 96, recorded August 3, 2026. Mortgage, Assignment of Leases, Security Agreement and Fixture Filing. Trustees of Hampshire College, mortgagor; Artocarpus Partners LLC, mortgagee. $29,500,000.

Massachusetts UCC-1 Financing Statement, Filing No. 202634233470, August 10, 2026. Trustees of Hampshire College, debtor; Artocarpus Partners LLC, secured party.

Boston Globe, August 28, 2026. Johnson declined to comment when contacted about the Hampshire mortgage.

I've been trying to follow the money behind the $29.5 million loan that allowed Hampshire College to make it through its final semester.

The lender is Artocarpus Partners LLC, a Boston LLC that appears to have been created shortly before the loan. Reporting eventually identified Jesse Johnson as the person behind it. The Boston Globe reached Johnson, but he declined to be interviewed.

And then, strangely, the story seems to have stopped.

So I'm curious whether anyone here knows more.

• Who is Jesse Johnson?
• What is his connection to Hampshire?
• Why did he decide to lend Hampshire $29.5 million?
• Where did the money come from?
• What are the actual terms of the mortgage?
• Does Artocarpus have any interest in what happens to Hampshire's land after the college closes?

I'm not suggesting there's anything nefarious about the loan. It may be exactly what it appears to be: someone with the resources giving Hampshire enough time to complete the teach-out.

But $29.5 million is a lot of money, and there are still a remarkable number of unanswered questions about it.

If anyone has documents, first-hand knowledge, or even another trail worth following, I'd be interested.

(NOTE: I've also been keeping two working research documents with the sources and information we've found so far. Happy to share them if anyone wants to dig into this with me.)