Hampshire College held its final graduation ceremony on Saturday in Amherst. According to administration officials, there were 192 graduates as well as friends, family, current and former faculty and staff who gathered under a white tent in the middle of Hampshire college’s campus. Colorful flags of all the graduating classes in the college’s history hang over the last graduating class.
Faculty kept a brave face for the graduating seniors, but most eyes welled at President Jennifer Chrisler’s last commencement address.
“A parent recently sent me a beautiful, poignant email about Hampshire. She described it as, and I want to get this exactly right, ‘a radical and wild place whose heart will beat on even when the colleges has ceased for the radical and wild minds will echo there forever.’ I have read that sentence many times in the past few weeks,” Chrisler said. “I keep coming back to it because that is what you are. You are the radical and wild minds. You are the heartbeat that continues. Hampshire doesn’t end today. It disperses.”
