We are very pleased to share with you all a letter written collectively by linguistics faculty at the Five Colleges, in support of our colleagues and students at Hampshire College.
Please do feel free to share this broadly:
February 22, 2019
To President Nelson, the Hampshire College Board of Trustees, and the Five College Community:
We the linguistics faculty of the Five Colleges are writing to express our distress at the recent news that Hampshire College will be accepting an extremely reduced first year class in 2019, and that this decision will precipitate a significant number of layoffs among both faculty and staff. This distress is tied to both the central role that Hampshire has played in the history of linguistic studies at the Five Colleges and to the ongoing importance of both its faculty and its students to the uniquely rich intellectual community surrounding language science here, one that has been instrumental in UMass Linguistics becoming one of the top linguistics programs in the country. We would therefore like to express our fervent hope that the strongest efforts will be made to help this special educational institution survive.
It is no exaggeration to say that the development of linguistics both at UMass and at the Five Colleges would never have happened without the presence of Hampshire College and its unique academic environment. Right from its beginning, Hampshire College created one of the two strongest undergraduate linguistics programs in the country, designed and constructed by visionary Hampshire faculty members Neil Stillings, Mark Feinstein, and Bill Marsh, later joined by Steven Weisler. At this time too, Hampshire was a pioneer in placing linguistics centrally in the then-nascent field of Cognitive Science. The founder of the UMass Department of Linguistics, Don Freeman, first taught at Hampshire during its opening year, and his experiences there were critical to his development of the UMass department not long after. Similarly, former LSA president Emmon Bach – another early member of the UMass department – at first taught half-time at Hampshire before moving to UMass full-time. Perhaps most importantly, Hampshire College, its faculty, and its students, were of central importance to the highly active Five College Linguistics Committee, which in the 1970s and 1980s was a major stepping-stone to the development of the undergraduate program in linguistics at UMass. Hampshire faculty also played an important role in helping to establish the UMass Cognitive Science program in the late 1970s and to win a major grant from the Sloan Foundation to support it.
This legacy continues to this day, as Hampshire faculty and students remain a crucial resource for both our students and ourselves. Thanks to its uniquely interdisciplinary program, Hampshire students have enormously enriched our classes, asking searching questions, sometimes challenging the strictures of our discipline and forcing the class to think in new ways. Some of the most memorable and gifted of the students we have taught have been from Hampshire. Some of these students have gone on to graduate studies in our own and others’ top-rated programs, including one of ourselves – Mara Breen – who is now an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College. Furthermore, our own students have benefited considerably from the rich and often interdisciplinary classes that Hampshire offers in Cognitive Science and Linguistics. An undergraduate major in Linguistics can – and should – touch so many other fields, and Hampshire has allowed those interconnections to happen. The linguistic offerings in the Valley would be sorely reduced if Hampshire were to drop their contribution, and our students (as well as ourselves) will be all the worse for it.
It must also be noted that Hampshire faculty continue to play a crucial role in our own graduate programs, advising students and even serving as influential outside members of doctoral committees. These dedicated teacher-scholars have devoted their careers to the unique educational mission of Hampshire, one that places special emphasis on both pedagogy and service. Consequently, these immensely talented individuals have often made deep sacrifices to the development of their own research programs in order to further the special interests of the College. It would be a tragedy to lose these irreplaceable people, especially since their academic futures may be in jeopardy as a result of their sacrifices to this unique institution.
For all of these reasons, we urge that the Five Colleges find a way to continue the bold, noble educational experiment that is this priceless institution. Hampshire’s educational example has been a major influence for us all not only in the past, but also in our current efforts to promote Team Based Learning, outside internships, community outreach, cooperative research opportunities with undergraduates in our labs, and our general efforts to promote and develop a mutually supportive intellectual environment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
We also hope fervently for a solution to these issues that does not significantly reduce the number of faculty or students at Hampshire, and that it is developed with the full transparent participation of the faculty and staff, in the spirit of shared governance. We cannot simply stand by and allow this defining feature of our intellectual community to fade from existence.
Sincerely,
Daniel Altshuler, Hampshire College and University of Massachusetts Amherst
Luiz Amaral, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Ana Arregui, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Giovanna Bellesia, Smith College
Rajesh Bhatt, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Maria Biezma, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mara Breen, Mount Holyoke College
Seth Cable, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Craig Davis, Smith College
Jill de Villiers, Smith College
Peter de Villiers, Smith College
Brian Dillon, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mark Feinstein, Hampshire College
Lyn Frazier, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Donald Freeman, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jay Garfield, Smith College
Lisa Green, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Alice Harris, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Vincent Homer, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Gaja Jarosz, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts Amherst
John Kingston, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Angelika Kratzer, University College London and University of Massachusetts Amherst
Magda Oiry, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Barbara Partee, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Joe Pater, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Doug Patey, Smith College
Thalia Pandiri, Smith College
Naoko Nemoto, Mount Holyoke College
Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Elisabeth Selkirk, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Eric Snyder, Smith College
Kristine Yu, University of Massachusetts Amherst
