On old buddy Roger’s advice, I went out today to see the movie Accepted before it left the theaters for good. ZOMG, check it out, he said. It’s completely about Hampshire. I had gotten that vibe from the trailers, in which a dude, who looks suspiciously like the Saturday Night Live actor in the sketches about Hampshire, starts his own college. The movie got lukewarm reviews, but I gave it a shot.
In a post-American Pie age, where movies about teenagers tend to be oversexed, this one hearkens back to well-meaning goofball school comedies like PCU and Revenge of the Nerds. In fact, it’s pretty clear that someone on the project was aiming for that effect; the soundtrack makes overt reference to The Breakfast Club and its sensibilities (other noteworthy soundtrack features include the Pixies’ song U-Mass, the Ramones, and Le Tigre).
And yes, it was totally about Hampshire. Or possibly Evergreen. Or Goddard, or Johnson College at U of Redlands, or someplace else at the fringes of the educational system. Well, OK. Seeing as ol’ Alma Mater just sent me the surprisingly thick guide to being a Hampshire Alumni Admissions Interviewer (yes, I signed up. obviously nobody up there remembers the chanting and muckraking and smack-talking I did anymore. ahahahaaa. no, seriously, there are less safe people to send out to greet the n00bs. i’ll be good, I swear. I’m a Respectable Member Of Academia now) I should probably qualify the comparison. So here’s Your Guide To Viewing Accepted And Being Accepted To Hampshire.
In college, I can expect:
…to major in skateboarding, explaining to my parents that I’m learning about aerodynamics, physics, and mechanical engineering.
Quite possibly. John Dwork did it with frisbee, adding a business component and a study of the history of sports to those topics. Legend has it he went on to work at Wham-O, though The Internets seem to think he’s currently best known for editing a number of books on the Grateful Dead.
… that my parents will still wonder about my employability despite my explanations.
Depends on what they’re like, but if you expect that, then probably, yeah. Luckily, if you play your cards right at Hampshire you’ll probably be much more employable than that guy in the movie who’s trying to blow things up using his mind.
… that a professor who lives in squalor on campus will lead class in a bathrobe, holding court like an extra-crazed Lewis Black and developing a massive cult following.
Maybe. Most of the faculty who used to live on campus have retired or moved off to start families, but Hampshire does tend to attract younger faculty with a real zeal for continuing the character of the place, so you may have some aspiring characters on campus. I hear Lester Mazor used to hold court in the clothing-optional hours in the sauna, but I guess he retired. Michael Lesy has his cult following, but he’s much less genial than Lewis Black, so unless you have a thick skin, I’d steer clear. Lynn Miller will certainly engage you in debate on the ineffables, wearing his trademark bolo tie and swilling something dubious from an Ehrlenmeyer flask. He’s probably your best bet.
… that students will invent their own classes, and they’ll have titles like “Walking around thinking about things” or “Listening to the materials.”
Err… no. You may be thinking of Goddard College, from which Hampshire students got periodic reports from transferring refugees. At least at times in the past, students have been able to set their own curricula at Goddard, contracting with professors to complete a course of study at the beginning of a semester.
While I still, to this damn day, wish that I was allowed to develop my own courses at the beginning of the semester — would someone PLEASE offer courses titled “Time, Space, and the Internet” or “Cultivating Memes,” already? I can give you a reading list! — this is unfortunately a very difficult model of education to sustain. Self-directed learning is far too amorphous a product to standardize, and standardization is what capitalism wants from us all. Even more unfortunately for such attempts, Hampshire and Goddard students tend to be so deeply opposed to standardization that they fall into anarchy and personal dissolution. Given enough rope to hang themselves with, these students don’t even finish the curricula they’ve developed. I’m speaking from personal experience, here. Don’t tell me you’d be different, damn you, I’m a doctoral student in education at a dang Ivy League school now; do you really think you can take me? I know you, you little punk. sheesh.
There is an exception at Hampshire, of course: the periodic “Re-Radicalization” movements and the January courses led by students. During my time the former were led by an erstwhile homeschooler, who insisted that Real Learning could only be achieved by “asking our own questions about our everyday lives” (memorably satirized by Hampshire comedy major Eugene Mirman as “learning about film by smelling the camera”). This homeschooler proposed that we pay Hampshire tuition — at the time, the highest in the country — to take classes from our fellow students, effectively(?) seceding from the college. Fortunately, he was largely ignored by the administration, though he did attempt to commandeer a handful of incoming students to participate in this ill-advised project. His legacy is a series of student-taught courses of varying worth, which did in fact have titles like the ones scrawled on the whiteboard in Accepted.
Not to completely dismiss the perennial anguish of students about Hampshire’s slide into normalcy, though; the readings we did on our own during that time certainly prepared me well for graduate school in education.
… that everyone will drink and hang out by the pool all the time.
Um, no. If you want to drink, you can find drinking; if you want to do drugs, those probably exist too, but I was on the substance free hall, so I wouldn’t know. That’s sort of the glory of Hampshire: if you want it, it’s there, but it’s most definitely not the only social life to be had. And they’re not going to let you near the pool with glass containers. Sorry, even Hampshire has rules about getting glass shards in your feet, ya hippie.
… that hippies will walk around barefoot all the time and get their feet sliced open.
Uh, yeah, even rules about not getting glass shards in your feet won’t stop hippies. Rules won’t even stop hippies from intentionally composting on their dorm halls. Stupid hippies. That wasn’t in the movie, though; that’s just a sweeping editorial vagary.
… that “accreditation,” when it rolls around, will consist of a courtroom-like hearing where my ragtag bunch of misfit friends will go up against a board of stiff-looking old white people, and it’ll just be our word against the frathead morons at the snobby college down the road!
Uh, no. You really think they’d take your word for it that your college is working? They visit campus and take notes. Cmon. Stupid hippies.
… that a small, dubious-looking group of students will be responsible for making up just about everything resembling campus life.
Yep. That’s the Super Sixty, five dozen of us who made a power grab to make Hampshire better, or at least make ourselves feel important. We didn’t start the school like the guys in the movie, but we and our predecessors and heirs are responsible for the school’s various enduring cafes, publications, and shops. Hampshire students are notorious for starting their own fun; there’s no organizations like the Lampoon or Skull and Bones which have been around for a hundred billion years, so each generation of students tends to show up, say “why the hell doesn’t anything happen on this campus?!”, and, say, start a burger delivery joint in a third-floor lounge one night on a whim. (Nate, where are you now?) Great for learning how to start and sustain organizations, shitty if you expect your fun to be there when you get there or if you want tenured professors who won’t disappear halfway through your Div III (it is up to YOU to put recommendation letters in their folders when they come up for review, it is up to YOU to make noise with the trustees, people). The Super Sixty have their pros and cons; some of them end up being weird demagogues, like the guy who started the secession movement or like his predecessors, the group who demanded that the college stop mowing its lawns. But even some of the really overbearing Super Sixty members who you think are bound to wash out or get arrested become law professors or political science experts or artists with cult followings or published authors/members of Negativland/successful at the same brand of irritating editorialism they cultivated while at school.
… that campus will be full of a bunch of weirdos who I will tell stories about for the rest of my life, and I, as one of them, will feel more comfortable among them than just about any group of people I’ll ever meet.
Yes.
That was my favorite part about Accepted, actually. Like Revenge of the Nerds and Real Genius, it’s not about college at all — that’s just window dressing. It’s about being accepted for who you are, on your own terms. For me, as a high school senior about to head off to college, that was absolutely what I was all about. I really didn’t care about college so much as I cared about not having to put up with the same old normalizing bullshit I’d put up with for the past twelve years. So I packed myself off to Hampshire where it all fell away, leaving me free to discover the bullshit I made other people, locally and globally, put up with on my behalf. It felt like hell at the time, but I definitely wouldn’t trade it for the ongoing feeling-that-everything-ought-to-be-fine-all-the-time which I see my Harvard alumni friends struggling with.
yes, two roads diverged in an Amherst wood… sing it with me now…
(actually, the really funny thing about Accepted was that parts of it were clearly shot in Pasadena, where I put up with the normalcy for all those years. and yet they say the movie is set in Ohio. Hee.)
(I think I’m gonna submit this to the Omen. Should I submit this to the Omen? Does the Omen still even exist?)
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