Small liberal arts colleges face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise. The casualties are staggering, with an estimated eighty-nine colleges closing or merging since 2020 alone and forecasts that a quarter of the nation’s private colleges and universities are at risk in the coming decade. With a shrinking domestic applicant pool (the so-called “demographic cliff”), international students spooked by Trump’s immigration policies, rising costs and rising tuition, a terrifying job market exacerbated by AI, lingering fallout from the pandemic, plummeting interest in the humanities, and so on, even relatively comfortable institutions have had to rethink their priorities to stay afloat. And yet the shuttering of Hampshire College—which announced on April 14 that it finally couldn’t attract enough students to pay its debts—feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education in the US. Since its founding on farmland outside Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1970, Hampshire was the most visible exemplar of a tradition of …