EDITORS' CORNER
The private Massachusetts college plans to close this year due to financial woes
A professor at the soon-to-close Hampshire College has touted unconventional classes where he takes students outside to skateboard as a way to explore “themes in Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and liberation.”
The private, Massachusetts college recently announced plans to close at the end of this year due to low enrollment and financial struggles.
However, the institution also has faced repeated criticism in recent years for its overtly progressive ideology. One recently surfaced example of this is a “Decolonizing Education” class taught by Professor Noah Romero.
Romero, who teaches Native American and Indigenous studies, talked about the class in a 2024 video on the college’s YouTube page. However, the video recently captured attention on X in connection with the news of the college’s impending closure.
“We explore how themes in Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and liberation show up in skateboarding, in hip hop, in punk rock, in comedy,” Romero said in the video.
“It sort of shows how dynamic Indigenous knowledge is, and it makes it so that we have to understand that Indigenous people are still here, and that Indigenous people will always be here,” he said.
To “honor that,” Romero said he sometimes takes classes outside and brings “in skateboards and food to process our reactions to our readings.”
“The future depends on Indigenous knowledge,” he said in the video. “If we want to decolonize education, that means undoing, dislodging, subverting, all those things that make up the foundational DNA of everything that we see navigating a settler society like the US.”
For the current school year, his courses include “Indigenous Anarchy” and “Indigenous Education,” according to the course catalogue.
In the classes, students will examine “how Indigenous communities resist colonialism and assert autonomy through decentralized, egalitarian practices” and how “compulsory education [has] been used to perpetuate colonialism and its associated discourses, like racism, cisheteronormativity, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, ableism, and Indigenous dispossession,” according to the course descriptions.
When the college hired him in 2023, Romero had just written a book, “Decolonial Underground Pedagogy: Unschooling and Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights.”
In an interview with the college, he said his book “examines the anti-oppressive pedagogies found in queer- and BIPOC-led punk, skateboarding, and unschooling subcultures.”
Romero also described individualism and consumerism as “colonial logics,” and he talked about joining campus “efforts to dismantle white supremacy through disciplinary disobedience and transformative teaching.”
Hampshire College had struggled with low enrollment and financial debt for several years.
Despite these struggles, administrators continued to spend money on LGBTQ and DEI programs while laying off employees and slashing departments, The College Fix reported in 2024.
MORE: Hampshire College — one of the most progressive in the nation — to shut down
