Ken Burns Names the ‘Greatest Danger’ Facing Higher Ed
The documentary filmmaker and Hampshire College alum says his alma mater’s closure is part of a more troubling trend.
By Jack Stripling, May 6, 2026
Ken Burns Names the ‘Greatest Danger’ Facing Higher Ed | College Matters from The Chronicle
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In this episode
Ken Burns, who has helped to tell the story of the nation’s history through celebrated documentaries, attributes much of his success to the education he received at Hampshire College. Faced with the recent news that his financially struggling alma mater will soon close its doors, Burns is reflecting on the larger forces that helped to seal the college’s fate. Hampshire bills itself as a learning laboratory in which students are encouraged to follow their passions, driving toward a goal of personal transformation rather than the pursuit of any single vocation. If that’s not a marketable idea, Burns says, something is truly amiss in higher education and the American psyche. The nation’s “reprehensible culture wars,” Burns says, are only making matters worse.
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Related Reading
- Hampshire Announced Its Closing. Will Other Small Colleges Follow? (The Chronicle)
- Nearly One-Third of Faculty in Red States Say They’ve Censored Their Research (The Chronicle)
- A War on ‘Woke’ Classes (College Matters)
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Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but it may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling: This is College Matters from the Chronicle.
Ken Burns: The greatest danger that faces higher education is this transactional tendency that everything is about an exchange that ultimately is economic and not what education should be, which is transformational.
Jack Stripling: When Hampshire College announced last month that it would close its doors for good in December, a palpable sense of loss spread across higher education. The small college in Amherst, Mass. now enrolls only about 625 people, but it has earned an outsized reputation as a place designed for students to pursue their passions.
Hampshire is also known for helping to produce one of the nation’s best-known documentary filmmakers: Ken Burns. With films about the Civil War, baseball, and the American Revolution, Burns has brought to life the story of the country in all of its conflict and complexity. He has also, in recent years, led fundraising efforts to save his alma mater.
Today on the show, we’ll talk with Burns about Hampshire’s closure — and we’ll get his take on political efforts to restrict how history is taught in the nation’s colleges and universities.
Jack Stripling: Ken Burns, welcome to College Matters.
Ken Burns: Great to be with you, thanks.
Jack Stripling: Well, I wanted to talk to you today because you’re a proud alumnus of Hampshire College, which unfortunately announced that it plans to close soon. You and others have worked very hard to save this place, but it just didn’t work out. This was a very small college and it existed for less than 60 years. But my impression is that it was a life-changing institution for a lot of people, including you. Can you talk about what you feel like we’ve lost here?
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