<p>The family blog is designed to keep families up-to-date and interacting with each other. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, only the most sanguine of posts are allowed.</p>
<p>I tried to post a question for discussion, but received an email informing me that The blog is designed as an information resource for families, not as a forum for debate.</p>
<p>I had wanted to find out if other parents were as outraged as I was concerning a mailing to my home.</p>
<p>By censoring posts on a blog designed to keep families interacting with each other, the school stifles dissent, and only those adhering to the prevailing dogma are allowed to speak.</p>
<p>The censored question was as follows:</p>
<p>Has anyone read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?</p>
<p>This is the profane and sexually explicit book addressed to my 17 year-old entering student and mailed to my house. The book was chosen for common reading and to be discussed with other incoming students at an orientation meeting. The choice was defended by the sender, who admitted having knowledge of the contents, by reasoning that the book had received numerous prizes.</p>
<p>My student was still pursuing high school studies and had not enrolled in any college classes yet. I find it highly objectionable that such literature was mailed unsolicited to family households.</p>
<p>I read and enjoyed, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. I might not consider it worthy of the Pulitzer Prize that it won a few years ago, but it still had poignant and affecting characters and gave me some insight into what it might be like to be a geeky outcast in an inner-city Hispanic community. I’m not sure exactly why this was considered the best book for incoming students to read, but I presume that it was an attempt to get students to think about and discuss multiculturalism and tolerance of others.</p>
<p>A few passages are sexually explicit, but I don’t consider the book to be excessively or gratuitously sexual or profane. When my kids were high school seniors they no doubt read books that were as sexually explicit as this one. I suppose that if a family was more protective of its kids than mine, then their near-college-age students might not yet be exposed to such literature. Still, these kids are going to be college students in a few short weeks and I think that most of them will benefit from some frank discussions about appropriate and inappropriate expressions of sexuality at that time.</p>
<p>Capester, I don’t know if your intended post to the Hampshire Family Relations Blog only contained the last three paragraphs from the above message, so I can’t comment on whether or not it was appropriate for the Blog administrators to block the posting. I do know that in the past the Family Relations Blog and its predecessor, the Hampshire Family Listserve, got sidetracked from their purpose of exchanging information for and between families. On several occasions they were dominated by overly negative exchanges from parents who were unhappy with the quality of the cafeteria food, the cost of the Family Weekend, or the date when students were allowed into the dorms. I imagine that the blog administrators are quite sensitive toward avoiding similar outbreaks.</p>
<p>At least you can post your concerns here, and folks could decide if they agree that those concerns are valid.</p>
<p>ALF, the quality of the book is irrelevant. Whether or not I believe that the book is appropriate for my student is irrelevant.</p>
<p>It is the mailing of a profane (hardly a page goes by without words that I am not allowed to re-print here) and sexually explicit book to a minor and to a household with younger siblings, without permission, that is wrong. Using the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the material to a minor might be illegal.</p>
<p>The omitted line, omitted for the purpose of brevity, from my attempted post was as follows:</p>
<p>“Perhaps this book might be appropriate if introduced as a part of a contemporary literature class”.</p>
<p>The mailing is the student’s first introduction to the school, and this choice shows poor judgment.</p>
<p>A close friend of mine is the Dean of Education at a University which also mails literature for common reading to incoming students. He was incredulous at this school’s choice of reading matter for the common reading, and lack of regard for the families.</p>
<p>We are now receiving emails from the school reminding us that the author will be on campus to answer questions . Also, he will be available to the incoming students who have been force-fed his book. I suspect that the school’s curious choice for the common reading was swayed by the author’s willingness to appear on campus in order to promote his 3-year old book.</p>
<p>FYI, the introductory book for the incoming 2011 class is, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other”, by MIT professor Sherry Turkle. I haven’t read it, but it sure sounds appropriate. According to the Hampshire web site the book, "…explores the ways that communication technologies like texting, email, and social networking sites have affected communication itself. According to a review in Publishers Weekly, Turkle’s book ‘makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other’.”</p>
<p>Hi, my daughter is seriously considering Hampshire, now that she is accepted. Upon reading in various websites, one thing I read in one of the students comments (and worried me) was that it was impossible/very hard to transfer out of Hampshire due to lack of letter grades. Is this true?</p>
<p>A couple of my son’s friends transferred out (to UMass-Amherst and SUNY-Purchase). Of course, UMass has had a lot of experience dealing with Hampshire transcripts, so that was no bid deal. The Hampshire courses transferred in, with the exception of some very obscure course that did not match up with anything that UMass offers. The courses were not listed with grades (maybe Pass/Fail?) and did not factor into the kid’s eventual UMass GPA. The student who transferred to Purchase lost a couple of courses in the process, but the remainder appeared on his SUNY transcript, again with no grades. I imagine that Purchase, being a somewhat alternative-y college, probably might be better at dealing with Hampshire courses than elsewhere.</p>
<p>I suppose that transferring to other schools can be problematic, particularly because many courses are interdisciplinary and therefore are hard to compare to courses at another institution. That is probably a bigger issue than the lack of letter grades. I think that one can look at the written evaluations written by most Hampshire profs and imagine a letter grade that corresponds to that particular evaluation. </p>
<p>I am most familiar with the transfer policies of the U of Washington, which tries to match transfer courses to those that are in its catalog. If the course cannot be matched up, then it is transcripted as “Psychology 1XX” or “English 2XX”, with an attempt made to determine if the course is a Freshman- (1), Sophomore- (2) or Junior- (3) level course.</p>
<p>I mix them up, but one of them transferred (to SUNY Purchase?) because of costs - he thought that the aid package was good enough, but in the end, he could see that he would end up owing too much after graduation. The other one was not getting enough out of his classes. He was skipping most of them and couldn’t get motivated to do the work required. It turned out that he needed more structure than he thought he did, so he went to a University.</p>
<p>Decisions were supposed to be made by today, April 1. If you haven’t heard anything, you should call or email <a href=“mailto:admissions@hampshire.edu”>admissions@hampshire.edu</a> to find out.</p>
<p>FYI, Hampshire designates classes by their entry date, as opposed to graduation date, so students entering this Fall are referred to as F11 (Fall of 2011) students.</p>
<p>Hello there! I was wondering about how much money the NSS scholarships got this year? My friend actually got the highest 12,500 scholarship. Me, on the other hand got a 6k one (Faculty).</p>
<p>Is there a limit on how many classes Hampshire students can take at the other five colleges? My daughter wants to concentrate on dance and biology. Hampshire will be a great place to bring these together in an inter-disciplinary way, but for these areas, it looks like she’d have to take a lot of classes off-campus.</p>
<p>I think the limit is two classes per semester. On average, not only in Hampshire, students take 4 courses per semester. I once read somewhere that 5 courses were for people with ‘no social life’, and six was rather extreme. But I don’t know about that. If it is accurate two is a good enough amount.</p>