<p>It has only been about a month since first-year students arrived, and so far the only substance abuse issues that my daughter has had to deal with center around over-imbibing, and even those have been uncommon.</p>
<p>DD and I visited last week. We were extremely impressed. Very high level of engagement from students we met, a number of whom were not on the official tour. All seemed to really like or love it, all seemed very serious about their work. Better facilities than I expected, small classes, real opportunity to some serious work as an undergrad. Not a whiff of pot. As with many things, I think the rep is from days past. It’s really too bad if there are people who would not look at Hampshire because of that rep, because I think for the right kind of kid (independent, engaged, really interested in their education as opposed to just getting the degree) you can get a terrific education there. Funny that those same people would not hesitate to send their kids off to top party schools per, e.g., Princeton Review, such as Penn State, U of Georgia and other big State U’s. Visit those places on a weekend.</p>
<p>Can’t speak for others, but D did not considering schools w/ a party rep (including a number SUNYs). D was attracted to Hamp b/c of its rep as a haven for indie, free-spirits. Sadly, such schools tend to have more of a drug culture than is comfortable for our family. No doubt the alcohol consumption at party schools greater/worse/more-of-a-problem that the drug use at the Hamp and similar schools, but the comparison is unimportant to us b/c hipster D was considering only the latter. </p>
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<p>ALF, what substance abuse issues would there be beyond over-inbibing? Is your point that there was no injury or property damage as a result of the drug use? Getting so drunk/high that one needs to be taken to the hospital or one’s friends call poision control is quite serious (even life-threatening) even absent other, related issues.</p>
<p>NYC, it was not my intent to minimize the very real dangers of alcohol abuse. I was just trying to point out that it appeared to be the largest problem, in contrast to the use of illegal drugs. I suppose that the immediate consequences of short-term marijuana ‘abuse’ are minimal in comparison to alcohol abuse, but certainly kids can (and do) get themselves in physiological trouble with more potent illicit drugs.</p>
<p>Hampshire’s Residential Life Office apparently keeps track of the number of Aid Car calls during Halloween, which is certainly the biggest and wildest party at the college. They were pleased to report a nearly 50% reduction, compared to last year (9, versus 17), so I guess that represents some progress. Even 9 sounds kind of high (no pun intended) to me, but my daughter felt that was not too bad, considering that there were 4,000 attendees. She also noted that not all Aid Car calls were necessarily drug/alcohol-related, and most involved just a quick emergency room visit. I don’t know what conclusions can/should be drawn from this statistic, or how it would compare to a similar-size event elsewhere, but there it is for your consideration.</p>
<p>As someone from Amherst I will tell you that 9 incidents for 4000 students is an incredibly low number for an event of that size. Hampshire should be proud of themselves. And you have to remember that more than half of those attending are not even Hampshire students. There is alcohol and drugs on “all” college campuses.</p>
<p>Hampshire is currently one of the top schools for my younger daughter and after reading this 2+ year thread I wonder why nyc is still posting here if she is so negative about Hampshire? As a native NYer myself I think you should be much more tolerant of others choosing their own way and of the beauty of public transportation even if it is a little less convenient.</p>
<p>If your daughter is not comfortable with this lifestyle or feels she would be intimidated then I suggest looking into a religious or military based school where they have a much stronger non-substance philosophy than any other college. </p>
<p>We get it - you don’t like Hampshire and are doing your best to have everyone think your way. Now please stop.</p>
<p>Agree with amtc and MsBees. UConn’s Spring weekend, with probably 9,000 or 10,000 attendees, numbers arrests and hospital visits in the hundreds. Yet, I don’t hear people expressing the kind of “my kid’s not going there because it’s a party school” rap that Hampshire gets. I don’t get it, and I think it’s based on both a mischaracterization of Hampshire and a lack of recognition that drugs and alcohol get abused to some degree at vitrually every college campus. After visiting and talking to quite a few people, including students and faculty in unscheduled, unscripted encounters, and talking to several alums since our visit, I would be thrilled if my daughter went there. I would have zero concern that there is more of a drug or other substance abuse culture than exists at most colleges. Agree with amtc, someone that concerned should maybe be looking at religious or military schools.</p>
<p>I am a recent graduate of Hampshire who, (insert shock here) used drugs for all of my four years. I graduated having written an academic Div III of over 100 pages, gained the respect and dedication of reputable faculty members and my peers and will be attending a top graduate program in my field. I do not necessarily advocate drug use having seen in my time at Hampshire how dangerously it has impacted the lives of people I care for. However, in reading this thread I noticed that the majority of commenters are parents or prospective parents and so I felt the need to clarify some things. </p>
<p>As many people have mentioned already, if you go to any school in the country on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night you will observe a huge percentage of students who are drunk or under the influence of drugs. Hampshire is no different, but the mentality of the students and the environment of these weekend nights parts tremendously from that at, for example, any of the other schools in the five college consortium. Hampshire is the only place that, after drinking a few cocktails and hitting the bong, a group of kids will sit in their mod living room and passionately discuss the politics of the administration, or their latest philosophy lecture, or the last weeks episode of mad men. Not to diss our compatriot institutions, but I have personally seen parties at the top liberal arts school amherst college end in violence, homophobic slurs and sexual assault. So, to parents, I would say your focus should not be on the availability of a pretty harmless drug like marijuana but on the character of the student body.</p>
<p>I have absolutely nothing against Hampshire. I occasionally post here b/c, having posted here myself, I continue to be advised of postst here. </p>
<p>I am certainly aware that drug/alcohol use on college campuses is common, as it was in my day. There is, however, a range: party schools at one end and religious schools at the other. Hampshire had more of a drug culture that we wanted; it was not unique in that regard. We also found a number of top 50 LACs with a better fit, in terms of drugs/alcohol. And, while not dismissing grad87’s experience, statistically, there is far less drug/alcohol use at women’s colleges than at peer coed schools, so your observations are probably truer for Hamp/UMass/Amherst than for Smith and MHC.</p>
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<p>AMTC and nepop, a pity that individuals as tolerant as you apparently believe yourselves to be, have to resort to name-calling or other trash-talk when confronted with an opinion with which you disagree.</p>
<p>“I would say your focus should not be on the availability of a pretty harmless drug like marijuana but on the character of the student body.”</p>
<p>Well put!</p>
<p>I think that too often the purported availability/use of marijuana at a school is used as a surrogate for an evaluation of the overall quality of the student body. As hampshiregrad87 notes from first-hand knowledge, this is not necessarily a valid assumption.</p>
<p>"ALF and other parents, do you know whether there is any plan to offer Zip Car on campus? (I know they are availble at Smith - - I wish I thought to ask this at the visit day.) "</p>
<p>This was asked in 2009, and at the time, the answer was no, but Hampshire just announced that they will have ZipCars available starting in February 2011:
<a href=“http://blog.hampshire.edu/family/[/url]”>http://blog.hampshire.edu/family/</a></p>
<p>At something like $8-$9 per hour, this might put a big dent in airport shuttle profits!</p>
<p>NYC, i have seen more shocking drunken behavior from Mt. Holyoke and Smith College students than from anyone in my four years at Hampshire. Perhaps drug use is not as prevalent, but I can recall on weekday nights buses of wasted Mohos and Smithies pouring onto campus with the poor girls barely coherent and throwing themselves at Hampshire guys. I feel bad for those women, having had some experience in a single sex environment myself I can understand how difficult it is to have a normal social life. However, it is clear that both these schools have a social environment that encourages the use of alcohol as a crutch to participate in social events and to hang with the opposite sex. just sayin.</p>
<p>the point of this comment is i guess to draw attention to the fact that just because drugs are accessible at a school like hampshire does not necessitate misuse and abuse of those drugs. i really believe if you look closely at the behavior of students at other colleges and universities you can see that the availability and lack of stigma attached to drug and alcohol at hampshire actually provides an environment where drug use can be normal, safe and not inhibit students from being healthy and smart.</p>
<p>“but I can recall on weekday nights buses of wasted Mohos and Smithies pouring onto campus with the poor girls barely coherent and throwing themselves at Hampshire guys. I feel bad for those women, having had some experience in a single sex environment myself I can understand how difficult it is to have a normal social life. However, it is clear that both these schools have a social environment that encourages the use of alcohol as a crutch to participate in social events and to hang with the opposite sex. just sayin.”</p>
<p>As OP, I have to note that just as subsequent posters have suggested (in some cases insisted) that my experience touring Hampshire is just one data-point and did not necessarily represent a full/accurate picture, the same is true for other posters’ observations re: other schools.</p>
<p>I spoke to my kids (son graduated from Hampshire in '10 and daughter is a 2nd-yr student), and they did not feel that there was noticeably more drunken behavior among Smithies and MoHos, compared to Hampsters. They felt that marijuana use was probably higher at Hampshire, compared to Smith and Mt. Holyoke, but not hugely so.</p>
<p>I’m still more concerned about tobacco use, which seems shockingly high to me at all of the 5 Colleges. I’m just blown away to see how many teenagers are chain-smoking cigarettes. And, don’t get me started on those darned hookahs!</p>
<p>I understand that this is a little belated, but hampshiregrad87’s post #72 was mentioned on the Smith forum, and so I’d like to copy and paste what I wrote there (before I read any of his/her other posts) here:</p>
<p>"Two points - </p>
<p>1) It seems like that poster (I haven’t checked out the thread or his/her other posts, so based solely on the quote you’ve provided) has issues both with single-sex education in general and with these two women’s colleges specifically. How “difficult it is to have a normal social life” at a women’s college bothers me tremendously, because this poster seems to associate only drinking and dating/hooking up as “normal social life.”</p>
<p>This poster also is clearly exaggerating, and that makes the rest of his/her point, if you can call it that, even less founded. Are there students at Smith (and, I’m sure, at MoHo) who choose to spend some of their free time drinking and/or going to the other colleges to meet met? Absolutely. Do “buses of wasted Mohos and Smithies” “throw themselves at Hampshire guys” “on weekday nights”? No.</p>
<p>Even those Smithies who like partying at other campuses tend to do it safely and reasonably; no one would go on a weekday night because we have this little thing called work to do and because there are, in fact, plenty of things going on on-campus as well - practices, rehearsals, club meetings, movie screenings, lectures, etc. And in my experience, most Smithies who go off-campus on the weekends make fairly reasonable decisions about alcohol; plenty of them get drunk, sure, but realistically speaking you’re not going to have “buses” of young women “barely coherent” enough to just “throw” themselves at guys.</p>
<p>2) In my personal experience, no, Smith does not “have a social environment that encourages the use of alcohol as a crutch of participate in social events.” Again, there are certainly people who choose to drink, and they do so for a number of reasons, but according to polls the number who binge drink or engage in other unsafe activities involving alcohol is smaller than at other colleges. There is also no pressure to drink, even at events where most people are drinking. And as I mentioned before, there are plenty of social experiences that do not involve alcohol - sports, music/theatre/dance performances, clubs, lectures, just sitting around in your friend’s room watching movies or playing board games.</p>
<p>I find that most Smithies drink occasionally but not dangerously, and that most people who drink don’t spend all, or even most, of their weekend nights getting drunk. There are other things to do, you know, and most of them are pretty fun sober."</p>
<p>I was on campus today, with most students preparing for Spring Break next week. I noticed a lack of drunken or drugged behavior on the part of the students I saw, even though classes had ended for the week for many students. I was particularly impressed with students’ willingness to participate in drama workshops and other activities instead of fleeing campus at the first opportunity.</p>
<p>Can anyone comment on the creative writing at Hampshire? We are looking for programs for our writer son and he is interested in Hampshire. I now can’t remember if there is a creative writing concentration/major, but writing seems important to the overall curriculum.</p>
<p>One comment I will throw in to the pot discussion: Older son graduated from Brown. I remember walking through his quad past a kid in the middle of a school day, smoking a joint happily by himself in full view of everyone. It stressed straight me out considerably, but I learned to see the drug presence as a part of the extremely open quality of the educative experience at this very fine school, and I wonder if Hampshire might have that same ethos. You do worry about so many things when you send those eighteen year olds off to college, but in MOST cases, they will find their own healthy way.</p>
<p>My daughter tells me that creative writing is a strength of Hampshire. However, because of that, the creative writing courses are in high demand and are always over-subscribed. In response, faculty have taken to requiring students to supply writing examples in order to be admitted to most such courses. Also, they reserve most spots for students who have a declared concentration (Div II contract) in creative writing. A friend of my daughter’s wanted to just take one creative writing class, and he had to essentially write an extensive application in order to get in.</p>
<p>ALF and daughter (or other Hampshirephile with dorm experience) –</p>
<p>Now that the admissions process is over, I am finding other things to fret about, namely the following thread about substance-free dorms:</p>
<p>[Substance</a> Free Dorms - Pros/Cons? - College Confidential](<a href=“http://■■■■■■■.com/subfree-dorms]Substance”>Substance Free Dorms - Pros/Cons? - College Life - College Confidential Forums)</p>
<p>Could you comment about the extent to which this thread, and the opinions expressed therein, are germane to substance-free living at Hampshire? The gist of the thread, at least as of today, April 7, 2011, is that sub-free dorms tend to be weird places to live because two types of people tend to end up there: anti-intoxicant zealots and kids who are forced into the dorms their by their uptight parents and are therefore likely to rebel.</p>
<p>Based on my reading here, and on my limited time at the school, I kind of suspect that Hampshire is a unique sort of place in this regard. I know that Hampsters tend to hate generalizations, so I apologize in advance for asking you to make them, but, insofar as you can… will you?</p>
<p>I wrote a little about this in posts #22 & #47. It appears to me that the Hampshire sub-free halls contain a diverse mix of kids, but very few fall into the zealot or parent-forced groups. Most of them either want to study without distractions, or they have had bad high school experiences that they don’t want to repeat. My daughter is more of the former, and those sorts of kids seem to hang out together and can be a lot of fun. </p>
<p>The sub-free contract specifies that no drugs or alcohol can be brought onto the floor and no resident can be under the influence while on the floor. That does not mean that residents must foreswear the use of these substances. So, plenty of those kids go to parties where substances are present, and some of them partake. My daughter has friends who respected the sub-free contract by, ‘sleeping it off’ in a mod apartment before returning to their dorm. </p>
<p>My daughter described to me her limited experiments with mixed hard drinks (verdict: yuck!) and she participated in the annual ‘Easter Keg Hunt’ (get it?) where students hide several kegs in the woods for the other students to find and empty. So, bottom line, most sub-free residents aren’t zealots about it.</p>
<p>Our daughter had a friend who was definitely ‘parent-forced’ and she responded by periodically abusing various substances, but just not on the dorm floor. That girl’s parents seemed to have gotten wise to this gambit and compelled her to sign up for a ‘study intense’ floor the next year.</p>
<p>So, no, I don’t think sub-free floors are weird places to live at Hampshire. If I were a student, I would definitely request a sub-free floor. </p>
<p>There are so many ‘themed’ residence choices at Hampshire, it is pretty easy to live among kids who are similar to you; quiet through semi-quiet, study-intensive, men- or women-only vs. co-ed, various food choices (vegan, vegetarian, etc.) sub-free and allergen-free, and various identity-based residences (queer, LGBTQA, students of color, etc.).</p>