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CS Lewis said regarding progressivism:
RE: The Clock: "First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was mocking you if I answered that the clock is not always right? ... We have all passed a turn in the road that has led us to a place where we do not want to be, and it is time to turn back."
RE: Turning Back: "We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man" (Mere Christianity).
One of the most progressive colleges in the nation, Hampshire College, announced Tuesday it will shut down permanently, as it is out of cash and out of options.
Their story is the profile of so-called progressivism.
Be informed, not misled.
“The College no longer has the resources to sustain full operations and meet our regulatory responsibilities,” President Jenn Chrisler stated in an announcement, adding the Board of Trustees voted to permanently close the college following the fall 2026 semester.
The private Massachusetts liberal arts college — which openly touts its embrace of progressive concepts — had grappled with low enrollment and big budget deficits for several years.
But the budget woes never stopped campus leaders from funding programs advancing LGBTQ and DEI concepts amid laying off employees and slashing departments.
The announcement.
In her announcement, President Jenn Chrisler said this:
Seven years ago, the Hampshire community presented the College with a powerful mandate: to maintain independence and remain true to Hampshire’s deepest-held values. Since then, we have all worked together toward those goals, facing daunting challenges with the ingenuity and resolve that define the best of what happens here. We left no stone unturned, no solution unexplored, and made many sacrifices along the way.
Despite this herculean effort, the financial pressures on the College’s operations have become increasingly complex, compounded by shifting external factors. As President Chrisler has shared regularly with our community and our regulatory agencies, we worked aggressively to increase enrollment, refinance existing debt, and realize new revenue via the sale of a portion of our land. We have long known that addressing these issues is essential to establishing a stable financial foundation, supporting long-term operations, and meeting regulatory requirements. We are faced with the clear, heartbreaking reality that progress on each of these three key factors has fallen far short of what we had hoped.
As a result, the Board of Trustees voted to permanently close Hampshire College following the fall 2026 semester.
CS Lewis's "wrong road."
Hampshire College made headlines years ago when it took down the U.S. flag to promote multiculturalism. More recently, it offered Florida students wanting to flee the state’s conservatism a streamlined enrollment process.
As The College Fix previously reported:
Despite the long-term budget woes, campus leaders have continued to emphasize left-leaning programs and curricula over more traditional studies.
“Since the rocky year of 2019, Hampshire has undergone a major curriculum transformation, replacing traditional majors and departments with curricula focused on addressing pressing global issues such as climate change and racism,” Higher Ed Dive reported in July.
In recent months, Hampshire College has also touted its efforts to study and promote topics such as Drag and Environmental Justice, Disrupting and Dismantling White Supremacy, and Inclusive Weightlifting.
“Hampshire College made a big deal about offering spots to all of the left-wing New College of Florida students who wanted to leave after we eliminated their DEI and gender studies programs. Now Hampshire College is shutting down—go woke, go broke,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X in response to the news.
But a New York Times article on Hampshire’s closure did not mention its progressive bent, and reported it’s just the latest closure among a spate of such shutdowns: “Hampshire, in Amherst, Mass., joins an epidemic of college closures over the past two decades. More than 300 U.S. colleges and universities closed from 2008 to 2024, according to an analysis by The Hechinger Report.”
Compare the contrast between Christianity and progressivism.
Via Andrew Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
At the heart of our existence ought to be the distinction between God and His creation. Rather than amass power for ourselves, we believe in a divine disaggregation. We embrace a duality of God above and man below. We cannot arrogate to ourselves a power that was never ours to begin with. Progressivism denies the Creator-creature distinction because it is a metaphysic that rejects any notion of objective creation, objective Creatorship, or objective morality, meaning that progressivism conceives of itself as its own God.
Progressivism relies upon monistic explanatory principles. It denies the duality of power distinctions between God and man. The historical arc, then, is to create principles that allow for the total consumption of all things into progressivism’s conception of itself as divine and omnicompetent. Maybe that is liberty, pleasure, or power—or the progressive belief in the ever-improving conditions of man and man’s nature. So, it plays a godlike role even if it is not God. And if it is trying to play a God-like role, it will play that God-like role falsely.
Everything that begins with a false conception of its own sovereignty leads to a false conception of truth and results in a false conception of freedom—whether personal, spiritual, or political. This is why, when you look at progressivism and its effect on beauty, goodness, and truth, and its actual outputs on society—on the effects on the human person, the effects on the human family, the effects on what civilizations look like that become progressive—they end up becoming disfigured, disordered, and frayed. If God channels us toward productive creation in the direction of truth, beauty, and goodness, false gods channel creative potency toward the antitheses of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Progressivism conceives of itself as a totalizing project. Whereas Christianity honors the Creator-creature distinction, progressivism recognizes no Creator-creature distinction and bends toward totalization. Totalization bends toward monism and creates a whole system built on falsehood and deception. No culture survives the terminal state of progressivism when built upon the lie of honoring the collective—rather than Christ—as Lord. Why? Because the only universal sovereign in the absence of a True Sovereign is that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).
Takeaway
No culture survives the terminal state of progressivism when built upon the lie of honoring the collective—rather than Christ—as Lord.
Progressivism’s antipathy to God means its claims are comparably more anti-Christian than conservatism’s constrained understanding of the universe. Any political worldview that does not begin with acknowledging the order and truth of a sovereign God is a worldview—and political community—destined to fail.
It seems so-called progressives can not admit they are on the wrong path.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Bold. Be Prayerful.
