The president’s suite at Hampshire College currently has a no-shoes policy. There are more than a dozen mattresses laid on the floor, beds neatly made, and the occupants of this space are guarding against winter muck. The president of the college, Miriam (Mim) Nelson, is temporarily working out of different buildings on campus, while students stage a sit-in in her office. They have been living here, first in shifts and then in looser rotations, since January 31st—the longest sit-in in the forty-nine-year history of a college that is famous for its protest culture.

On January 15th, Nelson sent out a letter to the Hampshire community in which she announced that the college is looking for a “long-term partner.” Written in the upbeat tone of a corporate report, the document was difficult to decipher. On the one hand, it said that Hampshire was doing great: its fifty-two-million-dollar endowment had “performed well,” its budget was balanced, and two-thirds of its graduates were going on to earn advanced degrees. On the other hand, the letter noted that other colleges were closing, and the only way for Hampshire to survive in the long term would be to find a “strategic partnership.” In the days and weeks following the letter it became increasingly clear that by “partner” Nelson likely meant a wealthier and larger academic institution to which Hampshire could attach itself.

Massachusetts has indeed seen a spate of closures and crises of small colleges in the last couple of years: Mount Ida College closed and its assets were bought by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; tiny Wheelock College was swallowed up by Boston University. Hampshire is also very small—at the start of this academic year, it had just under twelve hundred students—but, unlike these other schools, it is a college with a national reputation.

On February 1st, the Hampshire board of trustees announced that the college would not be accepting a new class in the fall, with the exception of two categories of students: those who had committed to the college through its early-decision process, and those who had been accepted the year before but delayed matriculating. The same day, these prospective students received a letter that began, “We write to you today to invite you to join the Hampshire community—while acknowledging that this is a most extraordinary time in the life of the College.” The letter went on to say that the college would guarantee instruction only in the fall semester, that it was not clear which faculty would be teaching, and that campus services, including meals, would likely be limited. The Hampshire campus is about three miles from the nearest town, Amherst; grocery shopping requires driving or taking the bus. The letter circulated on campus, adding to the mounting sense of precariousness. Naia Tenerowicz, a sophomore at the college and a press spokesperson for the student protesters, told me that the cuts in services may make the campus uninhabitable for disabled students. “To be honest, I try not to think about what happens after May,” Tenerowicz, who uses a wheelchair, said. Students said that, once the letter hit campus, it precipitated a wave of dropouts and transfers, although no one is quite sure how many students will leave.

Two weeks after sending the letter, the college started layoffs, beginning with nine employees: seven members of the admissions office and two of the senior staff members in the development office. A Fortune magazine commentary called these actions “bewildering”: Nelson “was recently dealt a bad hand, but she, with the board’s support, has just knocked the whole deck of cards off the table in panic.” Hampshire depends on tuition for the bulk of its revenue; not admitting a full class, then firing much of the admissions office and crippling any fund-raising efforts by cutting development staff, meant that the college appeared to be entering a death spiral.

Students have marched and organized. So have faculty, staff, and alumni. The alumni-driven effort is called Save Hampshire. The students, who have dubbed themselves Hamp Rise Up, have set a goal even loftier than saving the college: they intend to reinvent it in accordance with the ideals and principles on which it was founded, fifty years ago.

Hampshire College is a child of the sixties. In 1958, the presidents of the four colleges of the Pioneer Valley—Amherst (where I teach), Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—commissioned their faculty to coöperate on a plan for a new college. The group produced a proposal for an experiment in self-directed learning, one conceived as an answer to the crises both in faith and in financing for the liberal arts. In the original vision, students would take fewer courses to allow for greater concentration, faculty would teach only one lecture course per term and concentrate on seminars, and the ratio of faculty to students was going to be one to twenty. Hampshire College opened in 1970, and some of the ideas in the original proposal—such as an emphasis on seminars and a winter month of intensive study—have become common features of liberal-arts colleges. But the relationship between students and faculty at Hampshire remains relatively unusual, because much of what Hampshire students do is best described as independent study. The college has no grades, only narrative evaluations. Hampshire is the only nationally ranked college that, in its admissions, is not just test-optional but test-blind—it definitely doesn’t want to see your SATs. (The decision to reject standardized test results caused U.S. News & World Report to drop Hampshire from its rankings in 2015.) The institution proclaims democratic governance and transparency among its ideals.

In recent years, the language that Hampshire uses to describe itself has changed. (I noticed this in September, on a campus visit with my daughter, whom I was trying to convince to apply.) The word “entrepreneurship” began cropping up. On its Web site, the college listed entrepreneurship as one of five key characteristics of the community envisioned by Hampshire—along with inquiry, creativity, social justice, and sustainability. It hired an entrepreneurship professor. To prospective students, the college boasted of the number of entrepreneurs among its graduates—more, it seemed to me, than of the number of activists, artists, and academics. Nelson, who took over as president in July of last year, earned her reputation as a social entrepreneur more than as an academic researcher or administrator. She is a nutritionist, a public-health and sustainability advocate, the force behind a best-selling, ten-book series on women’s health and wellness, and she speaks the upbeat, encapsulated language of doing good by doing well. Hampshire’s current predicament, for example, is conveyed on the college’s Web site as “Hampshire is evolving,” and the search for a solution is called the “Hampshire College Visioning Project.”

The language of the sixties counterculture and that of contemporary Silicon Valley has many overlaps: both privilege vision, transparency, and open communication. Yet their cultures clash catastrophically, and Hampshire is a case study. “This was a reservation for strange people who had said to themselves, ‘I don’t want to fit in,’ ” Polina Barskova, an associate professor of Russian literature, told me. “And then they were invaded by some extremely legible people wearing suits.” Barskova says that the language around the partnership is part Russian dystopian author Andrei Platonov, part George Orwell: “Perfectly smooth speech devoid of meaning but with the word ‘ethical’ appearing in every sentence.”