Hampshire College has announced that it is closing this year after 56 years. But one of its professors wants to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to save it, and wrote a very interesting Substack article to this effect. So I wanted to know if his scheme would work!

Resolves YES at any point during 2028 if Hampshire College is a functioning college with at least 10 legitimate undergraduate students.

In the event of weird stuff, like a merger, it may require some discretion to determine whether the new entity counts as "Hampshire College". I will do my best to adjudicate reasonably, based on whether the name and spirit of the new Hampshire College is remotely similar to the old Hampshire College. For example, UMass and Hampshire are "merging" in the sense that a bunch of staff from Hampshire go to UMass, and UMass acquires the Hampshire campus and launches "UMass Hampshire", I would look to see whether the new UMass Hampshire has a strong identity similar to the old Hampshire (resolves YES) or students just think of themselves as UMass students on a different campus (resolves NO). Hampshire as presented in the Substack post is pretty cool, and that surviving is what I'm ultimately trying to measure in this market. But nevertheless, if Hampshire College is acquired by someone who hates the guy who did the Substack post and does their best to transform it into a generic college, but it's still called Hampshire College, the market will still resolve YES. Feel free to ask me about hypotheticals.

Resolves NO if the college remains closed throughout 2028. I reserve the right to resolve early in September if it seems unlikely that this will happen, because it would be surprising if the college decided to randomly restart operating in like November 2028, though I will overturn the resolution if this changes.

General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.