Schumacher College Closes Doors at Dartington as Legendary Professor, Stephan Harding, Passes.

Beloved teacher, Stephan Harding, is mourned — as Schumacher College transitions after 33 years at Dartington Estate

Godspeed, Stephan Harding!

As I was finishing up this newsletter about Schumacher College’s split from Dartington Hall, I was stunned to hear the sad news of the passing of Dr. Stephan Harding.

Stephan Harding was a co-founder of Schumacher College; its founding resident professor, and an admired and adored mentor for generations of the school’s students. Author of the book, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, he was—as much as anyone—wisdom-keeper and guardian of the school’s vision and mission.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement, remembered his friend in a social media post yesterday:

“Stephan's legacy is huge, and perhaps the greatest testimony to that is the sheer number of people I meet in many places I go whose lives and direction was changed by being at Schumacher College, meeting Stephan and the other staff there, and being opened to such rich new ways of seeing the world.”

—Rob Hopkins

This video interview of Stephan Harding from 1994 really captures Schumacher College’s founding spirit:

Dr. Stephan Harding (1953-2024)

“Schumacher college is perhaps the only place I know of where it’s possible to combine a deep intellectual inquiry with some form of actually living out the implications of the inquiry. And the topics of course are always concerned with ecology, and why the society of ours isn’t ecologically sustainable. And what’s going wrong with it. What’s wrong with our worldview? Why aren’t we meshing with nature? Why aren’t we in harmony with nature? What is it that’s going wrong?

And also the inquiries are about ways that we might make things go right in the future.”

—Stephan Harding (1994)

Schumacher College’s Sudden Split from Dartington Estate

Schumacher College. (Drew Dellinger)

I’ll never forget the day Thomas Berry told me about Schumacher College with a gleam in his eye, just as the school was being founded in 1991.

In the years that followed, I tracked its growth with keen interest and admiration as many of my mentors and friends journeyed there, such as Thomas, Brian Swimme, Joanna Macy, Charlene Spretnak, Miriam MacGillis, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Matthew Fox, and so many others.

***

Last Wednesday—after 33 years of leadership at the living edge of ecological, holistic, and progressive education—it was announced that Schumacher College is “being shuttered” by its sponsoring organization, Dartington Hall Trust.

This abrupt announcement was met with a wave of emotions and reactions—including shock, sadness, distress, and dismay—by the institution’s students, faculty, and worldwide network of alumni and admirers, many of whom maintain that the college will continue.

A mini guest-lecture in a class at Schumacher College; September 2014. (Fiona Tilley)

Located in Devon, in southwest England, in the town of Totnes, Schumacher’s home for three decades has been the stately, virid lawns and charming buildings of the Dartington Estate. In their statement Dartington writes, the “Board continues to consider viable options for the College to sustain itself, including a proposal from the College’s learning leadership team to secure independence from Dartington.”

And indeed, just such an effort is being launched by members of the Schumacher community—to enable a new, independent Schumacher College to rise from these sad ashes. Their open statement can be read here.

An excerpt:

“The story for Schumacher College, an internationally renowned green university, is not over. It is clear for staff, and for alumni, that this type of pioneering, holistic, values-led learning must continue. Our worldwide community of students, alumni, benefactors, and supporters of all kinds, are committed to ensuring the continued existence of the College, whatever form that may take. We continue to make preparations for our independence and seek to make the next chapter of our story an inspiring example of regeneration, resilience and transformation. We want to demonstrate that viable yet visionary pathways for higher education exist, and to show that a vibrant future for education in a time of global social and environmental crisis is not only desperately needed, but also eminently possible.”

—“Open Statement of Schumacher College Faculty and Staff Regarding the Decision by Dartington Hall Trust to Close the College”

Anyone wanting to follow these efforts can join their mailing list to stay in the loop.

Satish’s Dream

Schumacher College was co-founded by Satish Kumar, its guiding spirit, as well as the long-time editor of Resurgence magazine.

As a young man, Satish set out walking—from India—on an epic pilgrimage for peace, to the capitals of the four nuclear powers at the time, sojourning from the subcontinent to the USSR, France, England, and then by boat to New York and Washington, D.C.

In his autobiography, No Destination, Kumar writes,

“As wanderers we were free of shadows from the past. The experience of a beautiful emptiness within myself, with neither material nor spiritual possessions, unlocked my soul. It was a journey without destination; journey and destination became one, thought and action became one. I felt myself moving like a river. A river and its flow are not separate things… the journey was me. It was as much an inner journey as an outward one.”

***

“In wandering I felt a sense of union with the whole sky, the infinite earth and sea. I felt myself a part of the cosmic existence.”

Satish Kumar arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1963, the same year as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He wrote to Dr. King and said, ‘You have a great dream. I have a small dream. My dream is to meet you.’

Dr. King wrote back immediately saying that he had heard of Satish’s pilgrimage, and invited him to Atlanta where they met and conversed in King's office, underneath the portrait of Gandhi on his office wall. He told Satish that while, for many, nonviolence was a tactic, for him it was the deepest of principles, a way of life.

This spirit of nonviolence—along with a cosmological vision informed by Thomas Berry; a perception of Gaia shaped by James Lovelock and Stephan Harding; an ecofeminist analysis inspired by Susan Griffin, Joanna Macy, Charlene Spretnak, and Vandana Shiva; a critique and ethos prompted by E. F. Schumacher; a systems view espoused by Fritjof Capra—and so many others—all of this and more became the field of imagination, practice, and possibility that rooted and blossomed and renewed itself for three decades as Schumacher College.

I trust that the genius, vision, and spirit of that imaginative field is not done blooming.

My first visit to Schumacher College: 2007

Sixteen years after Thomas Berry told me of this exciting and important new venture, I finally arrived at the car park of the iconic brown building they call the Old Postern.

2007 was my first poetry-and-speaking tour of the U.K., and my swing through Devon, Totnes, and Schumacher was an absolute highlight. I will always remember the Fireside Chat I did with Satish on a cold November night—reading poems and engaging in public conversation in front of a dancing, orange blaze; ranging over topics from art to activism to Thomas Berry and cosmology, and, of course, the ecological crisis.

A beautiful, powerful night made even more special by the presence of my awesome teenage son, Israel Dellinger, and my dear old dad, Walter Dellinger; one now grown, the other now gone.

My last visit: 2019

The last time I walked the green, lovely grounds of Schumacher, in July 2019, I had a wonderful, all-too-rare opportunity to share tea and have another long conversation with Satish, which, as I described at the time, touched on poetry, cosmology, Thomas Berry, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Mary Oliver, William Blake, poiesis, autopoiesis, Satish’s 1963 meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., and more.

Visiting with Satish Kumar at Schumacher College, July 2019.

It is this wide-ranging spirit, unifying the sciences and the sacred, the humanities and the holistic; the poetical and the political, that has made Schumacher College one of the planet’s indispensable learning centers for thirty-three years, through our times of Great Turning and Great Transition from a terminal Cenozoic period to an unfolding Ecozoic Era.

The opportunities I have had to visit Schumacher College—in 2007, 2014, 2015, and 2019—are shimmering highlights in my memories.

I have no doubt that Schumacher College will continue for this simple reason:

It must.

It is so necessary.

The need for its worldview and its wisdom is too great for there not to be a Schumacher College.

Flyer for Drew’s week-long course at Schumacher College, September 2015.

Drew Dellinger’s Earth Talk at Schumacher College in 2015. (Penny Elsley)

***

As a last word, here are some thoughts from my dear brother, Dave Hampton, who I met at the week-long course I taught at Schumacher in 2015. They give a poignant sense of what it would mean to lose Schumacher College.

From DAVE HAMPTON — 8/30/24:

“I’ve been thinking a lot—about what the imminent closure of ‘Schumacher College’ in Totnes represents—in the hearts and souls and psyche of so many dear friends who experienced the place. And who are so moved—collectively—by this news.

The college represented so much more than anything in education.

If we called it a ‘church’ that would have been closer. Was it a shrine? Where people came to worship Gaia.

In my psyche it was a space where permission was given to care deeply. To remember the sacred, together. To live sustainably, together. And to all eat, around equal tables of four, as equals.

…

It feels like losing a tall beloved oak tree, that has housed and sheltered and supported so much life.”

—Dave Hampton

May we use this moment to celebrate everything Schumacher College has been, and the myriad electrical currents of creative energy it has launched into the world.

At the same time, let us stay attentive to the possibilities emerging at present for new expressions of the Dream of Schumacher College.