Q&A: ANTIOCH PRESIDENT MARK ROOSEVELT

There’s an unusual — historic, even — higher-education story happening right now in southwest Ohio.

In the quiet, pretty Greene County village of Yellow Springs, a dedicated group of teachers and staff, and a brave group of students are working hard to bring back to life a college that had died. Long-running financial problems led to the closing of Antioch College in 2007. The school reopened in 2011, and leading the charge back to a healthier future is President Mark Roosevelt.

Harvard-educated, the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, a former Massachusetts state legislator and 1994 gubernatorial candidate there, he came to Antioch after the very tough job of running the Pittsburgh public schools, where he got local credit for turning around a troubled district.

Roosevelt’s goal for Antioch is not just a turnaround, but also a leap into the future that helps find successful new ways for liberal-arts education to shake off the current criticism that it is impractical and not focused enough on careers and jobs for graduates. Roosevelt is proud of Antioch’s famed co-op program, which puts students in four quarters of intensive work environments that are directly tied to their studies, and thinks it can serve as a model.

Both charismatic and thoughtful, Roosevelt speaks just as passionately about his hero, Abraham Lincoln, as he does about the need for educational reforms, and the role he hopes Antioch will play in the cultural life of the region. We caught up with him in his McGregor Hall office last week, where he can look out upon a campus that is still recovering from years of neglect, but which today sports new signage, landscaping and a smart crop of new undergrads. Today we present an edited, condensed recap of our wide-ranging conversation.

Q: Not many people can claim to have a job that is truly unique.

A: How do you mean?

Q: As far as we’re aware, you’re the only person in the country in charge of bringing back a college that had died.

A: If you put it in those terms, I suppose you’re right. It feels different from when I started — I’ve been here two and a half years now — but you’ve hit on the essential contradiction of this job: We’re both a startup, and a 162-year-old institution. That is managerially complex.

Q: How so?

A: Well, we are not the college that was closed, but there are many aspects of our programs that are inherited directly from that college. Much of the ethos is inherited, and then some is new. So the fundamental question is, how can you both honor the past and also honor the opportunity of rethinking what a liberal arts college should be, how it can be funded, structured, how the curriculum can be designed and delivered? We’re trying to take the best of the past — the college’s co-op program that puts students in work environments, for example. We still believe the separation of work and academics is artificial. How do we both honor that and build on it, so that we’re looking at experiential learning in a new way? That is the heart of what is exciting about the enterprise.

Q: What sort of image would you like for the new Antioch to project?

A: Rigorous. Cutting edge. Demanding curriculum. A global focus, with heavy emphasis on foreign language acquisition. And we’re attempting in various ways to get ahead of the curve in terms of addressing the crisis in higher education and liberal arts education — how do we deliver a very high-end product at a fairly modest cost. It’s not easy. If it were, a lot of folks would have done it already. We have some advantages here. In some ways, the campus having been let go, physically, as badly as it had, is kind of an opportunity. We will be a very small, very tight, very efficient plant at the end, and that will help us in the long run. The trustees, too, decided that the campus will be heated and cooled by geothermal and solar power, and while there are some initial startup costs, that will save about $400,000 a year when we’re up and running.

Q: What attracted you to the job?

A: Exactly what we’re talking about. Who else has a chance to really think deeply about how liberal arts education shall be organized? That’s the up side. The down side is the money pressure. And there’s a lot of that.

Q: Antioch had a fairly long history of financial problems, right? I once heard someone say the school relished being poor.

A: Yes, and I think that contributed to what finally happened. I don’t believe a culture of scarcity or poverty is beneficial in any sense. It’s not at all benign, and it has many corrosive effects. So, there comes another balance — we want to be careful with other people’s dollars, because we exist on goodwill and donations; how to embrace frugality, but not poverty?

Q: How many faculty and students?

A: We’re in the midst of hiring nine new faculty, which will put us at 24 in the fall. We have about 200 students.

Q: What’s the goal?

A: Good question, and we’re not sure. We intend to remain a very small liberal arts college, so we could be as small as 800 or as large as 1,200, which would take us quite a while. Until we get our accreditation, which will be a seminal moment for the institution, students are enrolled tuition-free. We’ve sought students who can put Antioch back on the map and move us to a place of real quality. The free tuition was a critical step.

Q: Characterize the sort of students you’ve attracted.

A: I’d say they’re more risk-embracive. We’ve placed a great emphasis on grit. Being smart only gets you so far; you have to be able to apply it. So, they’re slightly older than other students, and probably more idealistic. Their self-identification is that they want to do something with their lives that pushes the box a little bit. They’re probably more questioning than other students. Really, the whole thing about Antioch is not to have a typical student, but I think those qualities are all there in ours.

Q: Why are they older?

A: Well, last year we had 3,000 applications for 75 openings, which made us the most selective college in America. Most schools would only look at the ACT and SAT scores, and put them in files. We look for facets of their life story that tell us something about them and what they will bring to the campus. So many of them have taken time off to do something interesting, or maybe they’ve struggled a bit, and that makes them a little older when they get to Antioch.

Q: What sort of struggles?

A: An interesting thing you find when you say that you’re looking for grit is the way people can evidence it. I don’t mean to be Supreme Court-ish about it, but it’s a lot like what Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography — that you know it when you see it. With some applications, it flies off the page right into your face. That someone faced a particular challenge, and overcame it. For instance, in our culture today, it’s it’s one thing now to be openly gay. But say that you were the person who organized the first gay/straight student alliance in Utah? That could be grit.

Q: True story?

A: I’m changing the facts slightly to respect privacy, but that does more or less fit the circumstance of one of our students. And really, an emphasis on grit is interesting, because it raises a lot of intriguing questions about privilege — because as parents, we generally try to protect our children from having opportunities to display grit, right? We are an unusual school in an unusual time, so when a student complains to me that there is something we don’t have here that they would like to see, I usually turn it back to them and say: OK, make it happen. That’s not your typical college experience.

Q: What sort of culture are you trying to create?

A: Open-minded. Big-time open-minded. In my welcome to students, I talk about what the liberal arts should do for you — among them, that if one of them sits here for four years and ends up thinking the same things as before they arrived, then they have failed. I think a liberal arts education should shake zealotry; it should get you to have a little doubt infusion, which is a healthy thing. It should give you the ability to see nuance, and understand that most things are not black and white, and the ability to talk across differences. In my position, I will refer to the famous quote from Horace Mann, our first president, that’s the Antioch motto: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” I do my best to honor it, but I like a quote from Sam Adams that I think is a little less sharp-elbowed: “There are two kinds of people in the world — those who are committed, and those who live off the commitment of others.” We definitely want our students to be the former.

Q: You’ve mentioned the state of liberal arts education nationally. How did it end up where it is?

A: I have a different perspective on it since I came from K-12 education, and K-12 has been going through the last 30 years what higher education is going through now — people questioning outcomes, and having to decide, How open to change am I? Incredible scrutiny tends to make most people overwhelmingly defensive, where people will say, It’s hard to quantify what we do, you can’t apply those standards to it. I think there are things in liberal arts education that are good, and really are hard to quantify. But there are also quantifiable problems in higher education that haven’t been dealt with — affordability, retention rates, and how adept colleges are at putting together support systems for the students that we know are likely to struggle, such as first-generation college students, or students of color.

Everybody is resistant to change forced from outside. But this isn’t just happening in our business. I’ve got friends in publishing, the legal industry and others who are experiencing this. It’s that higher education, like K-12, is more of a public process. I think we need to be very open to these discussions, and very accepting that there may be better ways to do business. But at our core, at Antioch we are a residential, small liberal-arts college experience, and one, some things associated with that are inherently expensive, and two, many of those things are also inherently valuable and worth defending. For example, it’s hard to quantify all the good things a student gets from peer interactions while living on a campus for four years, or the faculty interactions, or the learning that happens from those, that is life-enhancing but not directly tied to employability. Exposure to the world of music, and literature, and art, and conversation and thought that are all deeply enriching and make you the person you become.

Q: Judging from your office decor and books, you’re a big Abraham Lincoln fan. What do you get from him that helps your work?

A: Wow. I almost feel shy talking about it, not wanting to sound presumptuous. I derive great sustenance from the life of Lincoln, and I love that I can spend time in his company when I read the things he wrote, which I do often. He was such a wonderful writer. There’s that old cliched question of who, from anybody in history, you’d want to have dinner with, and he would overwhelmingly be my choice. His ability to do tough things — and he was asked to do many tough things — but to do them with as much gentleness and kindness as could be mustered, and yet firmness when he had to be firm — I think he got as much done with what he was given as is humanly possible. He also suffered enormously, and yet he just gave and gave and gave of himself to people, and he continues to give to this day to those of us who choose to dig in and listen to him.

Q: Of course, you have connections to another president. Talk a little about the family legacy.

A: I’ve not ever particularly enjoyed talking about it. The reason is that I prefer for people to take me for what I am, and not have it color people’s impression of me. But it also makes me proud to be part of a certain political heritage.

Q: Well, he was a great president.

A: He was a complicated man. Obviously, I’ve studied him and spent time coming to terms with that. The only member of his immediate family I knew was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and I had very mixed feelings about her. She had a very tart tongue and disparaged a lot of people, including and especially Eleanor Roosevelt, who I don’t think of as a person who deserved to be disparaged.

Q: Yellow Springs suffered when the college closed. What do you want the town-gown relationship to be?

A: For us to be more integrated with our community than any other college in the country. Two things happening now illustrate that — we’ve developing our old gymasium and turning it into a community asset, sharing it with the town. We’re also renovating our old theater, with contributions from the village, and it will be open to the village. There are lots of things that could play out — energy issues, recycling, food service — could we someday work with the Yellow Springs schools on food service? Who knows? We’re looking for all sorts of ways for this college and this fascinating village to work together. We have a radio station, WYSO, an art gallery, we own Glen Helen, we have a little chapel, the riding center, the Antioch Review — it’s a very unusual collection of assets for a small liberal arts college, and they lend themselves to interaction with the community.

Q: What’s your personal role in the community?

A: This isn’t a big-man-on-campus kind of place. My main thing is, let’s work together, in the broadest sense. Sure, there are some dissident factions, but look — I’m 57, and I’m not into fighting. My attitude is, people can work things out. There’s so much fun stuff to do, even though it’ll be a lot of work.

Q: So, what do you think higher education looks like in the future?

A: Many, many different variations of offerings. Where I think we will succeed is to have a distinctive niche where we integrate classroom and experiential learning. We never tout it, but when you graduate from Antioch, you know how to respond to an alarm clock, you have a full resume, you know the habits of work. So what we do does indeed address some of the criticism in society that the liberal arts are cut off from the workings of business and from American life. We are looking to be a place with a distinctive contribution to our very carefully created niche.

Q: Looking ahead, what are your challenges and advantages?

A: Almost all the challenges are monetary. We have to understand that it is self-indulgent to talk about things that we have no money to support. Now, this year, incredibly, we will hit a nearly $21 million budget, by far our best year. I think people are regaining faith and are seeing things that make them want to be supportive. The alumni will hit close to 30 percent participation in fundraising this year. Those are pretty substantial numbers, but that’s still where the challenge lies. Our advantages? The unique opportunity to start this thing fresh.