By Holly Zachariah, Monday, July 9, 2007
Steve Schwerner jabbed his cane toward the gnarled branches of the old oak tree and, with a sigh, told a tale about why the world laughs at Antioch College.
It was a commencement, sometime during his 15-year run as an administrator. As dean, he called the roll. Dozens of graduates crossed the Mound, a hump of dirt on a well-shaded lawn at the center of campus, to give Schwerner a hug and grab a diploma.
A long line of successful and motivated students became alumni that day. Among them could have been a MacArthur fellow or a Fulbright scholar; the college has churned out plenty of both.
But the photograph that ran in local papers showed a man in a clown costume draped across the twisted branches of the towering oak.
That choice perpetuated a stereotype about Antioch College, a place often portrayed in caricature, a tie-dyed hippie heaven, said Schwerner, 70.
“We’re not mainstream, so the world calls us odd,” he said. “We call our president by his first name, so they see us as disrespectful. We question authority, so they label us radicals. But people who haven’t been here don’t understand.”
Perhaps that is why all of the fuss about plans to close the college is a puzzle for some.
Those who do not call themselves Antiochians may not realize the irony of the announcement. This private, liberal-arts college teaches that activism is more than a buzzword, that contributing to society is a mission, that participatory democracy is life’s requirement.
And now, with word that the campus founded by the Christian Church in 1852 will close next year, the people who learned social justice at the hip of Antioch leaders find themselves pushing against the establishment that nurtured them.
The alumni are meeting in bars, libraries and living rooms across the country. They want to keep the college open, protect its assets and establish a local board of trustees to take control away from the larger system of Antioch University. They have raised a half-million dollars in three weeks. They promise to fight to save their school.
In a 1967 piece written for Holiday magazine, a man named Arno Karlen wrote of his alma mater: It is not just a college; it is a cult, a subculture that marks you permanently.
His was a story that, by its tone and with its descriptions, lured legions of students to Yellow Springs. It painted a picture of a campus where everyone was cool, where everyone had a cause.
But even back then, Karlen hinted at something that Schwerner knows eventually took hold:
We belonged to an elite that shunned everything lazy and popular — conforming as rigidly as at the most snobbish fraternity.
Perhaps, Schwerner said, one can conform in nonconformity.
“That is the paradox of Antioch: Our ideals are so high we can’t possibly live up to them. People came to Antioch and thought they could step on campus, breathe the air and all the social ills of the world would fall away from them. They do not. And that would make them angry.”
The lines on Schwerner’s face suggest wisdom, not age; his smile makes you think he has a secret.
Born and reared in the Bronx, the son of union organizers in New York City, he came to Antioch in 1955. When he left five years later, he had a bachelor’s degree in education and had met his future wife. They’ve been married 46 years this month. One of their two daughters is an Antiochian.
After a run from 1976 to ’91 as dean, he taught classes on everything from jazz to civil rights. He retired a few years ago.
Antioch didn’t make him the man he is, he says. Instead, it gave him the assurance that the man he would become would be OK.
He came here as a teenager from a middle-class family and had little inclination to take much of a public stand on anything.
He was much too polite for that.
Then he heard about two local barbers who wouldn’t cut the hair of black men. And he was outraged.
Long before anti-segregation protests were de rigueur, he demonstrated on the streets of Yellow Springs and sat in front of the barbershop to keep people away.
Empowerment, he knows, is cliche. But it is, he insists, what Antioch can do.
“It takes students who want to be like that, to be strong and brave but couldn’t find it in themselves to do it alone, and it shapes them,” he said. “That alone is Antioch’s greatest strength.”
Steve Lawry came from the Ford Foundation to be Antioch’s president in January 2006. The college was already in trouble. It had a small, $30 million endowment and enrollment had plunged.
The very things that once made Antioch a hallmark of progressive education — its extensive work-study program, teachers who don’t give letter grades, a strong, student-led campus government — were now common at other schools.
Enrollment was less than 500, and administrators were practically using revolving doors. Financial support of the alumni had waned.
“They believed we’d lost the Antioch they knew,” said Lawry, a college president who doesn’t wear a tie and has the sleeves of his baby-blue shirt rolled to the elbow.
He seems to want to continue. But he launches into president-speak instead. He quotes great leaders, talks about redefining missions.
He admits there is pressure for him to avoid pointing fingers. He’ll say only that the campus had become “undisciplined.”
“At some point we had become more of a social experience and less of an educational experience,” he said.
But the college has always been defined by its ideology, said Antioch archivist Scott Sanders.
There was the Red Scare of the 1950s, when outsiders declared it a campus full of communists. In 1990, a sexual-assault prevention policy that required permission for even hand-holding drew worldwide attention.
Probably most famous, however, is the spring of 1973. For six weeks, students angry over a potential loss of federal student aid barricaded buildings and locked out the staff. The sheriff finally ended it, but not before Antioch was labeled “Chaos Campus.”
Schwerner wasn’t there. He had earned his doctorate by then and was counseling students at Queens College in New York.
On a shelf in his fourth-floor office on campus sits a charred and melted rotary phone. It is from the dean’s office, firebombed in 1973.
It is a reminder to Schwerner that things can always get worse.
If the college closes next year, he believes it will never reopen. But he thinks that the alumni will put up a good fight. They’ve been taught to.
“What can you do to make the world a better place for the powerless?” he asks. “How can you make a difference today?”
“It takes students who want to be like that, to be strong and brave but couldn’t find it in themselves to do it alone, and it shapes them. That alone is Antioch’s greatest strength.” -Steve Schwerner, retired dean of students.