Author: ACAN

From The Editorial Page of the Dayton Daily News

Sunday, July 01, 2007

One of the more remarkable statements made in the wake of the announcement of Antioch College’s closing was by President Steven Lawry.

He said the reason he didn’t tell anybody on campus that the decision was coming was that he didn’t know.

The fact that no public warning was given has added to the anger of students, faculty, alumni and the community. It is hard to understand.

Sure, everybody knew that things were going badly.

But interested people reasonably expect that explicit warnings will be issued, so that, for example, an emergency fund-raising campaign might be launched, or that other rescue plans can be entertained.

Try to imagine similar problems at a public university or college. So much more would have been known, as the result of public filings of financial information and public trustee meetings. There would have been much more communication and “process.”

For Antioch — so associated with insistence on power for the people — to be accused of being closed off and secretive is an irony that has been much and appropriately noted.

In the wake of the news-making announcement, a lot of criticisms are being made about the way the university is structured and run. Some resonate.

The final authority is a board that runs a far-flung university system but meets only a few times a year for a few days. Antioch College itself has no board, and the college president doesn’t report directly to the university board, but to a chancellor.

So there are lots of factors fostering separation between the board and the college.

On top of all that, and because things have been going poorly, there’s been an awful lot of turnover. That, in turn, causes a lot of problems, sometimes leaving people feeling they can’t even get a good explanation for why a policy exists.

And there is conflicting information. These days, for example, one gets different information about enrollment trends, depending upon whom one talks to.

A couple of years ago, the board instituted a change in the academic structure of the college that was designed to increase enrollment but was followed by a sudden enrollment drop.

(The change eliminated traditional academic departments in a fairly radical approach to interdisciplinary education.)

There’s dispute about how much input the faculty had in this decision, and about whether the reform was simply enacted too fast.

What’s clear is that the board has ultimate responsibility. One might — in other circumstances — have expected heads to roll.

They didn’t, although some trustees have now offered to leave, in the wake of the latest news.

The anger of faculty members and alumni about the closing might be shrugged off as typical Antioch stuff, the acting out of self-styled rebels. In fact, though, people have questions and complaints that would arise even if the Antiochians were a bunch of Republicans.

The world beyond Antioch likes to talk about other factors that allegedly brought about its demise. Extreme politics; extreme political correctness. Fine.

That discussion needs to be had within the Antioch community. Did a determination to question authority devolve into a prohibition against questioning the dissidents? A lot of knowledgeable people think so, and think that the culture impacted the school’s attractiveness to students and faculty.

Meanwhile, though, some nuts-and-bolts issues need to be confronted, too. There are good ways and bad ways to structure and administer colleges. Antioch University has not done well by Antioch College.

By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic, July 1, 2007

So it’ll go. The little college with the big history will disappear, at least on paper — the buildings will hang around, you assume, since we’re not exactly talking midtown Manhattan here, and condos aren’t much of a possibility — and the world will lose a little more of its magic. But it can’t be helped. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is tens of millions of dollars in debt, enrollment is sagging, and that’s that. The school’s Board of Trustees announced last month that after a century and a half of educating the young and the restless, the school — the alma mater of distinctive writers such as Rod Serling, Lawrence Block, Herb Gardner and Mark Strand — will close permanently a year from now.

Still undetermined, though, is the fate of the Olive Kettering Library. The stolid-looking brick building on the serene campus in west-central Ohio houses some 325,000 books. Yet its irreplaceable heritage is its special collections, including the papers of Horace Mann, Antioch’s first president, and those of Arthur Morgan, who ran the school in the 1920s and pioneered the idea of co-op education: Antioch students spend several semesters off campus, working in their chosen fields.

“We are told that the library will be maintained. What that means, I’m not sure,” said a worried-sounding Nina Myatt in an interview last week at the library. “There are lots of raggedy edges that either haven’t been thought through, or that we haven’t been told about.”

Myatt, Antioch class of ’53, is the curator of Antioch’s special collections. She’s only the third person to hold that job since 1900. She loves what she does, and until the trustees dropped their bombshell last month, she had no plans to retire. “I’ve taken care of all of this for so long,” she said with a wistful sigh, nodding toward the tall bookshelves.

Antioch College is part of the five-location Antioch University system. The other locations, at which are operated non-residential degree programs, will stay in business. Because the library theoretically serves all locations, administrators have said it will keep the lights on — but no guarantees on longevity. Myatt and her colleagues remain uneasy.

Yet in an online world in which so much of the world’s knowledge now is available with the brief sweep of a mouse, who needs bricks and mortar? Who needs physical archives?

Well, anybody with a romantic soul, for one thing.

To engage with a letter or document on a computer screen is quite different from engaging with the real thing, from being in the presence of the tangible literary artifact. Basic data can be endlessly and harmlessly manipulated, shifted from book to screen to CD-ROM. The portal from which you access most information? Irrelevant. But when you peer at the actual piece of paper bearing the signature of the person whose mind and heart created it, you feel as if you’re part of a great invisible chain of thought and feeling; you’re not just a reader, but almost a collaborator.

Moreover, once historical documents are lost, or damaged through neglect, they’re gone. You can’t call the Help Desk and get a tech to come over and show you how to right-click your way out of catastrophe.

Thus as Antioch limps toward extinction, perhaps another institution will step up and take over the archives, and perhaps Antioch’s administrators will agree to let the precious material find another home. It’s our history. History is made every day, of course, but never the same history twice.

“It makes a great lump come into my throat, to think of all of this being mothballed,” Myatt said. “It’s just very sad.”

And perhaps tragically short-sighted as well.

jikeller@tribune.com

Defiant alumni start revival fund, vow to keep college open

By Diane Chiddister, editor Yellow Springs News

About 600 Antioch College alumni came to their annual reunion last weekend dispirited and despondent, having heard a week earlier that their beloved alma mater would, in a year, close down. But the alumni, who spanned seven decades of Antioch graduates, left two days later determined, committed and upbeat, having decided to throw their considerable energies, talents and resources into saving their college.

Please read the story in its entirety.

Though whomever wrote the headline missed the fact that we’re not closing, folks have been saying this is the best national coverage we have received.

Antioch Closure Ends Chapter in Higher Education by former faculty member John McChesney reports.