“If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable?
Nay, why do we call men wicked at all?
Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.”
–Horace Mann

Horace Mann’s quote appears on the web site of “The Antioch Papers,” an open archive for materials that address the closing of Antioch College by the Board of Trustees of Antioch University in 2007, the misuse of Antioch endowment funds, and the rejection of alumni donations. Alumni have attempted to buy back the college from the governing Antioch University in order to operate independently. Even though progress seems to have been made recently, the Board has rejected all prior proposals from Antioch College alumni.

In 1853 Horace Mann was Antioch College’s first provocative president. Antioch professor (and Mann niece) Rebecca Pennell was the first U.S. woman to receive equal pay and rank with male professors. Coretta Scott King and other important black civil right leaders attended or were graduates. The greatest irony of Antioch’s closing, and one that has not escaped these pages, is that Antioch College was known nationally for its shared governance practices, and as one of the first institutions to include students in the administrative life and decision-making of the college. As economic times have changed and enrollment levels dropped, however, Antioch’s conservative Trustee Board reveals the vacuum at the heart of shared governance practices — BOTs still hold the purse strings of universities and they can open and shut them at will.

One of the documents on the “Antioch Papers” site (that Paula Treichler has also referenced) is Brian Springer’s video ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL (2008). Media curator and Antioch colleague Chris Hill brought the video to my attention recently when she was speaking last week at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hill is widely known in the media art world as someone who has supported, reviewed and documented the video art and public access movements of the 70s and 80s. She curated Video Data Bank’s important anthology, “Surveying the First Decade,” which demonstrates the cross-fertilization between artists, journalists and filmmakers in the early days of the video Portapak. From Steina Vasulka’s experimental video effects in SWITCH! MONITOR! DRIFT! (Steina Vasulka, 1976) to the QUEEN MOTHER MOORE SPEECH AT GREENHAVEN PRISON (People’s Communications Network, 1973), the push towards achieving a transparency of ideas, materials and politics with new forms of technology is obvious in Hill’s work.

Transparency is the driving theme of ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL — a theme that becomes evident through ironic juxtapositions of material. The video opens with text appearing over an aerial shot of Antioch college from a 1967 student film: This footage was shot for you. Next, we cut to a shot from the Antioch College library video cameras: This footage was not shot for you. This footage was shot to document a Homeland Security exercise directed by a private corporation. Then, we drop back forty years earlier to a 1967 Antioch student film that was staged in the same part of the library (with the same paint color it appears), featuring a group of young, black performers happily singing “My Girl…”

The dominant footage in ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL is the staged hostage takeover of the campus, a military exercise that began in Antioch’s Coretta Scott King Center in the same month as the announcement of the closing of the college. Springer creates links between the Antioch SWAT team contractor, L3/Titan, the company that supplied the translators for Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and the university board. The video text describes how student enrollment dropped dramatically once Antioch University took over the finances and curriculum of Antioch College. The blame for the mismanagement of Antioch College is clearly placed at the feet of the administration of Antioch University, just as mismanagement of the Iraq war by private contractors lies with the Bush administration. Not surprisingly, Antioch University threatened Brian Springer and Tim Noble, the “Antioch Papers” website creators, with legal action for the release of “confidential attorney-client communications.”

Library staff resented military exercises taking place in their building and refused to close the Antioch library. In the video we occasionally see students checking out books while the theatrical hostage takeover with actors and plastic machine guns goes on around them. We hear Homeland Security and library staff talking off-camera about the exercise. An off-screen advisor provides direction to the terrorist/actor, “Call them oppressors of the masses…!” The actor then yells the statement across the library at other students, as directed. Someone else off-screen references the fact that the Homeland Security leader for the Antioch exercise is assigned directly to the (Bush) White House. Text and a link with the video provide more information about this figure — Kevin Gates, Executive Office of the President, Office of Science & Technology Policy, Homeland and National Security Division — striding through the Antioch library. Springer inter-cuts this 2007 “hostage” footage with the 1967 student music film throughout the video, juxtaposing an earlier Antioch College — a place for diversity and singing in the library — with the more recent Antioch College — a place for Homeland Security exercises and the silencing of a faculty.

ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL continues video art’s investigative impulses by highlighting the paranoid conservatism that has grown out of the 9/11 tragedy and its unfortunate backlash. ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL makes obvious how this backlash can dampen diversity, end economic transparency, and stifle colleges with vision.

In order not to shut down the Antioch learning environment (or the Yellow Springs economy) entirely, Hill and other faculty have formed the Nonstop Institute, a liberal arts educational “project,” funded by Antioch alumni. The Nonstop Institute continues to educate students according to the participatory and inclusive mission of Horace Mann.

Meanwhile, Antioch’s sprinkler system has frozen and water has drained into closed classrooms. Antioch College continues to crumble, just as it appears that the alumni plan is making more progress with the BOTs. The Great Lakes College Association together with members of the Antioch College Alumni Association and the Antioch University Board of Trustees agreed in June 08 to have “conversations,” which led to a “Letter of Intent” in January 09 about creating an independent Antioch College. They better hurry…

Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute to be Featured Presenter at University of Minnesota Higher Education Conference

On April 24-26, Nonstop will participate in the Reworking the University conference in Minneapolis, MN. The conference is given by the University of Minnesota and “seeks to draw together academics, artists, and activists, to share and produce political visions, strategies and demands for building an alternative university in common.”

Nonstop will stream live audio of its presentations from the conference so that communities in Yellow Springs and beyond can listen.

Nonstop has been invited to organize two sessions at the conference. The first will consist of presentations by faculty member Jean Gregorek and staff member Tim Noble. Jean Gregorek will present her paper Strategies for Fighting the Corporatization of Education: Lessons from The Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. Her paper discusses the closing of Antioch College and the efforts of Nonstop in the context of recent academic scholarship on the shifting landscape of higher education. Tim Noble will present his paper, Learning from Disaster: Building a Communication Infrastructure from Zero Using FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), will share his experiences building Nonstop’s technology infrastructure and discuss the important role that this infrastructure has played at Nonstop.

Nonstop’s second session will be given by Executive Collective member Chris Hill and Antioch College alum Michael Casselli ‘87 and will be a ‘gallery talk’ held in the University’s Bell Museum, where Nonstop’s installation “Education & Community” will be on display. “Education & Community” is a multi-media installation that integrates art and journalism, including student work, pertaining to the ongoing efforts to revive an independent Antioch College. The installation has been on display at Millworks since February 6. Nonstop’s geodesic dome will also be on display at the Bell Museum.

According to the conference organizers, “this conference is a chance to create a space for collective re-evaluation of the university in crisis as an opportunity for real transformation.” Given the challenges, crises, and ongoing re-evaluation on the road to an independent Antioch College, Nonstop is in a unique position to contribute to this conference.

College revival leaders see village as important partner

By Diane Chiddister, Yellow Springs News — read the original editorial here.

Antioch College alumni leaders see Yellow Springs as an important partner in their efforts to bring back the college as an independent liberal arts institution, an alumni leader told Village Council at its Feb. 2 meeting.

“We see the village as a critical part of the rebirth of both the programs and the health of Antioch College,” said Matthew Derr, the chief transition officer for the Antioch College Continuation Corporation’s board pro tem. “We see many opportunities for collaboration.”

Areas of potential collaboration between the college and the village might include the arts, health and wellness facilities and programs, and energy use, Derr said.

“These are three basic areas in which we have common needs and the opportunity to work together in a robust fashion,” Derr said.

According to Derr, those involved in the effort to bring back the college include the Antioch College Alumni Association, the College Revival Fund, the ACCC and its pro tem board, and the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute.

“All the groups are working together to build a future for the college,” he said, in an update to Council on the college revitalization efforts.

The effort also includes close collaboration with Antioch University leaders and the Great Lakes College Association, Derr said, stating that all of those entities have a common interest in helping the college to survive.

The effort to reopen the college, where operations were suspended due to financial exigency on June 30, kicked into high gear at the beginning of January after the Antioch University trustees approved a letter of intent for an independent college. That approval followed a five-month conversation between Antioch University trustee representatives Dan Fallon and Jack Merselis and alumni representatives Derr and Lee Morgan in an effort to reopen the college as an independent liberal arts institution.

The next 90 days are critical, according to Derr. At the end of that period, alumni leaders hope that the letter of intent has become a series of definitive agreements approved by the university trustees.

Most important, Derr said, is the alumni leaders’ current fundraising effort, which aims to raise $15 million within 90 days. And that amount is only the beginning, according to Derr.

“It will take tens of millions to return the college to health,” he said, stating that seven fundraisers are currently traveling the country in an effort to reach the fund-raising goals.

Derr declined to specify a time when the college might reopen if the efforts to achieve independence are successful, saying it’s too early in the process to speculate.

The letter of intent clarifies that, if the college reopens, Antioch College will include the historic campus, including the “golf course,” and Glen Helen. Negotiations will take place with the family of Coretta Scott King to clarify the future of the Coretta Scott King Center, Derr said.

Historic college assets that would remain with Antioch University are WYSO Public Radio and Antioch Education Abroad, or AEA, according to the letter of intent.

The alumni leaders intend that the Olive Kettering Library will be jointly used by the college, the university and the village, Derr said.

“We believe educational assets can and should be shared with the village and with Antioch University,” he said. “We have worked hard to change the tone of the conversation over the last six months.”

The board pro tem, which could become the college’s board of trustees if the efforts to revive it are successful, will meet in Yellow Springs Feb. 20–22, Derr said. One of the board’s first tasks is to evaluate the state of the buildings, and for that effort they have hired the Stanley Consultants of Iowa, the same firm that Antioch University used last year to evaluate the condition of the facilities. The pro tem board hopes to build on that previous work, Derr said.

The board chair is Lee Morgan of Yellow Springs and Minnesota, retired CEO of The Antioch Company and grandson of historic Antioch College president Arthur Morgan. The board’s vice-chair is Frances Degen Horowitz of New York City, former president of the City University of New York, and the secretary is Terry Herndon, who is retired from the Lincoln Laboratories of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.

Other pro tem board members include Pavel Curtis, a software architect at Microsoft, Allyn Hansson Feinberg, an architect and senior vice president for ERTH Technologies, Inc., Atis Folkmanis, creator of Folkmanis puppets, Joyce Idema, director of press and public relations for the Santa Fe Opera, Jay Lorsch, the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School, Rozell Nesbitt, a human rights activist and consultant for diversity for the University of Chicago, Edward Richard, president of the Edward H. Richard Foundation, and Barbara Winslow, coordinator of the Women’s Studies program at the School of Education at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and former member of the Antioch University Board of Trustees. Honorary pro tem board members are Kay and Leo Drey, and the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton. Derr is serving as consultant to the pro tem board.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

Light, energy at new Nonstop home

By Diane Chiddister, Yellow Springs News — read the original editorial here.

The Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute community will celebrate its new campus at Millworks on Walnut Street with an open house this Friday, Feb. 6, from 4 to 7 p.m. The public is invited. Shown above are, clockwise from top left, Nonstop IT specialist Tim Noble and faculty members Hassan Rahmanian, Jean Gregorek and Bob Devine in the library; Nonstop students in the new community government loft are, at bottom, Lincoln Alpern and John Hempfling and on top, from left, Kelly Ahrens, Reuben Hesselden, Molly Thornton, Shea Witzberger and Eva Erickson; bottom right and left photos, Nonstop faculty, staff and students took part in a community meeting on Tuesday.

The newly renovated space of Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute is significant on many levels, according to several Nonstop leaders. First, it provides a physical space that grounds the Nonstop community and gives it a home. And perhaps just as important, the new space works as a symbol of the creativity and adaptability that Nonstop has exhibited since it began a year ago, when former Antioch College faculty, staff and students decided to continue the values and traditions of Antioch even after the college closed its doors.

“We’ve demonstrated our adaptability regarding curriculum and also our ability to conserve some critical aspects of the college,” said Nonstop leader Chris Hill in a recent interview. “We have sustained the best of the college and at the same time creatively interacted with the village.”

The Nonstop community inaugurates its new semester and its new space with a grand opening this Friday, Feb. 6, 4–7 p.m. at its new headquarters at the Millworks complex, 305 North Walnut St. The event also includes a multimedia exhibition of art and journalism that reflect the ongoing efforts to revive the college, along with Nonstop’s evolving experiment in education. The event is free and open to the public.

The new Nonstop headquarters is a former manufacturing space that, over the past several months, has been transformed into two areas, one for staff offices and the other a center for the Nonstop community. According to Antioch College alumnus Michael Casselli, who designed the space, he and several others spent considerable effort transforming an “old, dirty” manufacturing space into an environmentally-responsible campus, constructed with a mix of recycled materials and green -innovations.

It was a labor of love, according to Casselli, an artist and set designer who moved to town last fall from New York City.

“It’s been a satisfying experience,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for the people doing the Nonstop project, and I’m happy to give what I can.”

Nonstop’s adaptability will be tested even further this spring, as plans for an independent Antioch College move ahead. In early January, after five months of conversations between representatives of the college alumni and Antioch University trustees, the trustees approved a letter of intent with the goal of creating an independent college. Alumni leaders are now engaged in fundraising efforts, with the intention of raising $15 million within 90 days in order to meet the terms of the letter. Should that happen, an independent Antioch could open its doors in the fall of 2010.

While much about the future college remains unclear, Nonstop leaders see their efforts as contributing to the reopening of Antioch.

“Nonstop is a bridge to an independent Antioch,” Hill said. “We’re reacting to the situation as it unfolds.”

Students return
No one knew what to expect last fall when Nonstop opened its doors. The majority of Antioch College faculty and much of its staff, funded by the Antioch College Alumni Association, last spring decided to launch Nonstop in an effort to continue Antioch College’s values and traditions even after college operations were suspended June 30 by Antioch University. Without a campus, Nonstop leaders chose to integrate into the Yellow Springs community, holding classes in churches and homes.

While Chris Hill hoped that villagers would take part in the classes, she had no idea if traditionally aged students would show up. While the cost of the Nonstop education was a fraction of what it had been at Antioch College, the current program is not accredited, and students had no central gathering place, no student union, no dorms.

But young people came anyway. About 15 fulltime Nonstop students, mainly former Antioch College students, came from across the country to town last fall to help launch the educational experiment. And even though the launch required from both students and faculty tremendous energy and more than a little inconvenience, almost all of last fall’s students have returned this spring.

For Ashley McNeely of Delaware, Ohio, her last semester’s experience at Nonstop was “the biggest adventure of my life. We had done so much, but we still had so much to do.”

Two of last fall’s Nonstop traditionally aged students dropped out this semester, due to pressure from parents, according to Nonstop faculty Hassan Rahmanian. However, that loss was more than made up by new students and former Antioch students who had been abroad last semester. The number of traditionally aged students has increased to more than 30 this semester, Rahmanian said.

“I didn’t know what to expect when I came, but I’m happy about what’s here,” said former Antioch College student Shea Witzberger of Solon, Iowa, who came to Nonstop from Antioch Education Abroad. “Nonstop has so many great classes and interesting people. You have to be engaged in community and help design what’s happening. It’s a continuation of the magic.”

And this semester Nonstop attracted several new students who had never attended Antioch College before. Previously at Northeastern Illinois University, Kathleen Connolly of Chicago decided to transfer to Nonstop because she wanted more of a sense of community, and her older sister had found that at Antioch. She found what she was looking for, Connolly said last week.

“These classes are smaller and all the professors are incredible and dedicated. We can see how passionate they are,” she said. “Young people need an environment like this, a real learning community.”

Many challenges
But establishing and maintaining that community last fall was one of Nonstop’s most significant challenges, according to Rahmanian. Without dormitories or a college cafeteria, students had to fend for themselves, and it was a stretch for some young people who had not yet taken on adult responsibilities. Consequently, Nonstop faculty and staff sometimes found themselves helping students with day to day tasks, including making budgets and organizing weekly community meals to make sure the young people were eating well. Former Antioch theater professor Louise Smith, who recently received a masters in counseling, offered her skills in working with students to address both daily needs and other challenges.

This semester, Nonstop leaders are putting even more focus on helping students learn to function well in a community. Smith is again offering her services, and more students are taking advantage of her skills. And Nonstop is offering a newly created class, Community, Organizing, Participation and Service, or COPS, that helps students both look at the importance of community, and develop needed skills, according to Nonstop faculty member Dennie Eagleson, who helped to create the new class.

“We’re trying to make the community learning more intentional and more supported,” said Eagleson.

Nonstop organizers are also for the first time requiring that each fulltime student give four hours weekly to activities necessary to meet the community’s needs. Overall, according to Rahmanian, Nonstop recognizes that the creation of community is a significant part of the Nonstop learning experience.

“This time community is taking place not by default, but by design,” he said. “This creates the space for enhancing community involvement.”

Another new aspect of Nonstop this semester was prompted by last semester’s experiment in incorporating older students into classes with traditionally aged young people. Because some older students have been out of school for many years and their skills were rusty, this semester Nonstop added an evening academic support program housed at the new space.

But overall, the combination of non-traditional and traditional students in classes sparked a richer learning experience, according to Rahmanian.

“The quality of conversations was heightened,” he said. “Questions were more thought provoking, because they came out of different sets of assumptions.”

Nonstop organizers tried to restructure some classes this semester to better meet the needs of villagers, recognizing that most adults don’t have the time during weekdays to take a regular schedule of classes. This time around, Nonstop is trying more abbreviated classes and daylong workshops.

So far this quarter, about 55 traditional and non traditional students have signed on for either classes or workshops, and more are continuing to sign up, according to Rahmanian this week. And again this semester, Nonstop organizers are offering Nonstop Presents, a series of evening and weekend talks and events.

Creating a home
Adding to Nonstop leaders’ challenges this fall, their first attempt at creating a common space in a Davis Street house didn’t work out. After zoning problems and concerns from neighbors about potential noise, Nonstop community members were again looking for a home.

One possibility was a large empty space in Millworks, in an area near downtown that is zoned light industrial. But the space, once used for manufacturing plastic molds for the former Corner Cat business, did not inspire visions of community and hominess.

Except, that is, to Michael Casselli, a former set designer and Antioch College 1987 visual arts graduate. After last June’s alumni reunion, Casselli decided to move back to Yellow Springs. He had lost his job in the production department of the New York Theater Workshop due to budget cuts, and realized he could continue his freelance design work while living elsewhere. He and Michael Jones, the partner of his former art teacher Karen Shirley, had begun planning for Eminent Domain, a new arts venture in Yellow Springs, and he had rented out a 5,000 square foot studio in Millworks, a size that he could never have afforded in New York.

Caselli moved back to Yellow Springs, he said, because “I wanted to help out with Nonstop. I have a strong belief in saving the college and maintaining the faculty.”

Where others saw a huge, empty old building at Millworks, Casselli saw potential. He began designing the new Nonstop center in October and, with the help of Antioch College alumni Gerry Bellow, Tim Noble and Meg Fleck, worked much of the fall turning the vision into reality.

The new Nonstop headquarters has two components, an area for staff offices and one for a central community space. For both, Casselli wanted to create as much natural light and warmth as possible, to enhance a feeling of hominess. He also aimed to use green practices and recycled materials as much as possible.

The public is invited to see the results on Friday. In the office area, walls separating the offices rise up to a foot below the ceiling, so that offices share both light and warmth. Much of the lighting comes from solar tubes in the roof that capture natural light. On a sunny day, the solar tubes provide all the light needed, Casselli said.

In the community area, Casselli designed a loft for community government, as well as an open-walled library and seating areas. He plans to build movable walls that can be used to create meeting spaces or present exhibits, and meetings will be held in a portable geodesic dome. An atrium at the entrance will provide more natural light.

Throughout the process, he sought input from Nonstop faculty, staff and students, Caselli said.

“I tried to keep it about community as much as possible,” he said. “It’s important that people care about this space.”

Nonstop students have contributed to the new space in a variety of ways, and in recent weeks could be found putting on finishing touches before the open house.

Not surprisingly, Nonstop leaders have incorporated the creation of their new space into their learning experience. While most elements of the new space are created so that they can also be used on the Antioch campus should efforts to reopen the college succeed, they offer a material home for the flexible and creative educational endeavor that is Nonstop.

“The decisions made about the space, the sensitivity to the environment and to community, became a metaphor for Nonstop,” Chris Hill said. “It became a teaching opportunity for us all.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

A Response to “Antioch – Will It Flatline Once Again?”

Posted by Bob Devine — read the original blog posting here.

It’s a shame that Charlotte Allen did not have the benefit of an Antioch education. If she had, she would not be publishing thrice-repeated rumors, pedestrian opinions, inaccurate factoids, half truths, and back-fence gossip in what purports to be journalism, but is actually just another anti-intellectual drive-by.

By way of example:

a) Allen notes that, “Famous during the 1950s and 1960s for its top-notch academic programs whose graduates included Coretta Scott King, wife of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Mario R. Capecchi,” but fails to note that Antioch also produced the leaders of The Putnam Funds, the Segal Company, Dayton Hudson department stores, as well as continuing to produce — right up until its closing, an extraordinary number of Fulbright scholars and McArthur genius awardees.

b) Allen cites one of the reasons for the closing of Antioch College as, “a draconian date-rape policy drafted by the Antioch “Womyn’s Center” (its actual spelling) that became the laughingstock of the nation after it was parodied on Saturday Night Live in 1973,” when in fact the policy actually boosted enrollment, and in pieces and in whole, the Antioch policy found its way into the sexual offense policies of more than 200 institutions across the country.

c) Another contributing factory Allen asserts, was “…the jettisoning of traditional arts and sciences majors in favor of a loosely structured program that essentially allowed students to take whatever courses they wanted.” That’s just downright false. The College maintained some very rigorous requirements for general education (including work in the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities) and major field requirements as daunting as any undergraduate program. Our majors were interdisciplinary, which has, in case Charlotte hasn’t noticed, become the norm for quality undergraduate programs.

d) Yet another comfortable rumor repeated as fact is the assertion that contributing to the demise of the College was “the creation of a radically left-leaning and notoriously intolerant student culture (aided and abetted by some members of the Antioch faculty) that ostracized dissenters and turned off potential applicants.” Antioch College’s final President circulated several mythic stories about the toxic culture of the institution to all who would listen during the time before he was terminated. Turns out, in spite of how much people wanted to believe that toxic culture played a role in Antioch’s downfall, and how much they attracted the attention of Charlotte Allen and others, that they just weren’t true.

e) Allen notes that “its accreditation was on the verge of revocation, and its relations with its parent institution, Antioch University, were overtly hostile.” The accreditation was never on the verge of revocation, and in fact the last North Central Association review of Antioch commended the faculty of the College for the quality of the academic program and their commitment to delivering it with scarce resources. More on the strained relations with the University below.

f) Allen states that, “The university, which mostly operates adult-focused graduate programs taught by part-time instructors on five barebones campuses around the country, was subsidizing the struggling college to the tune of $3 million a year.” This might be what the University told Allen, but the University campuses are hardly “barebones”. Antioch McGregor just built a $13 million building in Yellow Springs, Seattle owns its own campus, Antioch New England has a thriving and well appointed campus in Keene, N.H., and the two southern California campuses are hardly sparse or struggling. The “adult” campuses were, until 5 years ago, required to provide “overhead” to subsidize the College, as franchises of the flagship institution. Antioch focused on building adult campuses during a period of time when peer institutions were building their endowments. The subsidies to the College — going back to 1985 — were intended to substitute for endowment, until such time that the College was able to build its endowment to the level of its peer institutions. In effect, the adult campuses WERE the endowment of Antioch College. In their adolescence, however, the adult campuses wanted to be released from their obligation to the elderly parent, and in fact, participated in the “smothering” of that parent in order to collect the annuity (campus, real estate, endowment, library, brand), to continue to grow, and to collateralize borrowing.

The actual contributing factors in the demise of Antioch College include:

-The University harassing until they left, or firing the last 3 presidents of the College;

-The University removing the CFO and seizing control of the operating finances of the College;

-The University mysteriously losing $5 million through an accounting error;

-The University withholding the College’s endowment growth;

-The University Board imposing a curriculum on the faculty — which cut enrollment in half in just two years — and guaranteeing funding for this labor-intensive “innovative” program for five years, but pulling the plug after two;

-The University Board’s giving to the College (as part of their stewardship and fiduciary responsibility) diminishing from approximately $1m a year to approximately $25K a year in just three years.

No, the demise of Antioch College was more of an Enron/Bear-Stearns/AIG/Merrill-Lynch kind of organizational failure, rather than a casualty of the demon PC. A friend once described Antioch as “the cockroach of modernism”, and as the anti-intellectual times fade away, it’s a pretty sure bet that Antioch will once again be on the landscape of higher education.