YSNews – Save Antioch College

New Antioch College class, smaller than hoped

A few weeks ago, incoming Antioch students participated in welcome-week activities across campus. Among other options, students were able to roll balls of dirt and compost in wildflower seeds to create seed balls, which can be thrown in fertile spots to grow wildflowers. Whether the activity was intended to be symbolic or not — planting the seeds that will grow into something beautiful — the students were able to get to know one another and become a little more acclimated to the campus that will be their home away from home for the better part of the next four years.

The new class represents a moment of both promise and peril for the college. Antioch’s incoming class, the class of 2020, is a small group. At just 44 students, it is a number well below the 75 to 80 students the college had hoped to attract, according to a figure cited by Antioch President Tom Manley in his September state of the college address to alumni.

The size of the incoming class is a “number the college can work with, but that is not ideal,” said Lori Collins-Hall, Antioch’s provost, in a recent interview.

The small class size reflects nationwide trends, but it also reflects Antioch-specific factors, such as last year’s lower level of Horace Mann funding and turnover in the admissions department. And news of the college’s accreditation, which was a great boon to the college, came too late in the recruitment cycle to make a difference this year.

However, college officials expect next year’s enrollment to meet the college’s projections, Collins-Hall said. Antioch’s newly accredited status will open up new opportunities for both students and the college, while some new recruitment strategies aim to address the drop in attendance and the changing ways students are approaching higher education.

Who is the class of 2020?

The class of 2020, while lower in number than anticipated, is notably accomplished and diverse, said Collins-Hall.

Antioch’s incoming class hails from 15 far-flung states, including California, Minnesota and Michigan, with 22 students attending from Ohio. The students chose Antioch for diverse reasons. Carlos Mendez, a freshman coming from Oberlin, said he was drawn to Antioch because of its small student-to-teacher ratio. Eva Westermeyer, from Centerville, has always been drawn to Yellow Springs and was intrigued by the school’s closing-reopening saga, while Oliver Garrott from New Mexico was drawn to the co-op program and plans to use that opportunity to explore the intersection of mental healthcare and civil rights. Interviewed during their first week on campus, the students were at the same time shy and cheerful, excited for the college experience but at the earliest stages of figuring out what that experience would be.

The students represent a broad range of interests and experience, Collins-Hall said, including cosplayers, members of political campaigns, high school gay-straight club participants and Pokémon Go fanatics. Thirty-nine percent of the incoming class are students of color. Thirty-nine percent of the class is female, 51 percent male, seven percent transgendered and two percent gender queer. According to surveys conducted by the college, significant percentages of the students said they chose Antioch for its “hands-on learning,” and that the physical campus and the surrounding community made Antioch even more appealing. Incoming students all rank in the top third of ACT scores, while their average high school GPA is a B and transfer GPA is a B+. Forty-six percent of the class of 2020 are the first in their family to attend college.

“They are a mighty group in what they bring to the college,” Collins-Hall said. “While the class is small, they represent a continuing legacy of recruiting a body of bright, talented and diverse students who want to do good in the world.”

Factors affecting class size

According to the Sept. 8 issue of The Antioch Record, the college newspaper, the college met or exceeded its enrollment goals each year from 2015-2018 (with 75–85 students each year), but recruited only 66 of its anticipated 85 students in the class that entered last fall, and 44 of 85 students for this year’s entering class. The decreased attendance over the past two years coincides with decreasing financial aid in the form of half-tuition scholarships, a combination that Collins-Hall said is directly responsible for this year’s low class number.

Previously, a big draw to Antioch was the Horace Mann Fellowship, which awarded students 100 percent tuition, regardless of a student’s financial need, starting with the revived college’s first class, which entered in 2011. The school relied heavily on the promise of tuition paid in full to draw students to Antioch for the first four years after it reopened, according to Collins-Hall.

For the last two years, however, the Horace Mann Fellowship has covered only 50 percent of the cost of tuition. Despite the promise of significant financial aid, parents and prospective students were wary of paying for a degree from an unaccredited college, Collins-Hall said. In other words, robust scholarships helped make up for the lack of accreditation. The admissions office found it more challenging to recruit with half tuition. Without the full tuition offer, the college didn’t have the same “market pop and visibility,” she said, and admissions numbers dropped over the two years that the scholarship has been reduced.

“We didn’t sell the college — we sold free tuition,” Collins-Hall said. “You can’t underestimate the challenge of recruiting students to an unaccredited college. That’s why they were offered such hefty financial aid packages.”

Other factors contributing to the low incoming class numbers include decreasing college attendance nationwide. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. college enrollment fell four percent from 2010 to 2014. Lower attendance at traditional four-year institutions also reflects the changing nature of what students are looking for, Collins-Hall said. More students are choosing two-year career programs or attending community colleges before transitioning to other universities or programs. Antioch has not been immune to either of these trends.

Moreover, the admissions department at Antioch also experienced significant turnover and restructuring over the past year. Previous Dean of Admissions Micah Canal left in September of last year, after which Harold Wingood, an interim dean of admissions, took over in November, and worked for six months before Collins-Hall assumed the job in June. Two other admissions staff members left the college over the summer. Resources were stretched further when the recruitment and admissions process for this year’s class and the next overlapped, owing to the scramble of a department in flux and a college recruitment process that has moved steadily later in the year, as students themselves hold their spot in several schools and defer final decisions into the summer.

However, the fact that Antioch has received accreditation and has developed strong strategies for recruitment and retention bodes well for future classes, Collins-Hall said. The college also hired Bill Carter as a dean of admissions last week, who is coming to the school with a long background in higher education, most recently as the director of admissions at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

New funding, new strategies

Thanks to its new accreditation, which was awarded in July, the college will be able to tap into a variety of funding options for its students, such as the GI Bill, federal student loans and parent plus loans. The school will be able to take advantage of federal work-study programs and VA benefits, which are unavailable to unaccredited institutions. Accreditation also makes the college eligible for CFUS funding, which allows the college to enroll international students. Increasing the number of international students would be beneficial to the college on many fronts, Collins-Hall said.

While the Horace Mann Fellowship will never be awarded in the same way again, she said, new financial aid options and scholarships will be available in the future. Collins-Hall couldn’t comment on the specifics of upcoming financial aid, as the college is still putting together the financial aid packages it will offer students next year, but she said she expects that information to be available in November.

Other changes will allow Antioch to recruit more effectively, Collins-Hall believes. As an accredited college, Antioch can participate in the Common Application for colleges, which allows students to fill out one application and send it to a number of schools simultaneously. The process makes applying for colleges very simple, she said, and has quickly proven to be helpful to the recruitment process. The college has already received 10 applications for next year’s class through Common App.

Going forward, college leaders have decided to institute rolling admissions, admitting students as they apply instead of adhering to strict deadlines that often run late in the school year.

Another change that will likely increase next year’s class stems from changes to the FAFSA application. (FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.) Previously, applicants were required to include a copy of the current year’s tax return to determine aid eligibility, meaning that FAFSA forms couldn’t be turned in until taxes were filed. However, applicants are now able to use the previous year’s tax returns, meaning that the application process can begin much earlier, and thus lead to earlier decision making about which school a student will attend.

Focus on marketing

Beyond these changes, college leaders are crafting strategies to increase future enrollment while preserving and enlarging student body diversity. The college is working on a marketing message that highlights the great things at Antioch, and why they are worth paying for, Collins-Hall said.

“In addition to the fact that we are now an accredited institution, we’ve been working on strategy, marketing, and addressing the gaps in telling the Antioch story,” she said. “We’re focusing on why you want to invest in an Antioch education, and why that will put you ahead.”

For example, class of 2020 students cited Antioch’s emphasis on social justice and its status as a gender progressive school as key factors in their decision to attend the college, Collins-Hall said. Highlighting the college’s strengths, such as sustainability and farm-to-table organic farming practices, will continue to be a part of the recruitment approach, with recruitment teams focusing specifically on those aspects.

And once students have been accepted, officials want to keep them engaged with Antioch. Students will be able to take pre-enrollment classes and online seminars, and will be more easily able to transfer community college credits, she said. In fact, 25 percent of the class of 2020 are transfer students.

Another strategy entails reaching out to “affinity schools,” such as high schools with educational approaches similar to that of Antioch. Recruitment hasn’t been attempted in this way before, said Collins-Hall. The perspective of freshman Adam Green, from Columbus, seems to validate this approach. He was drawn to Antioch because of its similarity to his high school’s emphasis on experiential learning, which he maintains is a much better teacher than a textbook.

At the welcome-week events, students seemed happy to be on campus. After all, it was their first week at college, one of the foremost American rites of passage. Freshman Mendez said he felt like he’d been on the Antioch campus for 15 days, when it had only been three. Garrott was a few thousand miles away from his home in New Mexico, but he said “it’s not too big a deal” to be on the other side of the country, given his excitement at being at Antioch. And Green said that he already feels part of the Antioch community.

“I’ve met people I can tell are going to become my best friends,” he said. “It feels cool to be surrounded by that feeling.”

This year’s incoming class reflects the diversity Antioch has always valued in its students, Collins-Hall said, and she is equally optimistic about future classes. With accreditation, new sources of financial aid and the settling down of the admissions department, officials hope to maintain that diversity in coming years, but in proportionally larger numbers.

“We are actively planning to successfully hit our targets for next year,” she said. “And there’s no reason to believe we won’t hit that mark.”

Local food activists strategize, plan for a commercial kitchen

A growing interest among villagers around local food has sparked several upcoming events, including a garden tour and a series of potlucks. And the interest has led to an ambitious effort to make the village a regional food hub, with an initial step of creating a commercial kitchen as the first component of a community economic incubator.

“There’s a vibrant local food conversation taking place in Yellow Springs,” said Susan Jennings, executive director of Community Solutions, an organization that is helping to facilitate that conversation. “There’s a lot of community interest.”

Yellow Springs as food hub

The growing interest and energy around local food can be linked to the issue’s intersection with a variety of villagers’ concerns, including environmental sustainability, small town resiliency, economic development, nutrition and physical health, along with the pleasure of eating fresh food.

“We have a good group of people and it’s getting larger all the time,” according to Macy Reynolds of the local food committee of the Resiliency Network.

That energy and enthusiasm has led activists to begin pursuing an ambitious vision of making Yellow Springs a food hub in the region. The first step toward doing so is creating a commercial kitchen to help those who aim to pursue a local-food based livelihood.

“We’re trying to meet the needs of people who are trying to make money from growing local foods,” Reynolds said.

Such a commercial kitchen would serve as a resource for farmers, entrepreneurs, caterers, villagers and Antioch faculty, staff and students, according to a document recently released by Community Solutions. It would provide services such as preparation space for bakers and food processors, storage space for food trucks, teaching space for classes on food preparation and preservation and entrepreneurial opportunities for food businesses.

And the kitchen would be the first component in a larger vision of a community economic incubator, according to the document. Such an incubator would provide shared services and support for start-up businesses.

Community Solutions sees itself not as the sole mover-and-shaker on the project, but rather a participant that enables the process, according to Jennings last week.

“I see Community Solutions as not leading the charge, but being willing to broker the conversation and make things happen,” Jennings said, stating that the conversation around a food kitchen had predated her coming on the job two years ago.

The nonprofit has identified the central back wing of the Sontag Fels building on the Antioch College campus as a potential site for the kitchen. The site, which is adjacent to the Community Solutions offices, is a likely location because it has ample space, including space to build out to create a full community economic incubator, access to an underused parking lot and a central location for both the college and the community, according to the Community Solutions document.

Community Solutions is currently in talks with Antioch College, which owns the building, regarding the project, according to Jennings. While the hope is that the college will choose to partner with Community Solutions on the commercial kitchen and community incubator, organizers plan to go ahead and find a different location if the college chooses to not be involved.

The purpose of a community economic incubator is clearly in line with Community Solutions founder Arthur Morgan’s philosophy of the value of small communities, and the need to strengthen their economic infrastructure by creating many small businesses.

“He saw people as leaving small towns because of the lack of interesting jobs and interesting conversations,” Jennings said. “He believed that democracy thrived in the small community, but that democracy is meaningless if you don’t have economic structures.”

Organizers for the project aim to spend the next year surveying the area and community regarding the needs of those involved in local food production, according to local food committee member Julia Navaro, a 2016 graduate of Antioch College and current employee of the Antioch Farm. Other priorities include creating a business plan and cost analysis. According to Jennings, a very rough estimate is that $1 million will be needed for the project, with half coming from grants and the rest from donations. The group estimates a three-year period for planning, development and build-out, with an estimated opening of the food hub in the summer of 2019.

The time is right to move forward, organizers believe.

“I’m really excited,” said Navaro. “This has been a conversation at Antioch for a while now.”

Upcoming events

Those interested in local food issues can take part in two upcoming events, sponsored by the local food committee of the Resiliency Network.

This Sunday at 10:30 a.m., villagers are invited to join a garden tour of local vegetable and pollinator gardens. The event will start at the Antioch Farm (meet in the parking lot behind the Wellness Center), after which participants will visit the High Street garden of Al Schlueter. Then at about noon the group will tour the Orton Road pollinator garden of Macy Reynolds.

The garden tour is a followup to a similar event held last fall in Schlueter’s large backyard garden, when the focus was on the greenhouse in which he grows greens over the winter. The interest in the tour was robust, according to Schlueter, with about 50 people attending. This Sunday he’ll introduce people to his garden at the peak of the growing season, when he’s ready to harvest “everything you can think of.” At Sunday’s event, he hopes to address people’s questions about all aspects of gardening, including planting, mulching and protecting against animals, as well as learn new tips himself.

“I always get ideas from others,” he said in a recent interview.

Reynolds has been working for about 10 years on her pollinator garden, which contains the various layers of vegetation that insects require for both pollination and shelter, she said recently. She’s also found that creating a garden that draws an abundance of “good” insects keeps down the number of “bad” insects that destroy plants.

“It works,” she said of her garden.

In a second upcoming event, the local food committee will host its monthly Local Foods Potluck, which takes place the last Sunday of every month at 2 p.m. in the First Methodist Church. This month’s event takes place on Sunday, Aug. 28, with a talk by Schlueter on preserving vegetables using the methods of canning, freezing and dehydrating.

The monthly potlucks grew from a series of local food events last November sponsored by the Resiliency Network. A core group that attended the events has been meeting ever since, according to Reynolds, one of the organizers. Other members include Bob Huston, Beth Bridgeman, Schlueter, Navaro, Tim Honcho, Mike Breza, Sylvia Carter Denny, Nancy Lineburgh, Peggy Nestor, Carmen Milano, and Bonnie and Mickey Wilkinson.

The monthly potluck grew from the group’s awareness that some villagers were reluctant to support local community-supported agriculture, or CSAs, because they didn’t know how to cook unfamiliar vegetables. Consequently, each event includes a cooking demonstration by Milano, funded by a grant from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

All villagers are invited to attend the potlucks, and while participants are encouraged to contribute a local food dish, they’re also welcome to join in without contributing, according to Reynolds.

‘Deep green’ architect to talk at Antioch College

Architect Jason McLennan, a pioneer of sustainable design and creator of the Living Building Challenge, will speak this Saturday, Aug. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Antioch South Gym. (Submitted Photo by Paul Dunn)

A “deep green” architect is coming to Yellow Springs. Jason McLennan, recent winner of two major architectural awards and a pioneer of green building design, will give a public talk on Saturday, Aug. 13, from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Wellness Center South Gym at Antioch College. McLennan has designed dozens of innovative green projects around the world, and was recently announced as the designer for Antioch College Village’s cohousing pilot. Seattle-based McLennan and his team will be on campus during the weekend for a series of sessions with college leaders and prospective cohousing community members to kick off the cohousing project. His Saturday evening talk, however, is open to all villagers interested in green design and the ways in which buildings, people and the natural environment interrelate.

“Jason is a very talented designer, somebody in the vanguard of thinking about what it means to develop the built environment in a truly sustainable way,” said Sandy Wiggins, a green building expert and a consultant to Antioch College on the College Village project. Wiggins brought McLennan and the college together; the architect and his team are providing some pro bono services to get the cohousing pilot off the ground this fall.

McLennan is known worldwide as the creator of the Living Building Challenge, a framework that moves far beyond traditional sustainability measures and requires that buildings play a positive, regenerative role in local ecosystems. According to the website of the nonprofit International Living Future Institute, which manages the programs and conducts related advocacy work, buildings that meet all or even some of the Living Building criteria can claim to be the “greenest in the world.”

Talk on Green Design
“Deep green” architect Jason McLennan, a pioneer in sustainability and green design, will give a public talk on Saturday, Aug. 13, from 7 to 8 p.m. in the South Gym of Antioch College’s Wellness Center. The college has engaged McLennan to design the cohousing pilot project for Antioch College Village. McLennan’s talk will focus on connections between that project and worldwide trends in environmental design.

“The Living Building Challenge goes beyond the idea of minimizing harm … to create buildings and projects that are good for people and the planet,” McLennan explained in a recent interview. “It’s a very holistic framework for all the ways [buildings] impact on the world and in turn impact on people’s lives.”

That program led, in 2014, to the creation of the Living Community Challenge, which uses the principles of the Living Building Challenge to set sustainability standards for groups of buildings.

The Living Building Challenge and Living Community Challenge are “the standard bearers,” affirmed Wiggins. “They’re the “tip of the spear,” both in terms of what’s being called for and what’s possible in green design.”

ACV first ‘Living Community’?

At Wiggins’ recommendation, Antioch College adopted the Living Community Challenge as the framework for Antioch College Village, or ACV, in 2014. The college’s embrace of the Living Community standards was one reason he was attracted to the cohousing pilot, McLennan said. “There’s a tight synergy in values and ideals,” he explained.

Though the originator of the Living Building Challenge and founder of the International Living Future Institute, McLennan is no longer an employee of the Institute and is not involved in the assessment of projects.

The Living Community Challenge “scales up” the earlier Living Building Challenge. “Philosophically, they’re siblings,” McLennan said. “But they have different scales and different issues arise.” Rather than assessing a single building, Living Community standards measure the sustainability of a collection of buildings, such as a neighborhood, campus or city block.

There are currently no certified communities, though projects are underway in a variety of cities, McLennan said. The process takes time; the Living Community Challenge includes an upfront masterplan review, so the standards actually help guide the design framework for a project, as well as measure the outcome.

If certified under the Living Community Challenge standards, Antioch College Village could be the first such project in the world, both Wiggins and McLennan emphasized.

In his public talk, McLennan will not only describe the principles and philosophy of the Living Building Challenge and Living Community Challenge, but also provide case studies that he hopes will illuminate “what’s possible in green design,” he said.

One such case study is the Bullitt Center in Seattle, which was billed as the “world’s greenest office building” when it opened on Earth Day in 2013. According to a report aired by Northwest Public Radio on April 18, 2013, the Bullitt Center’s unique attributes include its use of 100 percent sustainably harvested lumber, the world’s only six-story composting toilet system and 575 rooftop solar panels that supply all of the building’s energy. The panels also collect rainwater, which is funneled to a 56,000-gallon cistern in the basement that provides all the building’s water.

The Bullitt Center meets the highest level of Living Building standards. First put forward in 2006, these standards are used to evaluate projects across seven performance categories: place, water, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity and beauty. Each of these has smaller, specific subcategories. Energy, for example, is measured in terms of “net positive energy,” which mandates that 100 percent of a building’s energy needs are self-generated using no combustion-based sources.

While certain metrics, such as for building materials and energy, may overlap with other green certifications such as LEED and Forest Stewardship Council, they are far more stringent than all other existing measures, according to the International Living Future Institute website. And many of the Living Building Challenge criteria bring an utterly novel focus on human well-being, according to McLennan.

“The training of architecture is really about how the built environment impacts the mental and emotional and physical well-being of people,” he said. Under the terms of the Living Building Challenge, these impacts are extended to the health of the ecosystem and the lives of plants and non-human animals within it, he added.

There are currently about 100 Living Building-certified buildings around the world, according to Wiggins, and many more in the process of development. Unlike other certification programs, Living Building projects are assessed based on actual, not projected performance. This means that projects must be operational for at least 12 consecutive months before they are evaluated, adding another layer of rigor to the process, McLennan said.

Cohousing kick-off

Beyond his public talk, McLennan and his team will spend the weekend on the Antioch College campus gathering information for the first iteration of the cohousing design. One key decision is the location of the cohousing project, selected from several potential sites on campus, according to Wiggins. McLennan will also engage college leaders and prospective cohousing residents — specifically, members of the local cohousing group, the Antioch Eco-Village Pioneers — in a programming exercise to elicit basic design criteria for the project, including the design of individual units, the organization of units in relation to each other and the design and amenities of the common house that is a focal point of cohousing communities.

McLennan said he’ll be doing a lot of listening that weekend. “We take a very patient period of listening and learning. We view our project as having two clients: the people and the community writ large, which includes other species and future generations.” So he’ll be making a careful study of place, climate, culture and people, he said.

Though he’s designed many different types of projects around the world, Antioch College Village’s cohousing pilot will be his first cohousing project. And this will be his first time in Yellow Springs and Ohio. But all projects are, in a sense, new to him, he said.

“I don’t like to come into a design project with a predetermined aesthetic. I don’t know what it will look like, and that’s the point. But it will be beautiful,” he promised, with a laugh.

With this weekend’s kick-off session, Wiggins said that the college is on track to complete the cohousing pilot’s conceptual design phase by the end of the year. He is currently raising funds for the pilot, previously estimated to cost $2.2 million for design and planning (an amount that includes some costs of the overall ACV project) and $6.5 million for construction. He is also working with the Village on zoning and planning.

“We’re hoping to begin building this time next year,” Wiggins said.

Choosing a college and a town

WHY YS?

This is the eleventh article in an occasional series
looking at why people choose to live in Yellow Springs.
If you have a story that fits our theme,
feel free to contact us at ysnews@ysnews.com.

When Lori Collins-Hall and Chris Burgher first visited Yellow Springs two years ago, they were checking out the village as a place to live. Collins-Hall had recently been offered the job of vice president of academic affairs at Antioch College, and the job was appealing. But before they arrived, the women weren’t too sure about the town. They already lived in a small town in upstate New York, population 15,000, and Yellow Springs was, well, really small.

They pulled into the village on a Friday night and parked downtown, surprised to hear live music pouring from the Emporium. And the sidewalk was full of people, talking and laughing. The next day, they stopped into the Train Station for a calendar of activities, and were amazed at all that was going on.

“There was more going on here than where we came from,” Burgher said recently, with a laugh. “I immediately fell in love with the town.”

At the time, Collins-Hall was chair of the sociology department and assessment coordinator of institutional effectiveness at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. She had recently opened up an email in which Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt was asking if she might be interested in coming to Antioch to help rebuild the college.

“I thought it was a prank,” she said of the email.

But it wasn’t a prank, and Collins-Hall was attracted to the job. She had the expertise, having focused her career on building skills in strategic planning, assessment and institutional effectiveness, skills sorely needed by a recently revived college. And she was intrigued by the opportunity.

“There aren’t many people in higher education administration who get to be involved in raising up a college,” she said. “The door opened and it seemed foolish not to walk through it.”

Not long after, Collins-Hall moved to Yellow Springs to take the job, which also involved helping to oversee the effort to gain accreditation. The hours were very long — she sometimes worked 16-hour days — but she wasn’t surprised.

“Friends had told me about the life of a vice president of academic affairs,” she said. “I knew there would be long days.”

And it helped that she enjoyed not only the work but also her co-workers.

“My colleagues at the college are wonderful,” she said. “I’ve rarely worked with a group of people who care so much about what they’re doing.”

At the time, it also helped that Burgher hadn’t yet moved to Ohio, so that Collins-Hall didn’t mind working long days. Burgher stayed nine more months at her job as an administrative assistant at the State University of New York at Oneonta, visiting Yellow Springs regularly to look for a house. While housing prices in Yellow Springs were higher than they expected, the women found a rental with a big backyard on Gardendale Drive, which they now share with Snickers, their dog. They also have room for visiting friends and relatives — both women have two adult children, with Burgher’s two sons ages 26 and 29 and Collins-Hall’s daughters ages 21 and 24.

The women laugh when they explain that they met on Match.com. It’s funny because they had circled each other for decades, living within a mile of each other in the same town, working in close-by universities, having the same friends and even going to the same Happy Hour — but until Match.com, they hadn’t met. Now, they’ve been a couple for eight years, and were married in New York State two years ago.

Burgher retired from her job on Jan. 30, 2015, and set off to drive to Yellow Springs the next day. While the couple doesn’t see each other quite as much as they would like (although the hours aren’t quite so long now that accreditation has been won), Burgher is settling into life in her new home. She enjoys taking pottery classes at the John Bryan Community Pottery, hiking in the Glen and gardening. When she wants more activity, she takes on contract work, and recently oversaw organizing the college’s commencement activities. And on weekends she and Collins-Hall like to hike and explore their new area — some Sundays they’ll set off in the car and just decide on the spur of the moment whether to turn left or right.

For Collins-Hall, work at the college, where she is now provost, remains rewarding. While the accreditation efforts are over until the 10-year review, she hopes to help the college define itself as a distinctive institution that offers real opportunity for young people to make a difference, both in their studies and in their school.

“Every liberal arts college these days say they offer a holistic experience,” Collins-Hall said. “But both the vision and the experience at Antioch sets it apart in the very real integration of students’ lives both in and out of the classroom. We want to capture that, the ways that students are involved in every aspect of the college.”

Both Collins-Hall and Burgher are glad they ended up in Yellow Springs.

“I love the work I do,” Collins-Hall said. “Every day it’s full and meaningful.”

Antioch College film students learn their craft at RNC

Last week’s Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Ohio, drew thousands of visitors, delegates, demonstrators and members of the media. Given the contentious and untraditional nature of the 2016 presidential race and the tense social climate, the RNC was more than just a political forum — it was a reflection of a pivotal point in American politics, and therefore American history. And this is exactly why Professor Charles Fairbanks, a media arts instructor at Antioch College, wanted his students to experience such a monumental event.

Inspired by “Four More Years,” a documentary about the 1972 RNC, Fairbanks took a number of students to the convention in order to document it. The Antioch film crew, comprised of Fairbanks, adjunct professor and studio arts coordinator Forest Bright and media arts students Lillian Burke, Charlotte Norman, David Blakeslee, Odette Chavez-Mayo and Ellie Burck spent two days interviewing, filming and trying to understand the event.

“I wanted to do something memorable for this [media arts] class,” Fairbanks said. “It’s a really great opportunity to practice media arts and engage with the political process.”

Although the documentarians were excited about the project, they were unsure what they were getting themselves into. Burck said she wasn’t sure if it was going to be dangerous or banal or both, while Chavez-Mayo wasn’t sure if she would be able to relate to anyone there because she doesn’t share their political leanings.

Upon arrival, the sheer scope of the convention both underscored and challenged the ways students were thinking about it before they arrived

The public square, where many attendees gathered, was cordoned off from protestors, Blakeslee said. There was a place for speakers, and further away were groups of protestors representing all sides of the political spectrum. Demonstrators ran the gamut from armed open carry activists to people wearing Trump masks to a group of doctors protesting the ill-treatment of their Muslim colleagues, Burck said.

Monitoring it all were police from all over the country, Burck said, noting that she saw badges from Georgia, Virginia and California. However, Chavez-Mayo thought the police were remarkably nice and engaged with attendees, going so far as to check on people’s wellbeing and asking if they were staying hydrated.

But one group seemed to outnumber everyone else there — the media, Fairbanks said. There were lots of people yelling and demonstrating, Blakeslee said, and each time even one person was making a lot of noise, even if it was just someone yelling into a bullhorn, “15 or 20 cameras would be focused on that person within 30 seconds,” to make sure they weren’t missing some kind of spectacle.

But the Antioch students weren’t there to document spectacles or highlight the troublemakers. Inspired by the 1972 documentary, the idea was to focus on the average person at the convention and the “everyday” environment of political activism, Fairbanks said. The students spoke with everyone from people carrying flags to the children of demonstrators.

The students made a point to simply listen to the people they were talking to, Chavez-Mayo said. The idea was to get at the personal reasons for supporting their respective candidates instead of engaging them in debate. To do this, the students worked in teams of two, interviewing people for an average 30 minutes per person.

“Being in a position of listening versus arguing is a different approach,” said Chavez-Mayo. “You get to hear more.”

The excitement of being there and the fervor of being among like-minded people, on either side, inspired an effusiveness among interviewees that the film students weren’t expecting. Most people were very willing to talk, said Blakeslee.

Spending so much one-on-one time with Trump supporters, for example, made her change her perspective on who they are, said Chavez-Mayo. Although she found some of their views illogical, she said she could understand why Trump’s rhetoric could be appealing. They were real people attempting to make sense of the world, and they found someone who resonates with their experience, she came to believe.

Bright and Burck, however, were a little less forgiving of what they perceived to be gaps in logic or lack of genuine analysis. So many people believed in odd conspiracy theories, Bright said.

“Everyone was just spitting out something someone else said,” Burck added. “There was no real human connection to their beliefs.”

Blakeslee said what he saw at the convention didn’t bode well for the nature of the two-party system, as the country is stuck with whomever the Republicans and Democrats pick as their nominees, even if members of that party don’t have much in common with their chosen candidate. Noting the intra-party squabbling over an outsider like Trump, lifelong Republicans are nonetheless going to support the Republican candidate no matter what, he said.

As the students spent more time at the convention, they grew more comfortable speaking with people, said Burke. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to go up and engage with total strangers, but the project gave her a sense of confidence and purpose in approaching the people she wanted to talk to.

“I want to do this all the time now,” Chavez-Mayo said.

Exploring the convention on such a personal and in-depth level exposed the group to some very powerful scenes.

Bright described the prompt and incredibly efficient police response to a scuffle. The police ran into the crowd, immediately created a circle around the subjects in the middle, and expanded outward to push people away. They brought in bikes to continue expanding the perimeter. There was also a Muslim man who had a prayer rug set up and was praying all day in the middle of the crowd, Chavez-Mayo said. He had video cameras attached to his body in order to film his own reactions, so he could show how politely Muslims conduct themselves in the face of snickering or misunderstanding. Burke described how another group had explained that Cleveland hosting the RNC was a second sign that a curse over Cleveland had been lifted, before handing out Christian tracts. The first sign was Cleveland winning the NBA championship.

“There was a lot of Cleveland pride,” Fairbanks said.

The raw emotion on display was incredibly moving to several students. One family had pictures of people killed by “illegal aliens” to inspire support for restrictive immigration policies. While the argument made little logical sense, Fairbanks said, learning that one of the demonstrator’s children had been killed by someone from another country gave a little more perspective to their anger. Another man, there with his young son, was advocating for justice for Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was killed by Cleveland police for holding a pellet gun. The man prostrated himself in front of police, yelling at them, his voice choking with emotion.

“He was giving all he could,” Fairbanks said. “It was the only way to express the extreme emotions he felt.”

However, the outright displays of emotion from both sides left a few of the students questioning the efficacy of such vociferous protests and the motivations of the people behind them. “[The protestors] aren’t interested in building a bridge,” Burck said. “They’re just there.” She noted that she didn’t feel any connection with Trump supporters, but she also felt alienated from the liberals there as well. It’s like a real life Internet comments section, she said.

“Does this change anything?” she asked. “Does anyone really shift?”

The approach makes for a “savage democracy,” Bright said.

But Chavez-Mayo disagreed, noting that she was willing to listen to more opposing views than she thought she would before going to the convention.

After spending all day immersed in such powerful emotions and arguments, the students had to unwind as a way to process the intensity of their surroundings, Blakeslee said. Whenever they got back together, they got pretty silly, he said.

“I had to go sing and dance with the street performers,” Burke said. “It just didn’t feel real.”

All in all, the group filled up well over a dozen 32-gigabyte memory cards, Blakeslee said. There is a ton of video and audio to go through.

The class will be editing for much of the next quarter, Fairbanks said, though the form their footage will take isn’t quite decided upon yet. Possible options include a feature-length documentary, a series, podcasts or some combination of all of these. Whatever format their project takes, Fairbanks said that crossing the political divide and talking to people has the potential to inspire empathy and understanding.

After a few days’ reflection about what they saw and how they will present it, the members of the group all agreed that it was an incredibly worthwhile experience.

“It really, really changed my outlook on protests, politics and filmmaking,” Blakeslee said.

Living, learning in the real world

Why YS?
This is the tenth article in an
occasional series looking at why people choose to live in Yellow Springs. If you have a story that fits our theme, feel free to contact us at ysnews@ysnews.com.

“Hey, Alex.” “Hi, Alex.” “Alex!”

From the Mills Park Hotel to the Spirited Goat, people know her by name. A former Antioch College student and onetime Tom’s Market employee, she now works as the special events coordinator for the Chamber of Commerce.

Meet Alexandra Scott: event planner, poet, activist, coffeehouse lover, future entrepreneur, villager.

Scott, 22, moved to Yellow Springs in 2012 to attend Antioch, drawn by its progressive legacy and the chance to help remake the college. She had two positive co-op experiences, at a food hub in Columbus and as a Miller Fellow at the Yellow Springs Arts Council, where she helped launch the Artists’ Directory, but decided to leave Antioch during her second year. “It just wasn’t the right time in my life” for college, she reflected in a recent interview. But she enjoyed the blend of art and social justice in Yellow Springs. And so she stayed.

“I don’t have any regrets. I’m really glad I’m here,” she said.

In fact, the Columbus native had been coming to Yellow Springs since she was a baby — for Street Fair. “My mom and I are huge festival fans,” Scott grinned. Scott was raised by her mom, Karen; her dad died when she was three, and perhaps as a result, mother and daughter have always been close. Scott counts her among her mentors and heroes.

Scott and her mom still take part in Street Fair. But these days Scott is the organizing force behind the twice-annual event — the most recent June Street Fair was the third she’d had a major hand in planning — and her mom helps staff the event as a volunteer.

Mother and daughter share another passion: poetry. Scott described difficult times earlier in her life. “I was bullied in elementary and middle school,” she said. “I was really shy; I didn’t like myself.” But she began to flourish in high school after discovering poetry and finding her niche in the Columbus poetry scene. Soon she was writing and performing regularly. She even co-performed a piece during the 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam, a national event. And she brought her mom into poetry.

Now, according to Scott, the word in Columbus poetry circles is, “If Karen Scott’s not coming to your poetry night, your poetry ain’t shit!” Scott’s tone was playful, and proud.

If poetry has been transformative, so has making her way in Yellow Springs. When Scott left Antioch in 2014, she faced two immediate challenges: finding a job, and finding a place to live. She worked at Tom’s Market as a cashier for nearly a year. (She was part of the “Antioch takeover” at Tom’s, she joked, a period that saw a surge of students working there.) She picked up a few hours of weekend work at the Chamber while still employed at Tom’s, and accepted her current Chamber position in March of 2015.

“Before I worked for the Chamber, things were a lot harder,” Scott admitted, describing a time when making ends meet was tough. “When I was so broke I could barely afford food, people helped me,” she said. If she needed something, she could put the word out on Facebook, and count on villagers to respond. (She’s since left Open Discussion, though, turned off by the “mean” spirit that can surface there.)

“There’s always someone there when you need something,” she said. To her, this willingness to help is a defining characteristic of life in Yellow Springs. “If I was anywhere else I would not have made it this far,” she speculated. She credits Karen Wintrow, her boss at the Chamber, for professional mentoring and support.

“She treats me like a co-worker, she listens to my ideas,” Scott said.

Owning neither a car nor a bike, Scott walks everywhere in town. Walking back from doctor’s appointments or other errands on the edge of the village, she is nearly always offered a ride, sometimes by a villager she knows only by sight. “I feel a lot of gratitude to a lot of people,” she said.

She’s been similarly lucky in her housing experiences, she said. She lived with a friend briefly, then rented a room from villager Leslie Lippert, “who took a chance on me.” Lippert remains a mentor and friend.

About a year ago, Scott was able to rent her own apartment on Dayton Street, where “the people watching is great, and the Gulch is my downstairs living room,” she laughed.

That location is key. Scott is just down the street from the Spirited Goat, “a place that means a lot to me,” she said. It was at the Goat that she discovered she loved to dance, and where she learned to play guitar. “I came out of my shell here,” she said, referring both to the coffeehouse and the wider village.

Coffeehouses are important to Scott — so important that she hopes to open her own someday. “I want to make people happy, and bring the arts to them” through poetry, music and visual art on the walls, she said. Her favorite Columbus coffeehouse is Kafe Kerouac, which she considers “another home to me.” She still goes back there, and helps staff their annual overnight poetry event, working from 1 a.m. to noon.

“I want to open a coffee shop when I’m older, but I’m not sure when ‘older’ is supposed to be,” Scott said. For now, she’s “saving up and just working on myself — pursuing my passions that aren’t work-related.” She doesn’t plan to return to a residential college, but rather envisions getting an online associates degree in business to help advance her coffeehouse dream.

Scott is deeply engaged by social justice issues, especially concerns pertinent to women, African Americans and trans people. Having taken part in Occupy rallies in Columbus and protests of the 2014 John Crawford shooting, she reflected a bit on her efforts to speak up against racism, sexism and other forms of injustice in everyday life. Through her Chamber work, she’s helped organize Yellow Springs Pride, and she recently joined the Home, Inc. board as an interim member, prompted by her passion for tenant rights issues.

“I can stand up for people who aren’t me,” she said, emphasizing the importance of “being an ally to people whose oppressions are different from yours.” But sometimes she struggles to stand up for herself “in that hard moment when something comes up.” She recently made the decision to do so. “I think I’m over worrying about people getting upset with me,” she said. “I’m a black woman and I’d like to be respected as a human being.”

A few years ago, Scott self-published a poetry chapbook titled, “If I Could Be Louder.” She’s just not loud or confrontational by nature, she said; people tend to describe her as “really chill,” “so nice” and “old soul.” Yet in her own quiet way, she’s having an impact, according to Chamber Executive Director Wintrow.

“We work under some very stressful situations especially with Street Fair and I’ve never seen her lose her cool or get angry. She puts everyone we work with at ease with her humor, helpfulness and kindness,” Wintrow wrote in an email this week.

Scott reflected that she’s “changed a lot” since coming to Yellow Springs. “I’m stronger than I was four years ago, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot, experienced a lot.”

Lippert, who saw Scott through some early “growing pains,” said it’s been a pleasure to watch her flourish. “I always thought Alex was somebody really special. … It’s been gratifying to see her grow up and find her place in the world.”

This fall, after October Street Fair, Scott plans to visit the Colorado mountains. Having never lived outside Ohio, she’s keen to travel. And given that touch of wanderlust, Yellow Springs may not be her home forever, she admitted. But it will remain her home in another, deeper way.

“This is where I came to be who I am,” she said.