Last Friday, Dec. 3, several Antioch College students, faculty and townspeople participated in a candlelight vigil on Xenia Avenue, in a display of solidarity with Mexico for the disappearance and subsequent murder of 43 students on their way to protest discriminatory hiring and funding practices by the government. The students had been arrested by police and, allegedly upon approval by the region’s mayor, turned over to a drug cartel for disposal.
Antioch student Odette Chavez-Mayo organized the event after she found out about the murders. “I felt extremely frustrated…like there was nothing I could do to help,” she wrote in an email.
“Although this wasn’t the first time that people in Mexico have gone missing (over 25,000 in the past 8 years and 100,000 murdered) it definitely caused an uproar and now people are out on the streets demanding justice.”
Chavez-Mayo wrote that she “reached out to #UStired2, an organization in the United States that was planning demonstrations all over the country… to spread awareness on the issues and to demand the U.S. government immediately stop the Merida Initiative,” a security cooperation agreement between the United States and Mexico, with the declared aim of combating the threats of drug trafficking, transnational organized crime and money laundering. Critics point out that the efficacy of the program is often thwarted because of corrupt government officials, police and military.
“My purpose was to bring awareness on the injustices happening in Mexico, the extreme corruption of the government, and the police brutality,” Chavez-Mayo writes, “all of which, I think is not that different from everything that’s been happening in Ferguson lately, so I think it’s extremely important to stick together.”
The protesters handed out flyers, each with a picture of one of the 43 murdered students. They also placed 43 candles at the foot of a large tree, which were left to burn as the vigil waned and dusk descended, making the flames increasingly prominent.
Antioch College presents ‘Softcops’
Antioch College opens the surreal comic-drama “Softcops” by Caryl Churchill this weekend, Dec. 5 and 6, at 8 p.m., at the newly renovated Foundry Theater on Corry Street.
The play was first presented in 1984 at the Barbican Pit in London and concerns itself with the evolution of the Western penal system, from the guillotine to the contemporary practice of surveillance. The play is loosely based on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,” written in 1975.
The Antioch production is directed by Louise Smith, her first since returning to the faculty as associate professor of performance at Antioch this fall. The production features original music and sound design by student Seth Kaplan ’15 and additional music by Meredith Monk. The cast includes students Sean Allen, Alli King, Kaplan, Gaerin Warman-Szvoboda, Cole Gentry, Spencer Glazer, Hannah Priscilla Craig and Alexander Campbell, who is also stage manager.
Amanda Egloff is technical director, and Michael Casselli is the media designer.
Tickets for “Softcops” are $7 for adults and $5 for seniors and students. Reservations can be made by calling 319-0200.
Antioch College ‘needs more’
In his self-described “transparent” way at the state of the college address last week, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt summarized the significant challenges involved in remaking the college, now at the start of its fourth year of operation: “You can see it from here, but it’s still just slightly out of reach.”
That’s what he told the tent full of 150 alumni and community members who came to campus Friday to welcome the newest class of 71 students and hear a campus update.
The main issue remains accreditation, for which the college is currently a candidate. The final site visit is scheduled for the first week of November 2015. At that point, Roosevelt said, the school “needs to be 100 percent accreditable.”
“The pressure on us is larger than ever” to get the college’s finances in order and build both capacity and long-term stability. And currently, he said, the group of people with the power to make that happen “is still too small.” The college “needs to do more”; it needs to “chart new ground.”
Even with rigorous academics, an established co-op program, and one of the most energy efficient campuses in the country, Roosevelt told the crowd, the college still needs to be able to stand apart from the rest by being true to its roots as a champion of social justice. The college needs to find ways to engage first-generation college students and those from outside the privileged class. He cited the statistic that 12 years ago 10 percent of U.S. college students came from the bottom 50 percent of the economic strata, and now that number is only 11 percent. The doubling and tripling of scholarship aid over the past decade has not changed the figure. In addition, the college’s academic program needs to help students once they arrive to navigate programs of study that give them the tools to address the problems of inequality and other social and scientific issues the world is facing.
To that end, according to a story in the Antioch Alumni Magazine published this week, the college has a fundraising goal of $19 million this academic year to balance its budget. Of that total, $6 million is already pledged for continued capital improvements for the Art and Science building and part of a third residence hall to open in 2017. But a remaining $13 million needs to be raised for operations and to support the 98 staff and 34 faculty currently working full time on campus, including 10 faculty and 21 staff members hired since July (12 of whom are replacements of employees who have left).
In addition still this year, according to Tom Brookey, the college’s director of human relations, the college plans to hire an assistant director of alumni relations, a new advancement vice-president, associate dean for community life, a nurse, a theater tech director and a Web and graphic designer.
Creating a campus with the physical capacity to house its programs is an ongoing challenge. The total cost estimate to renovate the campus facilities went from $30 million four years ago to a current $120 million. According to the Alumni Magazine, so far the college has raised $35 million through both donor contributions and investment gains on the sale of YSI, Inc. stock, for instance, to fund the renovation of North Hall, the initial phases of the Art and Science building, the start of the Foundry Theater, the Wellness Center, and the central geothermal plant. The future plan calls for an additional $44 million over the next eight to 10 years for facilities that accommodate increasing enrollment and expanding curricula.
Since gaining independence from Antioch University, the college has been able to raise more than $60 million in gifts and commitments from alumni (27 percent participation last year) and friends of the college, according to the Alumni Magazine. That’s good news given that until 2021, more revenue is projected to come from major gifts than from tuition. But the pressure will ease as the Horace Mann full tuition scholarship phases out, beginning next year, and more student-derived revenue comes in to replace it.
The task to raise Antioch College again is “still a struggle,” Roosevelt said last week. But to balance transparency with what he called “uplift,” Roosevelt added more.
“The difficult part is if Antioch College is true to its real mission, it seeks an outsize effect on the world — that means we need to push each other,” he said. “The challenge is to dig deep — the next year and a half will tell a lot about the story of whether Antioch is back or is not.”
Last Antioch College class enters on Horace’s tab
The incoming class at Antioch College may be more diverse, more international and more committed to saving the world than the three classes above them.
According to Antioch Dean of Admissions Micah Canal, 40 percent of the new class are non-white or Hispanic, while nearly one-third are the first generation of their family to attend college. Students with dual citizenship hail from Egypt, Mexico, Liberia, Nigeria, Canada, Burundi, Kenya, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom and Germany. And many also have already committed to making an impact on the world.
The exceptional qualities of the revived college’s fourth class are the latest reasons for optimism at Antioch, which is also celebrating the recent opening of its Wellness Center and Foundry Theater. Meanwhile, a massive solar field connected to a geothermal heating and cooling system is soon to come online and a new Science Building is set to open in mid-December.
This week 71 new students settled into their dorm rooms in North Hall after a dizzying week of orientation activities. Joining them at Antioch this fall semester are nine new faculty members and several new administrators, including a new vice president of academic affairs, a new dean of community life and a new director of the Coretta Scott King Center.
But after a flurry of major building and infrastructure projects and administrative expansions, growth at Antioch could soon be slowing. The incoming class is the last to receive the full tuition scholarship known as the Horace Mann Fellowship. The current enrollment of 246 students is only expected to grow to around 500 by 2022. And while faculty hires are expected to continue to rise, the administration won’t likely grow as fast as it has been, according to Vice President of Finance and Operations Andi Adkins.
Reflecting this week on Antioch’s progress since reopening in 2008, Canal, who was originally one of eight people working to first purchase the college from Antioch University and then reopen it, is awed.
“The amount the organization has grown and what we have done is Herculean and I feel honored to be part of this effort,” Canal said. “We are still a 160-year-old startup that is trying to reinvent higher education.”
Last week, Antioch President Mark Roosevelt addressed the challenges that Antioch faces while acknowledging Antioch’s efforts to redefine higher education in an address last week to students, faculty and staff.
“You’re coming to a college that is re-creating itself in a time where there is an enormous amount of skepticism of higher education in America,” Roosevelt said. Today most undergraduates are “drifting through college with no clear sense of purpose,” Roosevelt added. At the same time many colleges are simply producing “excellent sheep” while focusing on sports and fancy facilities and turning a blind eye to the “party culture.” But Antioch, he said, is a “very different kind of place.”
Antioch does not attract or produce excellent sheep, Roosevelt said, and Antioch is not a place to “hibernate with other people,” as happens at many small liberal arts colleges. Instead Roosevelt called Antioch a “four-year engagement with the world — not a retreat.” Through co-op experiences and impacting an institution that is still a work-in-progress, Antioch students “architect their own education.”
“We are still a work in progress and still establishing our systems and culture,” Roosevelt said. “We’re also a sensitive place because what you do and what you say can have a more profound effect here than at any other school you would attend.”
Admitting the kind of students that can do the academic work (oft-described as “rigorous”) and who want to contribute to rebuilding the college has been an important task for Canal’s office. But once again, Canal said he believes that the right students are here for the right reasons, despite the fact the college received only 10 percent as many applications (around 300 this year) as it did in 2012 after news of its full tuition scholarship went viral.
Looking ahead, Canal said the Horace Mann Fellowships have been de-emphasized during recruiting in recent years. The fellowships will be phased out starting next year, when they will be reduced by 50 percent.
“The value of the Horace Mann Fellowship is something we don’t talk about anymore,” Canal said. Instead, “we talk about the rigor of the academics and the vision that we have empowering the students to practice what they learn in a classroom environment in four co-ops.”
Retention of students at Antioch is also not a concern despite the first class dropping from an initial 35 students to 22 this semester, all of whom are expected to graduate next spring, according to Canal. The Class of 2015’s attrition rate was not surprising, Canal added, considering they were an “extraordinary pioneering group” who had just six faculty members and three open buildings and were without a dining hall for two months.
“They did some of the heaviest lifting,” Canal said. Today’s Antioch students are taking a much lower risk, he added, especially since the school was granted candidacy for accreditation status earlier this year.
As its students begin courses and co-ops this week, administrators at Antioch are also moving the Antioch College Village concept forward, finalizing campus stormwater management and landscape plans and planning for the next self-study on the path to accreditation. When the Science Building is complete, renovations on campus will finally slow down as a new residence hall isn’t needed for two years and renovations of Main Building aren’t projected to begin for at least 10 years. While progress at the college may be less visible in coming years, the work continues apace, administrators said this week.
Antioch College Farm sprouts power
A one-megawatt solar farm recently popped up at Antioch College along Corry Street as part of the college’s plan to become carbon neutral.
Around 3,300 solar panels were erected behind fences on five acres of Antioch property commonly known as a the “golf course.” The panels could begin turning sunlight into electricity for the college later this month, according to Physical Plant Director Reggie Stratton.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Antioch solar farm is 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, before the annual community potluck.
The solar installation will generate 1.2 million kilowatt-hours per year and is expected to offset the electric consumption of Antioch’s $8.8 million geothermal heating and cooling plant, according to a news release.
By 2018, an estimated 90 percent of Antioch’s electric consumption will come from renewable sources as the college looks to be among the first in the nation fueled almost exclusively by green energy, the release added.
“We are proud to be moving forward with these significant investments in clean and renewable energy,” said President Mark Roosevelt in the release. “The new Antioch College is starting at a time when it is abundantly clear that the way we live in America today is not sustainable. We believe we have an obligation to address these issues and have an opportunity to be a model for others.”
Antioch also released the name of the project’s investor, SolarCity. Based in California, SolarCity is the nation’s largest solar service provider, according to the news release. Under an agreement with the college, SolarCity will finance and own the array while selling the power generated to the college at set prices. Solar, Power and Light of Miamisburg was contracted to build and maintain the array.
Future plans for the solar farm include a replacement of the temporary fence along Corry Street, the planting of around 100 trees, bushes and shrubs along fences and the installation of 18 art panels from college and community artists on the fence between the two solar arrays.
Carrying on college Antioch College activist legacy
Fifty years ago this summer, a number of Antioch College students and alumni joined activists from all over the country to converge on Mississippi as a part of Freedom Summer. This project was aimed at establishing and supporting Freedom Schools throughout the state as a response to the segregation laws in the south and to help register African-American voters, particularly to participate in the 1964 Democratic national convention after they had been prevented from participating in the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.
The Freedom Summer project and the events that followed in 1964 left their mark on Antioch. In many ways, the participation of Antioch students and graduates in the project was a continuation of the school’s commitment to social justice, but the experiences of that summer affected many of the participants deeply. For some, this chance to put beliefs into action served as inspiration for a lifelong commitment to activist work. And the college soon gave more students the opportunity to act on their convictions by offering credit for co-op work at organizations like COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, which included the groups that made Freedom Summer possible.
“That was sort of a formalization of this work,” said Scott Sanders, Antioch’s college archivist, recently.
This year, seven current Antioch students participated in this Antioch tradition by traveling to Mississippi during their most recent break to attend a conference on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Like Antioch students of five decades ago, the current students also found themselves inspired in unexpected ways.
When Kijin Higashibaba, now a second-year student, came to Antioch, she was skeptical about the usefulness of social activism in the current political situation. She said she felt like there was no longer anything worth pouring all her energy into, that there were no issues about which anyone could say, “this is definitely wrong.” She signed up for the trip to the conference and the community engagement class to follow with the intention of learning more about the civil rights era, when she said she thought that the protest movement had been more effective.
However, Higashibaba found something unexpected in the workshops and conversations she had with other attendees. Over the course of the conference her cynicism about the validity of taking a strong stance on issues of civil rights diminished. The workshops at the conference helped convince her that it was possible for her to engage in activism around issues that concerned her.
“That was new and different for me,” she said. “I don’t know what the solutions are, but there are things that are just wrong.”
Social justice legacy
In a 1965 article for Antioch’s student paper, the Record, 1965 graduate Terri Shaw described her experiences participating in Freedom Summer. She took a car full of other participants in the Freedom Summer project down to Hattiesburg, where she collected information on intimidation and harassment related to the Freedom Summer project as well as desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, of which she unfortunately found no shortage. Overall, she said, she and other activists had mixed feelings about the experience, torn between excitement about the work they did and “a feeling that we should have accomplished a lot more.”
Shaw also recalled an especially difficult part of the summer. As she drove through Meridian on the way to Hattiesburg, she heard on the radio the news of the disappearance of three civil rights activists, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had been investigating the burning of a church in Longdale. She had been introduced to Schwerner at their training in Oxford, Ohio, and Meridian was only about an hour away from Philadelphia, where the three had gone missing. This news, she said, set the tone for the beginning of her work on the project, just as the discovery of the men’s bodies a few weeks later loomed over the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
In January of this year, David Goodman, a member of Antioch’s board of trustees, contacted Kevin McGruder, professor of history at the college, to tell him about the conference taking place in Mississippi for Freedom Summer’s 50th anniversary. Goodman’s brother, Andrew, was one of the three activists killed outside of Philadelphia. The conversation led McGruder and two other Antioch staff members to accompany seven Antioch students to this conference to understand how they relate to current Antioch.
Questions raised
Freedom Summer 50 took place on the campus of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the historically black colleges most involved in Freedom Summer. The conference both commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer project and hosted workshops on civil rights work that still needs to be done, including workshops on education, health, voting rights, and labor rights. The conference offered students an opportunity to learn about the role played by Antioch students previously and to think about how to apply past lessons to ongoing struggles, according to the participants.
“The conference organizers were very intentional about not having the main focus be on looking back” said McGruder.
The emphasis on the importance of ongoing struggles prompted the students to question what they could be doing to help, several said. Several involved said that they were struck by the how young the people involved in the Freedom Summer project had been, and felt they were doing little important work by comparison. But it was also inspiring to know that students had played a large role in such an important movement.
First-year student Ciana Ayenu said the conference prompted her to think much more about her identity as a black person than is usually the case at Antioch.
“I got to have a lot of interesting conversations about race that we don’t really have here, even though we maybe pretend like we do,” she said.
Especially memorable for second-year student Eric Rhodes was an event that took place just north of Jackson, in Canton, Mississippi. He had followed the labor rights track of the conference, and on the afternoon of Friday, June 27, he participated in a protest to support the unionization efforts of workers at a Nissan manufacturing and assembly plant in Canton. Soon after his bus arrived, the tone of the protest became more serious.
“We were there in front of the gates, probably 400 of us, and this unmarked car pulls up,” Rhodes said. “A guy gets out who has the Nissan insignia all over him.”
As the man seemed to be surveying the situation, several United Auto Workers security workers approached him to find out what he was doing, but he quickly got back in his car and drove away. A few minutes later several Jackson County sheriff SUVs circled the protest, parked near the gates to the factory, and stepped out of their vehicles, carrying shotguns. The man from the unmarked car, who the protesters believed to be a Nissan representative, stood with the police. The experience was unlike anything Rhodes had seen before.
“Coming from my background, being in a place where the state has allied with corporate interests to coerce people through the fear of violence” was eye-opening, he said.
Conference leads to class
This term at Antioch, the seven students are participating in a class on community engagement taught by McGruder and Nick Daily. The class encourages them to apply what they learned at the conference to issues concerning the Antioch community as well as other communities to which the students are connected. While the conference and class are both intended to help produce leaders in community engagement, they both emphasize that leaders don’t necessarily work in the spotlight or have all the answers.
“Really a good community organizer is a lot of times doing that work in the background,” McGruder said. “There are some people who go into these kind of initiatives who think they have to be superman or superwoman and come save the day, and good community organizing is not that.”
McGruder and Daily will guide students toward understanding the needs of the people with whom they’re working, learning how to gather information on those needs and build trust with the people. The students will then describe how they plan to meet those needs, forming plans based on all this information.
In many ways the class facilitates the retention of the connections drawn between Antioch’s activist past and the role these students will play in its future.
Jenn Wheeler is an Antioch College co-op student.