Save Antioch College

In this extraordinary moment in the history of Antioch College, you have been invited by the Antioch College Alumni Association Board of Directors, the elected body representing over 17,000 college alumni, to serve as a member of the Antioch College Board of Trustees Pro Tem. [Download]

As a member of the first board devoted exclusively to leading Antioch College in forty years, you are asked to lead the College in partnership with its key stakeholders through the current crisis, and to lay the foundation for its return to prominence and leadership as a residential liberal arts college based in our long-standing tradition of academic excellence, community governance and cooperative education.  Further, this is a call to re-create an independent and thriving Antioch College that adheres to its historic mission while growing and adapting to the ever-changing social, technological, environmental and financial opportunities and challenges of the 21st century.

For more than a year, college alumni, faculty, staff, students and friends from the Village of Yellow Springs and around the world have committed themselves to sustaining the vision, spirit and soul of Antioch College in preparation for the opportunity to appoint a board of an independent college. The community is grateful for your willingness to accept this weighty responsibility and stands ready to support you. We pledge our talent, time and financial resources to restore Antioch College’s historic stature and reputation.

In the tradition of Antioch College, and in keeping with the trust this invitation represents on the part of our community, we call upon the Board Pro Tem to acknowledge and honor the essential role that community governance will continue to play at Antioch College.  In preparation for the conclusion of the pro tem period of board leadership in thirty-six months, the Alumni Board further calls upon you to engage the community in the process of transitioning to a permanent Board of Trustee structure, and to continue to reflect a commitment to community governance in the vision, mission and by-laws, of the corporation that will ultimately own and govern the College.

In June of 2007 and again in June of 2008, the Alumni Association affirmed its commitment to the future of Antioch College in the form of resolutions passed by those in attendance at reunion and by the Antioch College Alumni Board. We ask that you review these resolutions carefully and consider the valuable insight they can provide to you as you begin your service.

Finally, you are called upon to take the measure of your success as a board from Horace Mann’s exhortation, in the same fashion that all Antiochians have for generations: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”