Save Antioch College

By Megan Rosenfeld

Saturday, July 21, 2007; Page A13

Geez, what did Antioch College ever do to George F. Will? My alma mater is on the skids, gasping for breath, and Will kicks sand in its face [” Forfeited Glory,” op-ed, July 15].

It’s easy to make fun of Antioch, which announced last month that lack of money would force it to close at the end of the coming academic year, 156 years after its founding. But why not look beyond cheap shots about hippies and radicals and ask why Antioch should be saved?
Bard College President Leon Botstein said recently that the closing of Antioch would be a “tragedy” and that the school is the “unfair victim” of liberals’ failure to give money to higher education (he noted that most instead endow programs to eradicate poverty and discrimination and to take on other worthwhile causes). As Botstein pointed out, small, independent colleges such as Antioch are needed to help preserve the goals of a free and just society and to educate those who will demand the responsive government we all deserve.

We need people who do not accept the status quo. “Antioch taught me to speak up for myself,” one graduate said at a recent meeting of shocked alums in Washington. We need people who have learned — in addition to history and science — to question authority.

There are a lot of reasons the school is going under, as fierce Internet traffic among alumni in recent weeks has shown. Blame it on the over-the-top radicals and the wimpy administrators of the 1970s; blame it on the tight-fisted alumni who felt unloved and responded in kind. Blame it on the multiple campuses and the unworkable governing structure that reigned over all with split focus and at times neglect. Blame it on lousy presidents, and the culture of consumerism, and, oh heck, blame it on Lindsay Lohan, too.

But don’t blame it on a failure of liberalism. That’s much too simple.

Institutions that experiment with the content of higher education, such as Antioch’s co-op job program combining classroom learning with real-world experience, often have a tough time keeping ahead of their mandate for innovation. The co-op job program, for example, has been obviated by the ubiquitous institution of internships and summer jobs for most college students. Other progressive schools, such as Bard, have found that courses in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are avant-garde. But Antioch should be allowed to carry on its role as a laboratory for higher education. Our mistakes often save other schools time and money.

When my husband was at Yale, the unofficial motto was, “We go to school to learn to rule.” Maybe that’s one reason they have a $20 billion endowment. Our motto is, “Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity.” Maybe that’s why we don’t.

(The motto of Trinity College, George Will’s alma mater, is, “Pro Ecclesia et Patria” — for church and country. Not quite as inclusive as “humanity,” but I’m not criticizing.)

Our small campus in Ohio has always been a target for anyone with an anti-progressive bent. When I was there in the late ’60s, the tiny Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan regularly marched down the main street of campus, apparently under the assumption that if Antioch vanished, the Klan’s racism could flourish. Some of us set up lemonade stands and watched the marchers from the sidelines.

The sexual-conduct pledge of the early ’90s came in for a lot of derision — but from what I’ve read and heard, date rape is not a problem at Antioch as it is on other campuses. All colleges today are petri dishes of social issues. When my son entered Temple University — a large, public, urban school — six years ago, he had to sign a pledge not to bring guns into his dorm. I talked recently with a woman who left Smith College a decade ago because she felt overwhelmed by pressure to be a lesbian. Antioch is not alone in incubating a kind of monolithic radicalism that allows for little deviation from leftist mantras. Our college leaders are aware of this problem and are wondering how to fix it.

Antioch has produced a suitable number of MacArthur “genius” award winners, doctors and lawyers, if that’s how you measure success. The proportion of Antiochians going on to get PhDs is one of the highest in the nation. We are proud to have never had a football team or a fraternity. To the best of my knowledge, “beer pong” was not invented on our campus.

Most of us alumni — who raised nearly $500,000 for an Antioch revival fund over the recent reunion weekend — do not want to preserve the starving, attenuated Antioch of today. We want our robust, challenging school back, the one that gave a home to oddballs of all kinds, that allowed the marketplace of ideas to flourish and that had a sense of humor.

If George Will hates us, we must be doing something right.

Megan Rosenfeld, a graduate of Antioch College, is a Washington writer and former Post reporter. Her e-mail address is rosenfeldm@verizon.net.

Letter to the Editor
Friday, July 20, 2007; Page A18

George F. Will’s July 15 op-ed, “Forfeited Glory,” argued that the suspension of Antioch College’s operations was caused by “repressive liberalism unleavened by learning.” The argument fails to fit the facts.

Antioch College’s governance structure is participatory and democratic and is no more toxic than any other democracy. True to its democratic ideals, Antioch has many powerful elected governance councils open to students, faculty members and administrators. As with any democracy, if a community member does not agree with a decision, that member can express displeasure at the polls or run for office. This is not a toxic culture; this is democracy at its best.

Above all, Antioch presents the student with every tool necessary for a world-class academic, experiential and democratic education, but it demands that students take responsibility for their own learning. This is an alien concept in today’s higher-education market, where students are predominantly customers purchasing an expensive service; most prospective students dare not take Antioch’s challenge.

Antioch is not as “user-friendly” as most colleges today, but it offers an unforgettable, challenging education that is second to none. A powerful coalition of outraged alumni, passionate faculty members and dedicated trustees will not let Antioch die.

JONAH LIEBERT

Woodside, N.Y.

The writer is a 2003 graduate of Antioch College.

 Update:  Deadline extended to Tuesday July 31, 2007

Community Government is calling for Letters to be written to the Board of Trustees. These letters
will be accepted in two forms, through email to the address
LettersToTheBoard@gmail.com and through snail/paper mail to:

Community Government
795 Livermore Street
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

The intent of these letters is to express why you think Antioch should
stay open, what Antioch means to you and a statement of your support for the college. All of these letters will be
compiled into a book and sent directly to each Board Member, with the
intention to persuade them to reverse their decision to suspend operations of
Antioch College at the Emergency Board Meeting in August. These letters
will be accepted no later than Tuesday, July 31st. That deadline is really
soon, but gives us enough time to take the emails and compile them into a
book.

We urge you to be both respectful and constructive in your comments. Also, please include your class year to demonstrate our broad, intergenerational support of this effort. If you have any questions contact Community Manager Rory Adams-Cheatham at vadams@antioch-college.edu.

From LA Times

Dr. George W. Comstock, a pioneering epidemiologist who almost single-handedly blocked the use of the flawed BCG tuberculosis vaccine in the United States and who played a key role in the development of other prevention strategies against the disease, died Sunday at his home in Smithsburg, Md. He was 92 and had battled prostate cancer for several years.

.Comstock was a young commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service after World War II when federal officials were considering a mass vaccination campaign against tuberculosis using the relatively new Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccine, which is made from an attenuated strain of mycobacterium that produces TB in cows.

He organized a trial of the BCG vaccine in Georgia and Alabama that stretched from 1947 to 1951 and concluded that the vaccine had an efficacy of only 14% in preventing the disease. He argued forcefully that the efficacy was too low to produce widespread benefit and that vaccination would render the Mantoux skin test for detecting TB infections useless by making vaccine recipients permanently positive.

In a country like the United States, with a relatively low incidence of TB, he argued, it was more important to be able to identify those exposed to the mycobacterium and treat them. Federal authorities agreed, and the vaccine was never widely used here.

“He always saw this as one of his most important contributions,” said Dr. Jonathan Samet, chairman of the department of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where Comstock taught for more than 40 years.

In the 1950s, after the development of the TB drug isoniazid, Comstock learned that Alaska had one of the highest TB rates in the world.

He moved his family to Bethel, Alaska, and began administering the drug to everyone who had been exposed to the mycobacterium — as well as to himself and his family.

He showed that the drug could prevent infections from progressing to full-blown TB, and that the optimum treatment time with the drug was nine months. The protocol he developed for therapy — still in use — was a major contributor in bringing the outbreak in Alaska under control.

After 21 years in the Public Health Service, Comstock retired and joined Hopkins, where he founded the university’s Training Center for Public Health Research and Prevention in Hagerstown, Md. — a unit that was renamed after him in 2004.

He pioneered work in community-based health studies looking for the causes of cancer, heart disease, eye disease and other ailments.

He was among the first to collect blood and other biological samples that were frozen and stored for future analysis. By looking at samples from patients who developed cancer, for example, the researchers could determine whether there were any substances in the blood that might have predicted the onset of the disease.

There was great interest at the time in whether consuming supplements containing vitamin A and beta-carotene might reduce the risk of lung cancer among smokers. His studies showed that, at best, there was only a small association between higher levels of the supplements and a reduced risk.

George Wills Comstock was born Jan. 7, 1915, in Niagara Falls, N.Y. While pursuing his undergraduate studies at Antioch College in Ohio, he obtained a part-time job at Eli Lilly’s pharmaceutical laboratory.

He worked in a lab that studied pellagra.

Although his job “mostly involved washing glassware and cleaning dog cages,” he later said, his boss persuaded him to switch from biochemistry to medicine and to attend Harvard Medical School.

Upon graduation from Harvard, he joined the Public Health Service because it paid more than a conventional internship.

He subsequently received a master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins.

Outside of medicine, Comstock’s passion was music. He was a woodwind player in various symphony orchestras and for many summers took part in recorder camps. “Early music” was frequently heard in his household; he taught the entire family to play the recorder.

Comstock frequently quoted Horace Mann’s 1859 commencement address at Antioch College: “Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity.” Comstock expanded on that theme, noting that “most of us aren’t going to win any big victories, but we can win little ones every day, and they mount up.”

Comstock’s wife of 60 years, Margaret Karr Comstock, died in 1999. In 2001, he married the former Emma Lou Davis.

In addition to his wife, Comstock is survived by two sons, Dr. Gordon Frederick Comstock of Arcade, N.Y., and Dr. Lloyd Karr Comstock of Chapel Hill, N.C.; a daughter, Martha Wills Comstock Williams of Marietta, Ga.; five grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; two stepchildren; and two step-grandchildren.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com