Save Antioch College

Hello Mr. Lawry,

Jimmy Williams is an integral part of the Antioch community and a knowledgeable point of access to the strands that tie Antioch’s past to Antioch’s future. I am saddened to see that his importance has been overlooked by this administration.

I am also amazed and appalled to hear that you don’t believe a dedicated Dean of Students is important to student recruitment and retention. Who else is there to act as a direct connection between the students who pay for the experience and those who work for them: you, Mr. Lawry, and all of the offices you oversee.

I’m sure Mr. Williams will make out fine without Antioch, and I’m sure you will save some money without a Dean of Students (or his secretary), but I believe the Antioch community got the short end of the stick on this decision.

Sincerely,

Forrest Gray

Class of 2000

While this may sound out of left field, has anyone considered contacting The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? If they are truly committed to improving and providing education to the population at large, then perhaps they would be willing to assist in or provide a grant that would sustain the college through the proposed period of rebuilding. If this develops into a real possibility, then Antioch would certainly have to install a new president firmly vested in higher education, who would make decisions limited to the betterment of the institution and firmly committed to Horace Mann’s founding principles. The Gates Foundation requires a letter of inquiring prior to submitting any proposal. So, I am going to take it upon myself to come up with a something that I hope will pique their interest in getting involved. I’ll update you as things develop.

Respectfully,

Sid Blair

class of 1983

Trustees Must be Turned Around or Locked Out Vision & Stature

For many, and not just alums, Antioch College has been a crown jewel, perhaps even the crown jewel, of college education in this country and perhaps beyond. Number three among colleges in Macarthur genius awards. Long among the highest in Graduate Record Exam standings, among many other academic as well as broader standards of liberal arts education. Current postings show Antioch has even been very highly rated in scientific education. As the first, and perhaps still, the unique liberal arts college in use of work-study programs, it contributes in myriad ways to our nation and the world. Its gender and racial equality policies go back far beyond even the Arthur Morgan era of the 1920s and 1920s. Despite the disastrous over-reaching attempts over the recent decades to spawn off-shoots, there is not one sign of a replacement. Tradition & Decline

When some of us attended Antioch the ratio of applicants to admissions was one of the highest in the nation. The impact of the total Antioch experience on students and their life work has been imponderable. The production of broad-minded and vigorous liberals was without parallel. Only the mush-brained liberalism of those who oversaw the hijacking of the College, leaning far over backward for students who should never been admitted and apparently the professional avarice of Trustees who, we are now informed by former Trustees, disdain the College in favor of their satellite so-called University operations can explain the new Antioch College, a sad ‘ghost’ of its former preeminence. Social Ferment & Social Chaos

Since the 1930s increased concern for economic as well as social progress in the great advances for labor and civil rights expressed in the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal,
Antioch has been a national college, with substantial recognition from
California to New York and a student body to match. But families and their prospective students from major urban centers have not been conned by the mushy-brained liberalism of recent years and shifted their application focus to second choice colleges, as my sons did, one to Harvard and his brother to another Ivy League school. Proper investments in staff and facilities rehabilitation as well as balanced attitudes toward students is urgently needed to reverse that grotesque decline, graphically depicted in Michael Goldfarb’s Op Ed article in the New York Times yesterday, June 17. Outrage & Action

Time for whining about decay and maudlin recollection is over. The modest endowment was over $60,000,000 and it is still reported to be $30,000,000, not chicken feed, if enough to whet the appetite of carnivorous satellites. It must be used to restore the College, not continue to bleed the College dry in favor the questionable satellites, which cannot possibly compare in their significance to the College. It is vainly but devoutly to be wished that the current outrageous Trustee pronunciamento is merely a ‘clever’ bid for contributions. But more likely, effective action must be taken to reverse the decision, by court injunction if necessary, and replace the Board of Trustees with those concerned about the College, not just the so-called University. Very simply, it clear the Trustees failed both in their most basic substantive obligations as well as in decent and transparent process. Even in this era of indulgent corporate malfeasance, such actions bring jail terms. I’m getting a bit old for civil disobedience but surely some could hang and/or burn in effigy the malefactor Trustees. Or a court ordered injunction.

Perhaps all good things end, but the current national nightmare demands more, not less, Antioch education.

Surely the so-called Right Winger pols, pundits, and related Neros are celebrating this grotesque event. Is it possible there is more than money involved, or more behind the money problem? The abrupt action others document suggests guilty manipulation now common in our federal executive offices.

My wife and I, as well as classmates, found our life roles absolutely transformed to enable manifestation of Horace Mann’s dictum. Three of my children did not attend but now, well into their very different careers, they have also fulfilled that vision.

There may not be a lot of Arthur Morgans out there, but Bob Devine or perhaps some nominee of his must be drafted to restore some decency to this essential institution.

The hijacking must cease.

As our only elected Bush president, Bush 41, used to say, ‘This will not stand.’

BobBogen@hotmail.com

Dear Antiochians:

I am a 1983 graduate of Antioch College–the last class to receive a B.F.A. from a dying fine arts program–even then one of the best in its league. I attended the college from 1979-1983 and lived in Yellow Springs until 1992. It is strange, because in the spring of 1979, after I applied and was accepted; the hometown newspaper in Kent, OH reported that Antioch was not able to pay its faculty and may be closing its doors. It was the big joke at our commencement that Antioch actually made it to 1983, for our class to graduate. One of the speakers read letters from the archives in 1850’s about the financial struggles and that they may be forced to close the doors. Financial woes are in the DNA of Antioch’s institutional structure.

I have always seen Antioch as a Phoenix that rises from its own destructive tendencies. However, there has been a collective memory that keeps the place afloat, along with a freshness from all the comings and goings of the students and the stability of a faculty/staff who understood the place and held it together for each generation. I wonder is this base eroding? The historic/global and technical challenges loom larger than they did 20+ years ago when I attended. The baby boomers were dwindling, even then, and enrollment was down.

We are losing a sense of place–a scripted and generic world is replacing what is most unique in us as a country. Antioch has always been a champion of the terminally unique, for better and for worse, but it always managed to survive.

I do not see any great visionary leaders on the horizon. I wonder if Steve Lawry really gets the place? Obviously the doors are closing, so the right leadership has not been taken. How can you have Antioch without the College? It is the heart and soul of the organization. Monumental mistake to close the campus.

Antioch College is about this wonderful merging of ideal and place. There is an experimentation and a certain political banter, but there is a tradition of challenging, even renegade teachers (sometimes even administrators!) and characters that stay with you for the rest of your life. And there is the beauty of Yellow Springs, which has an air of the transcendental in its marrow. It is a tangible presence, connected to the natural world in which the campus and Village are merged. There is no Antioch without the Village of Yellow Springs and visa versa–I would hate to see them go their separate ways, if that were even possible.

Antioch has always been about character and place, not institutional conformity or curriculum or even academic rigor. It has been about exploring character and being challenged by characters to open oneself to character in oneself–for better and worse–and to the character of a place. It’s historical figures have taken on a certain, challenging, “epic” character. I have found it to be true that finding my own character, I can learn anything and reinvent myself over and over. This is the best that an American Liberal Arts training can offer. It is why all of us who have set foot on that campus do not forget it, even if we leave it, it stays with us.

However, to hear people talk about the same problems that we did in 1980’s–“the problem is the University” or the problem is the “never recuperating from the extremism of the late 1960’s and early1970’s”–I do not buy. This sounds like “dejavu, all over again”! We just keep spinning our wheels with the same old rhetoric. It seems there has not been the right combination of leaders to reinvent the place for the next generation. It is stagnating.

At the moment the news does not bode well. There have been other moments of bad news and the place survived. Bad news today. 28 years later, it appears the news has finally come, that the doors are closing. Sad for all of us whose characters have been formed in the crucible of Antioch College, it is our loss; and we know it to be a loss for American culture, as well.

I want to encourage the current students and staff to fight like hell to keep it open. Start your own campaign. Find your character and get it to stand up for its place. It is hard for me to imagine an American educational landscape without the place and character of Antioch.

I hope the board realizes that to cave into the current forces is a huge failure of charcter on its part and a poor excuse for leadership.

Sincerely,
Lesley A. Pownall Bahr, B.F.A. ’83
Ottertail, Minnesota