Save Antioch College

At Antioch College a new class of 45 students has been accepted, three of the six initial faculty positions have been filled and work to renovate the campus continues. While optimism is high, finances are tight, and as the college moves closer to re-opening this fall, its reliance on donations will continue to grow.

“We are in the interesting position of not expecting significant revenue from students until 2013, so we are more dependent on philanthropy until then,” said President Mark Roosevelt in an interview last week, pointing out that the re-opened college will pay the full four-year tuition for the first class of students who enroll.

Currently, the college has just two months of operating cash on hand even while it counts as assets a $25-million endowment in addition to $5.5 million in outstanding pledges.

“I can’t deny that having two months of money in the bank is a challenge,” Roosevelt said. “But we will end this year with a surplus, because we will raise more than we spend.”

By the end of the college’s fiscal year in June, Roosevelt expects to raise additional money from this year’s outstanding pledges and alumni at this summer’s reunion, especially as the college takes major steps towards re-opening.

Antioch’s annual expenses of $6.5 million will increase to about $8 million in the fall to pay for faculty, staff and facilities. But some of the endowment’s restricted funds for scholarships will be available then, though the college is only allowed to use 5 percent of its endowment each year to operate.

To pay for expenses next fiscal year, Roosevelt estimates about $2 million will come from donors giving to Antioch’s annual fund, $1.4 million from the endowment and the remaining, about $4.6 million, from major gifts.

“There are some people of means deeply committed to seeing this enterprise succeed and many of these same people will have to fill the gap,” he said.“My job is to be able to create an institution that is attractive to other folks not in this core group and cultivate a large group of caring alums.”

Roosevelt said he hopes the alumni who have been “true believers,” supporting the college when it wasn’t clear if it would succeed, will pass the baton to those who have been hesitant to donate in an uncertain time or because of contentious issues such as the role of former faculty. Before then, more healing needs to take place in the Antioch community, Roosevelt said.

“Not that everyone is happy, but there is progress on reducing the loud tensions,” Roosevelt said, citing the hiring of former professor Hassan Rahmanian as dean of curriculum, assessment, planning and interdisciplinary learning, and continued conversations with former faculty to see how they might fit into the new college.

“[The tensions] need to be dealt with to create the atmosphere that giving will take place in,” he added. Roosevelt is also beginning to meet with large foundations to diversify the college’s donation sources.

“Technically we’re completely dependent upon alumni and other philanthropists right now,” echoed Antioch Pro Tempore Board Chair Lee Morgan. “But we have a relatively healthy balance sheet compared to many schools that have a lot of debt.”

The 45 admitted students and their families have been invited to campus on Sunday, April 17, for a campus tour and presentations by alumni. Alumnus Timothy Barrett, a MacArthur Genius Award winner, will speak, recent graduates will share their co-op experiences and prospective students will tour the Birch Residence Hall, where they will live and eat if they enroll.

By the end of April, the next three full-time faculty positions, in Spanish, literature and 3-D art, will be announced, Roosevelt said. And nearly $3 million has been spent on building renovations and maintenance since independence, which Roosevelt hopes to accelerate before the school year begins.

“Our goal is to be the greenest campus known to man,” Roosevelt said, citing his hope to raise money from large donors for energy-efficiency upgrades. In the meantime, conversations with local groups about partnering to renovate and operate a gym and performance space continue.

As the college moves closer to re-opening, Roosevelt said he believes the money will follow.

“They’ve raised $22 million in the last few years with no students, a campus and only a hope,” he said. “So there is urgency, there is need, but there are also resources and commitments.”

Stop. Close your eyes. Now envision an Antioch College where students are challenged to contemplate as well as analyze — to understand the outer world and reflect on the inner.

Imagine that classes might start with a 10-minute meditation, that students experiment with contemplative practices from spiritual traditions around the world, and that they bring mindfulness to bear on math and physics equations as well as to works of art and literature.

If this sounds Antiochian, it’s because it is. A group consisting largely of former Antioch faculty and students is promoting contemplative education as the fourth “C,” and one which would enhance the existing principles of classroom, co-op and community.

And if the group is successful in its efforts, beginning with a groundbreaking symposium this weekend, the college’s future students may have better attention, empathy, tolerance, equanimity and less stress, anxiety and distractions than other college students, organizers said.

At “Green Space for the Mind,” on Saturday, April 9, at Antioch’s Herndon Gallery, leading scholars will report on their efforts to incorporate contemplative practices into higher education. A Christian monk, a University of California neuroscientist, a professor of Buddhism and a Brown University institute director will offer advice on how the revived college could lead in this emerging field. The event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., is free and open to the public.

“The college would be at the forefront of something that is a big part of where higher education is heading,” said organizer Amy Maruyama, a 1996 Antioch graduate.

Contemplative practices would help students think more deeply about subjects and integrate new perspectives, according to organizer Robert Pryor, founder and director of Antioch Education Abroad’s Buddhist Studies Program.

“It’s not an alternative to rational thinking, it’s an enhancement,” said Pryor, also the symposium moderator. “We don’t have a different goal about liberal arts — these methods help achieve the traditional goals of education.”

Harold Roth, director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University and a panelist at Saturday’s symposium, said he sees contemplative practices as a way to foster academic learning as well as to help students deal with emotional stresses and get along with one another.

“They are less judgmental about themselves and have more compassion for themselves and others,” Roth said of students employing such practices.

Sponsored by the Southwest Ohio Council for Higher Education, or SOCHE, the symposium is the first of four events over the next few years introducing the Antioch and greater academic community to the benefits of contemplative practices and how to use them on campuses and in classrooms. SOCHE has given $10,000 to the initiative, with half going to its first event.

Daniel Goleman, best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence, will speak via Webcast at 10 a.m. on environmentally-conscious consumerism, the topic of his latest book, Ecological Intelligence. Goleman’s son, Hanuman, is an Antioch alumnus.

Following Goleman’s address and a lunch break, a panel discussion will begin at 1 p.m. among Roth, Linda-Susan Beard, a Bryn Mawr College associate professor of literature; John Makransky, professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston College, and Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis.

Beard will offer contemplative practices from a Western spiritual perspective and Makransky brings an Eastern one, while Antioch’s model would be secular.

“It’s not only a spiritual practice or a wellness practice,” added Maruyama. “It can contribute to scientific innovation by opening new pathways in the brain to allow thoughts to expand and grow.”

While the traditions date back millennia, scientific research into their effect on the brain only go back several decades. Saron will share the results of his groundbreaking research on the long-term neurological changes resulting from meditation and mindfulness practices.

Learning meditation, mindfulness and relaxation techniques could particularly be valuable to Antioch students, who may have more stress from the community process and their co-op experiences, organizers said. Plus today’s generation, they said, needs to learn how to quiet and focus their minds now more than ever as the rise of digital media has shortened attention spans and increased distractions.

Like an Antioch education, contemplative practice may be hard to quantify. But the organizing team of Maruyama, Pryor, Egart, Denman and Dianeah Wanicek stress the value of contemplation, and its importance for the college.

“Antioch has an opportunity to build contemplative practices into the curriculum from the ground up,” Roth said. “Places already established don’t have the flexibility.”