Tag: From the Print

At a meeting attended by several hundred in the Antioch College community on Tuesday, May 5, College President Mark Roosevelt announced that he will no longer lead the college when his five-year contract expires at the end of 2015.

“We’ve taken a dream and made it a reality,” Roosevelt said to college faculty, staff and students, stating that he’ll leave his job “with enormous regret and mixed feelings.”

However, he said, he believes, “it’s the right time. This gives the college the opportunity to find a new leader to take the college to the next level.”

The decision to leave is clearly Roosevelt’s, and Board of Trustee Chair Frances Horowitz of New York City, who was unable to attend due to a recent fall, thanked him in a statement read by Trustee Maureen Lynch.

“You have exceeded our expectations — which were high — and set us on a path of momentum that we have every confidence will be maintained in the years ahead,” Horowitz wrote.

Hired as the college’s first president a year after Antioch reopened in 2009, Roosevelt faced the daunting task of relaunching a liberal arts college at a time when liberal arts colleges are closing their doors. When he came to Antioch College five years ago, “There were no students, no faculty, no dormitories, no farm, no solar arrays, no identified means for renovating the campus,” Glen Helen Director Nick Boutis said at the event. “It’s extraordinary what we’ve accomplished. I’m deeply grateful that you’ve positioned the school to succeed.”

At the event, Roosevelt also announced that the Morgan Family Foundation has donated $6 million to the college, the largest single gift since Antioch’s rebirth, and perhaps its largest gift ever.

In an interview on Monday, Roosevelt said that while the task of reviving the college is not complete, “I feel a certain sense of completion.” When he leaves in eight months,  “I will have finished what I tried to do for as long as I could.”

And it’s time, Roosevelt said, “to take a deep breath and to consolidate our gains.”

There have been considerable gains, Roosevelt said. First and most important, the college is well on its way to accreditation. The process, which provides criticial legitimacy to colleges and universities, has been unexpectedly long and difficult but after a successful 2013 site visit from the North Central Association, or NCA, accreditation team, Antioch became an official candidate for accreditation, which allows students to receive federal aid. The second and last site visit will take place this November, when Roosevelt will still be on the job. The college could receive full accreditation in June 2016, he said.

“I’m very hopeful. I feel confident,” he said, stating his confidence is linked to the progress the college has made addressing concerns raised by the NCA team. Those concerns centered on financial instability, and the Morgan Foundation gift of $6 million helps to stabilize finances, he said, stating that the college budget will be in the black for 2015, as it has been each year since he arrived.

The need to raise money has been a constant pressure for Roosevelt. So far $75 million has been raised, and the college also received about $30 million from the sale of YSI stock. Along with operations, the funds have financed large renovations on a campus that had for years been allowed to deteriorate, with the largest renovation that of the Science and Art building ($30 million) followed by the Wellness Center ($8 million), Birch and North Hall dormitories ( about $11 million) and the construction of geothermal and solar energy installations. The college also is renovating West Hall for additional student housing, along with the Foundry Theater.

But the need for campus improvement remains huge, Roosevelt said in the interview. The complete renovation of facilities is estimated to cost about $100 million, rather than the $30 million estimated cost made by earlier college leaders, because the deterioration of campus buildings was so profound.

“About the only thing I’m angry about is how the campus was let go, and how everything was done on the cheap,” Roosevelt said about the college previous to its 2008 closing by Antioch University.

The unexpectedly high cost of upgrading the campus was one of several surprises for Roosevelt when he took on the job, he said in the interview. The other two were the difficulty of achieving accreditation and “the woundedness of the community,” around the issue of former faculty of the college, with strong voices raised both for and against rehiring former faculty members. In the end, while former faculty were not hired to teach, several were brought in to the revitalized college in administrative positions.

While the need for ongong fundraising remains critical, significant progress has been made in the depth and breadth of contributors. Before its closing, about 3 to 4 percent of alumni donated to the college, and that number is now up to 30 percent. The college has received in five years about 40,000 individual donations from 8,500 contributors, Roosevelt said.

What these challenges have in common has been the need for supporters to believe in the viability of the reborn Antioch College, Roosevelt said, and instilling that belief has been his most important task.

“My job was to build belief in the possibility of the college’s success,” he said.

He’s proud of his work, Roosevelt said, but ultimately the pressures of constant fundraising weighed on him. The pollen-rich Miami Valley has been hard on his health and worsened allergies and asthma attacks. And Roosevelt and his wife, Dorothy, feel a need for a change.

“For us now, it’s the right time” to move on,” he said.

Roosevelt came to the Antioch College job one year after the college was reopened by alumni after its 2008 closure by Antioch University, following Matthew Derr, the revived college’s interim president. Previously, Roosevelt was for five years superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, where he instituted significant school reform. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he had previously served as a state legislator in Massachusetts and led an educational reform effort in that state. He also ran unsuccessfully for governor of Massachusetts, was the CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives and managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, and taught government at Carnegie Mellon University.

On Monday, Roosevelt said he does not know what his next job will be.

In the interview Monday, Horowitz said that the college revival will continue on pace regardless of Roosevelt’s leaving.

“I think we’re committed to maintaining the momentum already established,” she said. “While a new person may have their own vision, nothing already accomplished will be undone.”

At the Tuesday event, Trustee Malte von Matthiessen, who will chair the search committee, said the committee is being formed, with representatives from students, faculty, administrators and the Board of Trustees. The search will be conducted by Isaacson, Miller, the same firm that brought Roosevelt to Antioch.

•  A variety of pathways on the Antioch College campus to promote walking and biking
•  A diversity of housing models, including cottages, townhouses and co-housing
•  Edible landscaping
•  Places for children to play
•  Incubator space for artists and tech businesses
•  Buildings that promote interactions between people
•  The highest green standards in design and construction
•  Ways to encourage knowledge sharing between generations
•  Affordable homes
•  Hammocks and tree swings

These were only a few of the many ideas, both big and small, that emerged Sunday evening at the Antioch College Village Charrette. Organizers of the Antioch College Village, a proposed project to create about 160 homes on campus, had invited the community to join in this design activity, and the community responded: about 200 people attended the three-hour event on a cold and snowy night. A talk by Oberlin professor David Orr was canceled due to bad weather.

“We live in an interesting time. The dream of what a home looks like is being redefined,” said design consultant Victor Dover of the firm Dover Kohl of Coral Gables, Fla., in opening remarks. The firm has hosted about 200 such design events, according to Dover.

Three other consulting groups also gave brief presentations: the international Integral Group, a “deep green” engineering firm; Biohabitats, a Baltimore interdisciplinary group that includes biologists, ecologists, civil engineers and landscape architects with a mission to “inspire ecological stewardship”; and Sandy Wiggins of Consilience, who is overseeing the Antioch College Village project.

In introduction, Wiggins, the former head of the U.S. Green Building Council, emphasized the importance of environmental sustainability to the project. The Antioch College Village aims to use the Living Community Challenge as its framework, which calls for buildings not just “less bad” than traditional construction, but ones that “actually contribute to the health and vitality of natural systems,”  including net positive energy creation, he said.

The Sunday event featured small groups engaging with each other to identify priorities for the project, as well as locate potential sites for the homes. According to consultant Dover, the activity was “in the spirit of a barn-raising, neighbors getting together to help each other out.” Later, spokespersons for each table reported on their “three big ideas” to the whole group.

On Monday, one participant, Toni Dosik, said she came away very impressed with the event, and with the Antioch College Board of Trustees for “choosing to spend what it must have cost to bring in such a professional team — it was a high caliber of consultants.”

Dosik was also impressed with the inclusiveness and transparency of the process, and disappointed only that the group lacked racial diversity.

Also impressed, Jane Baker said of the consultants running the event, “They figured out how to get the community involved, and to get feedback efficiently. It was very exciting, and something Yellow Springers are obviously enthusiastic about.”

For Amy Magnus, the introductory remarks from the consultants helped to provide a framework for the participants to consider a wealth of ideas without arguing.

“It worked well in our group,” Magnus said. “We were given good guidance.”

Magnus was also impressed that organizers offered a variety of methods to identify preferences, including drawing, writing and an oral report from each table. “They had a good way of capturing people’s input,” she said.

The five-day event continued Monday through Thursday, with a design studio in the South Gym open to the public.

On Tuesday, consultant Wiggins reported that “things are going fabulously” at the event. Along with the enthusiastic participation on Sunday, many villagers have been stopping in to the weekday design studio, along with attending special meetings around the topics of housing, schools and business, among others, Wiggins said. “Participation is outstanding,” he said.

The designers are working “late into the night” to capture ideas and at this point, “there’s clearly a pattern of development emerging,” he said.

Villagers are encouraged to attend the charrette’s final session on Thursday, March 5, at 6 p.m. to  hear from consultants about their work in progress.

Following the charrette, the designers will further refine their designs before doing a financial analysis of the project. Those will be presented to the Antioch College Board of Trustees in spring or early summer, “for their approval, and hopefully, we’ll move forward,” Wiggins said.

Little set in stone

The idea for the Antioch College Village emerged several years ago during a visit to renowned architect and Antioch alum Robert Davis, the creator of the planned community Seaside, Fla., according to Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt in his opening remarks Sunday evening. Davis urged Roosevelt to find ways to incorporate adults into the college community because, according to Davis, “integrating adults into your campus is the next big thing in American higher education.”

The concept resonated with Roosevelt, who initially saw the project as targeted toward “next chapter people,” those in their mid-50s to their 80s who “want to belong, want to be active, want to be part of something that matters,” he said. Many of that demographic came of age in the 60s and 70s, a time of great idealism and, “we’ve been pretty disappointed,” Roosevelt said. “Many would like to spend their later years together, reaffirming those values.”

When Roosevelt has asked “next chapter” alums and others if they find such a concept appealing, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable, he said. And to the organizers’ surprise, a feasibility study indicated that the Antioch College Village attracts not only Baby Boomers, but those of diverse age groups, so that the original market has broadened.

Little of the Antioch College Village is “set in stone” at this point, according to Roosevelt, but one thing is clear. The project has to be income-producing in a way that benefits students at the college, which has a far smaller endowment than most liberal arts colleges.

“We need to think creatively about other sources of revenue,” he said.

So it makes sense to consider the assets of Antioch College, including Glen Helen, WYSO Public Radio and a close relationship with the village, as attributes that might also meet the needs of “next chapter” individuals, along with the financial needs of students, Roosevelt said.

“Our vision is to bring together people interested in finding new and better ways of living together and on the planet,” he said. “And to help support students.”

The News will have a story next week on the March 5 Charrette wrap-up session.

Several hundred villagers took part in last week’s Antioch College Village Charrette, a collaborative design event that aimed to create a plan for a new housing development on campus. Villagers gave input through the week as designers worked late into the night to create a plan, according to consultant Sandy Wiggins. Shown above is a draft version of that plan, in which many kinds of housing are located on the western and northern edges of campus. Above, currently vacant area around North College and Livermore streets, would be filled in with tiny houses, cottage courts, apartment buildings and co-housing. Visit ysnews.com to view the draft presentation of the project.

• Click here to view the entire charrette (197-page PDF document)

It’s like ping-pong if you were on top of the table.

That’s how Al Schlueter described the fast-growing racquet sport with a silly name that is a whacking success at the Antioch College Wellness Center.

It’s called pickleball, and enthusiasts describe it as a cross between tennis, racquetball and ping-pong. Played with a wiffle ball and solid paddle, the game is fast-moving and fun — and it’s a good workout, according to Franklin Halley.

“It’s quick, it takes hand-eye coordination, it’s a reasonable workout, it’s really social, and it gets you smiling,” Halley said of the sport’s benefits.

With six courts striped for play at the new wellness center, pickleball is attracting lots of players. Enthusiasts say that anyone of any age or ability can pick up the game quickly and start to compete. And since it’s usually played as doubles, it’s very social.

The makeup of the dozen or so villagers who came out for the popular Sunday pick-up game included three newbies and a host of regulars eager to teach them. There were young adults and septuagenarians. It included pickleball player of six years and Senior Olympic competitor Deloria Jacobs, who donned her own high-tech paddle and gloves; Halley, a swimmer who started offering pickleball clinics at the center, and Tjioe Kwan, who now plays pickleball three times per week between the wellness center and the Xenia YMCA, where he first picked up the sport. A longtime tennis player, Kwan finds pickleball similar but with its own benefits.

“It’s good exercise, it’s a very social game and it’s easier than tennis because the paddle is shorter,” Kwan explained.

Pickleball is on the rise in the U.S. in part due to its attraction to seniors. The U.S.A. Pickleball Association claims it is the fastest-growing sport in the country with more than 100,000 players and 5,600 courts in the U.S., according to its website.

Wellness Center Director Monica Hasek said recently that they chose to offer pickleball because they had heard from area YMCAs how popular the sport was with seniors, while it attracts players of all ages. In the last month, pickleball has become huge at the center, which surprised her since hardly anyone had heard of the sport when she gave tours of the newly-renovated center.

“In the last month it has gone rampant,” Hasek said. “People are excited.”

Currently there are three times for pickleball pick-up games, where anyone is welcome. The most popular is Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. in the South Gym. The game is also set up Monday and Wednesday from 1 to 3 p.m. in the upstairs gym. Members can come during any open gym time and check out the pickleball equipment from the front desk. There are three additional pickleball courts striped in the East Gym.

While pickleball is easy to pick up, the rules can be a bit perplexing. Games are played to 11, only the serving team can score and an area just in front of the net is off-limits for volleying. A pickleball player who violates the no-volley zone, also known as the “kitchen” or “danger zone,” is a “volley llama.” Another difficult rule is the “double bounce” rule, where both a return serve and the return of the return must first bounce before a player strikes them. Balls that must bounce are called “flapjacks.” Otherwise, it is similar to tennis and ping-pong.

Pickleball can be played indoors or outdoors. In fact, Halley and a small group of other locals have played pickleball on the tennis courts for the past five years, marking out the smaller court in chalk or tape and dropping the net slightly. But the pickleball community is now growing fast.

Among the regulars is Tod Tyslan, who learned pickleball while a student at Antioch College in the mid-90s. It wasn’t too popular then, but Tyslan got his start. He went on to competitive badminton before returning to pickleball recently when the community just “sprouted up,” he said. Tennis player Reggie Stratton recently started playing pickleball for a good workout but also believes it could be helping his tennis game.

“You sweat and sometimes you go to bed sore,” Stratton said. “It’s also going to help with my net reaction in tennis.”

In a particularly competitive game last Sunday, Tyslan and Stratton were down 10–3 to Kwan and Jim Johnson. The plastic wiffle ball on the wooden paddles was delivering a satisfying whack sound, and as the volleys quickened, the waiting players on the sidelines became rapt.

“You guys are getting greedy on points,” Stratton joked when the score was called out.

“You’re not so good at math,” Tyslan added.

Tyslan and Stratton won back-to-back game points to keep themselves alive, then lost three straight, with Tyslan barely missing a volley into the net on game point. Even in defeat, Tyslan had what Halley calls the “pickleball smile,” saying of his fault:

“I got most of it.”

Pickleball was started in the mid-1960s in Bainbridge Island, Wash, according to the U.S.A. Pickleball Association. The game was first improvised using a badminton court, ping-pong paddles and a wiffle ball. Eventually they lowered the net and started playing on a hard surface. The name is shrouded in legend, but according to some accounts, it was named after the inventor’s cocker spaniel, Pickles.

The Antioch Wellness Center, which opened in September 2014 after an $8 million renovation, has 1,753 members, including Antioch students, faculty and staff, according to Hasek.

Organizers of the Antioch College Village Charrette hope that many villagers participate in the opening event of the five-day process this Sunday, March 1, 6–9 p.m. in the South Gym in the Wellness Center.

“We want anyone who is interested in the future of the community and the college to join us,” Sandy Wiggins, the planning consultant overseeing the project, said last week.

The charrette is the first step toward moving ahead with the Antioch College Village, a proposed multigenerational residential project on the college campus. Organizers have described the project as a minimum of 160 units of mixed housing models, including rentals, town houses and perhaps some co-housing, located at various locations on campus. The project will be unique in the country due to its location directly on campus and also for incorporating into the units the highest standards of green design and construction, Wiggins said.

The Sunday event will be led by representatives of the design firm Dover Kohl, of Coral Gables, Fla.. The event is a hands-on, collaborative design activity during which participants will break into small groups to offer their ideas and preferences for the project, as well as look at possible locations, Participants might be asked to weigh in regarding their priorities for the project, the best ways to incorporate walkability or bikeability, or how to incorporate both shared and private facilities, among other possible topics.

“This is the beginning of the project, and we’ll be brainstorming about what’s important to people and how this project can benefit not just the college but the community,” Dover Kohl planner Amy Groves said this week.

Light finger food will be provided during the Sunday design session.

Following the Sunday event, the designers will hold an open design studio in the South Gym from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day Monday, March 2 through Thursday, March 5, during which villagers are invited to drop in and make comments in a more informal way. On Tuesday evening, March 3, from 6 to 8 p.m., organizers will host an open house for villagers to see the work done to that point. And on Thursday, March 5, from 6 to 8 p.m., the designers will present their work from the week, with opportunity for feedback.

The purpose of the five-day charrette is to create a plan for the project, Wiggins previously said. And according to College Vice President for Finance and Operations Andi Adkins in a recent article, the design plan will next be presented to the Antioch College Board of Trustees, who will decide whether the project will move ahead.

If it does, the addition of 160 new housing units on campus will be a substantial change to the village, Wiggins said.

“This is potentially a big development for Yellow Springs,” he said.

Villagers interested

Some villagers have already expressed their interest in the housing project. After Pat Brown wrote a letter to the editor for the News several months ago seeking others interested in co-housing, a group of about 12 has met, and has also met with Wiggins. Most are interested in downsizing and some aspects of living in a community, Brown said.

“My house is too big,” said Brown. But she’s very interested in living in a smaller space on campus, because “a college is always a seat of learning and new ideas. I’d like to be in touch with people like that.”

The college project also interests Brown because of the presence of the Antioch Farm. An avid gardener, Brown has discovered that maintaining her own large garden is too much, but she’d love to keep gardening.

“Then I don’t have to be responsible for the whole thing,” she said.

Another villager nterested in the Antioch College Village is Maggie Morrison, who hopes to see a co-housing component to the project. Co-housing allows people to benefit from both a private living space and areas for engagement with a community, a situation she has seen work well for her sister-in-law in California.

And Morrison is also attracted to the prospect of being a part of campus.

“I love the idea of being involved with Antioch,” she said. “I love the energy and vitality of young people.”

A new kind of housing

In a previous interview, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt said he initially envisioned the housing as meeting the needs of a new niche market: those Baby Boomers who want to downsize but also want to be engaged in, and useful to the community. Living on campus and potentially being involved in college classes and activities could meet that market’s needs, and could also help the college become more financially sustainable, Roosevelt said.

However, a 10-month feasibility study showed that other age groups also showed interest in the Village, according to Wiggins, so the vision has been broadened to become a multigenerational project.

What makes the Antioch College Village unique will be its location directly on a college campus, rather than tangential to campus, as with housing projects at other colleges. And the project aims to use the Living Community Challenge standards for its design and construction, which requires the most stringent standards of environmental sustainability, according to Wiggins, a principal in the green planning firm Consilience and former chair of the U.S. Green Building Council. Specifically, these standards require that the units produce all their own energy, are nontoxic, and source building materials from as close as possible to the construction site.

While many variables of the Antioch College Village are unknown at this point, it’s clear that the project, if it moves ahead, will be significant to Yellow Springs, Wiggins said. More housing means more people moving to town and more economic development, among other benefits to the village. So he hopes villagers respond to the college’s invitation to this week’s planning event.

“The object is to create a community of lifelong learners connected to the resources of the college,” he said.