From the Print – Page 7 – Save Antioch College

Antioch College ‘needs more’

In his self-described “transparent” way at the state of the college address last week, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt summarized the significant challenges involved in remaking the college, now at the start of its fourth year of operation: “You can see it from here, but it’s still just slightly out of reach.”

That’s what he told the tent full of 150 alumni and community members who came to campus Friday to welcome the newest class of 71 students and hear a campus update.

The main issue remains accreditation, for which the college is currently a candidate. The final site visit is scheduled for the first week of November 2015. At that point, Roosevelt said, the school “needs to be 100 percent accreditable.”

“The pressure on us is larger than ever” to get the college’s finances in order and build both capacity and long-term stability. And currently, he said, the group of people with the power to make that happen “is still too small.” The college “needs to do more”; it needs to “chart new ground.”

Even with rigorous academics, an established co-op program, and one of the most energy efficient campuses in the country, Roosevelt told the crowd, the college still needs to be able to stand apart from the rest by being true to its roots as a champion of social justice. The college needs to find ways to engage first-generation college students and those from outside the privileged class. He cited the statistic that 12 years ago 10 percent of U.S. college students came from the bottom 50 percent of the economic strata, and now that number is only 11 percent. The doubling and tripling of scholarship aid over the past decade has not changed the figure. In addition, the college’s academic program needs to help students once they arrive to navigate programs of study that give them the tools to address the problems of inequality and other social and scientific issues the world is facing.

To that end, according to a story in the Antioch Alumni Magazine published this week, the college has a fundraising goal of $19 million this academic year to balance its budget. Of that total, $6 million is already pledged for continued capital improvements for the Art and Science building and part of a third residence hall to open in 2017. But a remaining $13 million needs to be raised for operations and to support the 98 staff and 34 faculty currently working full time on campus, including 10 faculty and 21 staff members hired since July (12 of whom are replacements of employees who have left).

In addition still this year, according to Tom Brookey, the college’s director of human relations, the college plans to hire an assistant director of alumni relations, a new advancement vice-president, associate dean for community life, a nurse, a theater tech director and a Web and graphic designer.

Creating a campus with the physical capacity to house its programs is an ongoing challenge. The total cost estimate to renovate the campus facilities went from $30 million four years ago to a current $120 million. According to the Alumni Magazine, so far the college has raised $35 million through both donor contributions and investment gains on the sale of YSI, Inc. stock, for instance, to fund the renovation of North Hall, the initial phases of the Art and Science building, the start of the Foundry Theater, the Wellness Center, and the central geothermal plant. The future plan calls for an additional $44 million over the next eight to 10 years for facilities that accommodate increasing enrollment and expanding curricula.

Since gaining independence from Antioch University, the college has been able to raise more than $60 million in gifts and commitments from alumni (27 percent participation last year) and friends of the college, according to the Alumni Magazine. That’s good news given that until 2021, more revenue is projected to come from major gifts than from tuition. But the pressure will ease as the Horace Mann full tuition scholarship phases out, beginning next year, and more student-derived revenue comes in to replace it.

The task to raise Antioch College again is “still a struggle,” Roosevelt said last week. But to balance transparency with what he called “uplift,” Roosevelt added more.

“The difficult part is if Antioch College is true to its real mission, it seeks an outsize effect on the world — that means we need to push each other,” he said. “The challenge is to dig deep — the next year and a half will tell a lot about the story of whether Antioch is back or is not.”

Last Antioch College class enters on Horace’s tab

The incoming class at Antioch College may be more diverse, more international and more committed to saving the world than the three classes above them.

According to Antioch Dean of Admissions Micah Canal, 40 percent of the new class are non-white or Hispanic, while nearly one-third are the first generation of their family to attend college. Students with dual citizenship hail from Egypt, Mexico, Liberia, Nigeria, Canada, Burundi, Kenya, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom and Germany. And many also have already committed to making an impact on the world.

The exceptional qualities of the revived college’s fourth class are the latest reasons for optimism at Antioch, which is also celebrating the recent opening of its Wellness Center and Foundry Theater. Meanwhile, a massive solar field connected to a geothermal heating and cooling system is soon to come online and a new Science Building is set to open in mid-December.

This week 71 new students settled into their dorm rooms in North Hall after a dizzying week of orientation activities. Joining them at Antioch this fall semester are nine new faculty members and several new administrators, including a new vice president of academic affairs, a new dean of community life and a new director of the Coretta Scott King Center.

But after a flurry of major building and infrastructure projects and administrative expansions, growth at Antioch could soon be slowing. The incoming class is the last to receive the full tuition scholarship known as the Horace Mann Fellowship. The current enrollment of 246 students is only expected to grow to around 500 by 2022. And while faculty hires are expected to continue to rise, the administration won’t likely grow as fast as it has been, according to Vice President of Finance and Operations Andi Adkins.

Reflecting this week on Antioch’s progress since reopening in 2008, Canal, who was originally one of eight people working to first purchase the college from Antioch University and then reopen it, is awed.

“The amount the organization has grown and what we have done is Herculean and I feel honored to be part of this effort,” Canal said. “We are still a 160-year-old startup that is trying to reinvent higher education.”

Last week, Antioch President Mark Roosevelt addressed the challenges that Antioch faces while acknowledging Antioch’s efforts to redefine higher education in an address last week to students, faculty and staff.

“You’re coming to a college that is re-creating itself in a time where there is an enormous amount of skepticism of higher education in America,” Roosevelt said. Today most undergraduates are “drifting through college with no clear sense of purpose,” Roosevelt added. At the same time many colleges are simply producing “excellent sheep” while focusing on sports and fancy facilities and turning a blind eye to the “party culture.” But Antioch, he said, is a “very different kind of place.”

Antioch does not attract or produce excellent sheep, Roosevelt said, and Antioch is not a place to “hibernate with other people,” as happens at many small liberal arts colleges. Instead Roosevelt called Antioch a “four-year engagement with the world — not a retreat.” Through co-op experiences and impacting an institution that is still a work-in-progress, Antioch students “architect their own education.”

“We are still a work in progress and still establishing our systems and culture,” Roosevelt said. “We’re also a sensitive place because what you do and what you say can have a more profound effect here than at any other school you would attend.”

Admitting the kind of students that can do the academic work (oft-described as “rigorous”) and who want to contribute to rebuilding the college has been an important task for Canal’s office. But once again, Canal said he believes that the right students are here for the right reasons, despite the fact the college received only 10 percent as many applications (around 300 this year) as it did in 2012 after news of its full tuition scholarship went viral.

Looking ahead, Canal said the Horace Mann Fellowships have been de-emphasized during recruiting in recent years. The fellowships will be phased out starting next year, when they will be reduced by 50 percent.

“The value of the Horace Mann Fellowship is something we don’t talk about anymore,” Canal said. Instead, “we talk about the rigor of the academics and the vision that we have empowering the students to practice what they learn in a classroom environment in four co-ops.”

Retention of students at Antioch is also not a concern despite the first class dropping from an initial 35 students to 22 this semester, all of whom are expected to graduate next spring, according to Canal. The Class of 2015’s attrition rate was not surprising, Canal added, considering they were an “extraordinary pioneering group” who had just six faculty members and three open buildings and were without a dining hall for two months.

“They did some of the heaviest lifting,” Canal said. Today’s Antioch students are taking a much lower risk, he added, especially since the school was granted candidacy for accreditation status earlier this year.

As its students begin courses and co-ops this week, administrators at Antioch are also moving the Antioch College Village concept forward, finalizing campus stormwater management and landscape plans and planning for the next self-study on the path to accreditation. When the Science Building is complete, renovations on campus will finally slow down as a new residence hall isn’t needed for two years and renovations of Main Building aren’t projected to begin for at least 10 years. While progress at the college may be less visible in coming years, the work continues apace, administrators said this week.

Antioch College Farm sprouts power

A one-megawatt solar farm recently popped up at Antioch College along Corry Street as part of the college’s plan to become carbon neutral.

Around 3,300 solar panels were erected behind fences on five acres of Antioch property commonly known as a the “golf course.” The panels could begin turning sunlight into electricity for the college later this month, according to Physical Plant Director Reggie Stratton.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Antioch solar farm is 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, before the annual community potluck.

The solar installation will generate 1.2 million kilowatt-hours per year and is expected to offset the electric consumption of Antioch’s $8.8 million geothermal heating and cooling plant, according to a news release.

By 2018, an estimated 90 percent of Antioch’s electric consumption will come from renewable sources as the college looks to be among the first in the nation fueled almost exclusively by green energy, the release added.

“We are proud to be moving forward with these significant investments in clean and renewable energy,” said President Mark Roosevelt in the release. “The new Antioch College is starting at a time when it is abundantly clear that the way we live in America today is not sustainable. We believe we have an obligation to address these issues and have an opportunity to be a model for others.”

Antioch also released the name of the project’s investor, SolarCity. Based in California, SolarCity is the nation’s largest solar service provider, according to the news release. Under an agreement with the college, SolarCity will finance and own the array while selling the power generated to the college at set prices. Solar, Power and Light of Miamisburg was contracted to build and maintain the array.

Future plans for the solar farm include a replacement of the temporary fence along Corry Street, the planting of around 100 trees, bushes and shrubs along fences and the installation of 18 art panels from college and community artists on the fence between the two solar arrays.

Carrying on college Antioch College activist legacy

Fifty years ago this summer, a number of Antioch College students and alumni joined activists from all over the country to converge on Mississippi as a part of Freedom Summer. This project was aimed at establishing and supporting Freedom Schools throughout the state as a response to the segregation laws in the south and to help register African-American voters, particularly to participate in the 1964 Democratic national convention after they had been prevented from participating in the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.

The Freedom Summer project and the events that followed in 1964 left their mark on Antioch. In many ways, the participation of Antioch students and graduates in the project was a continuation of the school’s commitment to social justice, but the experiences of that summer affected many of the participants deeply. For some, this chance to put beliefs into action served as inspiration for a lifelong commitment to activist work. And the college soon gave more students the opportunity to act on their convictions by offering credit for co-op work at organizations like COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations, which included the groups that made Freedom Summer possible.

“That was sort of a formalization of this work,” said Scott Sanders, Antioch’s college archivist, recently.

This year, seven current Antioch students participated in this Antioch tradition by traveling to Mississippi during their most recent break to attend a conference on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Like Antioch students of five decades ago, the current students also found themselves inspired in unexpected ways.

When Kijin Higashibaba, now a second-year student, came to Antioch, she was skeptical about the usefulness of social activism in the current political situation. She said she felt like there was no longer anything worth pouring all her energy into, that there were no issues about which anyone could say, “this is definitely wrong.” She signed up for the trip to the conference and the community engagement class to follow with the intention of learning more about the civil rights era, when she said she thought that the protest movement had been more effective.

However, Higashibaba found something unexpected in the workshops and conversations she had with other attendees. Over the course of the conference her cynicism about the validity of taking a strong stance on issues of civil rights diminished. The workshops at the conference helped convince her that it was possible for her to engage in activism around issues that concerned her.

“That was new and different for me,” she said. “I don’t know what the solutions are, but there are things that are just wrong.”

Social justice legacy

In a 1965 article for Antioch’s student paper, the Record, 1965 graduate Terri Shaw described her experiences participating in Freedom Summer. She took a car full of other participants in the Freedom Summer project down to Hattiesburg, where she collected information on intimidation and harassment related to the Freedom Summer project as well as desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, of which she unfortunately found no shortage. Overall, she said, she and other activists had mixed feelings about the experience, torn between excitement about the work they did and “a feeling that we should have accomplished a lot more.”

Shaw also recalled an especially difficult part of the summer. As she drove through Meridian on the way to Hattiesburg, she heard on the radio the news of the disappearance of three civil rights activists, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had been investigating the burning of a church in Longdale. She had been introduced to Schwerner at their training in Oxford, Ohio, and Meridian was only about an hour away from Philadelphia, where the three had gone missing. This news, she said, set the tone for the beginning of her work on the project, just as the discovery of the men’s bodies a few weeks later loomed over the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

In January of this year, David Goodman, a member of Antioch’s board of trustees, contacted Kevin McGruder, professor of history at the college, to tell him about the conference taking place in Mississippi for Freedom Summer’s 50th anniversary. Goodman’s brother, Andrew, was one of the three activists killed outside of Philadelphia. The conversation led McGruder and two other Antioch staff members to accompany seven Antioch students to this conference to understand how they relate to current Antioch.

Questions raised

Freedom Summer 50 took place on the campus of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the historically black colleges most involved in Freedom Summer. The conference both commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer project and hosted workshops on civil rights work that still needs to be done, including workshops on education, health, voting rights, and labor rights. The conference offered students an opportunity to learn about the role played by Antioch students previously and to think about how to apply past lessons to ongoing struggles, according to the participants.

“The conference organizers were very intentional about not having the main focus be on looking back” said McGruder.

The emphasis on the importance of ongoing struggles prompted the students to question what they could be doing to help, several said. Several involved said that they were struck by the how young the people involved in the Freedom Summer project had been, and felt they were doing little important work by comparison. But it was also inspiring to know that students had played a large role in such an important movement.

First-year student Ciana Ayenu said the conference prompted her to think much more about her identity as a black person than is usually the case at Antioch.

“I got to have a lot of interesting conversations about race that we don’t really have here, even though we maybe pretend like we do,” she said.

Especially memorable for second-year student Eric Rhodes was an event that took place just north of Jackson, in Canton, Mississippi. He had followed the labor rights track of the conference, and on the afternoon of Friday, June 27, he participated in a protest to support the unionization efforts of workers at a Nissan manufacturing and assembly plant in Canton. Soon after his bus arrived, the tone of the protest became more serious.

“We were there in front of the gates, probably 400 of us, and this unmarked car pulls up,” Rhodes said. “A guy gets out who has the Nissan insignia all over him.”

As the man seemed to be surveying the situation, several United Auto Workers security workers approached him to find out what he was doing, but he quickly got back in his car and drove away. A few minutes later several Jackson County sheriff SUVs circled the protest, parked near the gates to the factory, and stepped out of their vehicles, carrying shotguns. The man from the unmarked car, who the protesters believed to be a Nissan representative, stood with the police. The experience was unlike anything Rhodes had seen before.

“Coming from my background, being in a place where the state has allied with corporate interests to coerce people through the fear of violence” was eye-opening, he said.

Conference leads to class

This term at Antioch, the seven students are participating in a class on community engagement taught by McGruder and Nick Daily. The class encourages them to apply what they learned at the conference to issues concerning the Antioch community as well as other communities to which the students are connected. While the conference and class are both intended to help produce leaders in community engagement, they both emphasize that leaders don’t necessarily work in the spotlight or have all the answers.

“Really a good community organizer is a lot of times doing that work in the background,” McGruder said. “There are some people who go into these kind of initiatives who think they have to be superman or superwoman and come save the day, and good community organizing is not that.”

McGruder and Daily will guide students toward understanding the needs of the people with whom they’re working, learning how to gather information on those needs and build trust with the people. The students will then describe how they plan to meet those needs, forming plans based on all this information.

In many ways the class facilitates the retention of the connections drawn between Antioch’s activist past and the role these students will play in its future.

Jenn Wheeler is an Antioch College co-op student.

A multi-lens look at water needs

The Water Crisis in Turkey.

Women and Water: Personal Explorations of Impact.

Compost Toilet Construction: a Feasibility Report.

The Weaponization of Water.

Impacts of Antioch College Water Damage.

Social, Cultural and Environmental Aspects of Lake Management.

These are a few of the presentations that villagers are invited to attend this Saturday, Sept. 13, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at McGregor Hall during the Antioch College Water Symposium. The event is free and open to the community. For a complete list of presentation times and locations, go online to antiochcollege.org.

The symposium consists of 26 presentations made by 74 Antioch College students who in recent months took part in the college’s Global Seminar on Water. The course was team-led by instructor of cooperative education Brooke Bryan and writing instructor Robin Littell.

“Antioch College students in the Global Seminar on Water offer to look into our most pressing water issue and seek to address local, regional, national and global water crisis with innovative solutions,” according to seminar leaders in the class syllabus.

The current global challenges regarding water use and accessibility make it a natural topic for Antioch College students, according to Littell.

“The college’s focus on and commitment to sustainability demands that we engage those that can drive conversations that both inform us and serve as avenues for our students to affect change in the world,” she wrote in an email.

And it’s important to include the wider Yellow Springs community in the conversation, according to seminar leader Bryan.

“It provides a high stakes environment for our independent research because we are accountable to our peers in the community and imagining an audience beyond the classroom helps us learn how to locate our work when dealing with complicated, interconnected issues like water,” she wrote. “It also helps us forward our social justice and sustainability missions because we are able to catalyze important conversations in our community.”

The water course was the most recent Global Seminar, an Antioch College class that offers students an interdisciplinary look at issues critical to sustainability and social justice issues, including water, energy, food, governance, health and education, according to Global Education Dean Hassan Rahmanian, who oversees the seminars. In their course of study, students are required to take four Global Seminars.

The seminars “introduce students to multiple ways in which a selected problem area/theme can be approached, understood and investigated,” Rahmanian wrote in an email.

The interdisciplinary approach was meaningful to student Perin Ellsworth-Heller.

“This has been a really eye-opening experience/class in the sense that it covered water not only from a scientific and environmental point of view but also from a philosophical and humanistic perspective,” he wrote in an email. “I feel like the class has given me a cross-disciplinary look at a subject that is incredibly relevant to the modern world. I am now more convinced than ever that the only reasonable solutions to the world’s water problems will arise from a combination of many different ways of thinking.”

Many of the previous global seminars introduced students to a variety of perspectives on the topic, and the water seminar continued that tradition. The class included 17 speakers, including Allen Hunt, Wright State professor of geology and physics; Antioch University Midwest anthropologist Jim Malarkey; Rahmanian, speaking from a political perspective; activist Maya Nye, on the environmental crisis in the Appalachian hills; WYSO Environmental Reporter Lewis Wallace on “Pressures on the Great Lakes,” University of Dayton philosopher Bill Marvin on “Ethics, Technology, Water and Community” and Sarah Hippensteel of the Miami Conservancy District on getting engaged with regional policy.

The variety of speakers offer the opportunity for “a slightly different dynamic in the classroom,” according to Bryan. “Through the multimedia presentations, we glimpsed into the lives of squatters in Peru, women water carriers in West Africa who became permit-holding water managers in their community, Russian conservationists and Americans rethinking their relationship to the tap.”

Student Maya Canaztuj took the water seminar after working a co-op as a seasonal hydrologist with the Cleveland Metroparks.

“This job sparked my love for water, and I knew this class would be a great opportunity to learn more,” she wrote in an email. “The lectures have been great with so many knowledgeable people. My main gain was meeting the speakers, getting more information about their jobs and making those connections that could possibly be useful in the future.”

And for student Julia Bates, the seminar didn’t so much open her eyes to new problems, since her parents both grew up living next to polluted bodies of water, as it sparked new energy to tackle a critical issue.

“Seeing what others have done and are doing does give me hope,” Bates wrote.

New Herndon Gallery director— An artist of ‘scrappy resourcefulness’

After leaving the art world behind for two decades to pursue a career as a registered nurse, Jennifer Wenker, the new creative director of the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, has returned to art with an enthusiasm that can be seen reflected in her involvement in a wide range of art organizations in Dayton and Cincinnati, as well as her own growing body of work. This return is all the more impressive given that she completed her MFA in eco art activism at the University of Cincinnati only two years ago.

Recently hired to replace Dennie Eagleson at the Herndon Gallery, Wenker comes to Antioch from Greenfield, Ohio, a small town about 45 minutes southeast of Yellow Springs. She was born in Greenfield, where her family has lived for eight generations, a connection that she feels has had a strong influence on her art.

“I’m not really a homebody,” she said, “I just kind of stayed.”

All of the art and activist organizations with which Wenker has worked are based in southeastern Ohio, including the Marianist Environmental Education Center, which is affiliated with the University of Dayton, and SOS Art, a yearly art show in Cincinnati. The organization of which she feels the most proud, though, is the SPARK! Creative Artspace, which is centered in her hometown. The group describes themselves as being committed to “preserving and strengthening the culture of foothills Appalachia as well as introducing and spreading an appreciation of the arts in all their variety.”

The idea for SPARK!, she said, was formed while she sat in the grass at one of her daughter’s soccer games making a list of all the things she loves about creating. She then shared some of her ideas in conversations with friends, talking about the ways downtown Greenfield had changed and why people leave small towns for big cities. During these conversations, she said, there was a growing realization that “our empty downtown spaces would never fill up with what they had before,” so she and her friends decided to organize a conceptual space in which they could be creative together and share resources, collaborating with existing businesses and the owners of empty shops to move SPARK! into different locations as they became available. She describes the group as loose and amorphous. The people involved are just those who want to be, and this organization style has worked well, Wenker said. The group has put on a number of successful “pop up” events, including “artistically lighting” a barn near New Petersburg and a jug band concert and auction to raise money for a permanent location for SPARK!

“It’s really done good things for our community,” she said.

Much of Wenker’s work relates directly to the college’s commitments to sustainability and community. One of her shows from 2012, “Deeply Rooted Drifting,” centers around the development of emotional connections to place and the way people are always physically interconnected with certain spaces. Her own bio highlights that Appalachia, which she has considered her home for most of her life, has long been “a financially impoverished area rich in scrappy resourcefulness,” which is certainly reflected in her creative output and her participation in local art and environmental activist work. Other pieces connect more obviously to sustainability, incorporating and recycling paper and cardboard from her own family’s waste stream.

Wenker sees herself as both a naturalist and an artist, drawing influence for her work from her training in life drawing and pre-medical illustration during her undergraduate work at Morehead State University in Kentucky.

“I really loved the hand-drawn medical and botanical illustrations,” she said, but she lost interest in the field when digital illustrations began to replace the precise pen-and-ink sketches for which she had been trained. After several people in her family important to her had become sick, she said it felt natural to move from medical illustrations into the medical field itself, where she would spend the next 21 years.

The effects of these experiences stretch well beyond her own artwork into the way she understands her place in the Antioch community. She sees her role as the creative director as similar to her relationship to nature. She wants to be an organic part of the community rather than somebody working as an isolated individual. Her work as a curator at the Herndon is very collaborative, she said.

“We have a democratic process for how we select what might be interesting for shows,” a process that involves the Arts at Antioch Committee, which is comprised of student gallery assistants and volunteers, arts faculty, interested staff and others from the Yellow Springs community.

Although Wenker has only been at the Herndon for a short time, she’s already excited about several possibilities for future shows.

“I would love for more of the art to happen out there,” she said, gesturing toward her window that opens onto the horseshoe connecting three of the most active buildings on campus.

She is particularly interested in giving a voice to “quieter things” that may fall outside of what is generally considered to be fine art, including possibly reprising one of her shows that has already seen several incarnations, “Outsiders: An Exhibition of Work by ‘Nonhuman’ Others.” The show features found works created by “wasps, bees and birds,” among others, in part as an effort to bring anthropocentrism in art into question. This time she would like to see it as an invitational that might include Glen Helen as a part of the exhibition.

She would also like to host shows that would align with Antioch’s curriculum outside the arts, possibly including politically oriented shows. Drawing on inspiration she found while teaching conceptual drawing at the University of Cincinnati, she has recently been interested in conceptual mapping and would like to bring those ideas into the Herndon. She is fascinated by the beauty of internet search mapping, a process that makes visible for anyone connections between internet sites that would otherwise remain unseen. This kind of conceptual mapping, she said, has been applied in a number of other ways, and can be used to visualize connections as diverse as links between political figures and the chronology of interpersonal relationships.

Her enthusiasm is not limited to her work in the Herndon Gallery, however. Wenker said she has found the atmosphere all over Antioch exciting and energizing.

“I would have gone to college here if I had known about it,” she said.

Wenker noted that people on campus seem more optimistic than she had been expecting given how busy Antioch has been during the past three years working toward accreditation. She speculated that the excitement is a result of the recent good news concerning the college’s candidacy for accreditation. She described the mood surrounding the community meeting on Tuesday, June 8, during which she was introduced to the community, as light and buoyant, and said she loves Antioch already. She feels excited to have begun working at Antioch at such a positive time in the college’s history.

*Jenn Wheeler is an Antioch College co-op student.