Tag: news

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is a private liberal-arts school with a

Antioch College

history of social activism. It was the first American college to name a woman as a full professor and one of the first to admit students of all races.

Antioch also became one of the first to offer work study programs, so students could gain experience in jobs. And it was among the first to stop using grades to record progress.

A Protestant group known as the Christian Church started Antioch College in eighteen fifty-two. Even in those days it was different from most other American colleges because it admitted women as well as men.

During the nineteen sixties, Antioch students were active in the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. At that time, the college had more than two thousand students. But times changed.

In nineteen seventy-eight Antioch University was created. Antioch College became the undergraduate residential program.

But it has struggled with a shortage of students and money. School officials say students are rejecting the college because it lacks modern dormitories, wireless Internet or new athletic buildings. The number of students has dropped to only four hundred this past year.

Now, the university Board of Trustees has voted to suspend operations at Antioch College next July. School officials say the goal is reopen the college in two thousand twelve. They say they want to raise enough money to design what they call a twenty-first century campus.

Today Antioch University has five other campuses around the country designed to serve working adults. The closure will not affect the other campuses.

Some people say Antioch’s expansion is one reason the college is in financial trouble. But university officials say the other campuses have been helping to support Antioch College. They say the college has been operating at a loss for several years.

Antioch College has been closed and reopened three times already in its history, for financial and other reasons. Teachers and former students have talked about the possibility of legal action to try to stop the new plan. The Antioch College Alumni Association has been collecting money to try to keep the school from closing again — or at least make sure it reopens.

From the Dayton Daily News, by longtime WYSO staffer Vick Mickunas.

July 1, 2007

Joe Cali was a legend among librarians. He died this past winter. The day before he died he had kept the Antioch College Library open during a blizzard. It was more than dedication that impelled him. The man loved his work.

Cali was notorious for many things. I remember him for this: scholarly journals publish “errata,” corrections for mistakes that were published in previous editions. Cali was painstaking in his work. When he got errata he would look up the offending publications and attach the corrections therein. Find me another librarian who cared so much about his work. You won’t.

It was tragic to hear that Antioch College is closing. You can be sure that Joe Cali would have had something to say about it! There is a moral here: NEVER mess with a librarian. They guard their books with the maternal fury of a mother bear protecting her cub.

The Chicago Tribune had a piece today about the Antioch Library.

When Joe Cali died he was the longest serving Antioch staff member. They had tried to get rid of him in the past. During the administration of Antioch Chancellor Alan Guskin he was the target of removal efforts. It never came to pass. Why? Antioch faculty stood up for Cali. He kept his job. When he died he was still doing the job that he loved.

Today Antioch College faculty are fighting for more than that one librarian, they are fighting for an institution and their own survival as teachers and keepers of the flame, the Antioch Flame. It is still flickering ever so faintly. Long may it burn.

Vick Mickunas

From The Editorial Page of the Dayton Daily News

Sunday, July 01, 2007

One of the more remarkable statements made in the wake of the announcement of Antioch College’s closing was by President Steven Lawry.

He said the reason he didn’t tell anybody on campus that the decision was coming was that he didn’t know.

The fact that no public warning was given has added to the anger of students, faculty, alumni and the community. It is hard to understand.

Sure, everybody knew that things were going badly.

But interested people reasonably expect that explicit warnings will be issued, so that, for example, an emergency fund-raising campaign might be launched, or that other rescue plans can be entertained.

Try to imagine similar problems at a public university or college. So much more would have been known, as the result of public filings of financial information and public trustee meetings. There would have been much more communication and “process.”

For Antioch — so associated with insistence on power for the people — to be accused of being closed off and secretive is an irony that has been much and appropriately noted.

In the wake of the news-making announcement, a lot of criticisms are being made about the way the university is structured and run. Some resonate.

The final authority is a board that runs a far-flung university system but meets only a few times a year for a few days. Antioch College itself has no board, and the college president doesn’t report directly to the university board, but to a chancellor.

So there are lots of factors fostering separation between the board and the college.

On top of all that, and because things have been going poorly, there’s been an awful lot of turnover. That, in turn, causes a lot of problems, sometimes leaving people feeling they can’t even get a good explanation for why a policy exists.

And there is conflicting information. These days, for example, one gets different information about enrollment trends, depending upon whom one talks to.

A couple of years ago, the board instituted a change in the academic structure of the college that was designed to increase enrollment but was followed by a sudden enrollment drop.

(The change eliminated traditional academic departments in a fairly radical approach to interdisciplinary education.)

There’s dispute about how much input the faculty had in this decision, and about whether the reform was simply enacted too fast.

What’s clear is that the board has ultimate responsibility. One might — in other circumstances — have expected heads to roll.

They didn’t, although some trustees have now offered to leave, in the wake of the latest news.

The anger of faculty members and alumni about the closing might be shrugged off as typical Antioch stuff, the acting out of self-styled rebels. In fact, though, people have questions and complaints that would arise even if the Antiochians were a bunch of Republicans.

The world beyond Antioch likes to talk about other factors that allegedly brought about its demise. Extreme politics; extreme political correctness. Fine.

That discussion needs to be had within the Antioch community. Did a determination to question authority devolve into a prohibition against questioning the dissidents? A lot of knowledgeable people think so, and think that the culture impacted the school’s attractiveness to students and faculty.

Meanwhile, though, some nuts-and-bolts issues need to be confronted, too. There are good ways and bad ways to structure and administer colleges. Antioch University has not done well by Antioch College.

By Julia Keller, Tribune cultural critic, July 1, 2007

So it’ll go. The little college with the big history will disappear, at least on paper — the buildings will hang around, you assume, since we’re not exactly talking midtown Manhattan here, and condos aren’t much of a possibility — and the world will lose a little more of its magic. But it can’t be helped. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is tens of millions of dollars in debt, enrollment is sagging, and that’s that. The school’s Board of Trustees announced last month that after a century and a half of educating the young and the restless, the school — the alma mater of distinctive writers such as Rod Serling, Lawrence Block, Herb Gardner and Mark Strand — will close permanently a year from now.

Still undetermined, though, is the fate of the Olive Kettering Library. The stolid-looking brick building on the serene campus in west-central Ohio houses some 325,000 books. Yet its irreplaceable heritage is its special collections, including the papers of Horace Mann, Antioch’s first president, and those of Arthur Morgan, who ran the school in the 1920s and pioneered the idea of co-op education: Antioch students spend several semesters off campus, working in their chosen fields.

“We are told that the library will be maintained. What that means, I’m not sure,” said a worried-sounding Nina Myatt in an interview last week at the library. “There are lots of raggedy edges that either haven’t been thought through, or that we haven’t been told about.”

Myatt, Antioch class of ’53, is the curator of Antioch’s special collections. She’s only the third person to hold that job since 1900. She loves what she does, and until the trustees dropped their bombshell last month, she had no plans to retire. “I’ve taken care of all of this for so long,” she said with a wistful sigh, nodding toward the tall bookshelves.

Antioch College is part of the five-location Antioch University system. The other locations, at which are operated non-residential degree programs, will stay in business. Because the library theoretically serves all locations, administrators have said it will keep the lights on — but no guarantees on longevity. Myatt and her colleagues remain uneasy.

Yet in an online world in which so much of the world’s knowledge now is available with the brief sweep of a mouse, who needs bricks and mortar? Who needs physical archives?

Well, anybody with a romantic soul, for one thing.

To engage with a letter or document on a computer screen is quite different from engaging with the real thing, from being in the presence of the tangible literary artifact. Basic data can be endlessly and harmlessly manipulated, shifted from book to screen to CD-ROM. The portal from which you access most information? Irrelevant. But when you peer at the actual piece of paper bearing the signature of the person whose mind and heart created it, you feel as if you’re part of a great invisible chain of thought and feeling; you’re not just a reader, but almost a collaborator.

Moreover, once historical documents are lost, or damaged through neglect, they’re gone. You can’t call the Help Desk and get a tech to come over and show you how to right-click your way out of catastrophe.

Thus as Antioch limps toward extinction, perhaps another institution will step up and take over the archives, and perhaps Antioch’s administrators will agree to let the precious material find another home. It’s our history. History is made every day, of course, but never the same history twice.

“It makes a great lump come into my throat, to think of all of this being mothballed,” Myatt said. “It’s just very sad.”

And perhaps tragically short-sighted as well.

jikeller@tribune.com