Bye bye Antioch

[The Hegemo]

They are closing...possibly temporarily:


YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio - Antioch College, a small school with a history of social activism and civil disobedience, says it will close in 2008 to try to find enough money to reopen.

http://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/content/local_news/stories/2007/06/12/antioch.html

More here:

http://www.antioch-college.edu/news/releases/index.php?id=178

[Marlowe]

wow, that's really unbelievable! i didn't realize that they were in trouble financially. that sucks.

[weezer6]

up until last year, i used to go to yellow springs pretty often. the place, antioch, always looked fairly deserted, and needed the lawns mowed. i always wondered how they stayed open in the first place.

[The Hegemo]

I vaguely recall seeing an article (maybe in the Dispatch?) a year or so ago about how enrollment had dropped really low there and they were struggling to attract students.

And yeah, the campus did look fairly deserted and decrepit when I was last in Yellow Springs, although I just chalked that up to it being the summer.

[Artpunchehorse]

wow, that's really unbelievable! i didn't realize that they were in trouble financially. that sucks.

Why does it suck?

The place is obviously worthless

[markalot]

If that school is worth anything the students will still attend even after it's closed and they aren't allowed in.

[SheepNutz]

Well, if they redesign a new campus, they can demolish the old one with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch:
http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_pictures/grail/large/HolyGrail189.jpg

[ohmikeodd]

It seems odd that in this day and age more folks aren't wanting to practice social activism and civil disobedience from the masters. Perhaps all is well in America? :rolleyes:


The truth is probably more like this: if getting that degree isn't going to get you a job after you graduate there is not much of a reason to go.

[mike]

It seems odd that in this day and age more folks aren't wanting to practice social activism and civil disobedience from the masters.

No, I'm certain there are. They're just not willing to come to Nowhere, Ohio to do it.

The truth is probably more like this: if getting that degree isn't going to get you a job after you graduate there is not much of a reason to go.

Yeah, that's probably true. There used to be a time when a broadly based, liberal arts education and degree would do the trick (and I'm sure in many fields, still might). It's all about specialization any more, isn't it? Employers want you to know/do one thing and do it well.

Yellow Springs is a cool little town. I hope it maintains a way to keep its freak goin' on.

[ICONOCLAST420]

I vaguely recall seeing an article (maybe in the Dispatch?) a year or so ago about how enrollment had dropped really low there and they were struggling to attract students.

The place is obviously worthless

The truth is probably more like this: if getting that degree isn't going to get you a job after you graduate there is not much of a reason to go.

The school is worthless and has a horrible reputation, it's a known fact in Dayton that many hiring managers will throw resumes right into the trash the second they see the words "Antioch College" on it.

Having a convicted cop killer on death row, whether you believe him innocent or not, as a commencement speaker probably wasn't the smartest thing to do.

[Marlowe]

Why does it suck?

The place is obviously worthless
to you maybe it is, so you're welcome to your opinion.

but to large numbers, it's a different story. i grew up 10 minutes from there, have a lot of friends who live in yellow springs, and/or have gone to antioch, so quite a few ties to the past will be snuffed out. and, i worry that this might begin a slow but inexorable decline for yellow springs, which is one of the few offbeat places in ohio, where i have spent countless days playing ultimate, bumming around and going on the bike trail, and countless nights drinking at the tavern or peaches. also, antioch is an institution with a history that has punched well above its weight for a long time, and it sucks to see that coming to an end. yeah maybe they are liberal freaks, but nothing wrong with having a few liberal freak refuges scattered here and there.

[jd1]

Young's will finally take over the whole town.

--JD

[Sushi]

This is very sad. Antioch had a great history and noble mission. I seriously looked into going there. I was especially intrigued by their co-op program. They've turned out a lot of kind, decent graduates who have a belief in the common good and aren't afraid to work for it. (Not that there's any money in that, which is probably why their endowment is so small.)

[Marlowe]

The school is worthless and has a horrible reputation, it's a known fact in Dayton that many hiring managers will throw resumes right into the trash the second they see the words "Antioch College" on it.

Having a convicted cop killer on death row, whether you believe him innocent or not, as a commencement speaker probably wasn't the smartest thing to do.
i was a hiring manager in dayton for many years, and i would not toss a resume into the trash. so i think that's a bogus statement.

and in any event, very few antioch grads would actually end up living/working in dayton. so basically, your point is crap.

[markalot]

but to large numbers, it's a different story.

Large numbers? Like 2000, and now down to a few hundred?

In 2000, convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal, found guilty in the 1981 killing of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, gave a taped commencement address. Hundreds protested nearby, including Faulkner's widow.

The college drew national attention in 1993 with its "Sexual Offense Prevention Policy" that required students to ask permission from one another if they wanted to have sexual contact, including holding hands.


Yea, probably just a fluke that no one wants to go there.

[knubbin]

Having a convicted cop killer on death row, whether you believe him innocent or not, as a commencement speaker probably wasn't the smartest thing to do. My college had that guy as a commencement speaker in 1999. Guess he made the rounds of ultra-liberal schools. It was quite the controversy on campus, though it didn't shut down the school or anything.

[Floozy]

There used to be a time when a broadly based, liberal arts education and degree would do the trick (and I'm sure in many fields, still might).

A Women's Studies degree from Antioch got a relative of mine a job at Microsoft...

[knubbin]

From Inside Higher Ed.com today -- an analysis of the state of progressive schools, sparked by Antioch's announcement. Nothing groundbreaking here, but as a product of a "nontraditional" undergrad myself, I think it's an interesting article.

Countercultural and Alive (posted June 18, 2007)

With enrollment falling and unstable, professors fearing for their jobs, and a lack of broad public understanding over what the college is all about, its trustees convene. To the dismay of students and alumni — who say the trustees are selling out this proudly radical college’s values — the board decides to eliminate the undergraduate residential program. Instead the college will focus on its growing graduate programs, which aren’t offered on the main campus or taught by the faculty there.

That could be last week’s story about the closing of Antioch College. But it’s also what happened in 2002 at Goddard College. It may discourage Antioch alumni to know that the main undergraduate program that Goddard killed never came back. But the college — plagued at the time by deficits and faculty-administration warfare — is in the black and professors and administrators get along.

To be sure, there are plenty of ways that Antioch and Goddard’s situations are different. “Every nontraditional college is nontraditional in its own way,” quipped Ralph Hexter, president of Hampshire College, who was quick to note that despite his play on Tolstoy’s words, he wasn’t implying that these colleges are like unhappy families. (Antioch alumni these days might beg to differ and find the metaphor apt).

But what progressive colleges do share are a particular set of challenges. They tend to be small liberal arts institutions that pride themselves on low student-faculty ratios and individualized instruction — qualities that may be great for education but that don’t yield economies of scale. These are colleges with an explicitly progressive agenda, graduating far more social activists and teachers and artists than potentially big-gift contributing moguls. They are places known for educational innovations — many of which have been adapted by more mainstream institutions. And they are places where everyone has an opinion and expects to be listened to.

The vulnerability of nontraditional colleges worries not only their students and alumni, but many in higher education who know that places like Franconia College (1963-1978) or Black Mountain College (1933-1957) — institutions that helped shape their students’ lives and intellects — died.

Many of those saddened and worried about what Antioch’s closure means are educators at institutions with curriculums that would never fly at an Antioch, but who see as crucial to American higher education the existence of colleges with unique philosophies. “Any time somebody is trying to provide a distinctive educational program and such a school goes under, it causes the rest of us a great deal of sadness for the loss of something that is interesting, distinctive, and needed by a number of students,” said Chris Nelson, president of St. John’s College, the great books institution in Annapolis.

Full link here - http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/18/altcollege

[Artpunchehorse]

LOL at "progressive"

[Sushi]

From The NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/opinion/17goldfarb.html?em&ex=1182312000&en=5e337f956c285bbc&ei=5087%0A)

June 17, 2007
Where the Arts Were Too Liberal
By MICHAEL GOLDFARB

THIS is an obituary for a great American institution whose death was announced this week. After 155 years, Antioch College is closing.

Established in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, by the kind of free-thinking Christian group found only in the United States, Antioch College was egalitarian in the best tradition of American liberalism. The college’s motto, not in Latin or Greek but plain English, was coined by Horace Mann, its first president: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

For most of its history the institution lived up to that calling. It was one of the first coeducational colleges in the United States, and at a time when slavery was being practiced 70 miles to the south of its campus, it was one of the first colleges not to make a person’s race a factor in admission. It was also the first to appoint a woman as a full professor. All this happened before Lincoln became president.

Later Antioch would incorporate pragmatism, that most native of American philosophies, into its curriculum, balancing a student’s experience of learning inside the ivory tower with regular jobs off campus in the “real” world.

Yet it was in the high tide of liberal activism that the college lost its way. I know this firsthand, because I entered Antioch in the fall of 1968, just when the tide was nearing its peak. So much of the history of 1968 reflects an America in crisis, but if you were young and idealistic it was a time of unparalleled excitement. The 2,000 students at Antioch, living in a picture-pretty American village, provided a laboratory for various social experiments of the time.

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the college increased African-American enrollment to 25 percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years. The new students were recruited from the inner city. At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or administration, and certainly none of the students, could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.

I moved into this sociological petri dish from a well-to-do suburb. Within my first week I twice had guns drawn on me, once in fun and once in a state of drunken for real by a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her.

My roommate began the tortured process of coming out of the closet, first by pursuing women relentlessly and then accepting the truth and allowing himself to be pursued by men. He needed to talk all this out with himself when he came in each morning at 4 a.m., and in the face of his personal crisis, there was little I could do to assert my right to sleep. It was a mad, dangerous and painful time, but I do think I was made stronger for having to deal with these experiences.

Each semester, the college seemed to create a new program. “We need to take education to the people” became a mantra, and so satellite campuses began to sprout around the country. Something called Antioch University was created, and every faculty member whose marriage was going bad or who simply couldn’t hack living in a village of 3,000 people and longed for the city came up with a proposal to start a new campus.

“It was liberalism gone mad,” a former professor, Hannah Goldberg, once told me, and she was right. The college seemed to forget the pragmatism that had been a key to its ethos, and tried blindly to extend its mission beyond education to social reform. But there were too many new programs and too little cash reserve to deal with the inevitable growing pains.

For the increasingly vocal radical members of the community, change wasn’t going far enough or fast enough. They wanted revolution, but out there in the middle of the cornfields the only “bourgeois” thing to fight was Antioch College itself. The let’s-try-anything, free-thinking society of 1968 evolved into a catastrophic blend of legitimate paranoia (Nixon did keep enemies lists, and the F.B.I. did infiltrate campuses) and postadolescent melodrama. In 1973, a strike trashed the campus and effectively destroyed Antioch’s spirit of community. The next year, student enrollment was down by half.

Most of the talented faculty members began to leave for other institutions, and the few who were dedicated to rebuilding the Yellow Springs campus found themselves increasingly isolated. The college that gave the Antioch University system its name had become just another profit center in a larger enterprise and not even the most important one at that.

Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.

Much of this conformist thinking focused on gender politics, and it culminated in the notorious sexual offense prevention policy. Enacted in 1993, the policy dictated that a person needed express permission for each stage in seduction. (“May I touch your breast?” “May I remove your bra?” And so on.) In two decades students went from being practitioners of free love to prisoners of gender. Antioch became like one of those Essene communities in the Judean desert in the first century after Christ that, convinced of their own purity, died out while waiting for a golden age that never came.

I grieve for the place with all the sadness, anger and self-reproach you feel when a loved one dies unnecessarily. I grieve for Antioch the way I grieve for the hope of 1968 washed away in a tide of self-inflated rhetoric, self-righteousness and self-indulgence.

The ideals of social justice and economic fairness we embraced then are still right and deeply American. The discipline to turn those ideals into realities was what Antioch, its community and the generation it led was lacking. I fear it still is.

Michael Goldfarb, a former public radio correspondent, is the author of “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq.”

[yoshomon]

Oh my god I hate Antioch. GOOD RIDDANCE!!!