The Antioch College Comeback
Call it a comeback. After having its operations suspended for the past two academic years, Antioch College will begin admitting new students as soon as 2011, Inside Higher Ed reports.
Leaders of the failed college's alumni association and the Antioch University Board of Trustees announced on Tuesday a plan to make the college independent of the university that closed it. The deal gives the college ownership of its campus, its $19 million endowment, its name, its literary journal, and, most important, total autonomy from the university. In return, the university will receive $6 million from the college's alumni and other donors.
Antioch's departure and return have been as controversial as its history. Founded in 1852 by Horace Mann, the college played a part in the abolitionist movement and was one of the first institutions to admit students regardless of gender or race. In the 1900s, Antioch was one of the first colleges to promote co-op education, a system in which students alternate between learning in the classroom and learning through on-the-job work experience. The college's famous alumni include Clifford Geertz, Stephen Jay Gould, and Coretta Scott King.
Though the college's campus is designed to accommodate 2,700 students, it saw fewer and fewer students enroll in the years preceding its temporary closure. Many members of the Antioch College community also resented the college's association with Antioch University, an entity created to run branch campuses across the country that offered mostly graduate-level courses. When the university decided to suspend operations of the college, many members of the Antioch College community argued that the university was sacrificing the very foundation of the institution.
Since the announcement, many alumni have pledged to increase the size and frequency of their donations to the college.
Tags: colleges | Antioch College
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Reader Comments
Antioch College,Yellow Springs, Ohio
I graduated from Antioch in 1953. It had a good academic program, a working co-op work-study program, and a governance system that empowered all parts of the community. Most important, while there was a lot of freedom there, we spent a lot of time building community, so that it was a safe place to be. As Antioch is being resurrected, it will be important to make sure that all 3 parts of its educational structure are of the highest caliber. In addition, Antioch should be a model for respect for one another. This means structures for accomplishing this purpose. No one group of students should victimize other groups of students. Constructive diversity can be controlled by admission policies and campus life can also be constructive if the policies and methods for accomplishing this are established and enforced. From my observation of the alumni who accomplished the feat of helping Antioch to become independent of the University and to work towards reopening, I believe it is possible to create a new college that will retain the positive aspects of the former Antioch and avoid the negative aspects described by the former students above.
Joan Staples, Chicago, Illinois
Antioch College and its philosophy
I attended Antioch 1976-79. The school was so unstructured that the only real accomplishments were found through the co-ops, and 2 of my 3 co-ops were fantastic, enriching experiences. Unfortunately, the on-campus experience was exactly the opposite. There were few course offerings, virtually zero extra-curricular activities, rampant drug use, epidemic apathy, and viral man-hating feminists. So many students could not handle the lack of structure, the repeated back-and-forth movement to the co-op locations, the easily available drugs, the almost complete isolation from the real world, and the fact that you regularly lost contact with friends, that the turn-over rate was tremendous. And even if you could handle all of the above you probably found many of the people you befriended were forever lost. I suffer no tears over Antioch’s closure. The school took a tremendous amount of my money and gave me only two 3 month co-ops in return. I still have foul memories of the feminists and their malicious propaganda of lies spread through the school radio and newspaper. I was sickened that so many people, student and faculty, were unwilling to stand up to the spread of obvious falsehoods fomented by the feminist whose only apparent agenda was to demonized males. The lack of moral backbone Antioch displayed during my time is the primary reason I left Antioch and why I will not contribute one cent to the perpetuation of the philosophy for which it stands. I fully support the philosophy of open ideas and frank discussion, but not an environment of suppression so as to allow a minority a louder voice than the numbers of its members are entitled.
My memories of Antioch
My bittersweet (I'm being very kind here) memories of Antioch College are worth mentioning to anyone who will listen. The academic challenges of the college and the potential learning experience were in a sense, outweighed by a school and a student body that offered little direction and even less moral guidance. It is true that a person from a structured and advantaged background could do well here; but Antioch's penchant for unstructured, radical and leftist type belief systems attracted a strange group of people with little emotional or intellectual honesty in my opinion and even less honor. This lack of honor seemed to be upheld by the administrative forces as well.
The movement towards a radical minority-driven campus is, in my opinion, a disingenuous move towards appealing to a disenfranchised element and holds little promise for intellectual achievement. Rather it seems another swing at the activist past--a past that was summarily rejected by main stream America from the beginning and a past that the institution cannot seem to distance itself from. Rather than move towards a market driven institution the radical forces of confusion are moving in a predicatably rejectable fashion towards politically driven, rhetorical, socialistic crap which students with any connections in mainstream America quickly distance themselves from and if not, wind up in the trash heap of social experiences. Antioch College needs to turn its vision around but then again even Wharton is proud of its transexual, lesbian and whatever combination except hetero you can dream of--representation. So maybe when your daughter comes back looking like a truck driver and your son comes back in a dress you will crow that he/she/it is on the cutting edge of social experiences. I still think you're just weird--in general.
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