From a staff person at Antioch:
1 in 5 employees are being terminated today

if only we had the big bucks in hand already

every time the phone rings we are thinking it is our turn

thanks to everyone...maybe we can derail this madness.

Over on the SaveAntioch mailing lists. I'm trying out an embed flash player, so bare with me.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/19/botstein

Please spread the word -- as always, comments on our coverage from Antioch alums are encouraged.

The New Your Times has an op-ed opinion piece titled Where the Arts Were Too Liberal. While The Columbus Dispatch states Antioch sunk itself by refusing to evolve.

Both of which were found first by Patrick Cates and submitted to the Alumni-chat.

Marie Javins remembers her senior project and later reflects on the state of the College.

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As the news of the college closing has unfolded, it seems that there was a conflict between the university system and the college. Alumni, me included, were asked for money. I tossed the letter out. It was no different than any other year. Schools that teach social justice aren't usually rolling in money and high enrollment.

And if I had realized, would I have given money? Well, sure, fifty bucks or whatever. But Antioch is a school that puts out social activists and creative professionals. Not so many rich people. Would it have changed anything if we'd all kicked in a few bucks, while keeping an eye on our rent? Probably not much. I've recently come to the startling realization that after taxes, more than 50% of my monthly take-home pay goes to rent. Scary.

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Above clipping from the No Hurry in JC blog.

Peter Wood is Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars has an interesting article. Here are some clippings from it.

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I have been looking for what Antiochians of recent years think about the name of the College. The Antioch website, unusually for a college, has little to say about its history. In 2003, someone with the blogonym Yazz Cudd admirably declared "We owe it to Antioch's founders to 'keep the faith," (with appropriate scare quotes) and he did a little research on the topic. He discovered that ancient Antioch "really was a shining star of civilization... amazingly free from social and political oppression." According to Yazz, the founders of Antioch College, being highly educated folk, knew that the city was renowned for "artistic expression," and good architecture, "including basilicas, baths, and libraries of intricate and astonishing complexity and loveliness." Not to mention "variegated stonework employing brightly colored patterns and mosaics."

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I have conservative friends who, on hearing the news of Antioch's demise, said "Good riddance!" That doesn't seem to me quite right. Antioch had clearly lost its way and its closing does represent a judgment by Americans as a whole who were no longer willing to risk their children's education in such a venture. But Antioch once upon a time was a serious place. The catalogue of 1854 lays out admissions standards tougher than any American college or university today and a rigorous four-year curriculum requiring sciences, mathematics, Latin, Greek, French, and German, art, literature, engineering, and more. Today, we would call this elitist and damn it as impractical even if it were possible. But Antioch's founders opened their college to women and, though there was internal resistance, the College accepted black students as well.

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PS: The Yazz he keeps mentioning is my friend Yazz Cudd class of '66 if there was any confusion. Now if I only Peter would have linked to the article Yazz Cudd wrote...

The Sexual Offense Prevention Policy still making news over at FIRE while the College faces uncertain time a head.

"...Antioch University, in my home state of Ohio, is closing the doors of its main undergraduate campus (called Antioch College). Even living in Ohio, few people knew much about Antioch with the exception of a short time in the 1990s when the college became nationally known for its bizarre sexual offense prevention policy. Adopted in 1991 at the prompting of the “Womyn of Antioch,” the consent requirements for this policy made news because they are virtually impossible to fulfill—but to fail to do so was a sexual offense."

More than once when I was be asked what College I attended and answered Antioch College the next item brought up by them was the SOPP as remembered from that Saturday Night Live skit mocking the it from the 90's.

"There are undoubtedly myriad reasons why Antioch is closing its doors. But enrollment, which was down to 300, certainly couldn’t have been helped by the fact that it had a policy so absurd that it gained a reputation for treating all of its students as potential sexual predators. Is this the road down which Gettysburg College, as another small liberal-arts school with an unreasonable and infamous sexual assault policy, is destined to travel? Only time will tell, but really, haven’t policies like these claimed enough victims?"

For some history I thought some would like to read what Sara has written on her own blog

"Let me begin this post with a declaration -- I am an Antiochian. I have a hard earned degree from what was, in 1957, one of the most difficult colleges to actually get into, then classified with Reed, Oberlin, Carleton, and Swarthmore on all the quality measures. My class that entered just 50 years ago this September with 325 members, graduated in 1962 with just 140 survivors. We got a hell of an education, given that in 1957 it was a bit unusual to send a kid from suburban Dayton to work in the Cabrini Housing Project as a group worker, less than a year after she had left High School. But that was my education. More educational yet -- one of the ten year old girls in one of my groups came to get me when her older sister murdered her pimp, and she thought they needed help -- could I provide? (I called a U of Chicago Law Student and he came, helped, and got her a real lawyer.) And that was only one day in my first Antioch Co-op Job."

You can leave comments here but there are already some on her blog.

With Antioch Closing not everyone feels like saving the College. Take Henry P. Wickham Jr. who grew up around the college.

Read it here with some reader comments.

The original can be found on the SaveAntioch mailing list.

1) The Board did not actually deal with alternative scenarios for dealing with the College's financial difficulties, such as (a) merging McGregor and the College, (b) closing another center of the University, (c) liquidating the endowment, (d) bailing out of the so-called Renewal Plan that the Trustees imposed on the College. Some of these may be drastic, but they provide viable alternatives to closing the flagship campus. They did not consult with the faculty, the alumni Board, the Village or the major donors in deciding on a course of closing;