Present at the Demise: Antioch College, 1852-2008
By Ralph Keyes Nearly two decades ago, my wife and I fulfilled a fantasy by returning to the Ohio town where we went to college, met, and got married. In addition to our fondness for the town itself — Yellow Springs — we hoped to be of service to our alma mater, Antioch College. Muriel worked there in various capacities. Outside her office window she could see the Friends meetinghouse where we were married in 1965. I took part in programs for prospective students, spoke to classes, and helped organize events for alumni. Coming back to Antioch and Yellow Springs felt like a dream come true.
Antioch had changed dramatically. Its student body was now heavily pierced and tattooed. Antiochians seemed consumed with gender issues and boundary testing. In the student union I saw a flyer posted for a workshop on “fisting,” the insertion of one’s fist into a vagina or anus.
Soon after we arrived, Antioch’s vaunted ask-before-touching sex policy was enacted. When Saturday Night Live did a hilarious sendup of this policy, few on campus laughed. Like many, I found my alma mater’s approach to sexual activity somewhat absurd, but defended it nonetheless as a well-intentioned attempt to cope with the serious problem of sexual abuse.
If I’d dared to risk looking like a disgruntled alum, I might have paid more attention to things about Antioch that raised my eyebrows. By the early 1990s, its once-packed library was nearly deserted. The campus itself was beyond seedy. Some buildings were crumbling, others were vandalized, and many walls were spray-painted with edgy graffiti. Beer bottles and cigarette butts littered the grounds. Antioch’s president at the time told me that nearly half of its students smoked cigarettes, twice the national rate. Stories of rampant substance abuse could be heard, if one chose to listen. But Antioch and its students have always lived dangerously, so I tried to be tolerant, to look away from things on campus that made me uneasy.
After we’d been in Yellow Springs for several years, my son David and I visited half a dozen colleges that interested him. While David attended classes, I visited libraries, assuming they could tell me something about an institution’s intellectual atmosphere. Upon our return, I noted that Antioch’s own library was literally collapsing, even as administrators’ offices were being renovated. Bricks that had popped from its walls lay outside the library’s entrance. Weeds grew through cracks in its front steps. Some sections of the ceiling inside were water-stained, and linoleum tiles were loose underfoot. The library’s collection was sparse and dated, rich with pre-1970 books and serials, poor on materials thereafter. All of this had less to do with negligent librarianship (library employees are among the hardest working and most conscientious at the college) than with the fact that its library was so low on Antioch’s resource-allocation ladder.
Compared with students David and I had seen on our college tour, Antiochians now struck me as more bizarre than bohemian. Nor did their campus culture seem as understandable as the one I’d been part of from 1962 to 1967. I remembered Antioch as a lively, demanding institution, full of contentious students and professors. Many, including myself, were ardent left-wingers. Others stood elsewhere on the political spectrum. As we understood it, one’s political convictions were beside Antioch’s point. Its emphasis was on thinking for one’s self and keeping an open mind. “Re-evaluate your basic assumptions in the light of new evidence” was a campus cliché. I felt constantly challenged to justify my points of view. But I didn’t assume that reassessing those views would move me left. It might move me to the right, or toward the center, or nowhere at all.
The Antioch Muriel and I returned to did not emphasize that kind of open inquiry. The assumed endpoint was always to one’s left. As a result, Antioch’s emphasis had gone from searching for the truth to propagating the truth, from asking questions to teaching answers. One alum told me of asking a women’s-studies professor at Antioch if she ever assigned Camille Paglia. The professor recoiled, saying “I wouldn’t!” Why not? “Because she’s the enemy.”
In promotional pieces, Antioch billed itself as a “progressive” institution. Accepted applicants were invited to share notes on an online message board called “Radical Chat.” Inevitably Antioch’s appeal narrowed to an increasingly esoteric group of progressive-alternative students. When a longtime history professor reminded colleagues that Antioch was a college, not a “boot camp for the revolution,” students began wearing Boot Camp for the Revolution T-shirts. Eventually this became a campus credo.
Antioch was now for those who “got it” — the faithful. It was not for nonbelievers, nor for those who questioned the way business was conducted there. Antioch gave an increasingly cool reception to anyone — townspeople, alumni, parents, even trustees — who wasn’t considered one of us. When a townsman complained about Antioch’s replacing a basement air-conditioning unit with a loud, outdoor one not far from his bedroom windows, a college administrator commented that “sometimes you can’t push Big Brother.” (I’m not sure this administrator realized the Orwellian allusion, which in some ways was worse than if he had.) The college finally resolved this matter by persuading a conservative judge to nullify Yellow Springs’s noise ordinance.
Antioch’s indifference to outside concerns could be seen in the commencement speakers invited by graduating seniors. Those speakers included the convicted police murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal (attracting hundreds of demonstrators, including current and former police officers, as well as widows of slain officers), the former Black Panther Bobby Seale, and — until the interim president intervened — the poseur-professor Ward Churchill. Antioch’s commencement speaker this year was Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman best known for wondering aloud if members of the Bush administration had advance knowledge of 9/11 and for slugging a U.S. Capitol police officer.
One byproduct of Antioch’s self-absorption was that it made little attempt to communicate with the world beyond its borders. A strategic plan composed in the mid-1990s did acknowledge a need for better communication but addressed that need primarily in terms of sharing information within the institution.
Friends of the college tried in vain to call Antioch’s attention to its increasingly problematic reputation outside Yellow Springs. There, the most common perception of Antioch was as a place where you had to ask for permission before initiating sexual contact and where criminals were invited to address graduating seniors. Not that Antiochians cared. At the graduation ceremony where Mumia Abu-Jamal’s remarks were played (via a prerecorded cassette), a student speaker said Antioch took pride in being a home for “freaks,” and whoever didn’t get that could “fuck off.”
The atmosphere on campus grew wary, secretive, and suspicious. Antioch had come to resemble a cult more than a college. Faculty and staff members and students were warned not to discuss sensitive internal matters with outsiders. A highly critical accreditation report was put under lock and key with only a scrubbed precis being circulated on campus. This was stamped INTERNAL DOCUMENT — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Journalists could visit Antioch only when accompanied by a minder, as if this were Moscow University circa 1949. Even as private industry had begun to accept the need for greater transparency, Antioch College grew increasingly opaque.
Antioch’s administrative approach could best be termed “management by wishful thinking.” Budgets too often were based on anticipated donations that didn’t always materialize, and on projected rather than actual enrollment. That approach created internal pressure to manipulate data to conform with desired outcomes. During several years as a financial-aid counselor, Muriel watched fanciful enrollment figures being tossed about. Young Antioch graduates and dropouts who staffed the admissions office worked short days and didn’t always return phone calls. Financial-aid awards were often mailed well beyond the promised date, long after competitive colleges had mailed theirs. Muriel found it a constant struggle to keep her office from becoming too friendly with loan-making banks, a struggle she lost after her position was eliminated. Within months bankers’ logos began to appear on Antioch’s financial-aid forms.
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Even as entities such as IBM and General Electric were recognizing the need to change their organizational culture in response to painful assessments, Antioch did not. A group of alumni I organized, some of whom were ex-employees, met with one of Antioch’s recent presidents to express concerns about the college’s management. We were treated like interlopers. During the discussion, this president said that one of the main jobs of Antioch’s chief executive was to meet with alumni around the country and “counter” their criticisms of the college. In the midst of an earlier gathering convened to consider how to choose a new president, I suggested that Antioch search outside academy walls — in government, say, NGO’s, or even corporations — for an enlightened, capable executive. This was quickly dubbed “the pinstripe option” and referred to that way throughout the discussion.
Turnover was constant at all levels of Antioch’s administration. “Acting” and “Interim” became virtual job titles. In 2006, as Warren Wilson College inaugurated its sixth president in a century, Antioch installed its sixth in just over a decade (including an interim). A trustee told me of observing over 12 years’ time how little emphasis the college put on job performance, how much on fitting in. After a year of employment, a dean of students returned to the University of Kentucky, having been unable to implement minimal standards of deportment on campus. Students felt this dean did not “understand” Antioch’s ways.
At a meeting on campus, I got a taste of those ways. Even in the midst of routine discussion, students interrupted each other with angry outbursts. Presumably this was part of “calling each other out,” a popular campus pastime (”I’m calling you out as a product of privilege,” “I’m calling you out for wearing Nikes,” etc.).
After getting called out for calling Inuits “Eskimos,” an exchange student from Poland conducted a survey of language taboos among Antiochians. He and a colleague found that anyone thought to have used inappropriate words was liable to be ostracized. One student described being verbally assaulted after she innocently addressed a gay student as a “guy.” Many told the surveyors how fearful they were of saying the wrong thing. “If you say something wrong,” explained one Antiochian, “other people will have no mercy.”
Students were not the only ones being called out. Soon after he arrived on the campus, in early 2006, President Steven W. Lawry was the target an e-mail message from an Antiochian that said, “Fuck you, asshole.” This was not untypical of campus discourse. When the student newspaper asked readers what they would say to a “narc,” answers included “Stop snitchin’ snitches get stitches,” and “Die motherfucker Die.”
Granted, that type of gangsta posturing was simply a variation on, “Mommy, I said ‘doody!’” Still, it made for a hostile, intimidating campus atmosphere. A student’s relatives who visited the campus expecting to find an open and tolerant setting found just the opposite. They later wrote a letter to Antioch’s student newspaper lamenting the suspicion and mistrust they’d witnessed, in the form of insults, name-calling, and profanity. As if to illustrate their point, the same issue of the student paper in which the couple’s letter appeared included this piece of neo-haiku among its “De-Classified Ads”: “Arrogant Schmuck please/Leave if you want to maintain/Your balls. Chop chop chop.”
One summer I showed a friend from Colorado around my alma mater. When we got to the second floor of Antioch’s student union, with its crack-house décor, my friend — a liberal-minded psychologist — blanched. What was he thinking, I asked? “That I want to jump on a plane and go home to protect my daughter,” he replied.
High-school seniors determined to be Antiochians applied to the college despite its uneven academic program, trashed dorm rooms, graffitied walls, crumbling library, and student union that looked as if it had been decorated by John Belushi. Antioch’s appearance may have said Beware to parents, but to a certain type of prospective student it said Awesome. Anything goes! Those whom Antioch attracted reinforced and amplified its nihilistic culture, shrinking even further its institutional reach.
I came to see my alma mater as akin to an overspecialized organism that can survive only in a narrow, protected ecological niche. Antioch College had become the snail darter of higher education. In its not-too-distant past, Antioch’s strong academic program, well-administered campus, and unique work-study plan appealed to applicants with a wide range of outlooks and lifestyles. In its late-60s-early-70s heyday, the college’s enrollment rose to nearly 2,500. By 2007, even as enrollment soared at comparable liberal-arts colleges, Antioch’s had fallen to about 300 students.
Fitful attempts by myself and others to call attention to problems we considered potentially fatal routinely came up against an attitude familiar to anyone who’s raised a teenager: “If you want to help, just send money and butt out.” Eventually I came to feel that donating to my alma mater was a form of enabling, like giving spare change to a stumble-down drunk, hoping he’ll spend it on a bus ride to AA. (For a long time, we designated our donations for the library, until discovering that even funds so earmarked sometimes got used for general operating expenses.)
I began to have less and less contact with Antioch. Going there was just too demoralizing. On rare visits, I was struck by the sparsity of human bodies. Occasionally a student would amble from one building to another, or a small clump could be spotted outside a doorway surrounded by clouds of smoke. Other than that: nothing. Stillness. Antioch had become a ghost campus.
That was what greeted the current president, Steven Lawry, when he came to Antioch from the Ford Foundation last year. Lawry made a concerted effort to right Antioch’s ship, to restore some civility to its discourse and coherence to its management. But by then it was too late: The college was already in its death throes.
For us, what began as a dream ended as a nightmare. Rather than being able to help our alma mater grow and flourish, Muriel and I witnessed its collapse. This was excruciating, like watching a beloved relative decline, lose memory, and ultimately go mad. Most dismaying was how few of those involved were willing to acknowledge Antioch’s dysfunctional condition: not the administrators, the faculty members, the trustees, nor local journalists, who swallowed whole Antioch’s repeated assurances that things were in hand and on the uptick. As recently as September 2005, Antioch’s interim president told a reporter that the college was “on a straight road toward fiscal vitality.” That’s why so many were so shocked when its Board of Trustees announced in June that Antioch College would suspend operations in a year’s time.
I’ve been asked often whether the demise of my alma mater surprised me. It did not. I was startled and alarmed years ago, when it became apparent that Antioch was driving off a cliff. I braced myself for its impending disintegration. But Antioch’s slow-motion decline felt worse than its sudden collapse. When loved ones age and fail over an extended period, their departure can come as a relief. After years of sadly watching my alma mater self-destruct, that’s how its actual demise felt: less a shock, more a relief.
Ralph Keyes, Antioch Class of 1967, is author of The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life (St. Martin’s, 2004) and, most recently, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin’s, 2006).
Reprinted from the Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 46, Page B8 July 20, 2007












August 20th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
thank you for a truly shocking – and eloquent – expose of exactly where american education went wrong. as bridges were readying to fall and coal mines to collapse, grievance committees were manufacturing crises and crimes and camille paglia was somehow excluded from the magic garden of tolerance.
it’s time for education to reconnect to reality and its ancient charge of inculcating knowledge, self-responsibility, strength, and compassion.
August 21st, 2007 at 8:05 am
I experienced Antioch College through the Antioch Writer’s Workshop in 1998 and 1999. I enjoyed the workshop and interacting with the participants. I knew nothing of the college itself, except that it was very left leaning. It is sad that an institution of learning was so lacking in discipline and standards as to make the necessary changes to facilitate change and experience a rebirth into a vital functioning college. Sometimes the best thing to do is to let the willfully blind wander into the minefield. But where were the graduates of this college to find employment in the real world? Or have they gone extinct as well?
Sincerely
Norman Kincaide
August 21st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Antioch’s remarkable work-study program, initiated in the 1920s, gave students such as myself valuable real-world experience in actual jobs. (Many employers counted on a rotating crew of Antiochians to fill a single position 12 months of the year.) In recent years that program has shifted toward internships in social action groups, arts programs, NGOs, and the like. Well-intentioned as some of these experiences may be, they prepare Antioch students only for more of the same.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:32 am
I lived in Yellow Springs from 1991 till 1999. My conly contacts with the University were:
(1) I donated about fifteen years of Foreign Affairs issues to the library. They were greatful – but I sensed they really had no idea what to do with them.
(2) Attended a Writer’s Workshop – and on my recoomendation, Dr. Norman Kincaide went a few years later. I loved it – but had no direct contact with what was, by all accounts, a crumbling institution. The Writer’s Workshop will continue – whatever else happens to Antoch. That much is a blessing.
An elderly gentleman lived up the road from my house. He was married to a professor at Antioch. Whenever anything to do with the the university came up in conversation – he always referred to it as “The Insane Asylum.” He was a veteran of 3rd Army British – North Africa WW2. I am confident he could recognize insanity when he saw it.
Sincerely,
Paul C. Perkins, MD
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:58 am
It’s striking how many of those who have had dealings with Antioch in recent years use insane-asylum analogies when referrring to the college.
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:31 am
[...] Jean Gregorek, Associate Professor of Literature, responds to Ralph Keyes’s “Present at the Demise†published in the Chronicle of Higher Education Web Editors Note – Accessing Ralph’s letter at the Chronicle of Higher Education website requires a login but Ralph also recently posted this article here : http://ilfpost.org/?p=230 and this is the link provided above. [...]
October 10th, 2007 at 9:36 am
this is a sad tale but so helpful to those of us who missed the slow decline and were shocked at the news of impending closure.
reading the very well written and delineated disintegration of the college culture I knew in 68-73 makes me think that closing the place is the only correct path to take.
thank you for your insight into the process of decline.
October 18th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
There is a certain perfection to your description of the nihilistic Antioch College campus. When I came to visit the campus in the late spring of 1973, the famous strike that signaled the beginning of what has really been a slow ending, was just concluding. There was filth everywhere, it was overgrown with weeds, South Hall was crumbling and the gym seemed suspended in the 1930s. Even in its turmoil and neglect that has apparently worsened, the campus had a certain grandeur that cannot be denied, especially when considering Glen Helen. The jewel of the campus is located in Main Building on the 1st floor, a bronze plaque commemorating the Antioch College students who fought and died in the Civil War. The point that is sometimes lost is that the Antioch tradition springs from the great ideas of the Civil War: freedom, tolerance and free
association. I fell in love with Antioch College and I fell in love at
Antioch college, as did Mr. Keyes. My ex-wife really likes my mind and she thought that sending our middle son, Dylan, to Antioch would be a good idea, because she knew how Antioch had shaped my mind. I told her that his life-style did not match the current value system at Antioch. He is too smart, good-looking and normal for Antioch. He as a consumer would be abhorred by the product that Antioch offers. When I attended Antioch, the community was vibrant and filled with diverse opinions. Now, the students represent Rod Serling’s pig people, seeking conformity in thought and appearance. Unfortunately, the shrinking student population has created a limited gene pool for thought. Using the New York City Subway as an example, good and historical facilities that are neglected can be rehabilitated. A student body plagued by its
radical crassness can be liberated from itself given greater diversity in numbers. The Antioch idea is a good idea, one worth saving. That can be accomplished by first upgrading the facilities, especially the library. I would be a nihilist (with piercings and tattoos) if I paid $35,000 for two quarters of substandard housing, dilapidated classrooms and an out-dated library. Antioch College must be administered by a Board of Trustees separate from Antioch University. Many of the monetary shortfalls date back to the inception of the various machinations of Antioch University. It has been a continuing argument for almost 40 years that must end with the salvation of an important and distinctively American college.
June 15th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
As a 2007 graduate of Antioch College, I found your article to be very validating. I went to Antioch College as a sophomore at the age of 21 after having flunked out of my first college at 18. From everything I had heard about the place, I was expecting a veritable utopia. What I experienced was anything but.
The students I met there were intellectually lacking, and the college itself was academically moribund. You speak about your encounters with the former president of the college-I know exactly who you are speaking about. I enrolled in his class, intro to communications, and never had to write a single paper. Basically, all he did was talk about himself and how wonderful the college was. Perhaps worst of all was that I could tell he didn’t mean what he was saying-he came off as a true charlatan.
But so did my peers. From the scores of people who entered heterosexual but who left (or dropped out-why drop out? you don’t have to do anything) as ersatz queers (I myself am gay), there was nothing genuine about the campuses rhetoric. It was all an act, a very unconvincing act.
I was afraid that my superlative lasiness would prove to be my downfall while at the college. Miraculously, though, I sailed through. I didn’t have to do anything. You wrote about the library’s state of decay. The college found an excellent way around that problem-why invest in the library when you can simply keep students from actually NEEDING to use it? I never once had to research anything.
At first, students liked me because I was outspoken, but before long, I was reviled because I didn’t take the college’s “political conscience” seriously. I would consider myself to be a staunch leftist. But I refuse to apologize to a campus who calls me close-minded and elitist because I find it unacceptable that students aren’t expected to spell correctly or use proper grammar.
And this, ultimately, is what I am willing to bet the farm on: Antioch’s collapse is simply due to a lack of academic rigor. Anyone who applies to Antioch will be accepted, usually with generous financial aid. Organic difference and uniqueness are to be celebrated, but oddity for its own sake should not be. Apparently no one told the admissions staff. And of course, much of the college is staffed by alums/drop-outs. So, when your colleagues are degenerates and your students are dunces, what are you going to do if you have one shred of intelligence? You’re going to get a job somewhere else. That was the other dimension to Antioch’s demise: brain drain.
A boy from the town who I was romantically involved with (there are no gay men at Antioch College, only lesbians. It’s axiomatic that freedom with one’s sexuality is encouraged among America’s women and not among the men. So clearly, some people are faking!) was NOT accepted to the college: an admissions counselor deemed his paintings to be “too dark.” So clearly, diversity is also not one of Antioch’s strong suits.
My parents escaped Iran’s Islamic revolution-my father was an academic, my mother, an outspoken feminist. The parallels between their accounts of revolutionary Iran and Antioch are staggering-of course, people in Iran were more literate, but I digress. Freedom of thought and individuality are frowned upon. Being radical and crazy for the sake of novelty is celebrated.
And of course, brain drain is rampant (this also partially accounts for the school’s high attrition rate as well).
As someone who thinks history should be preserved and celebrated, I’m sad to see the college close. But as a person who has a permanently sour taste in my mouth from having experienced what Antioch really meant, it’s incredibly difficult to feel particularly sad about the college’s closure.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
After my rant yesterday, though… there is one major thing I forgot to mention.
While we may deride Antioch’s academic bankruptcy, there still exists a culture in which society’s norms are questioned. While this has also resulted in the promotion and celebration of repudiating every norm for no good reason, the good aspects of this philosophy only surface when one leaves Antioch.
I was romantically involved with a boy from Bard, one who decried that institution’s anodyne political culture. And as I meet more and more students from such places as Vassar and Oberlin or Smith and Sarah Lawrence, I encounter students who aren’t genuinely angry about the debauchery we see in our world every day. It’s not that they’re ambivalent, or even disenchanted; they have just changed as our country has. They’ve become ambitious, career oriented. That’s not a bad thing, but it leaves little room for inquiry into why our world is the way it is.
While at the College of Wooster, which had a campus culture much more diverse than Antioch’s, I craved a more left leaning political atmosphere. I didn’t really feel the need to have to engage other students’ assertions that we should just bomb other countries. I felt short-changed by professors who felt the best way to teach a class was to preach their academics though a muddied centrist lens. You can’t make an impression that way. And that’s why I eventually did choose to go to Antioch.
Hopefully if the Antioch College falls into the hands of some loving alumni who can clean house, academic integrity and intellectual nourishment can thrive in a college that still questions society and can instill a healthy distrust of society’s malaise (not what Reagan meant).
June 16th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Finally if you scroll up to Jean Gregorek’s response to your original post, she illustrates a lot of other reasons for the College’s collapse. And while the vast majority of students at Antioch toward the end were essentially useless, there were a few who were anything but. And with the College’s lack of structure, the self-motivated students could find some freedom to think for themselves, and to engage with Professors (THE GOOD ONES who’ve stayed because of their love for the college, and the occasional bright scholars within. These are professors like Ms. Gregorek herself, and my academic advisor who never minces her words and who mentored Michael Moore before coming here, Anne Bohlen).
I apologize for my three-posts-in-a-row.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:09 am
hi. i went to antioch from ‘88-’92 and graduated (technically class of ‘93 because i finished in december ‘92) with a self-designed major in “modern folklore.” antioch was, for me, the antidote to the structured education system that had disillusioned me in high school. i flourished at antioch and, for the first time in my life, found that i could persue knowledge without the “memorize and regurgitate” obedience training that passed for education in my high school. antioch was, for me, a place to question assumptions and apply critical thinking to *everything.*
it also had major problems. i was there in the fall of ‘90 when the “womyn of antioch” tried to resolve the problem of date rape on campus and remember the chaos that was unleashed when they railroaded through a sexual offense policy that became a source of national satire and a head-ache for lawyers who felt portions of it might be deemed unconstitutional.
i also remember how the alumni were frustrated that earmarked funds got absorbed into “general funds” and how cosmetic improvements to the campus took priority over improving the many anemic departments. (creative writing had exactly one professor when i graduated. many of the science fields were equally under-staffed.)
i just went through yellow springs two days ago and pulled off the highway to look at the recently closed alma mater. i have so many fond memories of that place. we remade it in our image and i know it is a very different school than the one that the students of the sixties remember, but i can say with certainty that our class, ‘92-’93, remmebers it as fondly as yours.
a memory of my first season was seeing the boarded up condemned “south hall” (still in disarray from the ‘73 strike) with the phrase “anthem for a doomed youth” spraypainted on the inside of one of the many ravaged rooms. antioch was the inverse of the reagan era… a punk rock college with a punk rock attitude. we didn’t make sense to everyone, but to those who “got it” it was home.
it is sad but fitting that antioch cannot survive the dubya years. in an era where fox news is manufacturing our consent, a place like antioch is worse than an anachronism. “anthem for a doomed youth” indeed.