Endless Knots

Antioch, again!

By George, they did it. College alum have purchased Antioch College back from the university, officially today. Congratulations to my fellow/felless alums. A triumph in such tough times. And special kudos to the negotiating committee: Lee Morgan, grandson of Antioch's storied president, Arthur Morgan, and Matthew Derr, both college grads, these two repping the college; and University trustees Dan Fallon, also a college grad, and my dear friend, Jack Merselis, himself a graduate of Antioch New England.

As Matt Derr was quoted in the Yellow Springs News (in whose press room I spent every Thurs night setting type for the Antioch Record, the college rag):

“Antioch College was one of the top colleges in the country in the late 1960s and it fell on hard times,” Derr said. “Here we are reviving it. There’s never been a story like this in higher education. No one thought we could pull it off.”

(And I am hereby creating a new category for this blog: Miracles)

Antioch is dead! Long live Antioch!

Incredible. Today's NY Times ("Ohio: Alumni Raise Money for Closed College") brings news that the Antioch College Alumni Board and the Antioch University Board of Trustees have both signed a Letter of Intent that would transfer ownership of the college and many of its assets to the Alumni Board for $6.5 million. I also just received a note on Facebook that includes the Letter of Intent, including all its provisions.

I've done so many posts on the Antioch drama that it warrants its own category here. I have friends on both sides of this complex situation; for a brief period (1998-2001), I sat on the University Board of Trustees. And, small world, Jack Merselis, who is still on University Board and who's been on the task force that put this agreement together, is also on the board of NetAge. I haven't talked with him about what's transpired (I'm so out of it that I didn't even know until tonight that this was in the works!) so can't offer any more than what's publicly available but I must say this: I am proud to be an Antioch graduate and very happy at the idea that the college may be put back together again.

Here's the press release explaining the provisions of the Letter of Intent, which can be read in its entirety on the Antioch College site:

First Step Taken to Create a Newly Independent Antioch College

Letter of Intent Approved by Boards of Antioch University and Antioch College Continuation Corporation

Ann Arbor, MI—Six months after operations were suspended at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio a Letter of Intent to finalize an agreement to create a newly independent Antioch College, separate from Antioch University, has been approved by both the Board Pro Tempore of the Antioch College Continuation Corporation and the Antioch University Board of Trustees.

“This Letter of Intent seeks to protect the interests of Antioch University while creating the prospect for a newly independent and viable Antioch College,” said Richard Detweiler, President of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and mediator and chair of the Taskforce. Detweiler continues, “This letter of intent, while not binding on the parties, establishes the framework to negotiate a more detailed and comprehensive definitive agreement.”

The Taskforce was proposed by the Alumni Association in response to a request from the University Board of Trustees to develop a process to create an independent college; both the University and the Alumni have sanc-tioned its work. The Taskforce, in addition to Richard Detweiler, also included Antioch College alumni Matthew Derr, ’89, Lee Morgan, ’67, and Antioch University Trustees Dan Fallon, ’61 and Antioch University-New England alumnus Jack Merselis, ’96.

My Antioch

From The Independent:

DAYTON, Ohio - Former faculty at Antioch College, which is temporarily closing amid financial problems, plan to teach in coffee shops, bookstores and parks to keep alive the spirit of the private school known for its pioneering academic programs.

Scott Warren, former associate professor of philosophy and political theory at Antioch, said 22 ex-faculty members have formed the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in the village of Yellow Springs, where the college is located.

Warren said the institute will follow the Antioch formula of offering progressive liberal arts courses while encouraging learning for life, humanitarian acts and collective decision-making. "It's an educational vision that keeps the DNA of Antioch College alive pending its resurrection," he said...

"The College That Would Not Go Gently"

Today's New York Times Education section carries yet another article about the Antioch College saga, which I've posted about aplenty. The story is not over and each writer who tries to tell it struggles for another angle that makes it make sense. Squaring the circle, that.

The lead picture with today's Times article says as much as anything in the piece itself: It's raining, pouring apparently, and one lone person is struggling into a desolate student union. In my five years at the college, there was never a moment when a picture like that could have been taken: the Union, as we called it, was teeming with activity day and night. Indeed, it was usually hard to find a table in the cafeteria. A college built for 2000 now has barely 200.

Graduation is next week and it might be Antioch College's last - and it might not be. The Antioch University Board of Trustees and the Antioch College Continuation Corporation (ACCC) are still talking, even after reports that talks have broken off. And there's yet another organization called "Non-stop Antioch" that vows to soldier on with a million dollars in funds collected by still another group of alums.

If the ACCC is successful in gaining control over the college (two deals have been proposed, one whereby this non-profit founded by a group of wealthy alums takes over the college assets in exchange for $10 million, another whereby ten of these alums join the University Board and ten of the current trustees resign), their challenges will be immense. Not insurmountable but immense. They too will have to make tough decisions about reconstruction, tenure, recruitment, endowment...all the things that plague the institution now. And, ironically, among their numbers are some of the very same people who served on the Board of Trustees while the college declined and the endowment did not grow.

It's not over and I do admire everyone who's hung in there constructively on all sides.

Knitting Antioch back together

My college friend, Pat Edwards, reunited of course via Facebook, has alerted me to this positive development in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where our dear, long-suffering Antioch College is situated. On the main street in town, knitters (and passersby) are stitching artful patches around "the knitknot tree." It's a trend, apparently. See "Knitters dress up trees for public art." As this blog is Endless Knots and I've been known to knit a thing or two, look for some developments here in West Newton (says she, eying the old maple in the back yard). Reminds me of "the note tree" on our beloved Bear Island in New Hampshire, where children (and their grandparents, principally) write messages on pieces of birch bark and tuck them in a particular tree near the island's famed Sunset Rock.

(AP Photo/Skip Peterson - thanks)

It's closed, it's open, it's closed, it's not...

Oh, Antioch. I've been following the saga since last June when the Antioch University Board of Trustees decided to temporarily shutter the college in hopes of saving it. In June, the board took its decisive vote; seconds later, the alums rose up in protest; in November, the trustees voted to reconsider their decision after a few alums banded together and formed a new 501(c)3 in hopes of taking over the college; and just last week, the board voted again to keep the college closed. Disclosure: I've got friends on both sides of this struggle -- trustees, of which I was briefly one, whose judgment I honor and respect, and officers of the new non-profit, Antioch College Continuation Corporation, one of whom has been a close friend since we were at Antioch together and whose business acumen is unparalleled (in my experience).

I don't know how to solve this one but I do know that this predicament calls for the greatest shoring up of maturity imaginable, including giving one another the greatest benefit of the doubt. I've heard a lot of conversation that is not that, frankly, and have been on the sore end of some of it myself just for saying that the board was brave to make its first move. I repeat what I said then: the college was not viable when I went onto the university board (1998) and things have only gotten worse. The trustees took a controversial decision that finally woke up the alums. Now, everyone, please talk civilly and productively. Not talking is not going to solve this. End of sermon.

Antioch College, Chapter 9763

For those following the Antioch College story, this update. Frankly, one could devote a whole website to it. Indeed, several have. A Boston area Antioch Alumni Association (alumni site here) meeting last Sunday prompts this post.

Brief recap: In June '07, the Antioch University Board of Trustees, of which Antioch College is the home of the brand and the original progenitor of its far-flung tentacles (there were once nearly 40 mini-Antiochs around the country), voted to suspend operations at the college for lack of funds. Enrollment had plummeted in the past few years (down from 2000 when I graduated in 1970 to less than a tenth of that this year). I've done a bunch of posts about this (The little college that might, among others), about the finger-pointing, about the outcry from the college alumni who revere their memories of their time there (as do I), about the immature reaction of some who chose to scapegoat others, some of those scapegoaters also having served in positions where they were responsible for creating the conditions that led to the college shutting down.

Comes then the outcry and the pledge by alums to fill the coffers. Good news, lots of energy to save the place, alums meeting everywhere to figure out how to turn demise into delight. Thrilling to see what my fellow alums were capable of - and how great the affection for this national educational treasure. Antioch's storied history is recorded in many places but in short it was the first college in the US to offer work/study, a unique form of experiential education that taught us how to work and learn at the same time. I've written elsewhere here about my co-op jobs. Horace Mann, the great educator who lived here in Newton, Mass., was the first president of Antioch College (1852); Arthur Morgan, Antioch's president for decades, instituted the co-op program. Then Antioch pioneered a massive junior-year-abroad program (Antioch Education Abroad) and I benefited from that too as the first woman from the college to go to Oxford as an undergrad.

Enough about how great it was.

Following their surprise announcement to suspend college operations, the university trustees seemed to hear what the alums were saying and, working with the Alumni Board, agreed in November to reverse the suspension. Then the unexpected yet again. The Alumni Board rejected the Board's suspension because the big-dollar donors were unwilling to fork over their funds (some had only made pledges) unless the college had complete autonomy from the University. Complete autonomy, meaning its own Board of Directors bearing no formal ties to the University. And at about the same time, a new nonprofit formed, Antioch College Continuation Corporation (link will take you to its most recent communication).

What struck me again at Sunday's alumni meeting was the fervor with which nearly everyone spoke, their love for the college and their desire to revive it. Most had a "hot button" issue, whether the way the original decision was communicated or the location of a new building for one of the Antioch graduate campuses located in the same town as the college, or why the other adult campuses (there are five around the country) couldn't just make up the college's deficit (they don't have the funds). But all agreed that Antioch College is a national treasure and that it must be preserved.

Me too. Among the most eloquent was Everett Mendelsohn, another of our esteemed alums and professor of the History of Science at Harvard, who has recommended that we convene the very the best minds in education - and among the alums - to plot the college's future. Funds are critical, yes, but a vision for an Antioch for the 21st-century is fundamental to attracting the brightest students and retaining the best faculty.

For my discouraged writer friends (and all Antiochians)

I love stories like this as they involve many favorite things - writers who keep at it even when rejected, food, honoring those who've died...and my alma mater, which has not died, Antioch.

If you get The Sunday New York Times, you'll be able to read the original. Otherwise (or if so inclined, even if), read Alex Witchel's nice recap of The I Hate to Cook Book author Peg Bracken's life (she died in October '07). Antiochians: she graduated in 1940. Here's a snippet:

The men who ruled the world in the late 1950s, or at least six of the men who ruled publishing, rejected Peg Bracken’s manuscript, “The I Hate to Cook Book.” It would never sell, they told her, because “women regard cooking as sacred.” It took a female editor at Harcourt Brace to look at the hundreds of easy-to-follow recipes wittily pitched at the indentured housewife and say, “Hallelujah!” Since its publication in 1960, Bracken’s iconic book, which celebrated the speedy virtues of canned cream-of-mushroom soup and chicken bouillon cubes, has sold more than three million copies. That helped lift her spirits, her daughter, Jo Bracken, said, about her $338 advance.

The little college that might

For those following the saga of Antioch College, it just gets better and better. Briefly, last June, the Antioch University Board of Trustees suspended operations at the college due to low enrollment and an endowment so paltry that subsidizing the deficit was not a viable option. The alumni went nuts. Appalled that their beloved institution (mine too) could be shuttered, they rallied, some more maturely than others.

Over the past six months, negotiations between the Alumni Board (elected by the College alums) and the Board of Trustees, augmented by a nationwide fund-raising drive among alums (not exactly known for emptying their pockets on behalf of the college in the past) led to two unexpected developments:

1. On November 3, the University Board agreed to lift the suspension with a number of provisos; and

2. Yesterday, December 11, the Board "approved a resolution instructing [the university chancellor] to begin exploring the possibility of transferring the ownership of Antioch College to a separate, free-standing liberal arts institution with its own board of trustees..." by July 1, 2008.

In the interim, a third group, the newly formed Antioch College Continuation Corporation, a 501(c)3 incorporated in Ohio, will serve as the new entity to operate the college, independent of the university. The incorporators of the new group are mostly college alums (one is not); a number are former university board members.

Hats off to this new group, to the alums working so hard to preserve this national treasure, and to the university board for moving with the tide.

NOTE TO ANTIOCHIANS: check out the virtual conversation among alums about all this along with the Antioch College Record Online. Ahhhh, for the days when I was a managing editor and stayed up all night at Yellow Springs News putting filler into lines of lead type.

ANTIOCH COLLEGE’S SUSPENSION LIFTED!

Just received this email from the Boston Antioch College (my alma mater) Alumni Group:

At 2 p.m. EST, the Antioch University Board of Trustees, in historic collaboration with the Alumni Board, agreed today to lift the suspension of operations at Antioch College originally slated for June 30, 2008. This decision, which follows intensive discussions between the University Board of Trustees and the Alumni Board, means that Antioch College will continue to offer academic credits and degrees to current students.

Amazing effort on part of alumni to raise the money needed to keep operations going. And indicative of the commitment of the Board of Trustees, most of whom are alums, to be open-minded and reverse a highly controversial decision.

I will write more about this in the days to come but this is quite a story in collaboration.

Meanwhile, here's the New York Times/AP article, Antioch College to Stay Open, already running on its site and on the International Herald Tribune site.

And from the collaboration point-of-view, alumni et al were able to listen to the college-wide meeting that took place in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which went on for three hours this afternoon, via streaming audio, and to participate in an 90-person chat, where people were able to post questions that others answered, identify who was speaking, and clarify points. Meanwhile, there was live blogging coming from the meeting itself, documents sent around to alums --and posted to the alumni website--while we were listening.

High fives to everyone involved. As Steve Schwerner, college alum and professor emeritus, said, "That [meaning the Board of Trustees' reversal of its decision] was the easy part."

I've written a number of posts about the Antioch situation.