For any of its graduates, Antioch College's co-op program, which sent its students out to work for about six months of every year, was its crown jewel. Out in the real world, the thinking went, students would learn how to put their ideas and their ideals into practice. I loved it as it gave me time to apply what I was learning and to think about my next steps. The Board of Trustees, which governs both the college and the five graduate and continuing-ed campuses across the US, has, in effect, sent the college on co-op. For the next four years, the college will close as a study takes place to redesign a 21st-century institution.
The NY Times, AP, LA Times, and just about every other publication that can get its hands around this story has been covering it. Most, including an unthoughtful op-ed in the NY Times, focus on the superficial aspects of the story -- Antioch's rep as a haven for mad(wo)men, where faculty let the students run wild, and the administration offers the same to the faculty, while the trustees look the other way.
I am a proud graduate of the 1970 class of Antioch College and a former member of the Board of Trustees. The cacophony of complaints that is blasting out of Yellow Springs, Ohio, the beautiful little village where Antioch is situated, lacks grounding in the reality of running a small liberal arts college without an endowment. The NY Times printed four letters to the editor in response to the knee-jerk op-ed it ran on June 17. But it didn't run mine:
To the Editor:
Michael Goldfarb’s swan song for Antioch College (“Where the Arts Were Too Liberal,” Op-Ed, June 17, 2007) violates two key principles of obituary writing. First, be certain the “person” is dead; and second, fact-check the forensics before reporting cause of death.
On both counts, Mr. Goldfarb misses the mark. The Board of Trustees of Antioch University has taken a brave and forward-looking stance: they’re wisely suspending operations at the college, which has fallen victim to the same plight that has caused numerous small liberal-arts colleges to shut their doors in the past fifteen years. Pending a thoughtful study over the next few years, which has the brains and budget to back it up, Antioch College may well re-open as a 21st-century operation.
Which leads to Mr. Goldfarb’s second error: The reason Antioch is closing for now has nothing to do with what happened nearly forty years ago on campus. If sex, drugs, and rock-‘n’-roll were the reason for Antioch’s closing, it would have happened a long time ago – and most other American colleges of its size would be shuttered too. Unlike Oberlin, Swarthmore, Haverford, Williams, Amherst, and many of its peers, Antioch College never had an endowment of any size until recently. When I was a student in the late 1960s, the endowment was $3 million; when I joined the board in 2000, it was $4 million. When the college suspends operations in June, 2008, it will stand at around $20 million, enough running room to explore and, hopefully, launch a true 21st-century institution of the sort that Horace Mann inspired a century and a half ago.
--Jessica Lipnack, West Newton, MA, former Antioch University trustee, Antioch College graduate, 1970, and star of the campus cult classic film, “The Antioch Adventure”
