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.
