When the decision to close Antioch College was announced last week, projected fall enrollment had fallen to a paltry 309 students at what was once one of the nation’s most-prominent liberal-arts colleges.
Grim financial reality had finally caught up to the 155-year-old college, best known for its activist and politically correct policies and for influential alumni who left their marks on American culture. After years of covering deficits with support from the five nonresidential campuses that make up the rest of Antioch University, that institution’s Board of Trustees voted to shutter the home campus.
Antioch College, located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, has long been saddled with dwindling enrollment and expensive campus maintenance, and could lean on only a small endowment of $36.2-million. College officials hope to fix the fiscal problems at the campus while college operations are suspended, beginning in July 2008. The plan — an uphill struggle in many observers’ view — is to reopen in 2012 with an improved campus and a new undergraduate curriculum.
“We really need a much larger critical mass of students,” said Tullisse A. Murdock, chancellor of Antioch University, noting that only 125 new freshmen were scheduled to arrive next fall. Of the decision to close the college, she said, “Certainly it’s going to be a huge disappointment to our college alumni.”
During a June 9 meeting, trustees declared a state of financial exigency for the campus, which means most of Antioch College’s 46 full-time faculty and 113 staff members will be laid off by July 2008. A university spokeswoman said an undetermined number of staff members would stay on to maintain facilities. The university will also establish a commission to determine the college’s long-term future, and some staff members might be included.
In the last 40 years, Antioch has developed a split personality, with modern campuses catering to adult students in cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and a quirky college with a grand, 19th-century campus in a small Ohio village. While the newer campuses thrive, the former heart of the institution has faded into decay.
“The decision [to close] was agonizing,” said one trustee, Barbara Slaner Winslow, an Antioch alumna who is an associate professor of women’s and social studies at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College. “For many of us, the meeting was like a funeral.”
Students can finish their degrees at Antioch University McGregor, which is adjacent to the college campus. They will also be offered “reasonable opportunities” at the other university campuses and assistance in transferring to other institutions.
“We’re going to do everything we can to graduate” the senior class at the college, said Steven W. Lawry, president of Antioch College. Mr. Lawry said the board appeared serious about reopening the college in 2012, but he acknowledged that it would be difficult to achieve that goal.
“The new Antioch has to be persuasive to Antioch College alumni that we have a strong governance model in place,” Mr. Lawry said.
Old Problems
Antioch is perhaps best known for its liberal initiatives, such as its lack of grading and its sexual-offense-prevention policy from the mid-1990s that required specific “verbal consent” for every step of intimacy — a policy that was widely mocked. But the social-justice roots stretch to the inception of the college, which admitted women from the beginning and had ties to abolitionists.
Antioch has a long list of notable alumni, including Coretta Scott King, Stephen Jay Gould, and Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Its first president was the famous education reformer Horace Mann.
The college was also well known for its pioneering co-op program, in which students were encouraged to work off campus. But the progressive offerings at Antioch College were no longer unique, says Alan E. Guskin, who was president of the college and university from 1985 to 1994, and is now a professor for the university’s Ph.D. program in leadership and change.
He said “the competition became very, very serious” to attract students to a cutting-edge campus, “which Antioch should be, and it wasn’t.”
Antioch began opening branch campuses in the 1960s, when its influence and notoriety were perhaps at their peak. The campuses were created as an attempt to tap into the growing market for continuing-education and adult students, said Ms. Murdock, the chancellor. From a high-water mark of 32 campuses and a law school, the university stabilized in the 1980s with five nonresidential campuses in California, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Washington State. It now enrolls about 5,000 students.
Antioch College had long had money problems, and recently made cuts to staff and faculty while postponing costly maintenance projects. The campus once served more than 2,000 students, but enrollment has for decades sagged well below that number.
“When I came, the college was in desperate condition,” Mr. Guskin said. During his tenure, enrollment at Antioch College rose to 650 students, from 400, and the college put about $18-million into restoring the physical plant. He says enrollment began to decline again in the mid-1990s.
The college has been running an annual deficit of $5-million for several years, said Mary Lou LaPierre, vice chancellor for university advancement. The university’s other campuses had been funneling about $1.6-million annually to the college for the last five years. (The university’s total 2005-6 budget was $78-million.)
“We’re spending to keep the doors open,” Ms. LaPierre said.
Ms. Murdock, the chancellor, said “deferred maintenance has gotten out of hand” on the 200-acre campus and that the university could no longer “shore up the college” with revenue from the other campuses. She said those campuses, “which carry the DNA” of Antioch College, are financially healthy and would not be harmed by the college’s closing.
Surveys of students who had been accepted but chose to attend other colleges found that the main reason they passed up Antioch was the decrepit campus."We can’t compete with other institutions,” said Ms. Murdock. She said the college should have trimmed budgets and invested the savings in facilities.
Ms. Winslow, who has been a university trustee for 12 years, the greatest length of service among the 26 board members, declined to comment on the board’s stewardship of the college, citing board confidentiality policies. But she said most of the college’s alumni are likely to believe the board has neglected the college in trying to oversee the larger system.
Thomas C. Longin, a consultant to higher-education governing boards and a former vice president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said, “If you diversify that much, you’re not doing as much as possible in keeping that core viable.”
Uphill Battle
Yellow Springs, a town of 4,000 located about 20 miles east of Dayton, has amenities that appeal to retirees, college officials said. They hope to turn a profit by offering continuing-education programs, corporate retreats, and recreational events. That money could be used to retool the college, Ms. Murdock said, and to enable its return. Antioch has shuttered and reopened three previous times, most recently in the 1920s.
“I am optimistic, but I realize that we have a lot of work to do,” she said.
Antioch might be able to reinvent itself as a truly cutting-edge college during the four-year hiatus, said Mr. Guskin, the former president. He said the “gritty” campus could also use a facelift. “Probably what they’ll be doing is tearing down a lot of buildings.”
One hallmark of the college, The Antioch Review, will continue its current publishing arrangement under the larger university’s ownership.
“As far as we know, we’re not going to be affected by this,” said Muriel Keyes, an assistant editor with the publication. The journal has remained an essential proving ground for new writers, said Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review.
Faculty members and students, many of whom first heard the bad news last week, were trying to sort out their next steps.
Chelsea R. Martens is an Antioch College senior who is taking a leave of absence to work for the college as a community manager. She said she was aware that the college had financial problems, but was shocked that it was closing. Still, she is determined to earn her degree in women’s studies at the college.
“I’m going to finish up here,” Ms. Martens said. “I want to be an alum of Antioch College.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 42, Page A1