About a hundred prisoners filed in, hobbled with leg irons and bound together by a long chain. The four of us onstage began to perform a series of familiar folk songs. “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” was among them.
My main job at first was to hide my complete lack of musical skill, for I was there for another reason. It was the winter of 1964, and I was an Antioch freshman on duty at one of the college’s more infamous co-op jobs, being a “normal control” at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.
A normal control takes medicine that is also being given to people with a disease. I was in a ward devoted to children with cystic fibrosis. When they died, I ground up their organs so experiments could be run on the tissues.
The hospital’s 13th floor, locked and guarded, was devoted to performing medical experiments on federal prisoners. If they survived, their sentences would be commuted.
After completing the songs we planned, I revealed our real purpose, kept secret from the hospital administrators who had approved our performance: to lecture the prisoners about how unjust their treatment was.
They were furious at us, grumbling, then hooting as they rattled their chains. I had learned a lesson I could not so easily have obtained in a classroom -- that not all victims welcome their would-be liberators. The next day the hospital informed me that, had I not been scheduled to return to Antioch the following week, I would have been fired.
A year later the lesson was repeated on an Antioch job in a Harlem elementary school. I was an assistant teacher in a fifth-grade class, and I loved the students; their lives were difficult, but they were inventive and exuberant. As a result, I remain convinced today that education, given sufficient resources, can free the poor from poverty.
Unfortunately, my employee resistance to injustice was to enter a new phase. Several of us were shocked at the school’s devotion to corporal punishment. Students could be sent to the assistant principal for a paddling or be placed in a tall trash can in the center of the hallway for hours. Everyone passing by on their way to lunch or recess was invited to kick the can. I was one of three student interns who protested publicly. The parents sided with the school’s disciplinary methods, and we were fired.
In fact I was released from almost every job I had until I became a faculty member. I have maintained ever since that practical job experience should compensate for the physical and cultural isolation of so many American campuses.
Antioch did that, since half of each year was spent on campus and half on a co-op job elsewhere. As a result, I learned what work is for many Americans, and it does not include much freedom, academic or otherwise.
I also learned that I could not tolerate in the workplace the restraints I was not well suited to endure. Antioch at the time maintained these jobs by guaranteeing employers an employee year-round, but the student doing the job would change every three or six months.
Back on the campus a certain freedom from rules was also in place. A week’s testing when I arrived freed me from all first-year requirements, save one science course. I devoted myself to the full-time study of literature, which was all I was really interested in doing.
Once I managed to get a full semester’s credit for studying the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. From that I learned what few college students on multicourse schedules can: what it means to immerse yourself thoroughly in a research subject, to devote yourself with obsessive love to a single topic. It was not bad preparation for being an English professor.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was under way. In 1965, before the country soured on the war, Antioch’s president, James Dixon, called a town meeting to chastise us all for not protesting the war aggressively enough. Still a teenager, I was innocent enough to imagine I was witnessing the typical college president.
I would learn otherwise. Two weeks later I was one of a dozen Antioch students who gathered in a Columbus, Ohio, sports stadium to interrupt a speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson. We hid our placards under our coats and filtered in among 50,000 farmers and townspeople filling the stands. Then we pulled out the posters and began chanting, “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
The crowd roared in anger, and LBJ called out, “You fools! You fools!” A Secret Service agent wrestled me to the ground and whispered in my ear how he’d like to get me behind bars and “beat the s*** out of” me. (Forty years later, about to become president of the American Association of University Professors, I would be arrested by courteous New York policemen who complimented us for committing civil disobedience on behalf of New York University graduate employees denied their collective-bargaining rights.)
The following summer I was back in Harlem, this time on an Antioch job working for Haryou-Act, the famous antipoverty agency. Assigned as a counselor in a summer program for black teenagers, I had, as my first task, to walk the streets in search of recruits.
Though I encountered both skepticism and hostility, people did sign up. We took them to museums, on rowboat trips on Central Park Lake, and to Shakespeare in the Park. Every activity we chose was new and unknown to our charges.
I kept some snapshots from that utopian summer, when I learned that even teenagers could be rescued from the cultural penalties poverty imposes, though I eventually lost touch with all the participants and will almost certainly never learn what became of any of them. They remain unchanged in the amber of memory.
I did take one major risk that season. I used some of Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty money to hire buses to take the program participants to an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. Needless to say, that experience was new to them as well.
Bureaucracy being what it is, my little expenditure was never noticed. And I did just barely avert a crisis. One of the young women got in a shouting match with a D.C. cop as we were about to board the buses for the trip home. I pulled her away, and we returned to Manhattan without incident.
At the time, the Selective Service System required colleges to report students’ progress toward their degrees as a condition of maintaining their deferments. Armed with misguided moral certainty, I returned to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and organized a successful campus movement to force the college to refuse to cooperate with the draft system.
Dixon properly felt we could not impose this on individual students, but he never let on, instead complimenting me on my political work and appointing me to a blue-ribbon committee to work out a formal policy. Months went by, and by the time we reached a conclusion, procedures had changed, and the issue was moot. Unlike many of my university colleagues, I am no longer automatically charmed and co-opted by committee appointments.
My final year at Antioch began with another single-topic semester. I had become interested in Jungian archetypes, concentrating on Carl Jung’s extensive work on the poetics of medieval alchemy. Supported, in true quixotic Antioch style, by a National Science Foundation grant, I spent the weeks reading widely in alchemical literature in a kind of intellectual vacation from conventional literary studies, meanwhile working as a draft counselor, a research assistant for one faculty member, and helping another revise publications for her tenure.
That was also the year I met my lifelong partner, Paula Antonia Treichler, and thus eventually married into an Antioch family. Her parents, Paul and Jessie, had been Antioch faculty members since 1934, Paul as a drama professor and Jessie as an administrator.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Jessie recruited African-American students for full scholarships, among them the future federal judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and the future civil-rights activist Coretta Scott (King). Jessie’s diary records visits from Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. Higginbotham always said he owed his career to Jessie. Shortly before her death, Coretta approved the creation of an Antioch center in her name, in part to honor Jessie. With Antioch’s announcement last week that the college was shutting down, the center will now most likely be closed.
I always tell people, though they never believe me, that I could never have made it through any other college. There was no place like Antioch, with its mix of intellectual freedom, commitment to justice, and innovative program of courses and work experience. Higher education needed it then and needs it now.
Cary Nelson, Class of 1967, is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is co-author, with Stephen Watt, of Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (Routledge, 2004).
Background articles from The Chronicle: