As Antioch College prepares to reopen, its leaders are grappling with quandaries unfamiliar to most new campuses. At the heart of discussions about reinventing the iconic liberal-arts institution is the question of how much homage should be paid to the Antioch of old.
For a start-up with a legacy, there is no blank slate. Alumni have contributed significantly to a capital campaign that has put $22-million in the fledgling college’s coffers, and they want to be able to identify with the Antioch that their donations have helped to resurrect.
What’s more, some former tenured faculty members who want to return when the institution reopens this fall face roadblocks. The new Antioch does not offer courses in the same disciplines in which many of them taught. And administrators are insisting that the professors who do qualify for open positions apply for the jobs just like everyone else.
For the new Antioch to avoid repeating the history of the old Antioch, which closed three years ago as a result of dwindling enrollment and faltering finances, its new leaders say the college must rewrite the definition of a liberal-arts education. Some pieces of the institution’s history, they acknowledge, won’t resurface.
“There is sometimes the desire on some people’s parts to have the rebirth be an exercise in academic nostalgia,” says Mark Roosevelt, who became Antioch’s president on January 1, after five years as superintendent of the public-school system in Pittsburgh. “That’s not what I was hired to do, and I don’t intend to recreate exactly what we had. Let’s absolutely commit ourselves to maintaining the core elements of what was wonderful about Antioch.”
Reopening Antioch flies in the face of convention by ignoring a widespread belief that the higher-education landscape doesn’t need another small, liberal-arts college. In fact, Antioch shut down three times before, in the wake of financial problems. But its supporters share an unshakeable commitment to Antioch, a trait that Mr. Roosevelt says has presented challenges, even though it is one of the college’s greatest strengths.
“Without that fervor, that commitment, that dedication to this Ohio college that people have, we wouldn’t even be in the ballpark,” he says.
Loyal Faculty and Alumni
The loyalty that alumni, former faculty, and former trustees feel toward Antioch has been a key factor in the quest to reopen a college that counts Coretta Scott King, the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Mario R. Capecchi, and the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould among its graduates. The longtime supporters urged administrators at Antioch University, the parent institution, not to close the college in 2008. When that was unsuccessful, a group of newly out-of-work faculty created the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in an attempt to keep some semblance of Antioch College alive in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The college’s alumni board raised $1.5-million to support professors teaching their former students and members of the community in bookstores and church basements.
In September 2009, an alumni-controlled group called the Antioch College Continuation Corporation finally completed a $6-million deal to separate the college from Antioch University and take over the campus, a nearby nature preserve, and the college’s then-$19-million endowment. (It’s now up to $25-million.)
Then began the arduous job of positioning Antioch to reopen.
Among other things, the newly independent college hired a handful of former Antioch professors to serve as Arthur E. Morgan Fellows, named for an early president of Antioch. They were to help create a curriculum from scratch, with input from alumni and friends, and handle the paperwork for the college to gain accreditation.
Antioch is seeking degree-grantingauthority from the Ohio Board of Regents and regional accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Meanwhile, the 13-member Great Lakes Colleges Association agreed last week to review the credits of transfer applicants from Antioch.
But as those steps were taken, the question of what role the Morgan fellows and other former professors would play at the new Antioch remained under debate.
The college, in deciding not to automatically reinstate any former faculty, argued that a national search would ensure that the hiring process would be fair and transparent. Antioch College, its officials said, was a brand-new entity and wasn’t obligated to hire back former faculty.
An ad hoc group of 14 former tenured faculty members, however, says the years of experience at Antioch shared by the group’s members is a qualification that the college can’t afford to ignore. Chris Hill, a former associate professor of communications, says Antioch officials have underestimated the benefits of having professors on board with a deep understanding of the three pillars of the Antioch experience—classroom, co-op, and community—and how they work together.
“We’re aware of what the learning curve is for new faculty members who come into a system where students are doing co-ops every other semester,” says Ms. Hill, of the professors who want to teach at Antioch again. “And not only have we worked with each other at the college, we worked together at the Nonstop Institute. We have a lot of experience working together, and that needs to be taken into consideration as well.”
But with national searches for six tenure-track professors under way, in philosophy, chemistry, Spanish, literature, cultural anthropology, and visual arts, Ms. Hill’s line of reasoning doesn’t seem to resonate with Antioch’s administration. Members of the ad hoc group—not all of whom want to return—have been talking with Mr. Roosevelt to “inform and influence an agreement that benefits both the college and the tenured faculty,” Ms. Hill says. What form that agreement might take is unclear.
Some aspects of the search process are unconventional, like assembling a group of retired Antioch professors and colleagues from other liberal-arts institutions, mostly in the Midwest, to pore over job applications. The college hired Thomas Kirk, a former library director at Earlham College, to manage the process. In addition to the tenure-track positions, Antioch wants to hire three adjunct instructors and four one-year visiting professors.
“There are obviously things that are missing that would help in a search,” Mr. Kirk says. “Normally you’re hiring people into an existing department, and so you know that person needs to fit with what’s already there. But here we have a clean slate. You have to do a lot of imagining about how this might play out.”
On-campus interviews began a few weeks ago for those who made the short list for the anthropology, philosophy, and chemistry positions. Candidates interviewed with Mr. Roosevelt individually and with review-committee members. The college expects to fill all of its tenure-track openings by May.
A Desire to Stay
Scott Warren, an associate professor of philosophy at Antioch when it closed, is one of four finalists for the philosophy job, which drew more than 200 applications. He never looked for a job elsewhere after Antioch closed.
“I just said, ‘I’m going to stay here,’” says Mr. Warren, one of the college’s Morgan fellows. “I’ve been teaching for 34 years, and the 15 years that I was at Antioch were the happiest, and I didn’t want to go.”
After teaching at the Nonstop Institute, he says, he “sort of naïvely thought that we would just go back to the college and just start teaching.” Now he’s just hoping that “as many of the former faculty as possible can be hired back as quickly as possible.”
Jean Gregorek, a former associate professor of literature who taught at Antioch for 15 years, decided not to apply. She was taking a stand against what she says is the college’s violation of the tenure rights of former faculty. In the end, says Ms. Gregorek, who is also a Morgan fellow, “I just feel as though you can’t keep trying to make it work with an institution that doesn’t want you. If they really don’t want the former faculty—and I think the board probably does not—then what can you do?” Instead she went on the academic job market this year.
The American Association of University Professors, whose president is Cary Nelson, an Antioch alumnus, has been vocal about its belief that the college’s faculty members should be reinstated with their tenure rights restored. Mr. Nelson says Antioch should do what the association says is morally and ethically right.
Nearly 900 people agree, having signed an online petition last year in support of the former faculty. Ruth J. Hoff, an associate professor of languages at Wittenberg University, says if former faculty don’t get right of first refusal for jobs at Antioch, then the new institution risks marring its reputation from the outset.
“I would like to see a situation where Antioch’s mission of social justice isn’t just being paid lip service,” Ms. Hoff says. “I think that it would also be a really good thing to be reopened with the blessings of the AAUP.”
Legally, Antioch can hire anyone it wants.
Mr. Roosevelt, who has the final decision about hiring, won’t say how many former faculty will return. However, based on the tenure-track positions available, only Ms. Gregorek and Mr. Warren are a match by way of discipline. “Some number of former faculty will be a great asset to the college going forward,” the president says. But only professors whose qualifications match what the college is looking for “will have a leg up” during the search, he says. And former faculty will still have to apply for the positions and compete against candidates culled from a national search.
“I don’t want people drawing lines in the sand about this,” Mr. Roosevelt says. “I think if they really love their college, they won’t do it.”
Joseph M. Foley, vice president of Antioch’s Alumni Association Board, says the protracted discussions about former faculty, although important, are overshadowing other issues that are just as key to the college’s future.
“The real conversation we need to be having is, What is Antioch going to be?” he says. “How are we going to provide access to the global environment we’re living in? What kind of liberal-arts approach are we going to take?”
A Work in Progress
All parties agree that the old Antioch’s signature co-op program should be kept, and the college’s new curriculum is built around it. Students will do full-time paid work off-campus for six quarters, along with nine quarters of on-campus work. The new curriculum begins with the premise that the way people live in America isn’t sustainable. Antioch students, through seminars on global topics that include energy, food, and water, will focus on how to remedy that unsustainability. They’ll study a foreign language extensively and do at least one co-op in a foreign country.
To be sure, the new Antioch, just like the old one, isn’t the place for every student. Indeed, the college’s first class of students this fall must be prepared to “decide the kinds of clubs they want, the recreation they prefer, the spirit of the place they’ll call home,” Antioch’s Web site tells prospective students. “They will shape programs and help construct the experience they envision.”
In return for the work the students will do in jump-starting the college, and to temper the risk they’re taking by enrolling in a not-yet-accredited institution, Antioch has agreed to cover tuition costs (about $26,000 per year) for four years for members of the entering class. They will be known as Horace Mann Fellows, after the Antioch president who gave the college the motto that has embodied its well-known social-justice mission: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Four students committed to Antioch during the early-admissions period. The rest of the class, to be selected from 117 additional applications, will be notified by April 1. “They know they’re coming into a very unusual situation,” Mr. Roosevelt says of the new Antioch’s first class. In Antioch’s heyday, back in the 1960s, enrollment hovered around 2,000. Now the plan is for the college to have about 200 students in the next two to three years and then add 400 more by its eighth year of operation.
Mr. Roosevelt wants to alter what was long seen as the traditional makeup of Antioch’s student body, which had been ridiculed as unabashedly left-leaning and intolerant of those who weren’t. The president says he’d like to see a student body that reflects diversity in “culture, politics, and point of view.”
“There is a danger in an avowedly progressive college of stifling alternative voices,” he says.
Meanwhile, a task force is working to recreate a community-governance system that was key to the fabric of the old Antioch. For years, administrators, professors, and students worked together to run the college.
But one observer of the college warns that Antioch should tread carefully.
“They carried community-based governance to an extreme,” says James C. Garland, a former president of Miami University, in Ohio, who has followed Antioch’s recent trials. “It made it difficult for the school to make the decisions it needed to survive. They have to find the right balance between community-based governance and executive authority.”
An even more critical image to shed is that of a financially struggling college, Mr. Roosevelt says. “There’s nothing charming about being chronically underfunded. We need to raise money for the college and not do so in any embarrassed or shy way.”
Antioch alumni have almost single-handedly kept the college afloat with their donations, but ultimately the vision for the new Antioch must speak to a broader base to elicit the kind of financial support the college needs, says Lee Morgan, Arthur’s grandson, who is chairman of the college’s Board Pro Tempore. Its members, he says, keep the college’s cash flow in mind.
Whatever the friction around the forthcoming renewal, people on all sides of the issues say they want Antioch to stage a successful comeback.
“I want the college to exist,” says Ms. Gregorek. “I really do hope for the best.”
Mr. Garland, despite his misgivings about aspects of Antioch’s background, agrees. “If this was just a brand-new liberal-arts college, then it would be a very, very tough row to hoe for them,” he says. “But they have an established reputation. It’s a valuable niche in America’s higher-education spectrum.”
How will Antiochians plan to evaluate whether the rebirth of their college is a success? In the true spirit of Antioch, for many people with ties to the institution there appears to be no right answer.
That’s no surprise to Mr. Foley, of the alumni board.
“Antioch will always be a work in progress,” he says. “There are schools that present an image that they’ve got everything right, but Antioch’s a place that is always looking at how it can be better. And Antiochians are always disagreeing about how it can be better.”
