[Alumni-chat] Us and Them

[alanbenard (alanbenard at pobox.com)]

Pam:

There really are a small group of well-connected, well-off and well-intentioned alumni, most of whom appear to have graduated between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, who are indeed engaged in a  hostile takeover of the college. 

I say well intentioned because they dislike most everything about Antioch and Antiochians which came after their time. 

Some of them hate the student radicalism which led to the Strike of 1973. 

Some of them hate the inherent elite nature of a residential undergraduate program with tenured faculty, and can't understand why "the network" they helped to build and foster from 1965 forward didn't subsume the college earlier than 2007 -- they seem to want to see that happen before their clogged arteries take them away on their final heart attack. 

Some see the faculty as overpaid and decadent, the post-strike students as dangerous lunatics. They have their own special version of progressivism which doesn't include the SOPP, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and if you asked them around the kitchen table after a third sangria, loudmouthed queers and . 

Some of them really, _really_ fucking hate Bob Devine. That's all. For them, that's enough.

They want to see /order/. They like Steve Lawry kicking those dope-sucking snot-nosed kids asses. They like Art and Toni finally sweeping out the overpaid deadwood unreconstructed Marxist "professors." If it takes busting a union, well, so be it -- and honestly, most of these folks are all for it. After all, didn't public employee unions give some of them no end of grief in their own fiefdom within state government? 

As I said, these alumni are well-connected -- Toni and Art not only answer their questions, take their calls, they have them to dinner, and sit at full attention with eyes glistening as tales are told of mini-malls and old-folks homes and intergenerational somethings and provisioning by Sysco Systems and management by Hyatt and isn't it all so orderly and RESPECTABLE? 

They are well-off -- they've promised enough to make the University leadership feel comfortable about having to fight one, maybe two legal battles while closing the Yellow Springs campus, completing work on the McGregor Campus and keeping the other campuses spinning despite having spent a summer dragging the Antioch brand name through manure. And ensuring that nearly all other living alumni toss all further correspondence from the Annual Fund in the shredder, unopened.

They think they have it right, these alumni. Toni and Tom have set the stage and cooked the books and starved the college and Art, on cue, got the majority and closed the school. Do not ask Art questions, Art knows better(tm).

As for me, I love my college. And on June 12, 2007 I didn't hate anybody. 

But I'm learning to hate some people. 

Us and them. Yep.

Alan Benard, '92