[Alumni-chat] From the Columbus Dispatch

[Patrick Cates]

http://tinyurl.com/yuchz4

Antioch sunk itself by refusing to evolve
Sunday,  June 17, 2007 3:49 AM 
By Mike Harden

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio -- The campuswide disaster drill
at Antioch College on Friday seemed anti-climactic,
coming as it did at the end of a week in which the
school announced it would close its doors next year.

With fingers crossed, the college, which has now
retired more times than Frank Sinatra, is taking its
bows and blowing kisses at the alumni and benefactors
it hopes will help restore and reopen the Buckeye
State's Berkeley in 2012.

"It has risen from the ashes before," said Pam
Hogarty, proprietor of Unfinished Creations, a Xenia
Avenue shop that sells art supplies to the school and
its students. "If they can get some fresh blood and
some fresh ideas, it is not impossible."

Fresh blood? Fresh ideas?

Imagine a snowball. Picture hell.

"Antioch hung itself years ago," Ralph Keyes, an
author and Antioch alum, said two days ago from the
porch of his home here. "The body has finally slipped
the noose and hit the floor. That has caught people's
attention.

"It has been a very ineptly managed institution for
the last 10 years," Keyes continued. "Interim and
acting have become job titles.

"I can't begin to tell you how painful it has been to
have a ringside seat to my alma mater in its death
throes."

But, he rued, "Antioch couldn't correct its mistakes,
because it wouldn't acknowledge it was making them. It
couldn't get its house in order because it was so busy
blowing smoke."

The one thing that no one was saying in Yellow Springs
on Friday is simply that perhaps it is time for
Antioch to close. Period. No more lying back on
propped pillows like some 19th-century tubercular diva
waiting for a bailout from increasingly disillusioned
sugar daddies.

In the 1960s, some of the best and brightest students
in the nation went to Antioch to explore and evaluate
their core ideologies. The school's reputation for
tolerance, social justice and political activism was
tested during that decade by the civil-rights
struggle, the Vietnam War and the women's movement.
Somehow along the way, the school also acquired the
reputation of harboring a bunch of Birkenstock
bohemians and pony-tailed, guitar-plunking pinkos.

Antioch is no longer the nation's only Antioch. Many
colleges offer some of the same programs that once
made the Yellow Springs school unique, such as
pass-fail classes and co-op learning.

Moreover, the ambitions of a great number of students
coming out of high schools today are often more baldly
practical. 

"They're a different breed," Hogarty said. "There is a
lot more materialism."

As for the type of students with whom Antioch has been
most comfortable, Keyes observed, "There is a smaller
and smaller universe of that kind of student."

But a fish rots from the head down. You can't take a
Buddhist approach to management and expect to remain
solvent long. It is not as though college trustees
have not been advised, "Why not recruit the next
president from a foundation or government or, God
forbid, the corporate world?"

The suggestion is met with an awkward clearing of the
throat and a dismissive, "Oh. The pinstripe option."

If Antioch is sunk for good, it will be because its
leadership missed the core wisdom of the bumper
sticker advising, "Forget world peace. Visualize using
your turn signal."

Mike Harden is a Dispatch Metro columnist. He can be
reached at 614-461-5215 or by e-mail.

mharden at dispatch.com




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