[Alumni-chat] New York Times

[Patrick Cates]

Well, somebody at the Times finally noticed. It's not
exactly a glowing review.

http://tinyurl.com/2385u2

June 17, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Where the Arts Were Too Liberal
 
By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
London
THIS is an obituary for a great American institution
whose death was announced this week. After 155 years,
Antioch College is closing.

Established in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, by the
kind of free-thinking Christian group found only in
the United States, Antioch College was egalitarian in
the best tradition of American liberalism. The
college’s motto, not in Latin or Greek but plain
English, was coined by Horace Mann, its first
president: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some
victory for humanity.”

For most of its history the institution lived up to
that calling. It was one of the first coeducational
colleges in the United States, and at a time when
slavery was being practiced 70 miles to the south of
its campus, it was one of the first colleges not to
make a person’s race a factor in admission. It was
also the first to appoint a woman as a full professor.
All this happened before Lincoln became president.
 
Later Antioch would incorporate pragmatism, that most
native of American philosophies, into its curriculum,
balancing a student’s experience of learning inside
the ivory tower with regular jobs off campus in the
“real” world.
 
Yet it was in the high tide of liberal activism that
the college lost its way. I know this firsthand,
because I entered Antioch in the fall of 1968, just
when the tide was nearing its peak. So much of the
history of 1968 reflects an America in crisis, but if
you were young and idealistic it was a time of
unparalleled excitement. The 2,000 students at
Antioch, living in a picture-pretty American village,
provided a laboratory for various social experiments
of the time.
 
With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the
college increased African-American enrollment to 25
percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years.
The new students were recruited from the inner city.
At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational
residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs
and rock ’n’ roll became the rule, as you might
imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be
involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or
administration, and certainly none of the students,
could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They
were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.
 
I moved into this sociological petri dish from a
well-to-do suburb. Within my first week I twice had
guns drawn on me, once in fun and once in a state of
drunken for real by a couple of ex-cons whom one of my
classmates, in the interest of breaking down class
barriers, had invited to live with her.

My roommate began the tortured process of coming out
of the closet, first by pursuing women relentlessly
and then accepting the truth and allowing himself to
be pursued by men. He needed to talk all this out with
himself when he came in each morning at 4 a.m., and in
the face of his personal crisis, there was little I
could do to assert my right to sleep. It was a mad,
dangerous and painful time, but I do think I was made
stronger for having to deal with these experiences.
 
Each semester, the college seemed to create a new
program. “We need to take education to the people”
became a mantra, and so satellite campuses began to
sprout around the country. Something called Antioch
University was created, and every faculty member whose
marriage was going bad or who simply couldn’t hack
living in a village of 3,000 people and longed for the
city came up with a proposal to start a new campus.
 
“It was liberalism gone mad,” a former professor,
Hannah Goldberg, once told me, and she was right. The
college seemed to forget the pragmatism that had been
a key to its ethos, and tried blindly to extend its
mission beyond education to social reform. But there
were too many new programs and too little cash reserve
to deal with the inevitable growing pains.
 
For the increasingly vocal radical members of the
community, change wasn’t going far enough or fast
enough. They wanted revolution, but out there in the
middle of the cornfields the only “bourgeois” thing to
fight was Antioch College itself. The
let’s-try-anything, free-thinking society of 1968
evolved into a catastrophic blend of legitimate
paranoia (Nixon did keep enemies lists, and the F.B.I.
did infiltrate campuses) and postadolescent melodrama.
In 1973, a strike trashed the campus and effectively
destroyed Antioch’s spirit of community. The next
year, student enrollment was down by half.
 
Most of the talented faculty members began to leave
for other institutions, and the few who were dedicated
to rebuilding the Yellow Springs campus found
themselves increasingly isolated. The college that
gave the Antioch University system its name had become
just another profit center in a larger enterprise and
not even the most important one at that.
 
Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal
trends in education became entrenched. Since it is
always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small
group than a large one, as the student body dwindled,
free expression and freedom of thought were crushed
under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the
1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might
encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college
became a place not for education, but for
indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a
little to the left of The Nation in worldview.

Much of this conformist thinking focused on gender
politics, and it culminated in the notorious sexual
offense prevention policy. Enacted in 1993, the policy
dictated that a person needed express permission for
each stage in seduction. (“May I touch your breast?”
“May I remove your bra?” And so on.) In two decades
students went from being practitioners of free love to
prisoners of gender. Antioch became like one of those
Essene communities in the Judean desert in the first
century after Christ that, convinced of their own
purity, died out while waiting for a golden age that
never came.

I grieve for the place with all the sadness, anger and
self-reproach you feel when a loved one dies
unnecessarily. I grieve for Antioch the way I grieve
for the hope of 1968 washed away in a tide of
self-inflated rhetoric, self-righteousness and
self-indulgence.

The ideals of social justice and economic fairness we
embraced then are still right and deeply American. The
discipline to turn those ideals into realities was
what Antioch, its community and the generation it led
was lacking. I fear it still is.
 
Michael Goldfarb, a former public radio correspondent,
is the author of “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace:
Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq.”





       
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