Matt’s “Keep Antioch Open” letter to Alumni-Chat

On Jun 30, 2007, at 7:00 PM, Sistersara wrote:
>Matt, I don’t think keeping open is really an option.

Thank you for being clear on where you stand on this issue. As I mentioned earlier there are a number of us who are working, very hard right now, towards the ‘Keep it open’ goal. I am not excited about the idea of ‘building a new college’ in 2012, no matter how cool it may be. That will not be ‘Antioch’ to me if the current ‘community’ is dissolved. My heart and checkbook will go elsewhere.

As you said,  I’m reacting to the heat of the now but it’s more than that. This isn’t kneejerk, I don’t think the BoT or Steve Lawry are evil, I just think they are steering the ship in the wrong direction and don’t share the same vision for Antioch College that I and others share. For as long as I’ve been involved with Antioch there has been a tangible tension between the “business” of Antioch verses the “Community” of Antioch. I think that we’ve drifted too far into the business end of things and that’s what has been hurting the college. I think the BOT was right in one of their arguments on why the new curriculum was needed… Antioch should be unique. However I think they were idiots for telling the faculty how to do the curriculum, the curriculum wasnt what we needed to make unique, what we needed was a way to market what was already unique about Antioch. But the BOT was pushing for profit.. “make it more generic on the politics/community aspect, get a more generic president, other generic places make money, we can too”. This is similar to what happened with WYSO.. it got “NPR”d.. local volunteer shows were replaced with syndicated ones that raised more money. More money = better right? Not if it’s at the expense of the mission, and I think the BOT’s ‘mission’ and vision of Antioch College got watered down and has drifted far from the potential the college has.

Here’s the thing, I care deeply about the faculty there now, I studied with many of them 15 years ago as a student, and worked with them for the 5 years I worked at the college after graduating, and have met and corresponded with many of the newer faculty since then. They are an amazing bunch of people and I am have no qualms about the academic program Antioch provides. They are worth fighting to save. I have also met and corresponded with a number of current students and they too are worth fighting to save. While I have some mixed feelings about the pros & cons of Unions from time to time, they staff members I know & have worked with are amazing individuals. No one stays at Antioch for the money, they stay for the community, whether that’s the broader community or the co-workers they work with day to day, logical or no, I believe Antioch attracts and retains exceptional people. Antioch’s institutional memory and community are worth fighting to save.  If the doors close on 7/1/08 we lose all that.

While I love the goal of having an independent Antioch College, and of having an Antioch College in 2012 that rocks, I refuse to accept the idea that the only way to accomplish this is to shut it down and restart it years later. And while others may not be posting here on this subject, I know for certain I am not alone in this feeling. That’s what is driving me to spend hours on this subject brainstorming with others about ideas on how to save Antioch, raise funds, help admissions, help the faculty etc.  Not just now but down the road. This huge grassroots effort we’re seeing now isn’t a ‘reopen in 2012’ effort. It’s “Save Antioch”. Closing the doors in 2008 is letting it die, and I will not let that happen without a fight. I can point out a number of things I think were flawed with the current Antioch but I refuse to believe that it was a dying college. This crisis was manufactured by the BoT. If they had left the curriculum alone, or even funded the 5 year plan they promised, I believe Antioch College would be solvent. Struggling perhaps, but not closing it’s doors.

I’m not living in an illusion. I understand the BOT is in control now. I understand that faculty, staff and students are leaving NOW. I also understand that keeping it open will be hard and isn’t statistically likely. But I’ve also seen more energy and focus on Antioch in the past week than I have in years. I can’t explain this in any logical manner, but there are a number of us who have been basically waiting for a chance to help Antioch. Antioch never asked for our help beyond fund raising and that wasn’t what we could provide, least not in the amounts they wanted. But whether the BOT intended this or not, they’ve woken the ‘sleeping giant’, at least for the Antioch circles I travel in. People are not just pissed off and whining, they are working hard with ideas, vision and passion to do what they can to keep the doors open. We may not succeed but damned if we’re not going to do all we can to fight this decision.

This is why it’s worth doing work NOW to keep it open. The sooner we reverse this decision the sooner we can start the new Antioch plan and put this passion towards not just fundraising but helping Antioch reach it’s potential. I am glad folks like you, Michael Olenick, and Mark Pomerantz are discussing some of the bigger vision planning for down the road. I still believe in an amazing kickass Antioch in 2012, I just think.. no, scratch that… I BELIEVE we can get there from where we are now without hitting the reset button.

If others are out there who feel the same about keeping it open, please speak up, i’m feeling kinda lonely here. On the other hand if everyone here are all ‘2012ers’ well then we need to figure out why the dozens if not hundreds of folks doing the grassroots ‘save antioch’ work are on such a different page than those in the chat rooms. In the meantime, if it takes bake sales, concerts, and other wild ideas to keep Antioch open then that’s what we’ll do. Logical & pragmatic, probably not, but worth doing? Definitely.

-Matt ’92

“Oh, my beautiful dreams for the college!!” – Horace Mann

A mental core dump of my feelings about Antioch College announcing it’s closing it’s doors on 07/01/08

I’ve been trying to find a way to put into words what I’ve been thinking since I heard Antioch College was closing. I’ve e-mailed and chatted with a number of friends since I heard about this and that’s helped me frame this a bit but I’m still mostly in shock. I am on a family vacation in WV right now and only can get online once kids are in bed and I can sneak off to the main lodge, so I didn’t hear about this until 10:30 PM on Tuesday 6/12 when I got hundreds of e-mails from various friends, chat lists etc. A good friend from Antioch, Adam Schwartz, said ‘I feel like I just found out a close friend has terminal cancer’ and that pretty much summed up how I felt that night. I went to bed that night and had dreams of going to reunion and chatting with Bob Devine and others about possible ways to revive Antioch. My sub-concious was still optimistic in my dreams, just like how I still have chats with Michael Groteke, a friend from Antioch who died in a car accident while we were still students back in the early 90’s. Gee dreams about Antioch not living up to it’s potential… “Oh, my beautiful dreams for the college!!” – Horace Mann on his deathbed.

“The personal is the political”

As An Antioch Student

Other folks have summarized Antioch’s 150+ year history much better than I ever could so I’m not going to try here. Instead I’m just going to speak to my own dance with Antioch beginning back in the fall of 1986 when at a college fair in Yonkers, NY a fellow Hastings High School student, Kerry Donnegan I think, asked me if I had seen the booth for Antioch College and suggested that I look at it. For some reason this recommendation stuck and I requested literature from Antioch. It arrived and immediately caught my eye with it’s all lowercase logo and font over crayon scribbles. Totally non-pretentious, non-standard, humble and eye catching. The fact that it had a co-op program, which a friend of the family had sung the praises of regarding his alma-mater Drexel University won more points in my book. I applied to Antioch and like 8 other schools via the ‘common application’ and got accepted to most. A few months later when chatting with a friend at a YRUU conference in Vermont he said he had just come back from visiting this really cool college in Ohio and he was going to apply. When he said it was Antioch I pulled out my acceptance letter and said ‘You mean this Antioch’. He said there were lots of other YRUU folks out there and that sold me on it. I showed up in Fall ‘87 sight unseen and while I had a love/hate relationship during my time there, I considered it home and, the faculty, students, campus environment, made me who I am today.

Antioch Staff

In 1992 when I graduated I ended staying as the CG Budget Manager / Community Manager as part of ‘The Collective’ and then after that I was hired as the ‘Assistant to the Dean of Students’ from June 1993 to June 1996. I was the ‘Assistant Director of Technology Resources’ from June 1996 through October 1997 when I finally escaped the Yellow Springs gravity well and moved to Ellsworth, ME. This was a fascinating time for me, to see the college from another point of view. It was fun being the ‘He used to be a student here, he’s ok’ guy in the administration, until entering students in Fall 1997 started calling me Mr. Baya. Ugh.

Antioch Alumnus

However I didn’t fully escape, I was on the Alumni board from 1997 through 2000 and returned a number of times during that period for Alumni Board meetings. Since then I’ve been in touch with a number of CMs trying to offer some ‘institutional memory’ on some matters CG, ComCil related and most recently finally found some Record editors willing to accept my offer to help them get the Record back online. Since they apparently couldn’t figure out how to get online on the campus server I got them set up with their own website on my server and spent dozens of hours setting it up and posting articles up only to be served with ‘cease and decist’ type letter from the college president as soon as the site began to get any traction. For the past 8 months I’ve been corresponding with Record editors & CMs trying to find out what hurdles needed to achieved before the Record could get back online and what a coincidence that the college president finally put things in writing last week enabling this again. Prior to the closing announcement Christian Feuerstein, a fellow Antiochian friend with publishing experience, and I had sent a number of letters back and forth with this falls Record editor planning on getting her new software, saving her money on printing, getting the Record online and really showing what some alumni volunteer time partnering with a campus office could do. We may yet do this but certainly spending the time setting up a site that will no doubt get ripped down on July 1, 2008 when the college officially closes.

The ‘new Antioch’ in 2012

First off, a reality check. I don’t believe it’s going to reopen in 2012, or at least not in any manner that resembles the Antioch I know and love. A watered down mainstream college with the same name perhaps, but with all new faculty and no ‘institutional memory’ from the Antioch I know and love. If the Board of Trustees think alumni are going to blindly support this ‘new Antioch’ I think they are sorely mistaken. They’ve just killed the Antioch I know and love and now they want me to trust that they can rebuild it bigger, stronger, faster than before?

“Fool me once …”

Here’s the thing that gets me. Even if Antioch College returns with a ’state of the art campus’ (which means what exactly? fresh paint, new furniture and high speed wireless campus wide and a new PR campaign now with serif’d fonts?) in 4 years, and for the sake of argument lets say they find a fleet or really good faculty that are somehow not tenured elsewhere and are willing to trust and work for a place that closed it’s doors 4 years earlier, and again, for the sake of argument, lets assume that by some stroke of luck & dedication by Alumni and current faculty that some ‘institutional memory’ is passed on.. oh and that they can find a bunch of students willing to pay lots to attend a ’startup’ college with no upperclass students and existing community or track record of quality, who’s to say that if in 4 years there’s a downturn in enrollment or a ’stumble’ for some other reason, the Board has already made it clear they believe that closing the doors is an option on the table.

“But I’m not dead yet…”

Maybe if the college is separated from the University and it’s board is filled with activists and visionaries with a sense of responsibility and mission then maybe… maybe. But will Antioch University let the college, and it’s endowment, separate? What would be their motivation to let those assets go besides lots of really angry alumni writing them? Surely the Yellow Springs real estate prices alone are worth a pretty penny, and if the penny pinchers on the BOT only look at things as ‘bottom dollar’ then I don’t see them letting the college spin off, least without ’selling’ it at fair market value which means we’d have to raise 10’s of millions just to do that, let alone enough money to operate the college etc. Guestimates for all this total over $50 million. I doubt the ‘committee of 17000′ alumni can muster that unless a few sugar daddies of granting institutions step in.. and why would they? Antioch’s already pronounced itself dead, surely there are more worthy places that didn’t throw in the towel. Anyways, I don’t see them letting this go willingly, and is it really worth raising money to ‘buy’ it from them? Could we form a new college easier? Or should we create the Antioch Scholarship program to assist and encourage activists & truth speakers at other colleges? I have no idea. I guess my optimistic subconscious still has a need to keep some part of Antioch alive.

Disgusted

The Board of Trustees closing Antioch College just disgusts me on many levels. Losing money or not, the only reason the satellite campuses exist is because Antioch College spent it’s money opening them instead of building an endowment. Antioch University itself is solvent, it can afford to have the college run at a loss, at least for long enough for them to follow through with their recent 5 year commitment to help the new curriculum gain traction etc. Bob Devine has explained in far better detail than I could ever summarize how the BOT basically screwed the college over the past decade through policy changes and requirements. Even if this wasn’t the case, the fact that they even considered closing it proves that they just don’t feel the same way about the college that I do. I know I’d consider and attempt every other option before closing the place. It’s bigger than just a part of a business, it’s an organization with a mission that I signed up to be part of back in fall 1987 when I started attending and I know I’d do just about anything to keep it open if I were entrusted with it’s care. It’s clear to me the Board doesn’t feel this way, or at least all board members who didn’t resign as soon as this decision was made (I heard at least one did, so it’s good to know there was at least one person in that room in Seattle that made it clear this was NOT a reasonable option). Frankly I’m still shocked that this option was on the table, I certainly never heard that things were dire. I thought we were in an expected downturn in enrollment because we just switched our curriculum and while things weren’t perfect we were progressing and moving forward.

Parallels

This is another example of how more mainstream generic businesses eventually kill off the small specialized unique places. Home Depot & Lowes kill off small hardware & building supply stores. Borders, Amazon, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks kill off small bookstores. Super Wal-Marts kill… well just about everything including supermarkets. In this case the weekend campuses have become the bread and butter of Antioch University and the unique little small college with students who speak out and attend protests and make the news have become a liability. Those on board just consider the university a business, they clearly have no sense of mission for the college itself, if it ain’t profitable, kill it. Sure this is the way to treat a business, and if that is all Antioch College is then fine, treat it as such. In my book it’s much much more. Guess this is why I’m not on the BOT, I care for Antioch in a non-logical irrational manner, it means too much too me.

“The Medium Is The Message” or “…and the horse you rode in on”

Also this “4 year break” sends other messages. That the board feels all the current faculty were ‘part of the problem’ and aren’t competent or worthy of the roles they currently hold. They just ripped dozens of tenure contracts to shreds. How can they expect to get any decent new faculty after doing this? Any wise person would be pretty leary to trust going to work for place that just pissed on those it had made promises to only 4 years prior. I’m sure they’ll find some folks, and maybe some of them will be good, but it seems like a really shakey assumption that they can just restaff the place. As if quality faculty are an easily replacable commodity. Just cogs, throw out the old and get some new ones. It also does the same for any current students, you’re not worthy, you’re disposable, we have no respect for you or our commitment to your education, please leave so we can bring in new students in 4 years that wont be infected by your bad influence. I haven’t heard officially if this ‘closing the doors’ kills the UE 767 contract but I can only imagine that it does. Another ‘cost saving measure’ by releasing the college from the “oppressive” hold that a workers union has on it. The Antioch 2.0 will no doubt be Union free… just like the McGregor School & University offices… and Wal-Mart.

Immortal

On the night I heard about this one friend said this was like hearing a close friend had terminal cancer. But the more I think about it, it’s worse than that. As much as it hurts, we all know that other people we know are going to die someday.. hopefully a long time from now, but we know we’re mortal.. But organizations like Antioch you expect to outlive you, and that the time you spent studying, volunteering, and working there were part of something bigger, something eternal, something immortal. This is what makes this announcement even more shocking, I just truly believed Antioch would go on beyond me and that maybe my money & time spent to help there would count for something bigger. For the record that ’something bigger’ is NOT Antioch University, I feel no allegiance to the University or those other campuses even if they ‘carry the DNA’ of Antioch College, as one trustee insists. I am glad they exist and I’m sure they are doing good work, but my heart belongs to Antioch College.

What I need to hear

I need someone I trust and respect that knows Antioch… not Steve Lawry, not Art Zucker (BOT Chair), not anyone in the Antioch PR or ‘advancement’ offices.. someone like Bob Devine, Susan Eklund-Leen, Jimmy Williams, or John Feinberg to convince me that the ‘new antioch’, or that whatever alternative organization/plan/movement/granfalloon comes along, is worth supporting. Until that is achieved the $200 I just spent to attend reunion this year is the last donation I’ll ever make. As far as I’m concerned Antioch University have proven to be poor stewards of the college and until someone I trust convinces me they are worthy of trust again, I’m out.

Postscript from Owen, my 4 year old son

Upon hearing that we are going to visit the ‘big school’ that daddy used to attend, it was clear that Owen had heard some other conversations about Antioch earlier in the week when he said ‘Is that the school that is broken?’.. Yes, son… yes it is

The next chapter

I am attending the Antioch College Reunion on 6/21 – 6/24 and have e-mailed all friends I could think of encouraging them to join me. If nothing else it’s a chance to say goodbye before faculty & staff we knew as students disperse, and maybe, just maybe there will arise a plan to move forward with. Join me.