Antioch College’s 2010 Alumni Reunion celebrated the college’s past, but not its recent past. The 50^th Anniversary year for the class of 1960, Reunion was organized to celebrate the participation of Antiochians in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the institution’s long-standing commitments to equality and social justice. The Morgan Fellows organized a presentation on the historic Gegner Barbershop incident, and the Alumni Board inaugurated the Walter Anderson Award, to honor the outstanding achievements of Antiochians of color. Among the recipients of various other awards were longtime Antioch faculty Steve Schwerner and Al Denman. There is no doubt that the College’s legacy on matters of social justice is a proud one, worthy of celebration (although one must note that the frame around the events was not big enough to include subsequent efforts to promote social justice by Antiochians of a more recent vintage). And yet, as inspiring as the Reunion events were, I could not shake the feeling that I was at a Magic Show, in which the direction of my attention to Social Justice victories of the past served as a distraction from outstanding Social Justice deficits of the present and immediate future. There was very little open discussion of the fact that Antioch College is presently an institution without accreditation, a registrar, admissions staff, co-op staff, recognized student body, recognized tenured faculty, or existing structure for shared governance, despite the fact that the College is slated to reopen in fourteen months.

There was also very little acknowledgment of the AAUP’s recent sanctioning of Antioch University for having needlessly closed Antioch College, for having failed to establish financial exigency, for having gutted the College’s system of shared governance, and for having abolished the tenure of the College’s hardworking and put-upon faculty. This last point is a particularly sore one. At Reunion 2007, the Alumni Board voted to support the students and faculty of Antioch College, to wrest the College from the grip of the University, and to insure the uninterrupted operation of the College and the perpetuation of its traditions. In 2008, the Alumni Board voted to sustain the faculty and students of Antioch College in exile as the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute (legal threats from the University prevented the faculty and students from using the name “Antioch” for this venture). The village of Yellow Springs rallied to support the displaced students and faculty, and classes at Nonstop were taught in and around the village until a group of especially stalwart community members refurbished a space to house classrooms and CG (and if you have not seen this space, you should; it’s an impressive testimony to grassroots organizing and ingenuity). When the University shuttered the College buildings, the College community – that part of Antioch that remained alive – became Nonstop. At that point in time, Nonstop was referred to by the Alumni Board and its fundraising arm as the vessel that carried the DNA of Antioch College. What has become of this vessel, and its precious DNA? Apparently, the Alumni Board and the College’s new owners, the Board Pro Tem, are content to let that vessel sink with all hands aboard.

The Board Pro Tem are the new owners of Antioch College, a private institution, and legally they can do whatever they like with it. However, if they expect the alumni of the old college to support the new college, it might behoove them to respect Antiochian values and processes (in fact, the old/new distinction is a rhetorical device; the point of saving Antioch was to continue it). Despite lip service to the victories of the past, the Board Pro Tem’s commitment to social justice in the present, in word and deed, remains an open question. The AAUP has expressed hopes that the revived Antioch College would honor the tenure of the faculty whose employment was wrongfully terminated by the University, and whose careers and livelihoods have been unjustly jeopardized, damaged, and demeaned. At a Community Meeting organized for this year’s Reunion, Antioch College faculty Chris Hill and Kab Butamina asked not to be given their jobs back, but merely to be acknowledged as legitimate stakeholders in the future of the institution to which they had given so much of their careers. The AAUP has also unequivocally identified the erosion of Shared Governance at the College (and an imperial, autocratic style of management on the part of the University) as the central factor in the crisis that precipitated the closure of the College by the University (i.e. that the crisis was created by the University’s own mismanagement of the College). At the same Community Meeting, a group of former Antioch/Nonstop students (organized under the aegis of the Antioch Community Student Union) made a case for the creation of an interim version of Comcil, so that there would be a process for their voices to be heard in discussions about the future of Antioch College. In short: some portion of the faculty and student body of Antioch College continue to reside in Yellow Springs, and remain committed to the future of Antioch College. At present, their state of exile is maintained by administrative bodies (the AB, BPT, and Acting President’s administration) who refuse to recognize their legitimacy or heed their concerns. Their collective, rhetorical question was, “In the absence of shared governance, will we be heard?”

The answer to that rhetorical question was delivered by Reunion 2010’s keynote speaker, the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton, who ought to be ashamed of herself. In her address to the alumni, Ms. Norton wove a narrative about the necessity of the College’s demise. She likened Antioch College to an ailing relative who couldn’t be saved from death, but instead had to be let go of; our beloved Antioch had to die, in order that it might be born again as the new, improved Antioch. Ms. Norton used an organic metaphor to describe this process, and spoke of Antioch shedding its skin (personally, I would have avoided snake imagery as too pointed a comparison, but the irony seemed lost on her). But who counts in this narrative as dead, shed skin? Steve Lawry’s toxic students? George Will’s out-of-touch, PC lockstep faculty? The Keene Six? Everyone who rallied to save the College from the University? Anyone who participated in Nonstop? Anyone not in the favored circle of power and decision-making? Who among us is expendable? Although she did not specify, Norton clearly suggested that some parts of the old Antioch deserved to die. In effect, she was telling the alumni “You no longer need to be ashamed to let it die. In fact, you should be glad it died. Your Antioch was better. And we need you to give us money, so that the new Antioch can be as great as yours was.” Meanwhile, the former faculty and students can be swept under the rug, ignored, and consigned to the trash heap. The screwed remain screwed. Where, in this, is there any social justice?

Norton’s address was a textbook example of what Roland Barthes was talking about back in 1957, when he said that Myth was de-politicized speech. By “de-politicized,” Barthes was referring to the process by which events that are the result of history and politics are made to appear as if they were natural and inevitable. That is precisely what Norton did in couching the demise of Antioch College in an organic metaphor, and invoking an organic process. In point of fact, there was nothing natural or inevitable about Antioch College’s closure; institutions are made by people, not nature, and their fate rests with decisions made by people, not nature. The historical record is clear to anyone willing to actually look: the College was rendered impoverished by changes in University accounting practices circa 2001. The College’s last accreditation review by NCA had been favorable, and NSSE scores remained high; by all the usual benchmarks used to measure in the academy, there was nothing wrong with an Antioch education. In fact, the NCA’s major criticism was about the governance structure of the University and the College (a fact which the University’s 2004 Renewal Commission Report acknowledged, but proceeded to ignore). Despite all this, the University trustees mandated an unnecessary curriculum change, failed to market it properly, underestimated the enrollment shortfalls that would result, reneged on their promise to raise money to support their own plan, and announced closure without consulting other stakeholders. When the University announced in 2007 that it would close the College because of an enrollment crisis, the University leadership neglected to acknowledge their own role in creating that crisis. So, fellow alumni, take heed: Antioch College did not die a natural death; it was murdered by the management practices of the University. If you believe anything else, you are in factual error.

According to its own documents, the University planned to merge the programs of AU McGregor (now AU Midwest) with the reopened college at their new castle on the west end of town, and open the old campus to “higher density development,” perhaps as a retirement community. The idea that you can increase the value of something by destroying it is called “creative destruction,” and is the theoretical brainchild of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, presently a darling of conservatives. It is also the guiding principle of the disaster capitalism delineated in great detail in Naomi Klein’s bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine.” So, fellow alumni, take heed: before you swallow the line that Antioch must be destroyed in order to live again, please consider whose party line you’re buying into.

As an alternative to Schumpeter, I would ask the Powers That Be/Board Pro Tem (PTB/BPT?) to consider the work of another economist, Douglass Cecil North. While Adam Smith begins with the assumption that individuals naturally act in a way to maximize their self-interest (thus naturalizing greed), North is among many economists who point out that it is difficult to maximize self-interest without perfect knowledge of the future (or, toward that end, unlimited calculating ability). So, North begins at a different place, and assumes that people face the future with uncertainty. In such a situation, North argues, the best predictor of how people will act is how they feel about their institutions. That is, people are more likely to vote if they feel elections are fair; people are less likely to cheat on their taxes if they think the tax code is fair; etc.

So, I would submit that Antiochians are more likely to support Antioch if they feel the institution is behaving fairly, and in an Antiochian fashion. The former involves not deliberately excluding people from the Antioch community or intentionally mistreating them; the latter involves a governance process that involves the community in decision-making (or at least the degree of transparency and accountability required in a democracy). One of the reasons many of us were deeply angered by the University was its touting of Antiochian values and history in the absence of any process (community governance) that embodied those values or honored that history. Antioch must walk its talk if its values are to be anything other than a hollowed-out totem. In a more specific sense, many of us thought the University plan to close the College and start from scratch was absurd. But how different from that is the current plan? If the Morgan Fellows are at-will employees of the college, and may not be the faculty who ultimately implement the curriculum they’re designing, how is that different from the Renewal Commission’s folly?

I don’t mean to disparage the good work done by numerous parties to bring the college back from the brink of oblivion. The current staff, while miniscule, have signed on for a Herculean task, and they are worthy of our thanks and admiration. But wouldn’t their burden be less ponderous if more people were carrying it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to embrace the former faculty and students, rather than reject them? Wouldn’t it be easier to introduce new students to a living model of community government (as all of us were introduced to it; modeled for us by the actual relations of staff, students, and faculty at community meeting and on committees) rather than expect them to reinvent the wheel? Do you really think that just any faculty, without the benefit of mentors with institutional memory, are going to understand the educational depth of the co-op experience, and the meaning of it being situated within a liberal arts framework? Do you really think that a collection of strangers who are new to Antioch are going to know how to jumpstart an institution with so few resources, or be able to honor its traditions?

As one of my colleagues observed, the cohort of alumni from the 1960s is the largest cohort of alumni, and one that has probably already attained the peak of their earning potential. So, perhaps it is unsurprising to see that cohort flattered, congratulated, and pandered to by fundraisers. Given that the expressed strategy of the College administration is to grow the endowment through bequests, such pandering may be cynical and ghoulish. Meanwhile, anyone who graduated from Antioch in the last forty years is told that their education was substandard. Well, I have to say: you guys had it easy. Those of you who attended Antioch in the 1960s inherited an institution with forty years of growth, and an academy rendered flush by postwar prosperity. Like all members of your generation, you have benefited from the good fortune of your circumstances, and continue to wield your demographic muscle. Those of us who attended Antioch after the strike inherited an institution with decades of deferred maintenance, hampered and stunted by its entanglement with the University, and all in the national context of growing conservatism and the dismantling of the public sphere by Reaganites over the last thirty years. We learned how to make less do more. We learned how to make community in an increasingly diverse culture. Who do you think is tougher? Everyone who graduated from Antioch in the last forty years, and everyone who kept the institution alive since 1973, deserves your respect and thanks. That is especially true of recent faculty and students.

For those of you who insist on self-aggrandizing nostalgia, I must insist in turn: there are only two things that have ever made Antioch College great. One of these things is the educational model, which has benefited Antiochians of all eras, and which has continued to produce engaged citizens despite the institution’s financial woes. The other is Antioch’s commitment to democracy, both in terms of social activism and community governance processes. If Antioch intends to honor that commitment, there’s no time like the present. Begin by acknowledging your existing faculty and students, and by building processes of inclusive deliberation into institutional decision-making (isn’t that what Algo Henderson and Douglas McGregor would’ve wanted us to do?). Part of the beauty and elegance of democracy is that its processes result in the sharing of wisdom. While Antioch has had financial problems from its founding, it has vast resources of human capital, and that capital should not be squandered. The alumni want to help, even (maybe especially) those among us who remain critical of the current situation. The deliberate marginalization of ever-increasing numbers of Antiochians does not seem like a strategy that will serve the institution in the long term.

- Dan C. Shoemaker, Ph.D.

Antioch College Class of 1992

July 2, 2010