Never ones to be constrained by conventional thinking, members of Nonstop Institute are taking an unusual approach to bringing interesting thinkers to Yellow Springs. In their series of talks this spring on higher education, Nonstop used high-tech but low-cost methods to create dialogue between members of the community and some of the most provocative thinkers in the nation.

This method differs in several ways from the more customary approach of a passive audience listening to a talking head. The Nonstop series, via Skype and iChat, electronically connected the experts, who were sitting in their homes and offices around the country, with the discussion participants in Yellow Springs. The guest speakers, who generally give about a 20-minute introduction before an hour-long interactive discussion with audience members, seemed eager to engage, according to Nonstop member Dan Reyes, an organizer of the event with Iveta Jusova.

“I sense that they’re excited about being taken off the beaten path” for the events, Reyes said in an interview last week.

Nonstop will this month bring via teleconference its most well known guest yet, the political philosopher and activist Michael Hardt of Duke University. Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of a trilogy of influential works on the political and cultural landscape, Empire, The Multitude and The Commonwealth.

The event takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, at the Nonstop campus in Millworks, 305 North Walnut Street. It is free and open to the public.

Published in 2000, Empire was a publishing blockbuster that went through 10 printings, unusual even for a commercial book, but unheard-of for a 500-page academic tome published by the Harvard University Press.

“How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can’t find a copy in New York for love nor money?…Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philsophy, Marxism and modernity that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity’s progress towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it,” according to Ed Vulliamy of The Observer. Emily Eaken, reviewer of the New York Times, wrote that the book “is filling a void in the humanties.”

Hardt and Negri’s thesis is that the modern influences of technology, globalization and new models of production are breaking down barriers both within and between individuals, leading to new political and cultural opportunities. On a global level, they believe, formerly dominant nation-states are losing power and unorganized masses of people, which they call “the multitude,” are gaining it. Overall, they see the trend as empowering for individuals and for democracy.

“They see the old boundaries breaking down as both a time of crisis and a chance to rethink the culture,” Reyes said. “Hardt has food for thought for us, regarding how to move forward into a new realm of possibilities.”

Hardt’s analysis covers culture as a whole, and the upcoming dialogue will consequently cover broader territory than the previous discussions that focused on higher education, Reyes said. However, the Hardt event will, like the earlier events, encourage participants to re-consider the status quo and open up to new paradigms.

“When this works, it has a great impact,” said Nonstop member Brian Springer, regarding the Nonstop dialogues. “If it’s really good, it can change your intellectual spirit.”

While organizers were somewhat surprised that someone of Hardt’s stature agreed to take part in an event sponsored by a tiny group in a tiny town, they feel his acceptance has to do with his being intrigued by Nonstop. All of the participants, including Hardt, waived charging a fee to Nonstop after hearing about the group and its mission.

“We’re interesting to him because he’s interested in institutions that are in the process of becoming, that are thinking outside the old playbooks,” Springer said.

No one could accuse Nonstop of not thinking outside the playbook. Formerly called Nonstop Antioch, the group of about 20 working and board members are mainly former faculty of Antioch College. When Antioch University shut down the college in 2008, Nonstop members organized to offer classes without a campus, with the former faculty teaching in churches and homes, and reaching out into the community. They did so out of a desire to carry on the traditions and values of Antioch College, several said at the time.

Part of the Nonstop members’ decision to focus their spring dialogue series on higher education was their desire to understand the forces that led to the college closure, according to Springer, who believes that while the Antioch closing was an extreme and unusual manifestation of the threat to higher education, the same forces threaten many institutions today. Speakers in the series included Cary Nelson, an Antioch College alumnus and president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, Ashley Dawson of the City University of New York, who spoke about her research into threats to academic freedom, and Sheila Slaughter of the University of Georgia, who discussed the effects of economic forces on higher education.

The series was “an attempt to understand how cultural forces created the conditions that led to such a catastrophe” as the Antioch College closing, Springer said.

While some of the original Nonstop members are now working at the revived Antioch College, the college’s new staff is small, and everyone could not be rehired — many of the former college faculty remain at Nonstop, Springer said. The effects of the decision to close the college are still reverberating, including that many of the former college faculty are about to lose their unemployment compensation, he said.

While Nonstop was originally funded by Antioch College alumni, it is now totally funded — its estimated 2010 budget is about $30,000 — by grants, gifts and supporting memberships, according to Springer, and its all-volunteer staff donates about $300,000 in donated labor yearly.

While Nonstop members are encouraged that the college alumni successfully reclaimed the college, they believe that they still fill a significant role in the community. Because they are mainly former longtime academics, they have a wealth of interests and expertise, and they want to continue making contributions to the Yellow Springs community.

“I see Nonstop as a complement to the revitalized college and to the humanities department at McGregor,” Springer said. Because the group is small, “it has more mobility to move and change” than do traditional institutions.

“We’ve become a flexible set of intellectual resources,” he said.

Nonstop members believe that the Yellow Springs community is an excellent place to apply those resources.

“This is an interested place. It’s vibrant and the people are curious,” Reyes said. “It’s not hard to have conversations here about topics that might be difficult somewhere else.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

Application deadline: June 8, 2010 – Apply Now

Nonstop Institute seeks proposals for its upcoming residency program Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project. The selected projects will incorporate an oral history (or histories) grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources. Application deadline is June 8, 2010.

The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. The four selected residency artists (can also include documentarians, writers, cultural geographers, others involved with oral histories) will have access to workspace at Nonstop for 7 weeks starting June 14. Opportunities for dialogue among residency artists and producers is an important component of this on-site residency project. The final projects will be installed and exhibited in Nonstop’s spaces in early August, using either a section of Nonstop’s 2000 sq ft exhibition space or its virtual website space. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or screening in Nonstop’s main space.

Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists and documentarians working the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by producers at any stage of their careers. Project jurying will be based on both the specific proposal for Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project and examples of past work. Four proposals will be selected, and at least two of the four will be current residents of Yellow Springs. Each artist selected will receive up to $150 for supplies. Further information and application forms will be available starting May 13 at this webpage.

This project is made possible in part by the generous support of the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

For further information please contact Chris Hill at 937- 767-2327 or chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org .

Purpose

Oral history making involves the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences, recollections, witnessing and opinions of individual speaker(s). Oral history making is grounded by an interview process characterized by open-ended questions and documented responses. For Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project Nonstop seeks proposals that will use a local oral history (or histories) as a major component of the artist residency. The proposed projects should be grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural or civic resources. The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or a screening in Nonstop’s main space, or reside on Nonstop’s website. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources.

General Information

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project artist residencies will be housed in the former office area of the Nonstop Institute at 305 North Walnut Street, Yellow Springs, Ohio. The residencies will begin June 14, 2010. The floor plan and a brief video documenting the evolution of the space will be available on the website. Nonstop offers free studio space to eligible artists for a 7-week period, followed by a publicized exhibition of the final projects. Artists also have access to the facilities on a 24-hour basis with wireless Internet access and a shared meeting space. Selected artists will receive up to $150 for supplies. Other amenities include a viewing area for DVD, a shared Macintosh computer and a kitchen area with a microwave, refrigerator, water cooler and a coffee maker. Any special technical needs associated with the work should be described within the application.

Eligibility

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists working in the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by artists working in all media and at any stage of their careers. A minimum of two residency artists selected will be Yellow Springs residents.

Selection Process

A panel of arts professionals and artists will review applications and select artists for the residencies. Artists will be selected based on the quality of their submitted work samples and their ability to integrate the conceptual framework of this project into the proposal for the residency. The selection process will be completed by the June 12, 2010. All applicants will be notified by email. Please do not call the office for selection results.

Useful Materials:

Residency Studios Floor Plan
Application Information (PDF)
Press Release

Deadline for applications: June 8, 2010

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GENERAL APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Applications consist of 2 parts:

1) Application Information must be submitted online (see form below).

2) Work Samples can be submitted online (see form below), or delivered by U.S. mail (see details below).

Work Samples can be submitted online (see ADD button below) or submitted on CD, DVD, or VHS tape and sent to Nonstop via U.S. Mail. Please submit work samples online if possible.

All submitted applications must be posted to the webpage on or before June 8, and all Work Samples must be posted to the website or received at Nonstop on or before June 8. Applications received after this date will be disqualified. Someone will be present at Nonstop to receive in-person delivered Work Samples from 3-5 PM on June 8.

If you are mailing in Work Samples (on CD, DVD or VHS tape), please mail to:

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project
c/o Nonstop Institute
305 North Walnut St., Suite C
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

IMPORTANT—IF YOU ARE SENDING A CD, DVD or VHS TAPE and would like it returned, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with proper postage. We will not be responsible for return of materials that do not include a SASE.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Hill (937) 767-2327 or inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org

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APPLICATION FORM, RESUME & WORK SAMPLES

Please fill out the online application below. Notice that there are limits to the number of characters for the Artist Statement, Project Proposal, and Special Needs. We recommend that you write out these statements in Word or a similar program that has a Word Count first. The online form will not accept statements that contain more than the stated number of characters. Please note that the application form below cannot be saved between sessions.

After you fill out the Application form, please notice that you must also submit a RESUME and WORK SAMPLES, and instructions for submitting these elements of the Application continue below.

1. CONTACT INFORMATION—Please include phone contact info along with the rest of the requested info.

2. ARTIST STATEMENT—Write a statement about your work, your art-making or journalistic process, and how this residency opportunity will support your current work (limit= In 1500 characters).

3. PROJECT PROPOSAL—Describe your project proposal, or the process through which you will engage the ideas, subjects, topics and materials that relate to the Purpose statement of Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project artist residencies program (limit= In 1500 characters).

4. SPECIAL NEEDS—Include any possible technical needs that may be an issue with regards to the presentation of the work. There is no guarantee that your needs will be met, but we will do what we can based on our limited resources (limit= In 1500 characters).

5. RESUME—Your resume should be uploaded using the ADD FILES button below (as PDF or .DOC file). Your resume should include your name, address, phone number and email address along with your exhibition, screening, performance, and/or publication history and educational background.

6. WORK SAMPLES— Online work sample submissions can be uploaded using the ADD FILES button below. Please submit strong examples of your previous work. These Work Samples can be images, sound files, text files, or media (see specific instructions for each of these types of Work Samples below). Where possible, we encourage you to submit Work Samples that will give the reviewers some sense of how your past work connects to the project you are proposing for the Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project residency. We encourage you to submit ONE TYPE of Work Sample that is most relevant to the project you are proposing. If you think you need to submit more than one type of Work Sample (for example, both image files and sound files), then please contact inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org before June 5 so that we can speak with you about your decision and anticipate your submission. Please do NOT send original artwork.

a. IMAGE FILES—You may submit up to 20 images. Maximum size in any direction: 1000px. Image resolution: 72 dpi. Each image file should titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Image Script. Upload your images online using the ADD FILES button below. Image Work Samples must be submitted online.
IMAGE SCRIPT—The Image Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Image Files submitted. You must submit the following identification for each image: Your Last Name, First Name, image number, Title, Dimensions, Materials, Date completed, and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample).

b. SOUND FILES—You may submit up to 12 minutes of sound files that represent up to 5 different projects (as excerpts or complete works). Please submit MP3 files only and submit online using the ADD FILES button. The reviewers will listen to the first 5 minutes. They may decide to listen to up to 12 minutes. Please number the submitted files in the order that you want the reviewers to start their listening. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Please give careful consideration to what the reviewers will hear in the first 5 minutes. Each of the sound files should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Sound Script.

SOUND SCRIPT–The Sound Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Sound Files submitted. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification for each sound file submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt duration, date completed, your role in the creation of this work and any information on collaborators (for example: John Smith, editor with Jane Doe recordist OR John Smith, composer and post-production, with Jane Doe and Peter Jones, musicians on violin and bass), and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample). Sound submissions must be made online.

c. MEDIA FILES (MEDIA PROJECTS, PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION)—You may submit up to 12 minutes of video on a DVD or VHS tape. The reviewers will watch the first 5 minutes. They may decide to watch up to 12 minutes. Please order/number the submitted projects in the sequence that you want the reviewers to start their viewing. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Please give careful consideration to what the reviewers will watch in the first 5 minutes. Each of the video projects should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Media Script.
MEDIA SCRIPT–The Media Script is a separate document that should be printed out and accompany the numbered media work samples/chapters on the DVD or the sequential selections on the VHS tape. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification and description for each media project submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt duration, date completed, your role in the creation of this work and any information on collaborators (for example: Jane Doe, editor and sound with John Smith camera, OR Jane Doe, writer, performer, with Peter Jones and John Smith, media documentation, editor), and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample). Please submit media projects and media documentation of performances on DVD or VHS tape. Please test your DVDs and make sure that they play without problems. With VHS tapes, please make sure that when you submit them they are rewound and cued to the beginning of the first selection.

d. TEXT FILES—You may submit up to 25 pages of text. Please submit text-based Work Samples online. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Each of the text-based projects should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Text Script.
TEXT SCRIPT–The Text Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Text Files submitted. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification and description for each text project submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt length, date completed, and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample).

We understand that these directions on how to submit Work Samples involve careful attention to details. If you have any questions, please contact inquiries@nonstopinsitute.org. We will be monitoring this email address daily.

From this past week our second guest in this series, Professor Sheila Slaughter (University of Georgia, co-author with Gary Rhoades of Academic Capitalism and the New Economy), engaged the Nonstop audience in a discussion concerning the manner in which the new economy mode of academic capitalist thinking has become enmeshed with many dimensions of higher educational practice. Executive leaders, administrators, boards of trustees, but also many faculty are involved in enacting the current ascendancy of what Slaughter calls the “academic capitalist knowledge regime” over the “public good knowledge regime.” Whereas the public good regime views education and knowledge as a legitimate and reasonable expectation for all and to the benefit of all, the academic capitalist regime views education as a private service, and it handles knowledge as a commodity to be packaged, patented, marketed and sold.

Slaughter elaborated on a significant theme in her book concerning the essentially false promises academic capitalism proponents frequently make about turning students into “empowered customers.” In actuality, the marketing-centered university, perpetually hungry for tuition revenues, attends little to a broad consideration of individual educational needs and more commonly circumscribes student choice to the economic advantage of the organization. Despite aggressive promotion of representations to the contrary, academic capitalism in practice is not a good option for students, nor is it a good option for faculty labor, which faces increasingly less stable conditions of employment. Academic capitalist commercialization agendas quite frequently fail to cover the expense of the substantial additional administrative apparatus demanded as the cost of doing business. Slaughter provides us a great deal of food for thought and an occasion for exploring alternative ideas in efforts to move ahead.

Coming up on April 29 at 7 p,m., Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, joins Nonstop for the third teleconference installment in this series. Along with his long-standing work as a distinguished professor of modern poetry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Nelson is widely recognized as a committed advocate for socially-just institutional practice and higher education reform. His 25 books include the 2010 volume No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. Nelson has worked tirelessly to expand the traditional academic dialogues concerning intellectual freedom and shared governance to include meaningful consideration of graduate student employee efforts in union recognition, as well as calling attention to the systematically exploitative conditions increasingly common in many colleges and universities’ reliance upon part-time and short-term-contract faculty who are responsible for a great deal of many institution’s educational work but enjoying virtually no job security. As AAUP president, Nelson has aimed to better enable that association for taking on the significant challenges facing American higher education today.

Frequently situated as a voice of social conscience in national debate on higher education, Professor Nelson remains attuned to his educational roots in Yellow Springs. As an Antioch College alumnus he understands the importance of the educational traditions long situated in this community. He has in recent years generously shared his ongoing educational research with Nonstop, and we are pleased to welcome him back to discuss the current situation for progressive liberal education and possible paths ahead.

by Dan Reyes & Iveta Jusova

originally appearing in 4/22 YSN “Other voices”

An endless rain is just beginning.
Into the ark, for where else can you go,
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see things from all six sides.
….
As far as the eye can see, there’s water and hazy horizon.
Into the ark, plans for the distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all this
will still come in handy someday.
–From Wislawa Szymborska, “Into the Ark” translated by Clare Cavanagh

Antioch College was closed by the Board of Trustees of Antioch University on June 30, 2008 after an intensive year-long struggle to save the 155-year-old institution. This was the fourth suspension of operations in the College’s history. Opening its doors in 1853, the College was declared bankrupt by 1858—the first of many insolvencies, declarations of financial exigency, payless paydays, and salary cuts. Alongside of this checkered financial history, however, the small liberal arts college carved out a well-deserved reputation at the forefront of both the old and New Left, and as a laboratory for progressive education in the U.S. When this precious legacy was put at risk, the victim of corporatizing trends in higher education, Antiochians united to fight back.

Many of Antioch College’s educational experiments, seen as outlandish at the time, have now passed into common practice. From its inception the College employed female faculty and admitted women students to the same curriculum as male students; students of mixed race were accepted in the 1850’s and by 1863 the Board of Trustees had decreed that no student could be excluded “on account of color.” In the 1920’s, influenced in large part by John Dewey’s theories of applied learning and education for participatory citizenship, the College pioneered its highly successful “co-operative education” program alternating on-campus semesters of liberal arts courses with semesters of paid work and research. This period also witnessed the deliberate cultivation of town-gown partnerships and enterprises designed to support the local economy while providing experiential opportunities for students. In the following years the College implemented a governance structure that included student representation in decision-making at all levels, including the hiring and tenuring of faculty, and an honor system for student examinations. Letter grades were abolished in the 1960’s in favor of personalized narratives. The outward-looking emphasis of the co-op program was augmented in the 1950’s by Antioch Education Abroad, one of the first international study programs in the U.S, and a decade later by the creation of traveling Environmental Field Programs led by recent Antioch graduates.
At the time of its closure in 2008, Antioch College was the flagship campus of Antioch University. The history of what was first described as a ‘network,’ then a ‘federation,’ and then Antioch University began from the most idealistic of motives, with a directive from the College Board of Trustees in the mid-sixties to extend its educational opportunities to traditionally underserved populations. This led to the establishing of experimental field programs and mini-campuses all over the country, aimed at communities in Appalachia, Philadelphia, and Washington DC; at Native American reservations, at migrant workers, miners, and prisoners. Still more mini-campuses were engendered through the ambitious initiative known as the University Without Walls, which came about through Antioch’s leadership in the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities. Some of these campuses were quite substantial operations; the Antioch School of Law was particularly respected in progressive legal circles. They were also quite successful in terms of reaching large numbers of nontraditional and diverse students. Programs multiplied rapidly, and soon satellites were sending out satellites with a total of somewhere (to this day no one knows exactly) between 35 and 40 mini-Antiochs. The award for the most eccentric campus goes to the Antioch branch in Columbia, Maryland, a one-acre portable college in a giant vinyl bubble (unfortunately, last-minute cost-cutting on the air conditioning meant that the internal temperature became unbearable and all within the bubble ended up poached).1
The College’s noble experiment in taking education to the streets, or in arrogant empire-building, depending on one’s perspective, created tremendous confusion in terms of mundane details such as registration, faculty supervision, and tuition payment, and by the time the Board decided to fire the ambitious president who had presided over the chaos, the College finances were in shambles. In the eighties, the College was rescued by another ambitious president who consolidated the most stable of the ‘adult’ campuses still standing and organized them into a new entity designated Antioch University, made up of the residential liberal arts College plus commuter campuses in Seattle, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Keene, New Hampshire and Antioch McGregor in Yellow Springs. Today these campuses provide a variety of continuing education and graduate programs for adults in such fields as Leadership, Management, Creative Writing, Psychology and Education Certification. However, these institutions evolved without implementing a system of tenure, instead utilizing a small group of core faculty (most have PhD’s) to administer programs that rely heavily on adjuncts, practitioners, and short-term contracts with faculty at other institutions. And, with the exception of Antioch McGregor, the staff at the commuter campuses are not represented by a collective bargaining unit. Antioch University therefore came to encompass two very different kinds of educational models—models with incompatible assumptions about governance. While the College’s curriculum and indeed its very ethos were steeped in ideals of community participation, democratic process, and academic freedom, University campuses prized efficiency and the minimizing of fixed costs. The President of Antioch University McGregor, Barbara Gellman-Danley, touted her reported 2007 staffing of 18 full time faculty members who teach 750 adult learners with the help of 150 adjuncts as “a tight ship,” insisting that her strength as an educational leader was in “running a good business model.” 2

Antioch Abandoned

By the late nineties, the stress inherent in the juxtaposition of these two organizational paradigms was manifest and the relationship between the liberal arts College in Yellow Springs and the far-flung satellite campuses becoming increasingly tense. The University leadership sought to use (some would say usurp) the name recognition of the historic College while distancing itself from College traditions of faculty governance, academic freedom protected by tenure, student participation in committees, and political activism. A full account of the gradual disintegration of the College-University relationship and the increasing micromanaging of the College by distant University administrators can be found in the American Association of University Professors Report, “Antioch University and the Closing of Antioch College,” released this past September.
As the AAUP Report observes, “By the beginning of this decade, Antioch College’s system of shared governance had become limited to reacting to decisions made at the university level by the board and the chancellor.” 3 One indicator of the decline in governance at the once free-standing College is the fact that out of the six College presidents who served between 1996 and 2008, five were selected with virtually no input from the faculty. A series of lay-offs and consolidations in a financial reorganization imposed by the University leadership deprived the College of its own Chief Financial Officer and the College President of a direct relationship with the Board; from 2001 the President reported only to the Chancellor. Investigative journalist Brian Springer explains that the body “responsible and accountable for” the College’s administrative leadership became the University Leadership Council (ULC), comprised of the Chancellor, the University Chief Financial Officer, and the presidents of the six campuses, most of whom had no previous experience with liberal arts colleges.4 A decade of pleas by successive College presidents for more attention to the needs of the College fell on deaf ears. As one wrote to then-Chancellor Jim Craiglow: “While it seems to me that any University Strategic Planning effort would address…the specific issues of what it will take to sustain such a distinctive residential undergraduate liberal arts program within the framework of a federal University, the financial modeling I’ve seen thus far has been aimed at standardizing, rationalizing, and achieving equity across the campuses, with little regard for the history, circumstance or distinctiveness of the College.” 5
In 2004 the Board of Trustees and the ULC stepped up micromanagement of the College by mandating a ‘renewal plan’–a new interdisciplinary curriculum that abolished departments and proposed to alter the teacher/student ratio from 1:8 or 1:9 to 1:15 (in other words, to reduce the number of faculty positions). Sold to the faculty as a last-ditch effort to put the College on the road to financial stability, the faculty were presented with the task of designing and implementing a logistical nightmare in little over a year. Throughout this period, the faculty struggled mightily to maintain some semblance of a liberal arts curriculum, despite ever decreasing infrastructure and staffing cuts in academic programs, in academic support, and in student services. Neither complacent nor ignorant of the problems of the College, faculty lacked the means through which to make concerns heard. While some faculty left, many stayed, still compelled by the challenges and rewards of teaching a bright, intellectually curious student body. Numerous indicators of academic quality, such as national rankings in the survey of student engagement (NSSE), numbers of students obtaining Fulbrights, rates of acceptance to top graduate programs and of completion of PhD’s, remained stellar.
The new curriculum imposed on the College by the Board of Trustees either failed to attract students, or the confusion resulting from the curricular overhaul implemented too quickly made it difficult to explain and to market. Existing students were given incentives to graduate early in order to avoid the delivery of two different curricula at the same time. The unsurprising result was that enrollments dropped significantly. With an incoming class in fall 2005 of only 68 students, the situation turned dire. Although the Board of Trustees had promised to support the College through the inevitable hemorrhages caused by the ‘renewal,’ this turned out not to be the case. Donations to the College had been falling away. As morale plummeted, a new Director of Communications issued an email bulletin cheerfully named ‘The Good News Newsletter.’
The ‘cultures’ of the College and University continued to diverge and the presidents of the other campuses were encouraged to regard the College as more liability than asset. Gellman-Danley of Antioch McGregor cultivated relations with business leaders in the Dayton area, particularly those with connections to the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and new funding sources under the Bush Administration’s Homeland Security initiatives. In an attempt to literally detach Antioch McGregor from Antioch College, Gellman-Danley ordered the construction of a new $15 million-dollar facility at the opposite end of the town of Yellow Springs, moving into the 6000-square-foot space in 2007. As the Yellow Springs News reported, “Some have wondered how a new building for McGregor was financed while the [college] campus just across the street was crumbling.”6 The controversy which erupted at McGregor surrounding the building of the new campus and the separation from Antioch College was actively stifled—students’ newsletters taken from mailboxes, faculty warned not to speak publicly against the decisions of management. This was one of several occasions when the McGregor president made it clear that traditional concepts of academic freedom did not apply under her administration.
In March 2007 the University Chancellor, Tullisse (Toni) Murdock, a former president of the Antioch University unit in Seattle, armed with a consultant’s report that characterized the College’s tenured faculty and staff union as obstacles to a more flexible, market-oriented institution, informed the Board of Trustees that the College’s continued deficits could soon jeopardize the entire University system. The report outlined three options for Board actions. The third option, that of suspending the operations of the College for a minimum of four years in order to “clear out the ghosts” was the course of action explicitly identified as “the one preferred at this time by the university’s management team.” 7 That June, without having turned to alumni for help, without having consulted with faculty–as they were contractually obligated to do—without consultation with any of the many stakeholders involved in the fate of this historic institution, the Board of Trustees voted to put the flagship Antioch College to sleep.
The remaining members of the College faculty and staff learned of the decision when they were called to a special meeting, at which then-College President Steven Lawry relayed the news that all College operations would be suspended on June 30 of 2008. Tenure was voided by the declaration of financial exigency–a condition which seemed highly disputable given that other University units claimed to be financially sound. Staff union contracts ensured that many staff received severance pay; faculty were offered a year’s contract in lieu of severance. Sympathetic faculty at the McGregor campus were discouraged from talking to the press at the risk of being terminated as well. When President Lawry became too vocal about the glaring structural problems inherent in the College-University relationship, his head was the next to roll.
Pleas of financial exigency also appeared questionable given the salaries and compensation received by University administrators. The year before she presided over the closing of the College, Chancellor Murdock was listed as earning over $532,491 in total salary and benefits (including deferred compensation of $264,000). Gellman-Danley received $399,328, including deferred compensation.8
In August of 2007 Murdock unveiled a tentative plan for a ‘renewed Antioch College Yellow Springs’ to be organized on the same model as the other University campuses, without tenure, and presumably without a staff union. The proposal called for a small core faculty of eight (Antioch College employed 44 full-time faculty that year) to administer a ‘high tech’ version of a liberal arts education, linked to the other units via the web and assisted by virtual classrooms and a virtual commons.9 Later this proposal was quietly dropped.
For an entire year a coalition of outraged College alumni, faculty, staff, students, and citizens of Yellow Springs fought hard to have the decision to suspend operations reversed. This stage of the struggle involved multiple fronts, including a massive alumni fundraising campaign which began with the raising of half a million dollars over one weekend at the June alumni reunion, reaching 18 million in cash and pledges by the time of the October reunion. Other initiatives included a lawsuit filed by the tenured faculty which sought to prevent the closing of the College and the seizing of its assets; the formation of dozens of new alumni chapters; numerous petition and letter writing drives; protests from former trustees; town meetings and rallies in the Village of Yellow Springs; letters of concern from the AAUP; students and alumni haunting meetings of the Board. Efforts to rescue the College soon focused on obtaining a separation from its parent Antioch University, but the Board of Trustees turned down repeated offers by alumni to purchase the College. One group of wealthy alumni and former trustees, the Antioch College Continuation Corporation (ACCC), offered 12.2 million dollars for the College, with 6 million down and the remainder to be paid over the next few years. The ACCC’s insistence that they be ensured representation on the Board of Trustees was seen by the University as a ‘hostile takeover,’ and so the University resisted the deal, insisting that all the money be paid in cash up front. Soon after, the University released a press statement declaring the College ‘up for sale’ and making it known that they were ‘open to negotiations with any potential buyer.’10 This prompted a mock ad on the local Craigslist: “Antioch College no longer holds any substantial meaning or value to its Board of Trustees, beyond what it can be sold for on the open market. Offers by alumni groups promising to operate the college in a continuous manner, beholden to its traditional values of openness and academic freedom are particularly loathsome. Real Estate developers with proven military-industrial success are preferred.”
After June 2008 the beautiful 100-acre campus of Antioch College stood empty, its graceful pre-Civil War brick buildings shuttered, the heating disabled, the campus monitored by security cameras which might or might not have been operational. Despite repeated advance warnings from The Ohio Historical Society and concerned citizens of the Village of Yellow Springs (as well as the University’s own consultants), neglect of basic maintenance caused serious damage from burst sprinkler pipes in three buildings over the winter. In spring 2009 the Antioch campus buildings were placed on the Ohio Preservation’s list of Ohio’s Most Endangered Historic Sites.
The AAUP’s investigation into the closing of Antioch College determined that Antioch University had violated numerous AAUP standards and guidelines–most obviously, that faculty governance at the College and faculty control over the College curriculum were repeatedly sidestepped. As the AAUP report states: “There can be little doubt that Antioch College’s financial problems were in no small measure a product of managerial decisions made without faculty consultation, including a curricular experiment that was connected to a decline in enrollment and a decision to reduce
financial support to the college from the university.” The Association further found that academic freedom at the satellite campuses was infringed upon, and that the University’s declaration of financial exigency in order to terminate employees and eliminate tenured positions remained unsubstantiated. Ultimately the AAUP charged the Board of Trustees and the University administration with what amounts to gross dereliction of duty, noting, “It seems to the investigating committee not at all unreasonable to have expected the trustees to pursue the goal (the operation of Antioch College) for which the enterprise had been established….Unfortunately, the trustees and the administration of Antioch University seem to have lost sight of this purpose.”11
In June 2009 College alumni at last succeeded in negotiating a deal with the University to regain the campus and the rights to the name Antioch College. Keys to the campus buildings officially changed hands on September 4. This time, Antioch and its history sell for six million dollars.

Former Antioch student Jeanne Kay characterized Toni Murdock’s plan to close Antioch College and open a new unit of the University in its place as the higher education version of the tactic Naomi Klein has named “neoliberal shock therapy.”12 In these cases, drastic actions are taken to displace people, demoralize resistance, erase established traditions, and generally ‘clean house’ in order for outside interests to rebuild a national or local economy from the top down. In our own small example, a sanitized “Antioch Yellow Springs” was to be superimposed on the former Antioch College; a much reduced clone of the University’s tenure-less, administrative-heavy units with little room for dissenting voices was to replace the College and its messy self-governance. Clearly Antioch’s plight dramatized these common trends in the corporatization of higher education:

1) A consolidation of power in upper levels of administration; the expansion of administrative bureaucracy; a reliance on consultants as opposed to available wisdom and experience; a shift away from faculty and community traditions of governance; the abrogation of faculty control over the curriculum.
2) A lack of transparency in governance; a culture of secrecy and closed conversations on the part of Boards of Trustees and administrators; no consultation with other stakeholders in making decisions with far-reaching and damaging impacts.
3) The deliberate violation of tenure; increased use of contract, part-time and adjunct labor; increased reliance on distance-learning and low-residency courses; the undermining of tenured faculty through competition with contract faculty and the undermining of contract faculty through competition with adjuncts.
4) A succumbing to the ‘edifice complex’–prioritizing showpiece buildings and facilities over personnel; the building of ever-larger (and often unnecessary) new buildings rather than the rehabilitation of existing usable spaces.

Claiming the Legacy: Antiochians Fight Back

The decision to dispose of Antioch College was not one that faculty, alumni, staff, and students could accept. While our strategies evolved over time, and different constituencies worked in different arenas, we were united by certain core assumptions. We defined the suspension of the College as a financial and political choice made among other available options. This meant countering a number of convenient and widespread narratives–insisting that the College was not merely another regrettable casualty of prevailing economic winds, nor of its own anachronistic refusal to adapt to a changing marketplace. The closure was not a referendum on Antioch’s progressive educational mission or curriculum. Nor was the College brought down by a disrespectful, dogmatic, or ‘toxic’ student body (a view unfortunately given some support by President Lawry).
Our overarching goal was simply to refuse to cede the College to the University. In the winter of 2007-2008, frustrated at the University’s intransigence, Antiochians began to contemplate taking Antioch College off campus if the new round of negotiations between the Alumni and the University Board of Trustees did not yield a more positive outcome. An ad hoc group of about thirty faculty, staff, alumni, and students met over a weekend in March 2008 and brainstormed about how to move forward. By the end of that weekend, we had sketched out a plan and a budget for a college in exile that we desperately hoped we would not need, and the Alumni Board had voted to commit its financial resources to the project. A month later we learned that the University Board of Trustees had turned down the ACCC’s final offer for the College and were proceeding with the closure. The members of the ACCC disbanded in disgust; planning for what became Nonstop Antioch began in earnest. Faculty and students stopped attending the hollow shell of community governance, the Administrative Council (Adcil), and created our own governing body, named ExCil, or Adcil-in-Exile. In May eighteen Antioch College faculty—most of the tenured faculty at the time–signed up to teach with Antioch in Exile. Faculty then worked without pay from May through August to develop a curriculum, admissions and tuition policies, and a detailed budget. An Executive Collective was voted in, a group of three faculty members who would divide the leadership tasks of the new institution.
As faculty and staff mournfully packed up our offices, we were simultaneously starting to piece together a college from scratch. We scouted around for usable classroom spaces in the Village of Yellow Springs. Churches, coffee shops, arts spaces, and the senior citizens’ center opened their doors to us. We found surplus chairs, desks and blackboards at a sale at Wright State University, while computers and even a high-end server were donated. A nearby bookstore agreed to sell textbooks, and the Yellow Springs Library to handle reserve readings, as the University denied Nonstop faculty access to Antioch’s (still-open) Olive Kettering Library. After the dramatic rescue of the Antioch Women Center’s collection of books from the dumpster where it had been discarded by University staff, we put together our own library-in-exile, which soon added up to approximately 4000 donated and rescued books and materials. Staff and faculty joined Local 768 of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, obtaining a healthcare plan through the Steelworkers Health Fund.
Antioch-in-Exile was eventually renamed the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in response to a threatened lawsuit from Antioch University prohibiting us from using our own name, logo, or the letter ‘A’ in any way that could evoke anything Antioch-esque. Taking our name and our vision from one of the slogans of the past year–“Nonstop Antioch”–we saw ourselves as part protest movement, part educational think tank, part holding tank for the progressive traditions and institutional memory of Antioch College. We often described ourselves as the carriers of Antioch’s DNA; we also used the metaphor of Nonstop as a lifeboat or raft, salvaging as many bits of the sunken College as we could.
Our vision was nothing if not ambitious. We intended to keep Antioch’s professional educators together and pursuing the meaningful educational work we all feel called to do. We also wanted to apply ourselves more deliberately to the creation of a democratic, intellectually and artistically rich community. Another motivation was the opportunity of experimenting with new educational directions, with the combination of multiple perspectives inherent in the liberal arts joined to hands-on, community-based learning. Equally important was the need to minimize the impact of the loss of jobs and economic activity on the Village of Yellow Springs, as the College had been the town’s largest employer. And what better way to show, as former trustee Paula Treichler reasoned, that the College did not, after all, need to be closed– “that there was sufficient money to pay the faculty, that students would find Antioch appealing, that the physical plant need not have been so fraught and immediate an issue?”13
Central to our educational philosophy was (and is) the assumption that learning is an inherently social process with an inherently social mission. Here is an excerpt from the first description of the Nonstop Curriculum, written in the summer of 2008:

In response to the tragic and unwarranted closure of the historic Antioch College campus by the Antioch University Board of Trustees, Antioch College faculty, staff, students and alumni are creating The Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in the Village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Carrying forward Antioch’s long tradition of educational innovation, this enterprise re-imagines education for the 21st century as progressive liberal arts for life. Our goal is a liberal arts education dedicated to the core values of Antioch College and articulated succinctly in its Honor Code as “the search for truth, the development of individual potential, and the pursuit of social justice.” The Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute takes these Antiochian ideals into ‘exile’ with the intent of reinvigorating them in new contexts and environments.

The Institute is based in the Village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a place with a long legacy of forward thinking, openness to diversity and tolerance. Significant aspects of our educational curriculum are inspired by the interests and needs of the immediate community and its environment. Indeed, the curriculum of the Institute is distinctive in its historically unprecedented level of integration into, and collaboration with, the surrounding community.

Nonstop’s nurturing of a relationship with the Yellow Springs community and its careful stewardship of the College in exile were designed to be a marked contrast to the University’s indifference toward the historic campus and its environs. We consciously embraced the concept of a turn to the local, asking, “What would it mean to join the insights of ‘relocalization’ movements to the goals of a liberal arts education? How can we build upon existing local specializations and strengths, highlight and preserve local distinctiveness? What partnerships can we develop with local groups and organizations? With whom can we share facilities, spaces, and resources? What contributions can we make to the solving of particular local problems? What contributions can we make to the cultural and intellectual life of the area?” Our curricular directions came from necessity (our small size and shoestring budget) but were also inspired by the challenges facing Yellow Springs—an environmentally-safe power supply, clean water, smart growth without sprawl, affordable housing, the politics of food, the support needed to maintain all kinds of diversity in a small midwestern town.
The Nonstop Institute incorporated the knowledge and skills of talented local experts—particularly in the fields of environmental sustainability and the arts–inviting them to invent workshops, give presentations, and create community art projects. Our faculty, supplemented by Antioch College faculty emeriti, were able to offer a wide range of courses in familiar disciplines and areas (Beginning Chemistry, Research Methods in the Social Sciences, Anthropology of Place, Spanish, Modern Dance, Drawing, Film History, etc) as well as weekend workshops on such varied topics as Personal Finance, The Qur’an, and the History of Jazz. In addition to these, we developed new interdisciplinary courses which we hoped would appeal to Yellow Springers of all ages; these included Community Economics and Environmental Sustainability; Local and Sustainable Agriculture; Queer Theory and Environmental Philosophy. Some courses focused on applied learning aimed at meeting immediate needs—in the Advanced Computer Literacy course, students and faculty worked together to produce the custom-built database that managed Nonstop’s registration and evaluation system. Learning took place in countless ways outside the classroom as well, as students worked one-on-one with local artists and filmmakers, and with alumni librarians to catalog the Nonstop collection.
Because classes were generally small (4-10 students) finding classroom spaces proved less of a problem than we had anticipated. Dance classes met in the Presbyterian Church hall, photography classes at the art center, and the cultural history course entitled Visions of Suburbia in the living room of a Yellow Springs realtor. Faculty held office hours in coffee shops. Community meetings and weekly potluck lunches took place first in the Yellow Springs town hall and later in the industrial space we renovated to hold our business offices. All of Yellow Springs became the Nonstop Antioch campus, and one could potentially come across a Nonstop class or activity almost anywhere.
Another particularly effective Nonstop initiative was the cultural series we called “Nonstop Presents!” which we deliberately tied to the agendas of the town and to the major themes of the curriculum. Each month we produced a calendar of eclectic events–film screenings, scholarly lectures, artists’ talks, performances, panels on political issues. The series showcased the abundant talents of well-known Antioch College alumni from all over the country (most of whom donated their honoraria back to Nonstop), and we again drew upon regional resources—and upon our own students. “Nonstop Presents!” was also designed to enhance certain Nonstop courses and to provide opportunities for students to exhibit and discuss their in-class projects with a wider audience. Our intent was to ‘give back’ to the Village through the creation of multiple public occasions for the sharing of art, ideas, and new thinking in community development. All in all “Nonstop Presents!” hosted over 100 events and attracted over 1400 attendees.
Because we had suffered the consequences of being subjected to top-down management, Nonstop was committed to bottom-up governance processes and a ‘flat’ administrative organization. There was no president, no dean, no faculty rank. Nonstop took the unusual but important step of leveling pay scales so that all were paid roughly the same salary. We reconstituted Antioch’s bodies of community government but expanded them as well, regarding them as vital to the cultivation of critical leadership and civic skills. Organized into various committees, students, faculty, and staff regularly sat down together to make decisions about the direction of the project.
Obviously, a self-managed experimental college dedicated to localism and participatory governance required a major reorientation of faculty time commitments and forced us all to expand in new directions. Faculty work could now include such tasks as organizing alumni volunteers; participating in meetings of the Yellow Springs Village Council; negotiating zoning restrictions, building codes and liability insurance; and preparing lunch for sixty people. In retrospect, it’s hard to conceive of the faculty at a typical research university refusing to acknowledge their termination and uniting to continue the educational part of their mission outside of the ivory tower. But the high value liberal arts colleges place on collegiality and service had shaped our professional lives and identities. We were also friends and co-conspirators and had already been collaborating on committees organized to fight for the College. While we spanned generations, two-thirds of the faculty and staff who formed the backbone of the Nonstop experiment were female, a fact which may or may not be relevant; for good or for ill women may still be more likely to perform unrecognized forms of work, to relinquish personal ambitions in support of the greater whole.
A heavy contingent of Nonstop faculty came from the arts–partly the result of chance (a high concentration of faculty in the sciences were retirement age and opted to retire), and partly perhaps because arts practitioners are all-too-familiar with short-term projects and irregular incomes. The presence of a number of artists in our midst helps account for our overall willingness to take risks, to live with chronic uncertainty about the immediate future, and to improvise constantly. When the residential space we had rented to house our registrar, student services, and business office proved unworkable, we immediately set about to find another. An Antioch alum who also happened to be an accomplished professional set designer directed the conversion of an old plastics factory into a new energy-efficient space we came to call ‘Campus North.’ Dozens of us pitched in to spackle walls, paint trim, wash floors and decorate our new home. Everything produced by Nonstop had a vibrant aesthetic quality. Fall semester was launched by a parade with a marching band. Colorful pennants designed by a local artist declared that a Nonstop class or “Nonstop Presents!” event was in session, wherever it happened to be taking place. Projects in dance, photography, graphic design, and installation art expressed our vision of community while the process of art-making, often done collectively, enacted it.
There were far too many dimensions of the Nonstop experiment to do adequate justice to them in this space (for more details, see our very informative multimedia website: nonstopinstitute.org). Nonstop’s all-open-source Information Technology system, designed and implemented almost entirely by young alumni, is just one facet that deserves its own article. But it is worth noting that the creative use of internet technology was integral to our ability to build and sustain a far-flung community as well as an immediate one. List serves, a sophisticated on-line student newspaper, and the live audio and video streaming of meetings kept interested Antiochians constantly informed and engaged. With regard to teaching and course design, class websites were handy supplements to, but not substitutes for, face-to-face interaction. To explain ourselves to a wider public we deployed multiple modes of outreach across the media spectrum; we sent email petitions, posted video on Youtube and messages on Facebook, appeared on public access TV and local television, produced pamphlets and flyers, invited newspaper reporters to our classes, made presentations at conferences, and networked with academic labor movements across the country.
Rewarding as we found most of our work at Nonstop, the obstacles we faced were often daunting. The timeline of our existence was always unclear, as was our funding. These facts made advance planning and therefore accreditation impossible and severely hampered our efforts to recruit students. As we were not able to become an accredited academic institution, our potential pool of students ended up mostly a mix of former Antioch students, who were of course of traditional college age, and interested villagers, many of whom were senior citizens with the time to take classes. This produced the challenge of integrating very different age groups and degrees of familiarity with higher education within the same same classroom; at the same time it created lively opportunities for learning across generational boundaries. The most unfortunate consequence of our unaccredited status turned out to be that traditional-age full-time students were not eligible for federal student loans. Many of the younger students struggled to balance work needed to pay rent alongside their commitment to Nonstop. Tuition, although drastically subsidized (we decided to charge $100 a credit—or credit equivalent—hour; most classes were 3 ‘credits’) remained difficult to raise for some full time students.
Not surprisingly, the course of community governance ‘never did run smooth’–consensus-building meetings often ran overtime, and students did not always feel their contributions were valued by the faculty. The debates that developed around the question of how much tuition Nonstop students should pay, if any, led to intense discussion and eventually considerable acrimony within the community. Everyone agreed that access to knowledge and education should ideally be available to all; opinions differed as to what was practical for Nonstop Antioch to attempt. The tuition debate morphed into a split essentially about the parameters of shared governance, and eventually exposed a deep fissure in the conception of Nonstop on the part of its members: were we, first and foremost, an educational institution, an anti-corporate movement, or an experiment in community-building? Where were the boundaries of this community, and who did it now include? How to weigh the ’shares’ in shared governance? Ultimately, although the Executive Collective and the faculty maintained control over the project, some Nonstoppers became disillusioned with what they perceived to be an inadequate vision of community.
Despite unresolved differences in vision, despite the instabilities which plagued the project, Nonstop Antioch’s accomplishments in the year of its existence were impressive. We succeeded in keeping College traditions and institutional memory alive and breathing in Yellow Springs until the College campus could be regained. Our vigilance of the College grounds quite literally protected the historic buildings when we discovered and then publicized ongoing water damage due to broken pipes. We saved a large collection of out-of-print books, rare pamphlets, and college records from extinction and catalogued them for easy accessibility. During the dark period following the College’s closure, Nonstop preserved twenty-one decent-paying full-time jobs and created a number of part-time jobs in recession-stricken southwest Ohio. Our very public refusal to cede the College’s educational legacy inspired alumni and supporters and exerted constant pressure on Antioch University to free the College.
Nonstop enrolled a total of 124 multigenerational students, including a cohort of traditional-aged students. We offered over thirty college-level courses and workshops each semester. Student evaluations of instruction collected the last week of both semesters yielded rave reviews of most of these courses and workshops. These evaluations (admittedly not necessarily indicators of academic and artistic caliber, but certainly useful information) presented glowing pictures of highly-engaged students enthusiastic about the quality of teaching they had received. Unsurprisingly given small class sizes, students described individual attention and ample guidance from faculty. More remarkable were the number of students reporting that they encountered serious, even life-changing, academic and artistic challenges. Almost across the board students commended Nonstop classroom environments for stimulating open discussion and continuous experimentation.
Some measure of our deepening of the partnership of Antioch College and the Village of Yellow Springs can be gauged by the many enthusiastic letters and editorials in the Yellow Springs News. Reporter Diane Chiddister described Nonstop as “the little educational engine that could.” In an editorial summarizing our first semester, she wrote:

Nonstop reminded us that the magic of learning has little to do with expensive buildings or high-tech equipment, and everything to do with dedicated teachers and passionate learners, engaged in exploration and critical inquiry….Most of all, Nonstop enriched the village by inspiring us with their example of audacity, perseverance, and the glory of winning a victory for humanity.14

Nonstop’s total expenditures for the year came to 1.4 million dollars; however, this relatively small amount was supplemented by at least half a million worth of in-kind contributions. Supporters from many professions offered us their services—architects, lawyers, writers, photographers, carpenters, restauranteurs and more contributed to the project. Relying on volunteerism and donations (and our own self-exploitation) was obviously a short-term survival strategy on our part. Yet this amazing level of volunteer and discounted labor generated a sense of excitement and solidarity which proved incredibly contagious. According to Olivier De Marcellus, workplace struggles are not most fundamentally about defending jobs or wages, vital as these are; rather, they signify the deep need for acknowledgment of the social value of one’s work. As such, they are calls for more dignified social relations, for “some minimal common space of liberty or autonomy.” Ours was a campaign to save a threatened educational commons and to preserve it for future generations, but along the way it also became a fight to restore our professional dignity—the dignity of an eminently resourceful faculty and staff who had been discarded. And somewhere along that way the struggle forged an unexpected sense of collective possibility in all of us. As De Marcellus frames the question, “isn’t that [broad conception of dignity] what people involved in almost every big strike or struggle usually say after winning or losing the specific battle? Isn’t that what makes us all continue, generally losing year after year, but always much happier doing that than accepting society as it is?”15

The story of the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute has not ended with the successful purchase of Antioch College by its alumni. Nonstop is no longer offering classes, but has incorporated as a not-for-profit organization and reconfigured itself as a community arts and performance space providing diverse cultural programming in Yellow Springs. Some of us who created Nonstop have recently been hired by the Board of Trustees Pro Tempore of Antioch College. And, sadly, some have not; at the moment the re-emerging College has made very few hires. While the campus is now secured, many of the faculty and staff that we fought so hard to keep intact have been forced to seek jobs elsewhere. The new Board and the Interim President continue to assert their commitment to tenure, to a unionized staff, and to fair labor practices. As of this writing it is still too early to say how concrete these assurances will turn out to be.

Learning From Disaster

Higher education today is witnessing an exacerbation of the clash between the conception of higher education as a genuine public good, and the conviction (which takes varying forms, from wistful resignation to entrepreneurial zeal) that education must be abandoned to market forces and consumer trends. While its anomalous position under the University’s umbrella made our College particularly vulnerable to draconian economic measures, the impact of the corporatization of higher education has been isolating and demoralizing for many of those who work–or once worked–there. Given the current highly visible failures of neoliberalism, we now have an opportunity to interrupt the dominant logic defending the corporate university. Rather than reproducing short term, market-driven discourses, academic workers should be experimenting with a range of collective alternatives and strategies.
In our own example, Nonstop Antioch sought inspiration from the network-organization models pioneered by bioregionalist and ’slow food’ movements. Nonstop grounded itself in the existing resources of the Village of Yellow Springs and, at the same time, worked to make connections with other nearby colleges and other similar movements in progressive higher education around the country. These connections, and our constant influx of alumni, kept us from becoming insular and narrow, one of the possible downsides of localism. Yet perhaps the most important lesson of our endeavor turned out to be that surprisingly satisfying educational results can emerge when more attention is paid to the common interests of small colleges and the small towns they frequently inhabit. Underexplored potentialities may well exist for collaborations and the sharing of facilities between small colleges and local civic and environmental organizations, artists’ collectives, churches, parks, and community centers. Another lesson is that expensive consultants offering conventional wisdom too-often push to make colleges more generic than distinctive and focused on their own roots in the particularities of place.
The construction of new partnerships will never be sufficient to combat the many serious economic challenges currently facing American liberal arts colleges. Still, there remain many practical as well as environmental reasons for turning to the local. Local economies are threatened by many of the same forces which are undermining small cultural institutions of all kinds: forces which push for continual expansion and needless development; forces which tend towards the imposition of economies of scale and their accompanying homogenization; forces which undermine community self-determination, citizen participation, fair labor practices, and a reasonable quality of life for all. Nonstop’s temporary experiment in community-driven education is now over, but we hope that at least some of our creative synthesis of the liberal arts and the local will live on in a newly independent Antioch College.14

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1 Scott Sanders, Antioch: An Episodic History. Yellow Springs: Antiochiana Publishing, 2004. p. 30-33.

2 Lauren Heaton, “The College and the University—Financial Complexities Link Schools.” The Yellow Springs News. June 28, 2007. For a breakdown of the faculty/adjunct ratio across the University, see Scott Jascik, “The Adjunctification of Antioch.” Inside Higher Education. June 26, 2007.

3 AAUP Report, “Antioch University and the Closing of Antioch College.” Academe: The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. Nov/Dec 2009. p. 49. See also Brian Springer, “Antioch Budgets for Dummies,” and “Antioch Confidential.” Feb 2008. both pieces are archived on the website The Antioch Papers. theantiochpapers.org.

4 Brian Springer, “Antioch Confidential.” Feb 2008. p. 9. theantiochpapers.org.

5 Letter from President Robert Devine to Chancellor James Craiglow, Feb. 22 1999. theantiochpapers.org

6 Lauren Heaton, “The College and the University.”

7 Diane Chiddester, “Consultants Advise Antioch Closure.” The Yellow Springs News. July 5 2007.

8 Stephanie Irwin Gottschlich. “Antioch [University] Explains Deferred Payments, Jump in Expenses.” The Dayton Daily News. July 1 2007.

9 Tulisse Murdock, “Chancellor’s Address to the Graduates of the Antioch University Ph.D. In Leadership and Change.” Antioch University Commencement, August 11 2007.

10 “Trustees: ‘Antioch College Is Up For Sale.’” no author. Dayton Daily News. March 30 2008.

11 AAUP Report, “Antioch University and the Closing of Antioch College.” p. 56, 55.

12 Jeanne Kay, conversations with the author.

13 Letter from Paula Treichler, Former Antioch University Trustee to the College Alumni Board. private collection of the author.

14 Diane Chiddester, “Nonstop Inspiration.” The Yellow Springs News. Dec 11 2008.

15 Olivier De Marcellus, “Commons, Communities and Movements: Inside, Outside, and Against Capital.” The Commoner. No 6. Winter 2003. p. 10.

16 Many thanks to all of the folks who participated in and/or supported the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. Special thanks to Brian Springer and Tim Noble for their advice on versions of this essay, and for their dedication to the open flow of information, as demonstrated by their web archive project The Antioch Papers.

On March 5, 2010, Neil Coletta, an Antioch College Alum’02, gave a talk at the Nonstop Institute titled Culinary Studies at Antioch College: John Ronsheim’s Influence on Food Studies. Mr. Coletta is the Assistant Director of Programs in Food, Wine & the Arts at Boston University. Mr. Coletta’s presentation explores some of the intersections between this place [Antioch College] and the scholarly study of food – past, present and future.

Download Coletta’s edited presentation notes titled Culinary Studies at Antioch College: John Ronsheim’s Influence on Food Studies [150 kb].

When Hollywood does the Oscars like it did on Sunday, its hard to think that the American film industry is anything but big name, big budget movie-making. But every year since silent films were the rage, well-made films by talented artists, many of them African Americans, have gone largely unnoticed. Some of those films may be forgotten, but so that they are not lost, this spring [former] Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute faculty member Bob Devine is bringing them back through a public workshop entitled “African-American Film, 1920s-Present,” to watch and discuss the impact of black independent cinema.

The series got started this past Wednesday, March 10, with an orientation to films by Oscar Micheaux, a Chicago pioneer who made almost four dozen films between 1919 and 1940 and was one of the first African Americans to persist from silent film into the era of the talkies, Devine said. In an age that portrayed African Americans in popular film as “scary Negroes with rolling eyes who were maids and butlers,” Devine said, Micheaux’s work stirred controversy because it addressed head-on-issues and attitudes about race from the black perspective. In response to D.W. Griffith’s glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation, Micheaux made The Symbol of the Unconquered, the story of a Klan raid on an African-American community that was living on a valuable oil field in Alabama.

Hollywood did little to represent African Americans in film. The 1934 film Imitation of Life was the first major motion picture that gave an African American a leading role, and a speaking one. But even then, the film spent no time developing the character of Delilah Johnson, played by Louise Beavers, outside the context of her relationship with the white characters. By contrast, Devine is reviving films by black directors that afford black characters complex internal lives, with their own goals, passions and frustrations, apart from their white counterparts. .

“This series is meant to show the progression and evolution of black films that reflect how our culture thinks about race,” he said. ‘These films represent the sensibilities of African Americans, done by African Americans, cast by African Americans.”

Later films by black directors got less play than they should have, such as Ivan Dixon’s 1973 subversive film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Dixon marketed the film hyping the popular black image of a CIA character like Shaft and Superfly, a profitable formula in Hollywood at the time. But upon closer inspection, United Artists found that the CIA agent is really an infiltrator who wants to gain skills to train Chicago “freedom ‘fighters,” a subtle twist that caused producers to pull the film shortly after it’s release.

“In the black community that film is well known – it’s a blueprint for urban revolution,” Devine said.

The 1973 Ganja and Hess is another film by director Bill Gunn that Hollywood attempted to manipulate for profit as a “Blackula” flick. But the industry was bucked when Gunn came out with a cerebral look at the influence of African and European heritages. Producers cut it back to the simple horror movie they had intended and released it as Blood Couple, but it was later pieced back to its original form.

“I’ve seen it 100 times, and it haunts me to this day,” Devine said.

Devine first heard about many of these films in the 1980s while working to bring public television access to communities in Dallas and Milwaukee that were disenfranchised by the mainstream media. One of his friends in Milwaukee kept talking about a film called Nothing but a Man, about a man in the South who wants to be treated as nothing less than simply a man.

Eight years after leaving the Antioch College faculty, Devine returned to the college to research more about the black film industry and teach classes to help his students to “shade in some of the history that had been left out of the mainstream culture.” He spent his last five years at the college before it closed in 2008 teaching course focused on the representation of African Americans in film.

Devine chose the films for the workshop series out of about 30 of the most influential and most beautiful films from the 20th century. Some are well circulated, such as Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film by a black female filmmaker to get mass distribution, and some include better known black actors, such as Fats Waller and Stepin Fetchit. But many are hard to find copies that Devine got through black filmmakers collectives in New York and Indiana University, or even experimental clips, such as a recently uncovered anthropological research project by black writer and poet Zora Neale Hurston.

The black film series also includes some of Devine’s all-time favorite films, such as Charles Burnett’s 1977 Killer of Sheep, a lyrical film about life in the Los Angeles ghetto. The low-budget film was never shown in theaters, and it took Burnett four years just to payoff the rights to the music he used without permission, Devine said. But years after its completion the Library of Congress declared it a national treasure, and the National Society of Film Critics deemed it among the “100 Essential Films” of all time, according to the Charles Burnett Project Web site. It was also hailed by screenwriter Michael Tolkin, who said, “If Killer of Sheep were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized.”

The Wednesday workshops are scheduled for March 10, with a focus on Micheaux; March 24, with· a focus on Michael Roemer and his 1964 Nothing but a Man; April 7, with a focus on Gunn and Ganja and Hess; April 21, with a focus on Burnett and Killer of Sheep; May 5, with a focus on Dash and Daughters of the Dust; and May 19, with a focus on Cheryl Dunye and her 1996 The Watermelon Woman. The workshops are free and open to the public as a series or as individual events, though Devine recommends participants attend all the sessions to get an evolutionary sense of the industry.

“It’s a cultural enrichment project; that’s what Nonstop is about,” Devine said. “I strongly encourage people to take advantage of films that they’ll probably never see again in their lifetime.”

Eagleson exhibits her photographic work regionally and nationally. Her body of work includes projects made about alternative families in Ohio, a micro-loan program for Nicaraguan women, a music school in Sarajevo, and extensive work made in Cuba. Eagleson is a former faculty member at Antioch College. She continued to teach courses in photography and community journalism through the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. She is currently offering a series of workshops in Digital Photography through the Nonstop Institute. For more information, please call Dennie at 937-475-5618.

Taking-up this proposed practice of shared reading, we believe, recommends itself for the production of informed action. Significant traditions of educational thinking precede this moment, and the opportunity to situate ourselves in relation to dialogues started by others across varied institutional and historical circumstances both complicates and enriches the questions we might pursue. Particularly in relation to our intended focus on the dynamic potential of reading, our hopes for this project are to approach these engagements of word and world with the aim in mind of our mutual empowerment.

While both public media and professional academic literature today provide abundant representation for apologist of the status quo, we instead intend to favor the critical and creative voices that challenge established orders. Along with a growing number of similarly concerned colleagues in higher education, we feel that we have had more than enough of that brand of current-day ‘leadership’ fixated in its mercantile preoccupation and incapable of recollecting its own complicity in the creation of the puffed-up economic mirages that have put present and future public well-being in such serious jeopardy. The present-day widespread neo-liberal predilection to frame the current circumstances in higher education by implementing draconian measures with exigency as cover for the pursuit of selfish ends recommends our closer attention to both history and detail. After all, despite the media’s preference for the dramatic, very few of life’s significant socio-culturally situated occurrences fall unexpectedly from the sky. Rather, our social practices and institutional forms have histories of influences and causes that beg understanding in finding meaningful alternatives and solutions.

Our January 29th meeting focuses its attention on the first three chapters of Bill Readings’ oft cited 1996 classic, The University in Ruins . Readings insightfully identifies and engages a number of troubling developments for the situation and practice of the University, which have by and large only intensified in the decade and a half since. But aside from finding many of the author’s rather dire assessments holding-up persuasively, Readings takes all of this not as a signal for retreat but rather as a call for imaginative reconsideration outside the lines of prevailing preconceptions concerning both institutional purpose and socio-cultural necessity. The ‘ruins’ Readings speaks of are not so much a declaration about wreckage as they are a reference to certain Western modern ways of seeing tied up in our habits of understanding and expressing expectations about the world. The University is a child of these habits, and the question ahead of us turns on how we might creatively and constructively inhabit and maintain the space of social discourse in a time when old rationales and public will have been problematized and derailed, not simply as badly damaged but perhaps as founded in contradiction to begin with.

The Education and Public Intellectual Practice Reading Group, as a liberal learning initiative of Nonstop, welcomes participants from YS and surrounding communities who maintain an interest in progressive, socially conscientious educational possibility to join us this Friday (and on alternating Friday afternoons) for reading-based discussion. Advance information on schedule and selected texts will be posted on our “Reading” link at nonstopinstitue.org/nonstop-reading/, or for more information feel free to contact dan.reyes@nonstopinstitute.org.

originally apparing in 1/28/10 YSN  “Other voices”

By the Yellow Springs News

See the Yellow Springs News’ front page feature photos of the January 2009 Nonstop Gala.

In autumn of 2008 a group of former Antioch College faculty, staff and students launched Nonstop Antioch, a radical educational experiment aimed at preserving the traditions and values of the college even after the campus was closed. The effort, supported by the college alumni board, offered classes and workshops to both traditional and non-traditional students in village churches, homes and cafés.

A little more than a year later, the college is back. But the creative thinkers behind what became known as the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute see their mission as continuing, having evolved into a nonprofit group that offers educational and cultural enrichment to the village of Yellow Springs.

“Nonstop is a small boat that can turn fast and move fast,” said Brian Springer, one of the three-member Nonstop Institute executive collective, in a recent interview. “There’s been lots of discussion about an arts center in town and we thought, let’s enact that. Let’s provide a grounded example of what kind of arts can take place.”

The newest Nonstop project, an artist residency called “Open Village/Open Spaces” will kick off with a gala and fundraiser this Saturday, Jan. 23, 7 p.m. with an evening of music, dance and performance at the Nonstop space at 305 N. Walnut.

The evening, which is free and open to the public, will also include a silent auction. Organizers, who are also seeking grant funding, hope the event raises funds necessary to enable Nonstop to plan ahead for future projects.

The event will include dancing by Jill Becker and Colleen Leonardi, who will be improvising with local soprano Jennifer Gilchrist and photographer Dennie Eagleson; a reading of new work by Louise Smith; music by the local band MINK; and drawings by Wesley Berg.

Also on display will be installations by Orion Barrett, Linda Diec and Amy Koenig, the three Columbus artists selected for the “Open Village/Open Spaces” residencies.

Nonstop chose to sponsor six-week artist residencies in order to provide a more in-depth experience than those most often available in the arts community, according to organizers.

“This is relationship building rather than a one-time event,” said Nonstop member Migiwa Orimo. “This is an organization that adds depth to what’s already going on. That’s what excites me.”

Organizers also are excited about the networking opportunities provided by bringing Columbus artists to town. They hope the event will provide opportunities for local artists to meet those from outside the community, as well as bring to town the Columbus friends and colleagues of the featured artists, several of whom plan to attend Saturday night.

The project also provides an opportunity to make use of the Nonstop space, a large, formerly unused area in Millworks. Last year, guided by former New York City set designer and Nonstop member Michael Casselli, Nonstop participants spent several months working to transform the area into usable offices, a library and meeting rooms. Now that the college is back, the use of the space has changed, and continues to evolve.

“We wanted to keep the space lively,” said Nonstop executive collective member Chris Hill. “This is a creative solution to wanting to share the space.”

What direction Nonstop would take was not clear when the alumni board stopped funding the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute last summer, when, after plans for a revived college were finalized, the initial purpose for the group diminished. However, Nonstop members still saw a need for the sort of intellectual and cultural enrichment in the village that Nonstop Presents!, a series of events in 2009, had provided. And Nonstop members, who had worked intensely together to launch and maintain the initial effort, wanted to continue their collaboration.

“Over the last two years I learned this is a group of people who are do-ers,” Orimo said. “That builds trust.”

In August 2009 the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute became the Nonstop Institute incorporated as a nonprofit group. They have applied for, but not yet received, their IRS 501(c)3 status.

The group chose to continue its former leadership model of a three-person collective, composed now of Springer, Hill and Casselli. Board members are Otha Davenport, president; Joan Horn, vice president; Don Wallace, treasurer; Carole Braun, secretary; and Orimo. Working members are Jill Becker, C.T. Chen, Iveta Jusova, Tim Noble, Nevin Mercede and Dan Reyes, along with the collective members.

The “Open Spaces” gala is the formal launch of Nonstop, which has already sponsored a variety of cultural events in the village. In December, the group presented environmentalist and performance artist Mike Bonano of the Yes Men, who dialogued with the group via Skype. It has also launched a series of Sunday evening salons on current topics, the most recent a discussion of open source software by Noble and Chen. And Nonstop offers to any interested persons a reading group, which will focus on “Education and Public Intellectual Practice,” which will meet biweekly beginning on Friday, Jan. 29, at 4 p.m. They also plan an upcoming film series, along with a photography workshop.

For more information about the reading group and other events, log on to www.nonstopinstitute.org.

Nonstop organizers see themselves as complementing the efforts of the newly-revived Antioch College, and they hope to collaborate with the college, and potentially with Antioch University McGregor, on future efforts. They also see themselves as offering opportunities for future Antioch College students to interact with villagers, continuing the Nonstop tradition of building bridges between campus and community.

Most of all, the group of artists, educators and cultural workers want to keep stirring the pot of intellectual and artistic stimulation that they believe both feeds the village and themselves.

“We want to stay in Yellow Springs, and in order to do that, we need to feel nourished,” Hill said. “This is a way to do that.”

Nonstop Institute will host the Opening Exhibition of their inaugural Open Village/Open Spaces artist-residencies along with an exciting evening of dance, music and performance on Saturday, January 23 starting at 7 PM at 305 N. Walnut St (Millworks) in Yellow Springs. Installations using various materials by Columbus artists Orion Barrett, Linda Diec, and Amy Koenig have transformed former office spaces during their 6-week residencies. Sharing the stage that evening will be dance by Jill Becker, Colleen Leonardi, and Melissa Heston, improvising with soprano Jennifer Gilchrist and photographer Dennie Eagleson; a reading of new work by writer and performer Louise Smith; music by the Yellow Springs band MINK; and drawings by Cincinnati artist Wesley Berg. Throughout the evening a silent auction will be held, soliciting bids on artists’ work and collaborations to raise money for Nonstop Institute, a new non-profit cultural and educational organization. Nonstop welcomes this opportunity to bring together and celebrate new work by artists and performers from Columbus, Cincinnati, and Yellow Springs.

More about the Open Village/Open Spaces artist residents: Columbus artist Orion Barrett received his MFA (2006) from Ohio State and recent work has included quirky landscapes and machines using various materials and floods of hot glue. Linda Diec’s recent architectonic environments have used glass, matches, sugar, and ice as structuring elements. She received a BFA (2007) from OSU and has studied with glass artists in Turkey, Japan, and at Pilchuk (Washington). Amy Koenig received her BFA (2009) at OSU and recent work complicates private and public spaces using suitcases found in thrift stores, satellite images and photographs.

For further information:

Contact:  chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org (937-767-2327) (Chris Hill)

Environmentalist, filmmaker, performance artist and prankster Mike Bonano of the Yes Men will appear live (via Skype) to dialogue with the audience at Nonstop on Thursday evening, December 17 at 7 pm ($5 admission)

In addition to screening some of the Yes Men’s rarely seen (and undistributed) early work and responding to viewers’ questions, Mike will conduct a workshop with those attending to generate plans for a project in the Miami Valley. Don’t miss this local engagement with the Yes Men!

YES MEN LIVE (via Skype) AT NONSTOP
Thursday, December 17 – 7:00 PM
305 N. Walnut St., Yellow Springs – $5 admission

Download the YES MEN LIVE Poster and print-n-share it to get the good word out.

Liberal Arts Reading List

Purpose

Open Village/Open Space is an examination of how an artist’s work is shaped within a shared environment, addressing the intricacies of working in spaces whose use is simultaneously private and public. The Nonstop facility allows its members to flesh out concerns of freedom and constraint that occur when the public and private collide. The goal of the residency/exhibition is to provide both physical and conceptual workspaces that invite the artists to tackle these issues and the affect it has on the creation of their work.

General Information

The Open Village/Open Space Residency Program will be housed in the Office area of the Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs Ohio at 305 North Walnut Street, Yellow Springs, Ohio. The residency will begin December 10, 2009. The floor plan and a brief video documenting the evolution of the space will be available on the website. Nonstop offers free studio space to eligible artists for a six-week period. The opening will coincide with the 1st Annual Nonstop Benefit gala. Artists also have access to the facilities on a 24-hour basis with wireless Internet access, and a shared meeting space. Other amenities include a viewing area for DVD, a shared Macintosh computer and a kitchen area with a microwave, refrigerator, water cooler and a coffee maker. Any special technical needs associated with the work should be described within the application.

Eligibility

Open Village/ Open Space Artist Residency project invites applications by artists working in the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by artists working in all media and at any stage of their careers.

Selection Process

A panel of arts professionals and artists will review applications and select artists for the residency. Artists will be selected based on the quality of their work and their ability to integrate the conceptual framework of this project into the residency. The selection process will be completed by the December 7, 2009. All applicants will be notified by email. Please do not call the office for selection results.

Useful Materials:

Residency Studios Floor Plan
Application Information (PDF)
Press Release

Deadline for applications: December 1, 2009

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

All APPLICATION PAPERWORK AND EXAMPLES OF WORK MUST BE SUBMITTED ONLINE MUST INCLUDE AND BE PLACED IN THE FOLLOWING ORDER: Please include your Last Name, First Name at the top of each page.

All submitted applications must be posted to the webpage on or before December 1. Applications received after this date will be disqualified. Applications should not be mailed ALTHOUGH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION MAY BE GIVEN TO THOSE SUBMITTING TIME BASED MATERIALS ON A DVD. APPROVAL WILL BE GRANTED ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IF APPROVAL IS GRANTED THEN MATERIALS SHOULD BE MAILED TO:

Open Village/Open Space Residency Program
c/o Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs Ohio
305 North Walnut Street Suite C
Yellow Springs, Ohio  45387

We strongly urge all applicants to submit electronically.

Please contact Michael Casselli at inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org to discuss special consideration. Please submit your application to the Open Village/Open Space residency program on the Nonstop Website: www.nonstopinstitute.org

APPLICATION

For Application details and guidelines, please see beneath the form.  Please note that the application form below cannot be saved between sessions.  We recommend preparing the necessary materials in advance and submitting all information in one sitting.

ARTIST STATEMENT In 250 words or less, write a statement about your work and your process.

STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES In 250 words or less, describe your potential plans for projects, ideas and expectations as they relate to the Purpose statement of the Open Village/Open Space residency program

SPECIAL NEEDS Include any possible technical needs that may be an issue with regards to the presentation of the work. There is no guarantee that your needs will be met, but we will do what we can based on our limited resources.

SASE IF YOU HAVE BEEN AUTHORIZED TO SEND A DVD and would like it sent back, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope with proper postage. We will not be responsible for return of materials that do not include a SASE.

DOCUMENTATION AND RESUME

Please include a resume highlighting your exhibition and educational background.  Resume should be submitted as a PDF or .DOC file using the uploader below.

All work samples must be submitted electronically using the uploader below unless an exception has been granted to send a DVD of film/video, performance or kinetic art.

Only ONE format will be reviewed.

We will not accept CDs of digital images. Slides or VHS will also not be accepted. Please do not send original artwork.

The widget above for uploading images will only be available until December 1st.

The numbers on the image script should correspond with the numbers marked on the image file. Each uploaded image file must be titled with your Last Name, underscore, First Name, image number, underscore, Title, underscore, Dimensions, underscore, Materials, underscore, Date (Example: Smith_John01_Title_4” x 5”_Materials_2001).

Film and video artists must also submit a video script that corresponds to the submitted DVD.

Include the title, date, medium, dimensions, and a brief description of the work (less than 50 words for each image).
Please label all work samples carefully so that applications can easily be associated with them.

• A. 20 Images Each image file must be titled with your Last Name, underscore, First Name, image number, underscore, Title, underscore, Dimensions, underscore, Materials, underscore, Date

• B. Maximum size in any direction: 1000px Image resolution: 72 DPI.

FOR DVD The panel will watch the first five minutes of your DVD. You may choose to put a five-minute sample segment at the beginning of the DVD if you feel that is the best representation of your work. Otherwise, the panel will watch the first five minutes of the first work on your DVD. Only moving images, i.e. time-based media, video, kinetic art or documentation of performance art, should be submitted on DVD. DVDs of still artwork or documentation of artistic process will not be viewed. DVDs will be viewed on DVD players only, not on computers, so please test your DVD before submitting it. The panel may choose to watch to more of your work past the first five minutes. For DVD pieces containing several work examples, please make each piece a separate chapter on the DVD for easier viewing.

Musicians/Composers must submit work electronically.

• C. 5 Compositions/Arrangements

Each uploaded sound file must be titled with your Last Name, underscore, First Name, underscore,
Title, underscore, Instrumentation, underscore, Date
File Format:  MP3 only

YELLOW SPRINGS — The Nonstop Liberal Institute has designs to become a new source of cultural and intellectual advancement for Yellow Springs and Greene County.

The institute, formed in the wake of Antioch College’s suspension in 2008, began as a way for students to continue taking classes in an alternative format. Classes were taught by several former Antioch College professors and people from the community, and classes were held in coffee shops, people’s homes, and other public places.

Now, with the rebirth of Antioch College, Nonstop registered itself as a non-profit organization and has refocused its efforts on providing workshops and events for the community. “We host about 2 events per month,” said Tim Nobel, IT Coordinator for Nonstop. “We’ve been very successful in terms of engaging the community.”

Last Wednesday, they hosted a live teleconference with Steven Bezruchka, senior lecturer on Global Health at University of Washington, entitled “Capitalism and the health impacts of Economic Collapse.”

“I think we might do another event on health care, and I can imagine that there will be a series of local performers,” said Chris Hill, a member of the Executive Collective of Nonstop. “I think it makes sense to take advantage of the people who are here and their desire to continue keep the community active, and that’s what we see ourselves doing.”

“We hope to be able to collaborate with the college in some way, but in the short term, I think that there’s a group of people here who put an enormous amount of effort into making YS a healthy community and we want to continue to do that,” said Hill. “We feel that the space represents that issue and to carry that forward is a healthy thing for us and for Greene County.”

The office and meeting place is a renovated plastic factory, which houses custom designed offices and a library of books from the student and women’s center collections salvaged from Antioch College. The remodeling was done mainly by Nonstop faculty and volunteers, and used many materials recycled from the factory. The total redesign, which utilizes resources like natural light and recycled heat, cost about $10 per square foot, according to Nobel.

There is also a small stage and projection screen in the office to host Non Stop Presents events. Such events include dance performances, interviews, lectures and debates. People who are interested in becoming involved with Nonstop should go to www.nonstopinstitute.org or e-mail inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org.

An overview of the Nonstop facility and recent public events, including the installation of Nonstop’s emergency shelter at the University of Minnesota’s Reworking The University conference. Nonstop personnel lectured and presented emergency arts and education structures at the conference.

Chris Hill
Executive Collective
Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs