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Phyllis Williams:
When the strike in ’73 happened, I was the direction of the
student loan office. So that was where I worked and literally
for six weeks we couldn’t get in our offices. We were unable
to work, we worked at home, and it was very, very chaotic.
The only things we had access to were things we just happened
to take home the day before. We were in the process of converting
all our student loans to a billing service and I had the
printout, but I didn’t have all the account cards so I could
verify that. And for six weeks, to be unable to do those things,
it created real havoc. That same year, when we finished in June,
we didn’t finish our audit until
the following March.
Now in the business office, it created an awful lot turmoil,
because things still had to happen. We dealt with people’s
unhappiness about classes not being held, and that type of thing.
You know, “Why should I have to pay for the quarter when classes
weren’t held.” But some classes were. Some faculty members,
I don’t think they even missed a class. They held them in their
homes, they held them in different parts of the campus.
When we came back to work, we actually had rats. There
was garbage on the front campus. It created a climate for the
staff that there was an anger, we had to come back in and clean
up messes. Our papers were just all over everyplace. Some of
them were gone, and then they were hidden, and then they were
found and so the staff, I would say, was very upset over it.
Angry with the students, angry with the administration that
couldn’t get [the strike] resolved. I think the leadership kind
of had their hands tied. It was in court, things were trying
to happen, and some people went ahead and did what they needed
to do, some classes were held; other people just didn’t do
anything.
It was just so chaotic, and it was two months after we
had had a three-week strike from the maintenance staff, when
they walked out. Of course, we got into work, they would ask
people who were not members of the union not to got into work,
but we did come to work. So it was like we just get recovered
from that, and then we have this other one. It affected
everybody, I think.
How long did it take for you to get the office in working order?
We were months doing it, it literally took until the following
March to finish our audit that would have been done by sometime
in September. It was the following March when we closed our
books for the year ending
’73. You could never get into the
next year, and of course, it [had] an immediate impact on the
enrollment. People just withdrew. All of a sudden, everything
changed on the campus, the number of students here, dealing
with the students who argued and said, ” I went home, I wasn’t
here.” We had to do something with their billings and then we
agreed that some people, if they stayed, their last study quarter
before they graduated, they got a free quarter, their last study
quarter. They didn’t have a graduation. In fact, they had one,
I think last year, those people from ’73, finally had a
graduation.
It wasn’t postponed until a later date?
No, because we didn’t get back into the offices until about
the tenth of June.
So you couldn’t process anything…
No, you couldn’t process anything. So they didn’t have a
graduation ceremony. It had a tremendous impact on a lot of
people, in a lot of different ways. I think what happened in
some cases is that our reputation, and I don’t know whether
it was the reputation of the administration for letting it
happen, or the reputation of the student body being so much
in an uproar, but this had an effect on continued enrollment.
What about the first ten years after the strike, in terms of
what it was like to work here?
Because we suffered the decline in enrollment, that you were
constantly dealing with less money. The budget had to be cut;
we were laying people off simply because there was not a need
for them. At that point in time we probably had more than twice
as many maintenance people than we have now. In
’82, we actually
laid off tenured faculty people.
In ’82? Because I know that happened in ’74, right afterwards
In ’82 we laid <5ff tenured faculty. Some of them did what we
call a tenure relinquishment, simply because we had more faculty
than we did students. We were down to about 400 FTE's and we
had all this faculty which we did not need. The morale of people,
seeing their colleagues being laid off, some people left. Some
people left of their own accord. There were no salary increases.
I think one year, two people got a bonus of $200, and that was
the only salary adjustment. Needless to say, the faculty salaries
were always low anyway, and they didn't go higher at all. The
student-faculty ratio is so low now, but you can imagine what
it was then. We had 50 some faculty and 400 students and not
all were here at the same time.
We also, during that period of time went from the four
quarter system to what we presently have. And that made a change.
I think in one respect that was probably a little bit better
because it gave people time to be away. It doesn't work for
the co-op program, though, the current calendar.
I think it was a depressed time if it was not your nature
to be an upbeat person. You would just basically some to work
and then work and go home and that's all you did, there was
no enthusiasm. Recently some of the faculty members started
doing research, and when they do a grant proposal they put down
what they've done. And there was just this whole period of about
12 to 14 years where people didn't do anything. They had no
initiative, no enthusiasm to go on with other things. Even
though, with the enrollment the way it was, they had the time
to do it. But they had no encouragement, and I think part of
was the administration, but what the administration was trying
to do was how do you get enough dollars together to keep the
place going.
You're talking about Birenbaums's administration?
Right. When Birenbaum came on, he was brought on to try to close
some of these campuses that were opened. We opened too many
campuses and there wasn't enough administration to deal with
it. And [Birenbaum] worked on the ones'where the quality of
the programs was just atrocious. Those are the first ones that
he closed.
Did it help?
Well, it helped the drain, but then what happened at the college
with the continued enrollment- it costs so much to run the
campus, no matter how many students you have. And when you go
to 200 students under that number, there's no way you can operate
with a balanced budget. You see, most of the fundraising comes
from Antioch College alums. Because all the emphasis was being
put on the rest of the campuses around the country, the alumni
stopped giving money.
Stopped giving money during Dixon's time?
No, Birenbaum. Antioch's never been a wealthy school, it never
raised a lot of money. It was in '79, when we had our payless
payday, they had just launched a 16 million dollar capital
campaign, and then we come up with a payless payday, and it
just died right there.
Yes. What they did is, they had a stabilization fund, which
is basically money that they raised about a million and a half
dollars just to get us so we could turn around and start going
forward. It was chaotic in that respect, that you couldn't think
to the future because you had to get through today. And you
had to worry today about paying last year's bill. At one time,
we were probably eight months behind in paying bills, simply
because we were meeting payroll, and so we were constantly using
today's money to pay last year's bills.
I just interviewed Nina Myatt, and she talked a lot about '79
almost being worse in some respects than "73
I think '79 was worse because a lot of people live payday to
payday. The date was May 17th, a Tuesday or Wednesday, and to
be told on Tuesday or Wednesday that you're not going to get
a paycheck on Friday. People that were paid monthly, we had
two weeks to know. So it's like,•"I haven't spent all my money
yet, so I'm not going to go buy that new dress. I'm going to
save it so I can buy groceries next month." I think it affected
them financially in a different way, the payless payday. A lot
of the employees actually came to work knowing that they weren't
going to get paid. And what we had was people were coming to
work, and because they couldn't pay a babysitter, they brought
their child with them. Somebody's sitting there trying to work,
and here's a little child saying "Mommy, I want to do
this,
Mommy I want to do that," and it didn't work. Supervisors didn't
feel like they could say to someone, "Would you do this." How
can you tell somebody to do something when you're not going
to pay them? I think it affected them personally, and as I
say, a lot of those people lived payday to payday, so they were
able to go out after the first week and apply for unemployment,
and they did apply for unemployment. Eventually it came down
to where there were maybe six or eight people working in the
business office; we had about 22 originally. Then as we were
able, we would call an employee back to work. In September of
that year, I think we called almost everybody back.
How long did it go on?
We didn't get paid in May, and then the college didn't get paid
in June. But it was not the same way all around the university,
because in come states, state laws say you must pay people.
And so some of them actually got paid. In the state of Ohio,
nobody got paid. Eventually though, everybody got all the money
that was coming to them for all the hours they worked, plus
interest.
That happened for two months?
Two months for the college.
I asked Nina
this, whether or not you think '79 would have
happened if it hadn't been for '73?
Oh, I don't think that it would have. I think the decline in
enrollment at the college, the strike of '73, was definitely
the problem. Because people were just not coming, they were
unhappy with it, they didn't like what was happening; it was
an entirely different student body. We had a case where we
actually paid students to stay off campus. They were students
that were not ideal people, and the only way we could get them
off of here was to say, "Okay, you go to California and we'll
pay you to stay out there." Nobody went to class. I've seen
where you come here and you go to the cafeteria and see students
studying. It was like, "This is great," because it was not the
"in" thing to got to class. They'd go to the first and last
class of the quarter.
You're talking about after the strike?
After the strike. Even before that, we had too many students
here, too. I can remember one quarter when we had 1,000 students
on campus. Now, this campus cannot handle 1,000 students.
Everything was packed, people just lived where they could live.
They had to go to Xenia and Springfield to live, the cafeteria
was a madhouse; you basically had two shifts of people who ate
their meals in the caf. Classes were large, it was just not
ideal. Because the campus is not geared for 1,000 students-
actually 500 at one time is too many. Somewhere, 450 is the
magic number.
So did you see the quality of the student body change a lot?
Oh, absolutely. I've seen it where, what ever was there they
took, they didn't care who it belonged'to. They didn't care
about going to class. I've seen it where students walked in
who were full financial aid students and they wore clothes better
any of the employees who were working here. They just had
unlimited source of funds from some source. There was a lot
of stealing on campus, it was just not safe to leave anything
anyplace. This is from the time I came in the 70s, when there
were so many people on campus. One student stood up and said,
"We were raised that if you saw something and wanted it, you
took it. And then you brought us to Antioch and you expect us
to abide by the rules. We weren't raised that way." We made
it in some respects too easy for some students, and they didn't
appreciate the opportunity that they had. I think that in the
last three years, I think we've got good students here now.
I think they
want an education, and I think that's important.
Other times, it's a case where they're just at school and they
don't care what they do.
Is this is the 70s and 80s?
It took different turns during that period of time. We had a
time when you never saw a student reading a book, It just wasn't
the same, they never worried about going to class.
Actually, since '86, I've been more involved with the
students because we've moved back over here from G. Stanley
[Hall].[Our office] moved over to G. Stanley in '77. So from
'77 to
'86, the contact with the students I had would be the
ones who were coming over to G. Stanley and we'd have CWSP
students. I just think the student body now, I just really think
they're super people. I think there's some of them that really
want to learn about things and they've got common sense. They're
not living in their own little world, that
"This, is what I want
and that's the only way it can be." I think they listen to other
people. I served on Comcil now, this is my second quarter to
do that, and I'm really, really pleased with how people think.
The
students— they're not selfish. They're thinking, "I'm
representing a whole group of students, and what do they want."
And I think that's to our credit.
And
that's a change.
Yes. Definitely a change. One of the problems we have is that
a lot of people think Antioch closed. They still think we have
a lot of financial problems. We're better off financially, we're
not well by any means, but we're in much better shape than we
were five years ago. Every time we closed one of our adult
campuses around the country, it reads in the paper—"Antioch
College closes"; they think it's the [Yellow Springs] campus.
This is something admissions found as they went out and made
contact with counselors. So how do you get the word back out
there that we didn't close, and that yes, we did have financial
problems, but we're better, we're turning that around?
Could you speak a little more about how the strike affected
[Antioch's] image and/or reputation?
Once it comes out and says that you've got a payless payday,
immediately what people think is that you're going to file
bankruptcy. [Also], because we weren't getting any grants because
we weren't making any proposals for them; our name wasn't out
there to show we were still doing things.
With the alumni even, the fact that the fundraising went
down to almost nothing. No matter what we did, you got money,
but you got it from two or three people.
Was there also a lot of poor coverage?
You get the coverage with the strike, while the strike was going
on. Once it's over, it's not news, what's happening to the
institution and how it's trying to recover. It's only news when
it's bad. As I say, we weren't doing anything to get our name
anyplace. And then I think with Birenbaum, the fight between
Birenbaum and the college was so intense. He didn't like the
college.
He wanted to close it, didn't he?
As you look at the campuses that were losing money on the basis
of, you've got x number of students, the logic would have been
to close it. [The Yellow Springs] was the biggest drain. It
literally could lose two million dollars in a year. [That's]
a big difference than a program that's going to lose $50,000.
At the college, there were some costs that you couldn't cut.
You can't heat the power plant halfway; because of the system
that it has, if you turn it on, it's going to heat all the
buildings. And you can't use less electricity in a classroom
because you've got two students instead of twenty. The fixed
costs were there.
I'm certain it was talked about, but it never went as far
as going to the board to ever be presented to close the college.
Part of the reason I think it never would have happened is that
the majority of the board have always been college alums and
I don't think they would have tolerated it. When
Al came on
board, we had the law school that was losing hundreds of
thousands of dollars and the college was losing hundreds of
thousands of dollars every year, and there was no way you could
save both of them at the same time. When he was hired, it was
to save the college. He looked at the situation, and after two
months, saying "I can't do both." Al looked at it and said,
"We've got to refocus all our resources and our efforts on the
college", which we did. And getting the name of Antioch College
back there again.
How do you think the strike has affected the leadership-of
college?
I think at the time (of the decline] there were so many things
you had to do, and what did you do first? You were in a survival
mode, and when you're trying to survive, there's no vision.
You can't think beyond this year, or this quarter. I think we've
gotten beyond that to think, "What are our priorities?" We've
had one session with both the top administrators of the
university and the board of trustees talking about what is our
vision for the year 2000? In 1973, we didn't even think about
1974, let alone several years down the road. I think it changes
how you have to operate, because you have to survive. We've
gone through the change of people so much that you never have
time to really come together and know each other so you can
work together and take the next step.
Nina was saying there were a lot of faculty and administrators
changing hats and roles?
Some of that came out of necessity; you'd have an administrator
leave, and somebody has to step in there in the interim. At
Antioch it takes a long time to fill a position; we've always
had the committees and all of this, so you can't just go out
and hire somebody.
I think the fact that we didn't have enough continuity
with the people, there was always somebody at one of our campuses
changing leadership, and then its working with them. We also
went from one campus having a problem to another campus having
a problem, and we were putting out fires all the time. It would
be nice to think, "What are we going to do next year, what are
we going to do next quarter? " instead of putting out fires.
What about the mission?
The overall mission, and the Antiochian concept, I think it's
always been there. The people that stayed, they had that vision.
They just put it to the side to stay around and do [certain]
things. I see a lot of the faculty who were very depressed over
the time beginning to get excited about things again. They're
doing different things in different areas, they're doing grant
proposals and they're successful. Between '73 and '79, that
there's an awful lot of people who are desperately afraid that
it's going to happen again.
That something like a strike would happen again?
Well, it might not be a strike, but something that would put
Us to where everything is just stopped again. Since Al's been
here, the one year we made a big jump in enrollment immediately
everybody thought, "We've really coming back and we're going
to continue to do this every year." Well, the next year we went
up just a few, and then we stabilized and stayed the same.
And people say, "Well, it's going to happen again. We're not
going to make it." It's a little bit like when we started
building the new dorms and renovating buildings. Everybody was
very enthusiastic, they were very excited, things were happening.
Once we got to the point where we had all of our projects done,
and we hadn't started on the next one, it's like, "Oh, we're
in trouble again, we're not doing anything." It's this attitude
that they've got to get over and they can't let go of it. I
started in
1970, and so I've been through all the stuff that's
happened. What's happened to us in the last five years— I'm
not saying that I didn't think we could do it but there's no
way I thought we would have done it in the short period of time
we did. It was just unbelievable what we did in about a two
year period. A lot of the credit goes to the college alums,
who contributed money so we could go out and do those things.
But our reputation among financial institutions— if I had to
borrow money before that, I had a terrible time ever getting
a line of credit or borrowing money and it turned around to
where I had banks calling me and saying, "I want to come in
and see if we can do anything for you. As soon as we started
doing the building, that was the biggest step towards turning
around, then getting the qualified statement out of our financial
statement. For fourteen years, our financial statement said,
"We've done our audit but we can't guarantee that this company
will continue, or should continue.", because we didn't have
enough assets to cover our liabilities. In '87, that came off
of there, which was a major, major accomplishment.
Speaking of finances, what was the estimated damage of strike,
the financial loss?
The financial loss came over a lot of years, because we went
from
2,500 FTE's to 400 FTE's. That was a direct result of it.
There was damage, just physical damage. People came back to
work, and typewriters were damaged, things were missing. I would
say just the initial cost of cleaning the place up and getting
things back in order had to be a couple hundred thousand dollars.
And a couple hundred thousand dollars then would have been a
considerable amount of money.
Community. You talked some about decrease in morale and
depression, and how people were just surviving. What changes
did you see from before to after in the cohesion of the
community?
Before the strike, with the number of students that we had,
I don't think there was the same feeling of community that there
is now, because there were too many people.
So there wasn't really a community?
I certainly didn't sense it to the extent that I do now. I think
just numbers made a difference. Now, when you have community
days and you have a group of 14 people; 14 people can talk;
3,000 people can't talk. Now by going to community meetings,
people can sit there and everybody can have their say, but you
couldn't have it then. A minority of people controlled everybody,
Students, faculty?
I think students controlled more than anything.
So there were really a few students making a difference?
Yes, and not necessarily the right students. I think it was
a case where even the other students didn't like what was
happening, but they wouldn't fight it. I think it just wasn't
worth the battle.
You mean intimidating?
Yeah.
What about relationships between different groups on campus?
Right after the strike, everybody had so much to do, but there
were always the running battles between administration and
faculty. I don't think it was any different, I really don't.
I think there was the question of,"How could the administration
have stopped the strike?" It was always the administration's
fault, when in fact the faculty probably had more working
relationships with the students who instigated [the strike].
They actually had, not more control, but more contact with the
students, and could have convinced them that what they were
trying to do was not right. It wasn't that it wasn't right,
but that the college couldn't do what they wanted them to do.
Because the college could not guarantee something that they
had no control over, and we didn't.
But did the relationship between different factions change?
Oh, I have to believe that it did. It seems there was always
turmoil between the faculty and the administration, and the
changing of— the turnover of people. I think it was always
somebody new coming on board. If you wanted to change one little
thing, you upset somebody. If we could get people into positions
and they would stay for four to five years, I would say in
probably your third and fourth years, you'd see some stability
with things, and things beginning to move forward every year
we've had somebody new. Connie Pelekoudas was in [the Dean of
Faculty Office], Valora [Washington] was in there, then Connie
was back in there and now Gene [Rice], And everybody comes and
they work differently, they interact differently with people.
If Gene's here for five years, things should start falling into
place and beginning to make progress. Then I think all those
old battles can be won. I don't know whose idea is right, whether
the faculty's.or the administration, but maybe they can at least
work together and solve them.
What about administrators and students. Did that relationship
change?
I've interacted more with students in the last year. Well, I
did when I was the director of the student loan office. I met
with every student that was a financial aid student. Basically,
it was all business because there were so many students, you
didn't have time to really know anybody. And I've had dealing
with some of the students in maybe a co-op job or something
and particularly in the finance area and feel real comfortable
with working with them, love it when a student comes in and
talks. Some of the students have become very, very special to
me. I think that administrators who get along with students,
they can do it if they treat the student as their equal. But
if they don't treat the student as their equal, they don't get
along well. I can look at different people and just tell why
they don't get along with students.
I'm wondering if something like the strike affected the
relationship between those two groups in terms of the trust?
If there was more or less trust?
Well, at the time, I was angry over the whole thing. I was angry
over what happened to my records, but I wasn't angry at any
particular student. And I don't think that people took it out
on any individual student. Now, some people could have, but
I don't think that that was the case. I think if anything it's
like "How much involvement should the students have?" and "We've
got to make decisions and the students are not going to be in
there this time making decisions," because otherwise we could
have the same thing again. I don't know what happened prior
to the whole thing in '73 that prompted it. Something had to
prompt it though. I had no idea whether it was some kind of
a meeting, whether they were talking about financial aid, but
all of a sudden it happened. It
could've been a meeting and
somebody made some remark about there's no guarantee on financial
aid and that prompted the whole thing. "I came to Antioch and
I want to be guaranteed that I can be here for five years."
and somebody else said "We can't do that," thinking that the
next time, "They won't be in our meeting.' I don't think people
took their spite out on
[students].
But was there maybe a feeling that it could happen again? Or
when students are confronting administrators about policies
or challenge them in a large group, I wonder if the strike runs
through people's minds?
I think it does run through people's minds, I think as we've
had little ruckuses with the union. The union sees their
viewpoint and they don't see the administration's viewpoint
And there are two sides to every issue.
Back in this time it was not unusual for the union to have
walkouts. And in almost every case, whenever they had a walkout,
whatever they wanted, the administration gave to them. Needless
to say, it was part of what almost bankrupt the institution.
They would get things and they would lose employees, because
the college couldn't give them the additions that they wanted
and keep all the people an the payroll. It was a case where,
the administration was the enemy, to the students, to the
faculty, to the union. What it was really is that the
administration was trying to run a business and keep it going
and try and keep everybody happy and it was impossible.
People didn't sit down and really talk either. I think
they yelled. We had people who were not open.
What about the change in attitude among administrators and
faculty towards student dissent? Was that affected by the strike?
I think people were perturbed by the whole thing, really saying
that it was such a waste because they wanted us to do something
that we couldn't do. The whole effort, the time, the damage,
the dollars that were spent, was so unnecessary. At the same
time, the students did not see that.
What about the attitudes towards innovation and experimentation
in education?
As I said earlier, the fact that what we were trying to do was
to survive from then on, you didn't have time to think about
that. All that you were dealing with was what you were dealing
with now. We changed from a school that had too many students
and had a lot of good ideas to a school that went into a survival
mode and stayed there for a lot of years.
And changed with the coming of Guskin?
Oh, absolutely. Bill Birenbaum did what he was hired to do.
He closed some of the campuses. He didn't close enough of them
and he didn't pay attention to the college and he needed to
that along with closing the other campuses. It was the battle
between the "we" and the "they", the college and the university.
The college was "they". And the battle got to the point where
Bill just gave up on the college and said "I'll go ahead and
deal with the university and let the administration of the
college deal with the college."
What about the quality of the academic program?
One of the things that we lacked was a critical
mass. You have
a class with two or three students in it and it can't be a good,
class; here's just not enough interaction. That was probably
one of our biggest problems and the faculty's lack of enthusiasm.
Not all of them. Some of them really stayed in there and did
what they needed to do. They were depressed, and that has an
. I
impact, it has to.
Why do think so many people stayed?
Well, it's a little bit like myself in particular in '79. My
husband worked at Wright-Patterson and people knew where I worked
and he had people ask him, "Why does your wife stay there when
she's not going to get paid?" And he said, "If somebody doesn't
stay, they can't survive." I think that we felt that there
was something here that needed to survive. Some of the people
that are still here that work for me today, Debby Caraway, Jim
McKee in personnel, Florence Borton, they were all there, they
worked through it. If they hadn't been there, doing what they
needed to do, we wouldn't be here. I think it was the same way
with the faculty. The faculty believed in what was here and
they stayed. It's funny with Antioch, when people leave
Antioch,
they come back. Employees that will work here maybe ten years
and then go somewhere else, in two or three years, they're back.
There's just something about
Antioch— it becomes part of your
life.
A few more questions. One is how you think the strike affected
Antioch's commitment to a more diverse student body, both in
terms of ethnicity and in terms of economics.
I don't think it has an impact. Every school wants diversity
and there's only so many students out there. Every school in
the country is catering to minority students. If you're not
a wealthy school that can offer an excellent financial aid
package, or offer a big scholarship, you're not going to get
those students. At our adult campuses, we're facing the same
thing. [They're] predominately White, female institutions and
no matter what you do, you get more White females. Here, it's
pretty much of an even mix, but predominately white, simply
because we don't have the scholarships and the dollars to go
out and recruit the minority students that can go to another
school and really get a good package.
What about the strike's affect on the relationship between the
town and the college?
I think there's some people in the town that, and I think I've
sensed it more since I've moved here, don't like the college,
even though a lot of the businesses survive on the college,
not only from the student body, students probably spend a lot
more downtown than anyone realizes, but the number of employees,
even if they don't live in town. Every employee here pays the
city income tax. It's like when we couldn't pay our bills. People
in Yellow Springs wouldn't give us credit, some of them still
won't give us credit. And they only hurt themselves. We can
go someplace else and buy it cheaper, but it's convenient here.
Its like,
"Well, back in '79, you didn't pay your bills." That's
twelve years ago, it's a different institution now. They won't
forget the past and some of them never will. It's like some
<• .• the faculty that will never let go of what happened then.
They will never let go of the "we/they", the college and the
university. The college lost as much money as anyone else lost
but they don't want to believe that.
Do you think there's a lot of bitterness among faculty?
Not all the time, it just comes out at certain times. Something
will be said, something will happen and it's there. In the back
of their minds, its always there. But most of the time, they
go on and do their job and you don't feel that animosity.
I have one last question. Do you think the strike had any
positive affects of any kind?
It's hard to say this long after the fact. Some people
probably
learned about financial aid and really realized how it worked.
Maybe what it did is it brought out the good in some people
and the desire to make the place work. It was an individual
type thing of the student that would come in and say, "Well,
I know where your student account cards are" and that really
knew that what was happening was wrong because somebody had
taken them all and they were hidden and then we got them back.
Individually, it made people think about the school and think
about what they wanted to do and I think the people that stayed
have to be better for it. They liked the college atmosphere,
they like working with the students or they wouldn't have stayed.
Other than that, I hope we never, ever have to go through it
again.
^
Joyce Clayborn:
How long have you been here?
How long have I been here? By September I will be here
27 years. I came in '64. You know, [the union] had a strike
in '73 too, and then it went right into the [student] strike
not long after, I guess it was a matter of months.
Feel free to talk about both because I know they had something
to do with one another.
They did and they didn't. What I was really trying to
remember was the mood of the campus at that particular time.
I remember the strike had to do with the program of New
Directions students and financial aid. It got cut out and I
know that's why they were angry and that's why they struck.
Back at that point, students were a lot more militant than they
are now. If something like that happened now, people wouldn't
do the same thing.
Why do you think?
Well, we had a union organizer at one point at Antioch
and this man was so prophetic, because he told us ten years
ago, he said, "Antioch is soon going to be run like a business,
more than like a college, and the bottom line was going to be
the almighty dollar."
I think that that's what's happened, and the kind of
students that come here, they're here to get an education and
they place the most importance on that, which there's nothing
wrong with, but the other students had two priorities. They
were here to get an education, but their quality of life meant
a whole heck of a lot more to them than the students of today.
They were very angry when decisions were made without their
input, or even when they had input, when [decisions] went the
wrong way.
Do you think what you perceive as Antioch's "corporatization"
is due to something like the strike?
I would never say that it didn't have its impact, I would
say it did. Also, the biggest thing, in my opinion, Antioch
got to be more like a business because there was so much money
mismanaged. If you go back and look at some of the old
newspapers, there were people here who weren't doing what they
were supposed to do, and I think that's the principle reason.
Do you think the change in students happened after the strike,
because of the strike?
Possibly. I know one thing that's very glaring. The black
population, well, I'll just say the minority population period,
Do you think the strike has affected Antioch's commitment to
creating a diverse student body?
Definitely.
How so?
Several things. We have the economy, the percentages of
students on financial aid is a lot more than it used to be.
I've talked to some students who don't want to get involved
in things because they're given "a hard time." That's really
bad, when people get into a routine of saying, "Well, everything
is status quo and I'm going to go along with the program, I'm
not going to create any waves."
How do you think something like the strike has affected the
administration's attitude toward student and union dissent?
The strike of '73 has been brought up time and time again.
There were two, so whenever they bring them up, I think
immediately they're talking about ours. I think the
administration does get leery because we were accused of
pressuring the students to support us, and to me, that's
insulting student's intelligence as far as I'm concerned. It's
like we twisted your
arms. They can make up their own minds.
It's like I told The Record, "Your tuition pays my salary."
Students on this campus used to want to be informed about
everything. You have a right to know and to me, I give you enough
intelligence to say you can make up your own mind. You go to
the administration and get their side, you listen to us and
hear our side, and you make up your own mind. But I think you
should be informed.
How do you think the strike has affected the relationship between
the different groups on campus?
I've talked to students who have been in
AdCil meetings,
and the ones I've talked to are the ones that are really
concerned about what's going on, and maybe feel that students
should have more input into what's going on. And I get a general
consensus that Al [Guskin] controls the meetings. You may get
to say your piece, but it doesn't mean anything. And I remember
part of his "State of the College Address" too when he was
talking about student input, and my impression is that he was
saying, "Student input is okay up to a point, but we're still
going to make these decisions." I realize, there's got to be
someone at the top, that's the way the capitalist system works.
But sometimes when you're way up there, you better look down
and see what the other people want and what they need.
I don't think students are given as much say. It looks
like a facade to me, they create all these task forces, but
when it comes down to it, it's just like the way they treat
us, they're going to do what they want anyway.
Contrast that with the situation when you first came here.
You can remember stories that stand out in your life and
I remember one of the grape boycotts. If the farm workers were
protesting, students thought nothing of walking into our kitchen,
and going into that walk-in (refrigerator] to see what kind
of stuff we were serving. There was a boycott on grapes and
this [the Antioch Inn] used to be a public eating space. That's
when Dixon was president, and he was out here eating with some
friends, and students were back inside with those grapes. They
came out here and set them on the table in front of him. Can
you imagine students today doing that?
Speaking of the president, how do you think the strike has
affected Antioch's leadership?
Well, maybe that's one of the reasons why there's less
student input, and maybe that's why you're on committees. They
say you do have representation, but to me that really doesn't
mean much. Maybe they decided to go a different avenue: "We'll
pacify them and give them their say-so on what's going on,"
but really and truthfully, they're really going to do what
they're going to do. Students are handled more with kid gloves
than they were.
What about the strike's affect on Antioch's mission, winning
a victory for humanity, etc?
Those missions? Whatever happened to those? I didn't know
we were still on that starship course! Yeah, they canceled that
series, this is "Star Trek: The New Generation!" I have problems
with Antioch's mission, because in the first place, I don't
really understand what Antioch's mission is anymore. As a union
member, am I part of the community or not? So I can't really
answer, because to me, Antioch's mission has sort of detoured,
from what it was when I first came here.
Talk a little about the differences you see.
Well, the difference in students, the difference in students
not getting involved in things and letting things go status
quo, difference in student dress, more conservative students.
Administration-wise, more business-like administrators that
don't seem to deal with some of the problems on this campus.
They set priorities that sound really good, but [not] common
sense
things...We were talking once in a meeting over in the
presidents room and we were telling the college, "It's good
to have students here, but what about when you get them here?
How do you keep them here and what about their dorms?" The
housekeepers, they're real frustrated, because they were always
told that student dorms are priorities. Now, the academic
buildings or main buildings, now they're priorities. They have
to go over there every day just to pick cigarette butts up,
because that offends somebody. Priorities are different, and
to me, the people in main building's comfort shouldn't take
precedent over where students have to live every day.
I don't know the faculty that
well. I remember some older
faculty, people that I really liked and respected, because they
seemed to see both sides of a dilemma whenever there was a
confrontation. There were a few that were always pro-union,
probably because of their background.
Do you see that as a result of the strike, did the relationship
between staff and faculty as well as other groups change?
Maybe not directly. Communications here just broke down
period, and they still leave a lot to be desired: faculty
interaction with students, student interaction with
administration, faculty interaction with administration, staff
interaction with administration, staff interaction with
students...
You think all of them were affected?
Sure they were.
Can you describe what it was like to work here for the first
ten years after the strike?
It was a downhill trend and everybody was concentrating
on keeping their jobs, giving up raises, and giving up cost
of living: "if I keep my job, that's the most important thing."
...Trying to work with the college in the only way a union can,
by giving up, and not asking for a lot, trying to work things
out.
In the summer people just worked everywhere. The skilled
trades were everywhere, and we all banded together and said,
"Well, we're going to keep this thing afloat." We sort of put
the contract aside because we had to concentrate on things that
needed to get done. Violations, we turned our heads, because
it was more important to keep the place afloat.
There were a lot of staff cut directly after the strike, right?
A 25% cut?
Yes, and we were at a big AdCil meeting and AdCil said,
"No, there won't be any cuts." I will never forget this incident,
just before Christmas break, and people went home during
Christmas time, and got letters in the mail [telling them] that
they were laid off. That was just devastating.
How did the loss of people affect your work?
We have eight people in this kitchen and when I first came
here there were about 40 people, so you can imagine. You had
to double up, do whatever, do things that you'd never done
before. It was hard to adjust yourself to, but you look back
on it and you made it.
That's why it's so hard now when new administrators come,
and you try and educate them as to how it used to be, and you
get statements like, "Well, that was all in the past." I don't
care, the past is always a basis for the future. We get called
radical, and we get called this, [but] we made a lot of
sacrifices and no one wants to hear that. We talked to one
administrator about the pay-less payday [in 1979], [they said],
"Well, you got paid, didn't you?" Yeah, but what about the two
or three weeks when we had nothing, and the humiliation of going
down there [to the unemployment office] and those people treating
you nasty, talking to you like you were dirt? But that doesn't
even matter, because we "got paid." The attitude!
Did the relationships within the union change as a result?
No, I think we got closer. When the going gets tough, the
tough get going. We got smaller, we started feeling insecure,
and when you start feeling that, you get closer.
Why did you stay and why do you think other people stayed?
I stayed because I'm just the type of person that, it's
in my work life, my personal life, and if I commit myself to
something, I'm committed, if I feel like its worthwhile. I stayed
here because I liked Antioch, I liked my job, I liked the
students, and I never thought about leaving. I tell you, now,
in the past few months, I feel more like leaving here than
I did back then. I didn't even think about leaving back then.
I guess it was a challenge and we were all waiting, saying,
"It's going to get better, we know it's going to get better."
Mostly everybody had that same feeling, that Antioch had
given us some things and we weren't going to turn our backs.
We decided to work so the [students] could graduate [in 1979].
If we had said, "Oh, we're not going to get paid, we're not
going to work," that class wouldn't have been able to graduate!
At least I don't think they would've if all the staff had gone
home and all of us had gone home.
Do you think there was a sense among the staff and faculty who
stayed that they were helping Antioch to survive, that this
was a common mission?
Yes, that's the way I felt anyway. But, now it's like,
survive to do what?
What about the strikes' affect on the reputation and image of
the school?
I think it was really bad. That was a prime reason that
the enrollment dropped. But see, a lot of people didn't know
the real story, and if you read the news media, you can't believe
everything they print, because I was out there in the strikes
and The Yellow Springs News would have stuff in there that wasn't
even true. I was there and I saw it. It was just really sad,
because maybe some people would have understood, and maybe some
parents would've understood back in those days, that those
students felt they were right in what they did. I'm not talking
about the destruction they did, but in their principle. When
we went on strike, we felt we were right in what we did. The
students survived. At what cost, everybody
pays.
Al Penman:
First, I think the strike has to be put in the context
of what was going on throughout the society and throughout the
world at the time, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the counter
cultural movement. It has to be put within the context of the
spread of Antioch College into an enormously widespread
university, the deliberate decision of the president and the
board of trustees to extend our assets, the five million dollars
we had approximately in endowment, plus all of our assets as
ability to borrow and the name of the college, to extend all
of these in order to try to carry out what was a very laudable
aim, taking education to the people who were normally left out
of the mainstream of higher education. And the strike also has
to be put within the context of the president's inability, or
maybe disinterest, in careful management.
We lost two or three very important vice presidents in
the late 60s, they were never replaced by people of similar
quality, and the president was not interested in control. He
had a philosophy of enabling people to achieve their own goals
on their own, and he liked the idea of putting the assets of
the college on the line, making it possible for people who had
ideas about how they'd like to use these assets for their
education, making it possible for them to do that.
It was a time of enormous, messianic dreams, not only on
the part of the president and the trustees, "What Antioch College
could do leading the way into the future of higher education,
maybe the whole future would, to some extent, be led," but it
was also among students and faculty, it was primarily leftist
and Marxist. It was not on his part.
Not on Dixon's part?
No, not on Dixon's part. He was a leftist of a certain
anarchistic type, but he was definitely not Marxist. The [two
ideologies] could go down the path together for a while, but
they finally came to great conflict when it appeared that the
president of the United States whose name was Nixon decided
he couldn't support student loans. And [Antioch] students
demanded a guarantee, and a guarantee could not be forthcoming
because the college had already overspent its endowment. We
were probably by that time five, six, seven, ten million dollars
in debt. So the [administration] had to say, "Too bad."
I think many of the strikers thought the strike was the
beginning of a very important, maybe world-wide movement, the
forces of good against the forces of
evil. The forces of good
were people from working class backgrounds, people of color,
people of a Marxist orientation, all challenging the vested
interests, Dixon representing the vested interests of Antioch
College.
So, [the strike] was a really complex kind of thing, but
some of the consequences were fairly simple it seems. We lost,
I think, one quarter of our student body in about a three month
period from the spring to the fall, and that meant that the
next year we had to cut about a quarter of our faculty. I don't
know whether you've ever seen the enrollment graph, well, it
was a pretty steep slide for almost ten or twelve years.
The image a lot of people got of Antioch College was that
we were a very troubled place that couldn't find ways to resolve
our problems, and that probably we would close. We ourselves
talked about closing and there were lots of phrases like "going
down the tubes." We found it quite amazing sometimes that we
were still open. It was very discouraging of course to have
a budget cut every year for ten years, and not just a budget
cut but also cuts within the year, because we almost always
overestimated the [number] of new students we would have. A
number of us still speak about how its almost miraculous that
we're still open.
The way we were able to stay open was faculty took
tremendous cuts in their salary and had no salary increases
for years. We cheated on building, maintenance and will pay
for that for as long as these buildings stand. Leo Drey gave
a million dollars or more for about ten years in a row to meet
our deficit.
Who is Leo Drey?
He was a trustee, an owner of a business in Missouri, he
owns a lot of woodlands, he's in the timber business. He
graduated from Antioch, he had three of his children here. Two
of them graduated from Antioch during this period of sliding,
hard to know why they stayed. One of them came from, I think
Harvard, and turned around and went back after a year or two.
There was tremendous loyalty on the part of a number of
other alumni who kept supporting presidents who tried to deal
with [the
aftermath], or interim presidents, pretty good support
of the faculty, and in emotional kinds of ways.
Now, how did the faculty deal with it? Well, there were
a few people who felt enormous anger. I told you about George
Geiger, he'll never recover from it, he's resolved that it's
immoral really to forget it, to recover from it. For some faculty
it meant there were scars that made it difficult to be sensitive
like we used to be to each other. We related to each other more
distantly, or with a bit of suspicion over the years that has
all but disappeared, except for a very few instances. But it
made the faculty awfully apprehensive about our future and I
think it turned us inward.
Up until that time maybe we had felt confident about
ourselves as an institution, and ourselves as scholars,
sufficiently so that we could march to a different drummer.
We had a sense of our own cadence and what was really good
education. It didn't matter to us a great deal really how the
outside world evaluated our education, because we were convinced
we had vital, challenging, fun, productive education.
After the strike, and as we began to
fall, fall, fall,
we found ourselves working harder on maintenance problems, trying
to just keep things together. We found ourselves exhausted by
the attempt to overcome our despair, and simply tried to make
the place look attractive and produce good education, in spite
of the lack of the normal kinds of supports, physical supports
and economic supports. We no longer invented ideas with as much
confidence or with as much verve as we used to. Many faculty,
I for instance, put all of our energies into these maintenance
tasks and gave up our contacts with other institutions, we were
just too worn out.
So Antioch became pretty isolated...
It became isolated out of necessity, to try to deal with
our constant set of crises. Then came Guskin and he gave us
a tremendous shot in the arm, helping us to believe in ourselves
the first year. The second or third year he began to talk about
quality, and he had put his finger correctly on the fact that
we were not, from the outside, looking like a very academically
productive faculty, we didn't publish for instance. I think
he misunderstood what we had been doing with our time and didn't
understand the sense of weariness and discouragement, the lack
of confidence that still was with us, even though he helped
us feel we had a future.
Some faculty took his criticism and exhortations to be
a chastisement toward the many faculty who had not produced
the traditional kinds of research. That skewed the whole
understanding of what faculty development meant. Faculty found
themselves awfully polarized for a year or two over whether
we were going to be a publish or perish institution. I think
only in the last six, nine months have we begun to develop a
sense of balance about that, we understand that there's more
than one way for a faculty to pursue intellectual and other
kinds of goals, you don't have to write papers and go to
conferences and deliver them.
Guskin's been here five and a half years. I think I said
soon after he came, maybe before he came, that I thought it
would take about an equivalent amount of time to repair the
college that it took to nearly destroy it. It took ten, twelve
years for us to come to this and I think it will take ten or
twelve years to regain our position. I think we got very euphoric
[Guskin's] first year or two, he gave us raises for instance
and enrollment increased, and wow, that was wonderful, and
buildings began to be maintained. That euphoria didn't last
and it was very discouraging to discover that he couldn't keep
the incline as dramatic as the decline had been. That has made
people cynical, it has made them very self-pitying again in
a lot of instances, and made us kind of accusatory. [There was
a] a feeling he had misled us, betrayed us, that there was
something kind of deliberate about him.
So I think we're still in the midst of the problems that
all had their first obvious
manifestation in '73, but had their
roots far earlier.
When you were talking about maintenance, what kind of maintenance
were you referring to?
I was talking about maintenance of every kind, the
maintenance of our own individual psychology, and the psychology
of our departments or our colleagues, because as we lost faculty
and students, we had to redefine who we were as faculty. We
found ourselves trying to work with people who we hadn't worked
with closely as colleagues before. In some ways that was
advantageous, but in some ways it was difficult, because we
were thrown together out of necessity rather than out of
intellectual, or other kinds of interests.
Which was quite a new situation
Yes, because this had been a place where people had been
encouraged, and encouraged each other to form alliances on the
basis of their passions. Now our principle passion was to stay
alive. And there were maintenance problems of trying to interpret
to the outside world who we were, to keep student morale up
so that they would stay, trying to make things look good when
they weren't very good, trying to live within buildings which
were dirty, and in some respects falling apart.
Did anybody ever tell you about the gym for instance? For
a number of years we just couldn't repair roofs, and the south
gym, which had a magnificent dance floor, it was rained on for
really years, and tens of thousands of dollars of beautiful
flooring buckled. At least one, maybe two or three of the
handball courts had the same problem. The swimming pool leaked
like anything.
This building you can see here from my window, its right
behind the science building, it used to be called the engineering
building and was really quite a nice building, but it had a
flat roof unfortunately. The roof began to leak, and they took
all sorts of academic things out of there and they put
maintenance in there. You could go in there on spring days when
it was raining, and there would be two or three or four inches
of water on thousands of square feet of flooring, and that went
on for years.
So it was rendered unusable?
Practically. It was just amazing, they still used it, they
put plastic over equipment, and plastic inside as a kind of
temporary sub-roof to drain off the water. The library had the
same problem, leaking in dozens of places. If you ask Joe
[Cali]
to show you, he can tell you the exact spots where they had
swimming pools,
little children's swimming pools. Right in the
lobby for instance they had one, and they even gave it a name.
You can see how this is only physical maintenance, its
psychological maintenance, its a maintenance of practicality,
because there are certain kinds of things that you can't do,
like you can't use the library in the way you had been
accustomed to using it.
You mentioned cynicism after Guskin had been here a while and
I
was. wondering if that reaction was from the older faculty
who were here during the strike, or also included newer faculty.
I've wondered about that and I'm not sure. To a large extent
it was led by faculty who at least had been here for a while,
I don't know about faculty who had been here during the strike.
But it was faculty who had felt they had made so many sacrifices
over the years, and who had had enough of discouragement and
being on the short end of promises.
Were there a lot of promises made in the years when Birenbaum
was here too?
I suppose so, my memory's a little less clear about that.
We had such a contentious relationship with Birenbaum that it
was not possible for him to make promises and have use really
buy into them. Almost from the beginning, it was quite broadly
felt that
Birenbaum's sympathies were not primarily with this
campus, and that grew to a suspicion, which seemed to have some
confirmation that he thought that the way to save the university
was to get rid of the college. Because the college was a big
drain hole down which far too many of the limited assets of
the university were going.
His idea was just to keep the centers?
Mmmmm-hmmmm. He himself didn't live here you know. He lived
in New York, would come in to visit or do something periodically.
There was a real sense of estrangement, we felt quite like a
colony does towards the colonial masters, felt that we were
owned by outside interests who couldn't understand us and our
needs, probably didn't have our welfare and our needs at heart,
people who certainly had not linked their destiny with ours.
So, for years then, there wasn't any acting president on campus,
during Dixon's time as well.
That's right. In 1972, Dixon decided to move the president's
office about five blocks from here up on High Street. It was
supposed to be a symbol that, what we now call the university,
then called the system, had outgrown Antioch College and the
central administration should no longer be housed in Antioch
College buildings.
We searched for a dean of the college who would take the
president's central management role here. We found a young man-
from the University of Pennsylvania, Peter Cam-was his name. . *
He accepted, he came here to begin his acquaintance with us
about maybe a week after he accepted, and students took him
down into the faculty mail room for three days in a row, for
about six, eight hours a day,
mau-mauing him. That was a term
which means to pepper people with questions and comments and
bring them around to your point of view. They convinced him
that this place was on its way down, that the whole
administration was corrupt, so he resigned even before he took
over his office. He dropped the whole thing maybe two weeks
after he had accepted.
So Dixon, being desperate, had decided he was not going
to come back and be president of the campus or dean of the
campus, but rather asked Ewell Reagin to do that. Ewell Reagin
had been the associate academic dean, he had been asked by a
number of faculty and others to be a candidate in the dean's
search. He said no, I guess he preferred his role as academic
dean associate and he also felt he wasn't up to it. But he was
appointed dean by the president and then all hell broke loose
[during the strike] and the president fired him. He was a fall
guy really.
During Birenbaum's time, who essentially ran things while he
was in New York? Was there a dean of the college?
Well, we had at least a couple of designated deans [of
the college.] Erma Adams was for a year, she had been professor
of business. I think she was here for the year when we were
cutting all of the faculty, a quarter of the faculty. Almost
immediately afterwards she had a stroke and she died.
Eventually Frank Shea came, he had been a professor of
literature and then the president of a catholic college, he
was a an ex-priest. He was here as chancellor, that was our
new term instead of dean. He got into two severe conflicts with
the president. The first one was with Dixon, and resulted in
the firing of Dixon, and Birenbaum came. Then [Shea] got into
a conflict with Birenbaum, was not renewed at the end of his
three year contract, and within a year, had died of a heart
attack. So there were a lot of bodies, both physical and
spiritual, lying around. That's three of them, Ewell Reagin,
if you can take the destruction of his career, Erma Adams and
Frank Shea.
[These events] are very good evidence of the turbulence
of the place, and of the fact that it was impossible for faculty
or students to feel the place was well managed. These were people
who had both thrown their deepest interests into common lot
with us and had power, had some kind of authority, and ability
to carry it out. Frank Shea was trying to be a good leader of
what he understood to be the college's interests, feeling that
we had to have much more autonomy from the university than we
had. That brought him into conflict with the president, and
we won the first battle and got a new president, but we got
somebody who was as bad or worse, somebody who didn't even live
in Yellow Springs, who didn't even have his office on High
Street, but had it in New York. We lost the second battle over
autonomy.
Why do you think so many people stayed?
We used to be interviewed very frequently by all kinds
of publications, not just local publications, but national
publications. They were interested in the downfall of Antioch.
They would come up and ask me exactly that question, and not
only me, but almost all of the faculty. We all had complex
answers, but one element that was an almost universal element
in our answers, was that we still find it a fascinating place
to work, especially because of the students. Throughout we would
get students who were strong individualists, who would not take
our word as the final word, were self-motivated, had fascinating
backgrounds, who were at odds with the society, and were trying
to make it a better world. We liked that kind of stuff, that's
why we came here in the first place.
And that was enough to keep you here?
It was buttressed I think by the fact that many of us had
given up our contacts with professional organizations, and had
been concentrating all of our energies here. If we still had
professional interests, they were kind of dormant, they were
somewhat asleep.
How did the faculty-student relationships change after the
strike?
Well, during the strike, students were divided into at
least three camps: those who were strikers or with the strikers,
those who were highly critical ]of the
strike], and those who
seemed to be uninvolved. The latter two groups continued their
studies and the first group was starting the world-wide
revolution here in Yellow Springs.
You really think the strikers saw their role as being part of
a worldwide movement?
I think many of them did, there's no question in my mind
that they did. They got a lot of support from some faculty about
that. Well, it depended upon what kind of position you had as
a faculty member. People like me who were trying to carry on
their classes, who were critical of the strike, we had close
relationships with students who were also critical, and had
close relationships with students who were apolitical, who were
continuing their education. They were very alienated from the
strikers, in fear of them in some ways. Some faculty got beat
up who tried to enter their classrooms. I guess you know it
was a lockout, we couldn't use any of the facilities unless
we had the [strikers'] permission, and their permission only
went to those who were p.c, but nobody knew that phrase.
Would you say there was a lot of intimidation going on during
the strike?
Yes, a lot of distrust. I don't have a very clear
recollection of our ripple effect. It certainly must have
rippled, but I just don't have a very good recollection of it.
You might be interested to know, just as a little anecdote that
indicates how close some of the relationships were, one of the
three students that brought the [injunction] suit [that ended
the strike], Nate Bowles, has just recently invited me to come
down and give a talk to the bar association of which he is
president. That's kind of an illustration of how affections
that were developed during that period continue.
Do you think the divisions during the strike in some ways formed
closer alliances?
I think so. I have no idea how they continued on the other
side. My recollection is that there wasn't an awful lot of
bitterness on the part of the strikers toward faculty. Maybe
there was a sense of relief that we were back in the business
of education, we sort of pretended that maybe it hadn't happened.
Afterwards you mean?
Yes, say six months, a year afterwards, five years
afterwards. On the tenth anniversary, we had a meeting in
McGregor, a number of faculty got together to reminisce and
chart the events [of the strike]. Bill Houston was there, Hannah
Goldberg was there, Victor Garcia was there, I was there, Connie
Pelekoudas. We each gave our recollections of the events, tried
to talk a little about what it meant, and a guy stood up who
introduced himself and said, "I was one of those strikers."
He felt he was doing a very important thing, he just
happened to be wandering through, and [said] "Over the years
I have come to see that I have participated in the near
destruction of the college and come to regret it a great deal."
He came back about a year or two later and joined the admissions
staff and I think was the associate director or assistant
director, Ed Amrhein.
So, there was a willingness to recollect, to remember the strike?
We tried to rethink it, we tried to patch things up somewhat
there.
What about the strike's effect on administrative and faculty
relationships?
I think this is very important. Until about 1964 or 1965,
there had been a peculiarly harmonious relationship between
administration and faculty. Part of the evidence of this was
that most of the administrators had faculty status. They were
called administrative faculty, and then there were teaching
faculty [or] classroom faculty, and then there were co-op
faculty, and there were library faculty and so-on. Administrators
were [also] faculty.
Did they teach?
No, [but] they had faculty status. The idea was we all
had teaching roles, but we had somewhat specific kinds of
teaching roles. They were involved in the education process,
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educators. That had been cultivated for a period of ten or
fifteen, maybe twenty years by successive presidents.
Dixon carried that out, I think, quite well until about
1964 or 1965. At that time the idea of expanding the college
into what we now call the university, developing other centers,
began to take place. Morris Keeton, the academic dean, presided
over a study on the future of liberal arts colleges, and he
developed the theory that bad times were coming for colleges.
Those that were going to survive would be the ones that had
a strategy for coping with the problem of growth, and we were
to grow in a completely unique, Antiochian way. That was the
way the system or the university took place, taking education
other places. The strategy was we would not build buildings
or get involved in the high expense of residential programs,
[but] that cheap education could be delivered efficiently and
so on.
Now, as President Dixon began to buy into this for his
own ideological reasons, he felt that Antioch had a unique role
to play in the history of higher education in the United States
at this particular time. He was willing to gamble our resources.
As the president began to buy into the
[network], he began to
take a role that put him against a number of the faculty who
sensed that our resources were going to be squandered, and that
began the alienation or the splitting off of administration
from the faculty.
We began to resemble other colleges and other universities,
with a great degree of suspicion that worked in both directions.
Jim Dixon has been quoted a number of times, I think its probably
reliable to say, [he said] that the faculty was obstreperous
and terribly conservative about intellectual or educational
inventiveness,
pedagogically. And the faculty was highly
suspicious of him, feeling that he never told us the full truth
of where he was trying to lead us.
In 1966 or 1967, we had a three day marathon faculty meeting
on the library’s second floor for hours on end. We submitted
the president to interrogation and debated the future of the
college. If you want a really good recollection of what took
place there, talk to Barry Hollister, he presided over those
meetings. It was an attempt on the part of the faculty to get
control of the president, and if possible, to get him to resign.
From that moment on, probably long before that, the faculty
and the president felt they really couldn’t work together with
each other. Each was trying to destroy the other’s vision of
what the future ought to be.
So this alienation existed between faculty and administration…
And it’s lasted. There are a lot of faculty who will never
be able to view the administration as co-educators, [but think
that] their job is to administer. It’s kind of a mechanical
job as opposed to our really pedagogical job.
It’s hard for me to imagine administrators as co-educators who
don’t teach. It sounds really interesting, but I don’t get a
sense of what that meant.
Well, let me give you a specific illustration. Algo
Henderson, who was president after Arthur Morgan, helped to
develop administrative council. It had been started by Morgan
but [Henderson] helped to develop it, and part of his theory
was that the role of administrative council was not just to
advise the president but it was an educational role. Part of
the educational role was to educate all those who were members
of administrative council, faculty, students, and administrators,
as to how democracy works, so that they would understand each
other’s functions, and they would understand decision making
in a democratic society. It was real preparation for the outside
world. Also, the whole community would be educated, by either
being first-hand witness, or reading, or hearing about what
administrative council does.
I think the idea was that in all contacts that
administrators had with faculty or students, they were trying
to be a model for the way we work through difficult decisions,
having different values, different roles, responsibilities.
They had an educational role here, and it was really their
primary role. Their primary role was not to balance figures,
but to be a part of the total educational strategy. Antioch
is not just an institution, but educates students in the
classroom, the laboratory, the co-op experience of course, and
the total community. [Administrators] were members of the
community, community was defined in completely comprehensive
terms, except for the laborers, who never really got defined
as community members.
It sounds like the relationship between students and
administrators used to be quite different as well.
Yes, it was. In one other illustration, when I came in
1965 I was an assistant professor of philosophy and the college
pastor, and half my time was [spent] trying to help students
address deep, value concerns, that’s about the way I defined
religion. In 1965, all of a sudden LSD and mescaline were
discovered, and marijuana of course. There was the development
of the drug culture almost overnight on campus. It was an
automatic response on my part, to try to seize that interest
and turn it into an educational event as college pastor.
So what I did was look around to see who could help students
think through what drugs could mean in their lives. I said,
“Oh, the president,” in part because he was the president and
was extremely respected at that moment, but also because he
was a medical doctor, a very thoughtful and well-informed man.
So I asked him if he would invite students over to his house.
He invited them over for two evenings, we had about 50 students
who came over to his house and sat in the living room for two
or three hours talking about drugs in personal kinds of ways.
To me it seemed natural enough, and it seemed natural not
because I had seen it done at any other place, but because it
was part of the ethos of the place. He was an educator just
as clearly as I was an educator.
What about the changing attitudes toward student dissent or
criticism of the administration after the strike?
Well, anybody who was here and was not a part of the strike
and was not a sympathizer of the strike, saw [the strike] as
a defining event. If they had been confused about the dangers
of messianic ideologies, Utopian ideologies, they got clarity
about the dangers there. They understood that to take an idea
to its ultimate could endanger institutions and people’s lives.
They became very critical of Utopian ideology, critical I would
say, but not antagonistic. This has always been a place that’s
been open to dreamers, and it also made people critical about
Marxism. Marxism ruled the day here for eight or ten years,
a few years before, a few years after, but they understood that
Marxism was potentially very dangerous, because a Marxist
ideologist could, I didn’t say always would, divide people into
interest groups and have them fight out their interests in ways
that could be mutually destructive.
Connie Gahagan:
How do you think the strike has affected Antioch’s relationship
with Yellow Springs?
I don’t think Yellow Springs was affected by anything having
to do with Antioch until the great financial crisis [of 1979].
Then [our ears] perked up and everybody got nervous. But the
strike was all part of a ongoing political climate at Antioch
that everybody was used to. Of course, a lot of townspeople
were faculty people and friends and neighbors knew that that
was tough for them, but I don’t think that the town became
alarmed until Antioch threatened to possibly close down. Then
everybody had to re-evaluate their support of the school, what
it was going to mean for their property values and all that
kind of thing.
But before that, had people’s attitudes changed towards students
in town?
You know, it’s very hard to say because I was a student and
I feel that when you’re a student you aren’t recognized by town
people at all. It’s almost as though they’re looking straight
through you, they’re so used to transients that they don’t want
to get emotionally involved. It wasn’t until I walked into
Weaver’s carrying a baby that someone said, “Oh, How are
you?”
You know, I was acknowledged as a person. So it would be
impossible for me to say how people really felt during that
time. I think that the distinctions had been so clear that nobody
was particularly alarmed.
Distinctions?
Between what happens over there and what happens over here.
It’s not until many years later when the school was possibly
closing down that people got freaked. Because what did that
mean for our school system and that kind of thing if Antioch
really went under? And then there was conversation that maybe
Cedarville College was going to buy the campus and I remember
that rumor going through town. I think the town relies on Antioch
to a certain extent for some cultural and some political milieu.
But I don’t think the town is particularly involved with the
college.
Nor was it before?
Except that various individuals who lived here in town were
going through hell. Like Ewell Reagin. It was really sad what
happened to him. He had to step in and take over at a time when
no one was polite and no one was listening and he’s a very
polite, very nice man. And he was treated very badly.
By the school?
Well, by the students and I think.probably by the administration.
Really, he was fed to the dogs. He’s the prime one I can think
of during that time who was treated really shabbily by everyone.
And he was doing his best, he was always trying to listen to
people. I remember our meetings in the cafeteria were supposed
to be community meetings, and there was no community there,
it was just ugly. It was just, “Why aren’t you doing
this, why
aren’t you doing that?” and not even listening for a response
at all.
You were a student for two or three years following the strike.
How did things change afterwards for students on campus?
Well, some people transferred out and that was sad. It crossed
my mind, because we were paying a fair amount of money to go
to school and there weren’t always materials; there weren’t
even always professors. And I think just inertia kept me here,
fear of trying anything new. Of course, I had my friends, too,
that I cared about. I just think we felt like the last generation
of Antioch, that Antioch was still resting on its laurels from
the 30s, 40s,
50s…that nobody gave a damn what happened to
us in terms of quality of education. And yet in a way, it was
its own education. It was like, “Here’s your life, deal with
it.” I think college should be sort of a not particularly coddled
time, but it should be a little bit insulated, so you can study
hard or what ever. But when you’re worrying about “What will
I do for dinner tonight,” and you’re living kind of shabbily,
it’s too much real life at a time when you should be sort of
the ivory tower.
Students
survival?
were really worrying about that kind of day-to-day
? Because the college didn’t provide any reliability?
Yeah.
Do you think a lot of students were resentful of that?
I think people that were studying a particular thing that might
have disappeared [were]. I remember anthropology people at the
time, and their department disappeared. I remember engineering,
that department disappeared as well. And yeah, I think those
people probably do feel some resentment. But for most of us
it was playing at real life, it was all part of the show.
But was your studying affected by the fallout, or you program,
your interaction with your studies?
You know what suffered was not so much any one program as far
as my studying was concerned, but the overall lack of any type
of guidance whatsoever. There was always somebody assigned to
you, a faculty advisor or whatever. And there either wasn’t
time for that, or it wasn’t given priority, or whatever. But
when you’re investing as much as $40,000, somebody should say
to you somewhere along the line, “Well, what do you plan to
be when you grow up?, ” and I just didn’t get any of that. I
continue to feel some resentment about that. That we were the
last generation and of course people who always know what they
want to do… will get there. And there were a lot of determined
kids at Antioch, then and now; I just didn’t happen to be one
of them, so I was just kind of floating in college. That’s not
high quality.
How did you see relationships change between different groups
on campus because of the strike? For instance, between faculty
and students, administration and students, faculty and
administration…
Student on student, there was a lot of polarization. I remember
I was living in North Hall and when they took over the main
building, a lot of us went running downstairs and came outside,
like, “What’s going on?” And they said, “Either you’re with
us or you’re against us,” and they were like fascists, “Go back
to your room,” and they escorted you back to your room. In other
words, “We’re the politcos, we know what’s best for you, shut
up,” kind of thing. And “You’re welcome to come tomorrow to
a rally, or protest,” or whatever, “but we’re not going to spell
it out for you at this point.” So there was hostility between
students.
At the time there was still a lot of Black power, Black
is beautiful isolationism with Black students… They were under
a lot of pressure, like if a White girl was interested in a
Black boy, she was basically told to get lost and they were
under pressure themselves if they were seen talking. Strike
or not, that was still there.
Faculty and students, I think a lot of them became very
close, because faculty had to take kids into their homes to
teach them and everybody was struggling through the same
difficult time, and so I think that [relationship] actually
improved for a lot of people.
Student-administration, it got worse, because the big
honchos, I would say the board, and the president, they didn’t
really care about the Yellow Springs campus at that time. They
were really focused on, it seemed to me, taking their money
and spreading it elsewhere to all these satellite campuses.
Facutly-administration, I don’t know. [Faculty] were so
resentful, always. I think they were never paid well, they were
underappreciated. If you published a paper, it went unrecognized.
It may be a little better now, I understand the# pay is better,
and I do read the publications and they seem to be stroking
people that are out there doing things. But I think the
relationships between faculty and administration was bad the
whole time I was there, and it was bad as a faculty wife as
well.
What about faculty relationships with each other and not just
immediately after, but a few years down the road. How were they
affected?
Well, it’s like when you put a lot of rats in a cage. Too much
crowding, too much pressure, that was the situation then.
“There’s not enough money”, “I’ve got to get what I need to
run my program”, there was a certain amount of ugliness there.
But, maybe, and I can’t say this since I wasn’t on the faculty,
some of them grew closer too because they were going through
the same struggle. When everybody, years later, ended up in
the unemployment line down in Xenia, I’m sure they were feeling
for one another.
What about faculty and administration’s attitudes toward student
dissent? How was that affected in the years after the strike?
I’m trying to think what dissent there might have been. I can’t
think of any. Well, there was a lot of gay awareness, and a
lot of pressure for everyone to be bisexual. Antioch’s always
finding some new pressure to apply to you to make sure you’re
politically correct. There was an emerging need and desire for
women’s studies and I think sometimes people felt like they
were being told what the priorities were by a bunch of 18 year
olds. We had lot of these discussions. As a psychology student,
it seemed to me that people would say, “We don’t need to know
statistics, we need to know the psychology of gay women,” this
kind of thing. So I remember a lot of late-night discussions
with five or six other psychology students about what we should
do, what we shouldn’t do. There was just always an awful lot
of pressure.
It sounds like you’re saying there was a big drop-off in student
dissent after the strike.
Yeah, I can’t remember any big, organized thing at all. I would
just say [there was an] emerging, politically correct pressure
cooker, where you’re getting it from all over.
Less challenging of administrative practices and policies
directly?
Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I wasn’t really all that involved
with it, but it seemed to me that there was a lot of pressure
put on the administration to come up with a women’s studies
program when money was scarce and a lot of things like
engineering and anthropology weren’t even being offered. So,
I’d say there was still dissent, but not the whole campus
striking over something.
How do you think the strike affected the school’s commitment
to experimentation in education, innovative techniques, programs?
I think that the strike made the existence of the school so
precarious and for such a long time that everybody was walking
on eggshells. The news of that strike was national if not
international, and the effect was so devastating in terms of
kids applying that I have to think that everybody who had any
interest at all in graduating or teaching there or whatever
had to quiet up a little bit, pull together.
What about the school’s commitment to ethnic and economic
diversity in the student body, did that change? Not just in
terms of capability to do that, but also attitude towards having
it.
Well, before I got there, they had been so starry-eyed that
they’d actually gone to places like Detroit and walked around
the ghetto and said “Oh, well, you seem like a neat guy, how
about coming to this liberal arts college in Ohio and we’ll
foot the bill for you,” and I think what we learned from all
that was economic and racial diversity is fine, but we’re not
ever be the idealists we once were. I mean we got burned in
quite a few of these instances. In terms of economic, I was
a financial aid student. I never felt much support from the
school. It’s just not the kind of school you go to if you’re
financial aid and want an easy time of it.
What about the character of the student body. Do you think it
changed as a result of the strike?
Well, I do, as I say, remember people dropping out, trust running
out. Some people might have finished up a little earlier than
they would have otherwise. And then, after that, it was so grim
and there were so few people and so few people coming in, that
everybody who was there was like a survivor, and I don’t know
who came in. I think, from what I heard, there were a number
of wealthy parents who discovered that Antioch was a
copasthetic
place for their mentally troubled children to go, and they could
send them and it would be less expensive than a private mental
hospital, and their kid was at school at the same time. I
remember for years following the strike, the counseling services
at Antioch were way overworked, and there were a lot of burnouts
who were attending. And then, it kind of seemed to get sort
of preppy for a few years. And then, it just seemed to be Antioch
again. Kids who were interesting and knew what they wanted out
of life and mostly from New York Back to being itself, I think,
at this point.
What about the character of the academic program? How did it
change, other than reduction in innovation and that kind of
thing?
Well, as I say, I think it’s improved since the time I was there.
What about Antioch’s leadership? How do you think that was
affected?
Well, there simply wasn’t leadership until Guskin. I mean there
really wasn’t. And among other institutions, among higher
education, it lost status. And it hasn’t regained it. It’s doing
better, but…I’m on the Village Council here in town, and so
I do things like I recently visited Morris Bean Company, and
there was a new president there and I said, “How are you doing?
Is there anything the village can do for you?” And he said,
“in order for Morris Bean to survive, we need to get more
engineers in. And when I go out and try to recruit engineers
for our company, they say, ‘Oh, Yellow Springs, that’s where
Antioch is.'” And they seem to have mentioned to him any number
of times the [Sexual Offense Policy] where if you’re accused
of sexual assault, you have to leave, you can’t attend during
that time? And he feels that the reputation of Antioch is
negatively affecting his company, he can’t get people to come.
What about reputation and image, did you get a real clear sense
of the change during your years here, of the change in Antioch’s
reputation nationally?
When I came, I bought into this whole dream of it being a
community and all for one and this kind of very idealistic thing.
And I found out almost immediately that it wasn’t that way.
I think that for a while, and for a lot of the people that
continue to give money, they’re still looking at Antioch the
way it was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, maybe even, although [in] the
later 60s [it] was getting pretty rocky. I never experienced
what other people were talking about, this whole thing of when
you walked from one class to another, it was an unwritten rule
that you said “Hello” to everyone. Everybody greeted one another,
everybody made an effort like they do at Oberlin, I think it
is, where everybody keeps the campus clean, and all this kind
of cooperative stuff. But there’s only so long that this image
was out there of this being an idealistic place. And I think
it’s been gone for ten years. I think people see it now as just
another competitor in the small, liberal arts school market.
Probably the best thing it has going is the co-operative
[education] fact, and a lot of other schools have that as
well.
Do you think the strike had a lot to do with the change in image?
I certainly do. There was a lot of coverage. I mean, it was
in The New York Times, it seemed, weekly. And to what purpose?
I mean, no goddamn purpose? There were some kids there at the
time, I remember, being financial aid I worked in the cafeteria,
and they were just really almost out for their own glory. The
glory of the workers’ revolution. And they were inciting a
workforce that had basically been happy up until that point.
I remember hustling around the cafeteria picking up this or
going to clean that and people saying, “Hey, no, slow down,
don’t do anything unless somebody tells you to do it and do
it slowly,” and all this kind of stuff. The students I’m thinking
of went on to, whether they graduated or not I can’t say, but
they went on to work at places like Hobart and big factory shops
where they could organize workers and I remembered them talking
about how they were going to get ranch houses and big color
TVs and join the middle class and try to organize. Really, they
were just egomaniacs and they screwed up something that was
pretty good.
What about Antioch’s mission, do you think that was affected?
Both in terms of what Antioch was ideally and also in its ability
to attain that.
Yeah, I think if it wasn’t lost totally, it was lost by at least
80%. Because I think in the 40s, everybody understood that if
you were a poor kid, you could come to Antioch, you could work
hard, and you could become whatever you wanted to be. And it
didn’t matter if you were Black or White or male or female.
And that was really unique, after the war. Then it seemed to
be so quirkiiy insular that people wondered, “What the heck
are we about?” How we had a relation to this work-study ethic
at all. It seemed to be studying its own navel too much. I know
there have always been kids who graduated and have gone on to
go to South America and really help out a village and this kind
of really neat stuff. But I tend to think that it lost almost
all of its real common values. The Arthur Morgan philosophy
was just tarnished.
Why do think so?
I think instead of looking outward, they started looking inward
too damn much. To an unhealthy degree.
I wonder if you think there are any good, or positive effects
of the strike.
I think it was a complete waste of energy, complete waste of
money, complete waste of people and I really, really believe
that it all sprung out of the heads of,
well, I can really think
of one student, but let’s say a clique of maybe eight kids.
And the hell with them, that’s what I think, they really messed
up a pretty good place. Guskin, I don’t know what this place
would be without him, if he hadn’t come along. If we had one
more bad administrator who didn’t understand what the original
philosophy was, I just don’t think it would even exist.
Do you think the mission has been somewhat regained?
Yeah, because it needs to have a sort of base in practicality
to be Antioch. And that was always a real appealing part if
it, that you could be whoever you are, we’ll accept you, we
want you to be something of an idealist, a person who wants
to help others, and we want you to really study hard and at
the same time put it to practical use.
3
Virginia Garrett:
The typewriters had big gashes in them and the rolls were
strung out on the floor. We called IBM and they took all the
typewriters in. They took the best parts of one to fix the other
ones, we always referred to them as our strike typewriters.
And we had resumes completely destroyed that we had to ask
students to re-do. We pulled together what we could. Our records
person, her records were in the ceiling, whatever you call that
up there. Glass was broken and you picked up glass for months,
little bits and pieces had flown all over the place.
And we lost employers because we didn’t have students to
send, because after the strike, enrollment dropped. Somebody
did a survey on the drop in enrollment and it just went down
from ’73. And then ’73 tied right into ’79 with the pay-less
payday. So we had six years of “Are we gonna make it, are we
gonna make it?,” and then, when we went into to pick up our
check on May 17, 1979 there was no paycheck, but people worked
anyway, so we could graduate the students.
We worked ten years without an increase in pay. The staff
did get five cents in ’82 because we were so much lower than
the maintenance workers. We got that five cents. But that’s
all in a ten year period.
A lot of people would ask me, “Well, why did you stay?”
Well, because I had a lot of years in, I had five weeks vacation
and sick leave, and to start another job you’d have to start
all over, work a whole year with one week off, and then drive
20, 25 miles to work. Ten miles is enough far me with driving,
because I live in Springfield. I had two job offers with people
I knew and all I had to do was go and go to work. But I stuck
at Antioch because you hate to give up that much vacation after
you’ve been at a place for a while. I’ve been in the same
department, and I like working with the students, I liked what
I was doing.
I thought, “We’ll make it, we’ll make it,” and when
employers of the students would call, I would always give them
the pitch- “Oh, it’s not that bad.” I was scared, but I wouldn’t
let them feel that. Because then they [would say], “We don’t
want to take anybody”, and students [would say], “Oh, I don’t
know if I’m coming back if its shaky.” I said, “I’ll be here.”
I really didn’t know if I’d be here, but as far as I was
concerned I’d be here.
Why do you think other people have stayed?
I think other people stayed for some of the same reasons:
vacation, they had been here a long time, they didn’t want to
give up their benefits, and they felt like they’d ride it out
too. New people or self-supporting people did not stay because
they couldn’t afford to stay. My husband and I both work here,
so we both chose to stay for the same reasons. We had roots
and we could make it. When we went in to pick up a paycheck,
it wasn’t like we had to have it that day. Other people didn’t
because they lived from payday to payday.
We lost staff. We went from six-secretaries to two over
a period of time, because student enrollment just dropped so.
When I started here we had about 900 students on campus and
900 out working. That was a lot of work, that’s why we had six
secretaries and we had both floors in this building. We had
to take on more work [after the strike]. Instead of working
for two advisors, we now worked for three, and that was a period
of time when we didn’t have students to do the filing and stuff,
we did our own.
Do you think the people who stayed had a sense that they were
helping Antioch keep afloat?
Yes, because we even had people in maintenance that brought
their own lawnmowers in to cut the grass. A lot of things were
destroyed, not just our department, but buildings, plate glass,
my husband’s windshield, and all that stuff the college had
to pay for. They estimated $300,000 for physical damages.
Maintenance actually brought their own cleaning supplies in,
people who were stable and could suffer through and wait for
unemployment. During graduation, the maintenance people went
over and helped with the cooking, and serving the senior parents
and all. Everybody just worked everywhere and they weren’t
getting any money.
We did get paid for [the pay-less pay period] five years
later, we kept up with the time we put in, and we got paid over
that, all that unemployment didn’t give us. They paid us, we
were five years getting it, but we were back to work then.
Did things get better after ’79?
No, because after drawing unemployment and coming back
to work, people were laid off in summers. In co-op for instance,
we took turns with the layoff. There were three of us left after
the strike and we traded, like I would take the layoff one
summer, and one of the other secretaries would take the layoff
the next summer. So, everybody had a steady income every other
year, and then it finally got back to where we all worked the
whole year.
Has morale improved?
I think. Especially with the two people that I worked with
up here. I guess I was really lucky because the people I worked
with, we always kept our morale up. I think ours was higher
than in some of the other departments, because it was just the
type of people that I had to work with. Some of the faculty
departments weren’t as close to the workers or secretaries as
up here, because we were just like a family. We kept each other
going.
What was the morale like on the rest of the campus?
Real low.
Do you think people would have stayed if it wasn’t Antioch,
if it was another kind of place?
Antioch has a lot to do with it, because Antioch is a unique
place. I think in other places people would’ve left. Yes, there
was more loyalty than in any normal place. I think if it had
been a factory, or something like that, people wouldn’t have
stayed. Because it was Antioch, it was very different.
How do you think the student body has changed as a result of
the strike?
As far as students are concerned, I think they’re different.
I know they are from the students we had in ’73. I think students
now just take a different look at things, they don’t look at
the unions the same way. In ’73 there was the part-time
employment union. We have students now who support the union
or go through a fight like that, but not like they did in ’73.
I don’t think they would ever form a union, or get into anything
like that. They’re not as political as the students in
’73.
Has your interaction with students changed up here since that
time?
No, I don’t think mine has changed, because I’ve always
had this “over and beyond the call of duty” to students. To
me, this is what I’m here for, and I don’t think time or anything
would change the way I feel.
How has the co-op program changed as a result of the strike?
I think students are looking for different things now than
they did then. They’re looking for different types of jobs.
I think students then were more academic-oriented, and [only]
some are now. I think we have a different caliber of students
that are coming in now. We had a lot of problems back then,
because we had the New Directions program, which was a bummer,
it turned out to be.
What about Antioch’s commitment to economic and ethnic diversity,
do you think the strike has affected that?
I don’t think so. They just do it differently now.
What about the strike’s affect on the cohesion and/or unity
of different parts of the community?
I think it pulled together more [after the strike]. I think
it really pulled the students, and staff, and people together.
Because they needed to survive?
Yes.
What about the change in attitude among the different groups
towards each other. Do you think administrators viewed students
differently or vice versa?
Not in all cases. I know the workers, I don’t think it
changed their attitude. I think the president and administration,
it changed some things through there. It probably did at that
time, but see all those administrators are gone, and of course
the students are gone.
You don’t think Guskin is wary of something like a strike
whenever the students today demonstrate?
I don’t think he wants that. He doesn’t want a strike from
either students or staff, or workers. He doesn’t like upheaval.
He wants a non-adversarial place.
What about the affect of the Union strike of ’73. Did it have
a long term affect on the relationship between the administration
and staff?
We’ve had a lot of support from the administration and
faculty during strikes. It may not be everybody, but now when
something comes up, we get support. It’s surprising to me when
people say, “I’m on your side”, even right now. Not all of them,
but some.
What affect did the strike have on the faculty?
Well, of those that are still here, I think they all had
difference of opinion about the strike. Because they were real
down from the strike, and leading up to ’79, their morale was
shot too. A lot of them left.
And did their relationship with students change as a result?
I don’t think so, because a lot of them realized that
students had a legitimate gripe.
Even with all of the destruction of the strike?
Well, the destruction did [change their attitude], but
I think their attitude was toward the group of students that
did the destruction. Not everybody that was striking destroyed
things. It was just certain ones that were destructive. The
others were just supporting a cause, so to speak.
Do you think the strike changed the relationship between the
faculty and the administration?
Some of the faculty felt that the administration should
have been more [active] in trying to do something about the
financial aid business.
What about the reputation and image of Antioch, how did the
strike affect that?
It was damaging, very, very damaging. We would get all
kinds of calls: “Are you closing?”, “We expect that out of you”.
[Antioch] always had this reputation and it went down, and you
had to really convince employees. Students just didn’t come
here. We tried to, over the years, get it built back up, but
I still don’t think we’ve built it back up.
How long do you think it will take to get back to where we were?
Well, two years ago we said ten years. Probably after I’m
retired.
What about the strike’s affect on Antioch’s leadership. Do you
see any relationship there?
If it hadn’t happened, we would’ve gotten another president
[anyways], because there were things going on before the strike.
And then after the strike, what with ’79 and all, they had to
get rid of Birenbaum and bring in someone like Guskin. And Guskin
had to live in Yellow Springs, because the others lived out
in New York and weren’t too attached to the college. So one
of the requirements was that the president had to live in Yellow
Springs. But I think they would have had another president anyway
[after the strike].
Birenbaum, I don’t know what to say about him. He wasn’t
what Antioch needed, because we needed someone to try and pull
Antioch back up and Birenbaum wasn’t doing that. I think Guskin
is a whole different kind of person.
Do you think Guskin is succeeding in pulling Antioch together?
I think he is. He’s really trying and he’s done a lot since
he’s been here. I have faith that he’s doing all he can do,
not only to pull it back together but to keep it up, not to
let it go down again.
Do you think the school has changed since he’s been here?
Yes. We’ve sort of had to join the rest of the world a
little bit. We weren’t just Yellow Springs .
Sounds like the years after the strike made this place pretty
isolated.
Well, it’s always been a unique place, and everything was
always, “Oh, well, this Antioch, we’ll do what we want to.”
But you can’t always do what you want to, that’s what I mean
by join the rest of the world. You have to abide by things that
are going on outside your little haven. So, it’s changed, but
it’s still unique.
Do you think the Antioch mission has. changed?
I think they really tried to hang onto that. I don’t think
it has changed. I hope not.
Do you think we’ve been successful in holding onto it?
Of course generations change, and the students have changed.
We have a different caliber of students. As the rest of the
world changes, the students change, different attitudes. I think
people come to Antioch because of its uniqueness, and then we
have students that come for the co-op program. But when they
get here its too different for them, the whole atmosphere, its
not what they really want. I think we have more of that
[kind of student] now, then we did back then.
Do you think the strike has affected the quality of the kind
of education that Antioch offers?
I think it did at first, but we’ve had a lot of curriculum
changes, and we’ve built it back up. I think at first it tore
down because we didn’t have the faculty, and there was so much
money lost. I think we’re going back up. I know we are.
It’s been a long wait. Do you the strike had an effect on the
way the town and the college interacted?
I’m sure it did. The town’s always supported Antioch. I
think people’s attitude changed, especially in giving. We didn’t
have any money, and when people wanted to give, they wanted –
to use it for what they wanted to use it for. I know that this
happened a few times. People said, “No, I’m giving it for one
specific thing.” We really needed it for everything, and it
got so that people said, “Oh, I’m just not going to give
anymore.” I know we had a whole turnaround in giving when Guskin
came. People who didn’t give started giving again. I had people
call and say, “I have money to give. I want it to go to Antioch
and not the University.” When Guskin came, he assured people,
“This will go to Antioch college.” So that was a big change,
because we had people in the village that hadn’t given for years,
and then gave huge donations, and I actually know about that
because I saw it on paper. To me, Antioch is Yellow Springs,
and the village doesn’t want this place to close.
Do you think Antioch’s commitment to being different, to being
unique has changed as a result of the strike?
Probably a little bit, because I think they had to. But
I don’t think that’s total. When you lose that much money you
have to get away from the way you’ve been doing and do things
differently, to join the rest of the world.
Do you think the strike had any positive affects at all?
Yes, I think so, because students were striking for
financial aid and I think it made the college see the real needs
of students coming here. When I first came here the reputation
of the college was that it was a rich college, you had to have
a certain grade point average to get in, but financial aid
students had a need and [the strike] made [the college] see
this. Before, maybe it was overlooked.
Bill Houston?’
In terms of politics, it wasn’t like they were.jpJLcking the most
visible strikers [during the May 22, 1973 confrontationJ?
(Houston was one of seven faculty fired at this event).
I’m sure there were a lot of people they wanted”to get rid of
that didn’t get picked; I just don’t know, what J:helfr reasons,,
were. I would have thought they might have been:! reluctant to .,
pick Martin Murie and me because we weren’t generally perceived
as being as radical as some’of- the faculty members. Probably
it helped the other [fired] faculty, because we”had our personal
friends among the faculty that didnVt.. want to’see* us fired,
and it was hard to reinstate’us without reinstating everybody’
else. Just because we’d been here longer, and because as’
scientists we weren’t seen as being quite as radical, because •
radicalism wasn’t our., profession. I was’surprised, that they ‘
picked US. •.<"•,.•.. "•'"••; •••-..
Do you have any thoughts, .as to why they didn't pick more people?
It seemed as if, just from reading Reagin's- memo,1 that they .
would just say, "Okay, everybody here is fired or expelled..."
But they had to get.the names of everybody there and we probably
weren't going to sign^a list. They said they got the faculty
members that Ewell Re^gin recognized. Until now, I've at least
pretended to be objic^3%e, and talked about it in those terms.
I was personally very mu^h;iihyolved of course, and I felt that
what the admini.stration^was^"dping to the New Directions students
...I don't really khoto.what promises' they had made to; the New
Directions students,7in terms of what exactly was^written/down
on paper or said in words, but.I know that the general feeling
that was conveyed to these students was, "You come to Antioch
and we will guarantee to find the money for your education."
They were suddenly being told that they would have to leave,
or that they would have run up terrible debts.
Antioch was, and this was to
our credit I think, one of
the few schools that in our efforts to broaden the base of the
student body had deliberately gone to >poor areas. I would say
to the administration’s credit, I gather, because they were
basically the ones who made the decision. They went to ghettos,
Applaicha, to Native American reservations and so forth. They
encouraged the ^poorest of the poor to come here with the
guarantee, if nofcxt.an explicit guarantee, an implicit guarantee,
that we,would find-the money to help them out. These people
had already^,uilt up, a lot of them, huge debts. Maybe they
wouldn’t: seem^hiUge to a middle-class student, but to people
who came^’from^’the- -backgrounds they did these were just terrible
debts. If :.theyi;didn’t finish their education, and didn’t have
that degree, which they saw as helping them to get.a job, this
would make it ‘almost impossible to every ‘pay off these debts
they had already contracted. Then, telling them that, “If you
can stay at all, which we’re not sure you can, it will be a
lot higher debt rate, a lot more of this financial aid will
be loans rather than grants….” This just seemed to me a
terribly inhumane thing to say.
The administration hadn’t really thought of that possibility?
That the aid might run out?
They hadn’t thought of it, so that, to some extent maybe they
didn’t know how they were going to raise the extra money that
would be didn’t know how they were going to raise the extra
money that would be needed. They had just gone on the assumption
that the Federal Government would be a perpetual source of funds
for this. I thought they were obliged, even if it was necessary
to phase out the program, to phase it out at least so as to
protect those students who had been brought here under those
pretenses.
And did the [New Directions] actually have to leave?
A lot felt they had to leave. And actually, so many left that
the administration then had the money for those who were left
to more or less help them out. [The administration] had enough
money, it had to be divided among fewer students now because
so many left after the strike. After they lost the strike, they
felt they didn’t want to come back to Antioch. So, that sort
of solved the problem for the administration. Then the
administration did begin to phase out the program. Whether they
said or did or not, they in fact did. But this was something
which to me I felt they had no right to do.
I didn’t approve of some of the tactics which the strikers
used. It didn’t upset me terribly that they closed down the
campus, that seemed to be a reasonable strike action. But
firebombing the Dean of Students’ Office, some of the destruction
that went on in the Co-op Office the night before the strike
was ended, those things I didn’t support, didn’t approve of.
It seemed to me that what was happening, particularly the day
they had the big confrontation, (May 22, 1973), that seemed
to me that that was a situation where the students had to be
supported. It seemed to me that if we broke the strike, as it
seemed the administration was trying to do, and which they did,
that that would mean a real turn to the right for everything
at Antioch. I didn’t think that a strike winning would mean
a turn to the left, necessarily, but the breaking of it just
seemed to be a reactionary act.
I saw Antioch as a much less pleasant place to work after
the strike was broken. Now, of course, part of the reason why
it was less pleasant to work was the general deterioration that
had been caused by the fact that we couldn’t recruit students
for the following year, and so there were terrible financial
problems. It seemed to me that there was a change in the
atmosphere here.
A change in the atmosphere how?
It became a more repressive atmosphere on campus. “We had
broken the strike and we’ll do it again.” The faculty seemed
much less tolerant of dissent.
The administration as well?
I never had that much contact with the administration.
It seemed to go on the same old way it always had, far removed
from me. But I had day-to-day interaction with the faculty,
and there was less of an understanding, or less of an attempt
to understand [different] backgrounds, less tolerance for
dissent. I didn’t feel as much a part of the faculty for several
years after. I felt like I did my job, and I went home, and
that was it. I didn’t have anything like as much of a pleasant
interaction with most of the faculty.
Were there a lot of interpersonal as well as factional
resentments built up among different groups?
There was. Particularly a resentment of Mary Kaufman, she
was a Communist lawyer who was on the faculty here. Andy Winnick,
John McChesney.
Do you think a lot of this, the decreasing tolerance of dissent
and the lack of attempt to understand people from different
backgrounds, do you think that’s carried over?
Well, the composition of the faculty has changed so much
since then.
Or even carried over for the years [immediately] afterwards?
It carried over for several years. Also, another thing
which carried over, in dealing with Birenbaum, he had the
strength of weakness, that everybody was afraid to challenge
him. That if we did really challenge Birenbaum, refuse to go
along with the things that he was forcing on us, that it would
precipitate another strike of some sort, and that the College
would go under. And so, there tended to be a feeling that no
matter how bad he is, we have to go along with what he wants
to do because there was a feeling that he didn’t have the
responsibility to avoid a showdown that would ruin, would mean
the end of the College, and therefore we had better avoid it.
We, the faculty.
So, in other words, “Keep your mouth shut!”
Actually, not literally “Keep your mouth shut.” Everybody
talked about it terrible, but “Don’t take it beyond talk.”
Did students feel that way too? Was that sentiment extended
to the whole campus, that nobody better challenge anything?
I think the students were influenced a lot by the faculty,
so, yes. I think a result of the strike was there had been a
great deal of student independence of the faculty, but when
the strike was broken, many of the most radical, free-thinking
students had left. An awful lot of students left, across the
board, but more of [the left], and it made for a more docile
student body. The students, for the next year or two, who wanted
to come to Antioch tended not to be as radical as those who
came before. I didn’t see these as effects of the strike so
much as the affect of the fact that the strike was lost, and
that the administration won.
Did the administration ever own up to the fact that they had
treated New Directions students unfairly?
I can’t say that they ever did, no. I think they generally
said that they wished they had more money, and I think that’s
the truth. From the beginning they said they regretted the fact
that they weren’t going to be able to give the money to the
students, but its sort of like regretting that there aren’t
25 hours in a day. You can regret it, but they were implying
that they were doing the best they could.
They never said, “Oh, we planned it poorly.”
No, I never heard that. I’m sure that no one claims to
be infallible, or to never had made mistakes, but basically
they might have said, “Well, we made a little mistake here,
a little mistake there…” As far as I know, the administration
never said they had planned poorly, and they said they never
regretted the starting up of so many centers. They continued
to say that that was a good idea. This is something which
periodically happens at Antioch, which is that a new person
comes into a job, and he admits the mistakes of his
predecessors. But never their own, and always after it was too
late to do anything about it.
It kind of surprises and troubles me when I talk to a people
and they say that, “Well,
APIE, the Program for Interracial
Education worked great because that was based on particular
academic criteria and New Directions wasn’t, and that had a
lot to do with the strike. Back to attitudes towards economic
and cultural and social diversity, what do you think about the
affects there?
There are a couple of things that need to be said here.
One is that the Program for Interracial Education was troubled
from the very beginning. A white administrator was put in charge
of that, someone who sincerely believed in better education
for Black people, but was inevitably perceived and perhaps
inevitably was, somewhat paternalistic. I don’t think it was
particularly his fault. If I’d had the job, I would have done
many of the same sorts of things he did, been paternalistic
and been perceived that way. But it was the students in APIE
who insisted on taking control Of that program. And Dixon had
to give in on this, because [it was] clear that program couldn’t
continue as it was. Dixon just became so unpopular with the
Black students, with the students he was working with.
Dixon did ?
Dixon Bush, Dixon was his first name. There was Richard
Nixon, Jim Dixon, and Dixon Bush. [He] was the man named to
head APIE and he became extremely unpopular with the students.
I don’t think it was his fault, it was the faulty’of the
situation of the situation he was in. A white man heading up
a predominately Black program. It was like if I had been named
head of the Women’s Studies Program…
Sort of inevitable…
Right. And probably his values were different from those
of most of the students. The other big thing was, that there
were an awful lot of cultural differences between a lot of these
students, who came in from completely different kinds of
environments than most of the faculty. I grew up for the first
ten years of my life in a slum in Georgia, but I’d been away
from that for a long time. Not all of the faculty were from
upper-class backgrounds by any means, but in the process of
getting our Ph.D.’s and so forth, we had been educated away
from that . These were students who were coming in who were
just fresh from it. It was a valuable part of the education
of all of us at Antioch, but it wasn’t necessarily an easy or
pleasant kind of education to be told that some of our ways
of acting, just because they were middle-class, weren’t
necessarily the best, and they weren’t necessarily the way they
were going to do it.
The other big thing that happened, I don’t know who was
at fault in
this, apparently the administration of some of the
money that went to the New Directions program fell into the
hands of some gangster types.
There was a lot of misappropriation of funds.
There was misappropriation of funds, but there was also
the intimidation of students with guns, and things like that.
From other students?
Yes. All of this hearsay, but I heard it said so many times
that I believe it. I never personally had any interactions with
gangster types. Nobody ever threatened me in any way or I never
observed this first-hand.
There was a lot more crime on campus overall, wasn’t there?
Well, part of this, drugs. There was a lot of use of illegal
drugs, and not just pot, either. More dangerous illegal drugs,
and that inevitably brought crime. A lot of that was controlled
by the Mafia… the general feeling on campus was that some
of the dealers were tied into the Mafia. This wasn’t all New
Directions students, by any means. Drug use seemed to be across
the board.
By the counter culture students?
Some of it was thought to be that kind of thing. A lot
of the faculty blamed the New Directions program for this
crime.
And that was just an immediate reaction, without really knowing
who was doing what?
I think so. Two of the most widely people believed to have
the strongest crime connections on campus were New Directions
students. I’m sure there were many others among New Directions
students and non-New Directions besides the two.
How have the negative attitudes about New Directions affected
commitment towards diversity?
I think most of the faculty that had those feelings have
retired or died or gone somewhere else. I don’t think its as
strong and direct now. I don’t know to what extent Guskin is
influenced by it.
It doesn’t seem like we do have much commitment to economic
diversity.
We don’t have that much commitment to economic diversity.
Or ethnic diversity as much as we say we do, as much as a lot
of other more conservative colleges.
I think the College really would like more Black students,
more Black faculty and other kinds of diversity too. I think
the fact that we’re not putting more energy into that has to
do more with financial problems which may be vaguely connected
with the strike, but it’s been so long ago now that it’s hard
to know exactly how they are. I do think that there’s much more
willingness for ethnic diversity than there is for economic
or cultural diversity. Not cultural in the sense of whether
you listen to jazz or classical music; culture goes a little
deeper than that. I do think there’s the fear of getting in
the ghetto people, in theory of what culture they would be.
How do you think the strike has affected the faculty?
I think I see this attitude all over the country, and our
faculty are a little more liberal than the average American,
but we’re not insulated from the general meanness that’s in
this country right now.
It’s really interesting what you^said before about how the
conservative upswing really coincided with the downswing of
Antioch.
I think one of big effects of the strike was on faculty
attitudes, it scared an awful lot of the faculty, and made a
lot of people who had been vaguely in favor of student activism
and student action afraid that this was going to mean their
jobs, because there was a real feeling that Antioch might go
under as a result of the strikes.
You are aware that are two strikes involved. I don’t think
you can completely separate the strike of the two unions, the
part-time employee’s union and Local 767, U.E. I guess winter
quarter [of ’73] was the strike of the unions. And that was
the thing that began to really frighten the faculty. There was
some feeling that these people that are sort of below us on
the totem pole, below the faculty, the lower classes, were taking
things into their own hands. And there was a realization that
they had a lot less to lose than we did, because they didn’t
have as good a deal as the faculty did. There was a fear that
they could bring things down, and also
the fear that there was
a awful lot of student support for the U.E. strike and the
part-time employee union strike.
Did the union strike also include a lockout?
Yes and no. The U.E. did not institute a lockout, they
instituted picket lines which some of us observed. But the
part-time employee’s union, which was students, primarily caf
employees, students who worked part-time, both unions were
striking together… As part of that strike, they did chain
up Main Building. My recollection is that they didn’t close
the other buildings on campus.
That strike, like the student strike, was eventually won
by the Administration, eventually the union gave in. I believe
it is true that the U.E. sent one of their representatives here
to advise, to more or less put pressure on the local to settle,
because they were beginning to be afraid that the strike was
going to make Antioch go under, and that the national union
would get the blame for that.
The union was afraid of that, and so they compromised?
The national union, and so they encouraged the local union
to, it wasn’t so much compromise, it was pretty much giving
in and settling with the administration. Basically, the union
gave in. I think the part-time employees would have been more
inclined to hold out, but they realized that they couldn’t by
themselves and so they gave in too. This was the first time
the administration had really stood up against any kind of
student or worker protest.
This whole strike frightened the faculty very much. The
faculty was very much opposed to the Dixon Administration prior
to
this, and still was in a lot of ways, and so they were
reluctant to support the administration in any kind of strike.
They did then, and for the most part, the faculty did support
administration in the spring strike by the financial aid
students.
What about the union strike provoked the administration to take
a strong stand? What was so different about it?
A couple of things. Previously, the demands had been for
things like union recognition; [they] had not been for primarily
financial demands. They had been demands for greater student
control over the administration of certain funds, but they hadn’t
been for larger funds tc control. They had been [to change]
the nature of some of the exams which were required for
graduation, which were perceived by students as being culturally
biased. And these were things that the administration could
give in on without losing any money, which they maybe didn’t
have anyway. Some of the demands had cost money, but at that
time it was always easier for the administration to get more
money by just increasing the number of students on campus, and
that would increase the amount of tuition available and
everything would be fine. There had been lots of federal money
available for things like that.
In terms of special programs?
Special programs and in terms of student grants, so that
they could afford to take in students who themselves couldn’t
afford to pay the money the administration needed, but they
would financed by the federal government. The administration,
every time they had a financial problem, they would solve it
by taking another hundred students, and so the college would
grow.
And that didn’t create a problem?
They weren’t problems for the administration. I might make
it so there were too many people on campus, and it might make
problems for faculty in dealing with larger classes, and for
students dealing with larger classes, and for students in dealing
“with -larger-classes, but none of these were problems the
administration really saw that they had to face. If it made
the campus really overcrowded it might create tensions on campus,
and maybe some of the tension which caused the strike may have
been directly due to that sort of thing, but the administration
didn’t perceive themselves as feeling those pressures, so it
was easier for the administration to give in on issues like
that.
But there was no problem attracting another hundred students,
was there, as there might be now?
No, there hadn’t been. There was no trouble attracting
students, male students were exempt from the draft. So, there
was no trouble attracting to finance whatever needed to be
financed. Of course, for females it was different. But, the
administration could probably see several things coming. By
1972, it was beginning to be clear that the U.S. had lost the
war in Vietnam and they began to wind it down, and that would
mean there wouldn’t be the pressure on men to go to college
in order to keep out of the draft. It was beginning to be clear
that there were going fewer people in the college age in the
next few years, so there would be problems attracting students
that way.
Also, to a fairly large extent, the reputation of the
college was going down, partly due to the fact that they had
taken in so many students and it was so overcrowded. That was
making it harder to attract new students. All of these things
were conspiring to make it clear to the college that they
couldn’t finance things out of taking new students. The feeling
was that there was some limit, but that we could take as many
students as we wanted, that the only limit was to how many
students we could take care of in the dormitories and in the
classrooms and that sort of thing. People wanted to come to
Antioch.
Especially at that time, too, because is was seen as sort of
the Berkeley of the East Coast.
Yes, there was that too, that the students generally wanted
alternative kinds of education, and that was what we were
offering. I don’t think we realized that people in the age range
we attracted, that they were going to become more conservative
over the next few years. There were going to be fewer of them
and we were going to be less attractive, the draft wasn’t
pressuring them to come.
Also, I’m sure you are aware that the immediate thing that
provoked the strike itself, was the fact that the Nixon
administration was beginning to cut back on student aid. So,
even if we could attract students, unless they were rich, we
wouldn’t get any money out of them. If they didn’t have any
money, and if the Federal Government wouldn’t pay something
for them, attracting poor students wouldn’t solve any financial
problems. Attracting poor students had solved financial problems
in the past, because the Federal Government gave us the money
for them. Whether it was used for their educational needs or
for other needs of the college, whatever it was used for, it
was spent. It didn’t go into a backlog.
Your point being that Antioch
finances were tuition-based, one
way or another, either with poor or rich students.
Right. The administration didn’t ever explicitly say this,
but this was sort of in the background. “We have been awfully
good to you people. We have given you an awful lot of money
and so forth and now you’re biting the hand that feeds you.”
But the fact is that the students had been awfully good for
the administration. They had, even the students who hadn’t oaid
anything themselves, had brought the administration a lot of
money. It was almost the administration biting the hand that
fed it.
There was also the problem of the increasing number of
centers around the country, all of which were a drain on the
college. There were all sorts of fancy bookkeeping schemes which
were designed to show us that the Yellow Springs campus wasn’t
even paying its way and that we were being financed by the
others. Also, the central administration, they called it the
Network rather than the University then, the Network
administration was a terrible financial drain on everybody.
I know that later on, the Institute for the Study of Social
Problems was dissolved. What was the faculty’s attitude towards
the educational component of New Directions?
There were a lot of problems there. The faculty did support
the setting up of ISSP at the time it was set up. I don’t think
there was really faculty opposition to the idea that we needed
more study of social problems and more Black studies and Marxist
studies, things of that sort.
So there wasn’t an anti-leftist sentiment among the faculty?
There were individual faculty members certainly who were
antileftist, but the faculty as a whole, even those parts of
it that weren’t personally leftist, saw Marxism as a serious
academic discipline that needed study, that hadn’t had enough
study, and did not oppose the idea at that time of ISSP. Now,
later on, they saw ISSP as having supported the strike, most
faculty members affiliated with it had, and so later on they
turned against it after the strike. But, basically, although
there were faculty members who were opposed to it in the
beginning, I think it had a good solid majority of the faculty
supporting it. The feeling was that it was doing serious academic
work. There was some concern that that was done in a biased
way, but the feeling was that it was serious enough academic
work that that made it okay.
Do you think the dissolving of the Institute was mainly because
of the strike?
I think it was. Of course, it was some time later when
it was dissolved, if I’m not mistaken, about a year or two later.
And there also some faculty members that other faculty members
very much wanted to get, to get rid of after the strike. I don’t
think they particularly wanted to get rid if me, but I knew
there were some people they did, Most of them had been affiliated
with the ISSP, most of whom had been seen as ringleaders of
student discontent. Some of those people were people who were
very lukewarm in their support for the strike.
There’s a lot of mention in the Record directly after the strike
about the effort to eradicate the leftist politics on campus.
One other important effect, one positive effect the strike
had was that, prior to the strike, the Board of Trustees had
been one-hundred percent behind the administration. But one
of the big reasons the Board of Trustees supported the
administration was that they had seen student unrest all over
the country, causing major problems at schools, and Dixon had
managed to avoid such problems by twisting and turning and
double-dealing and whatever. There had been a closing down of
the campus during the, for example after the Jackson State and
Kent State killings, but that had been done with the cooperation
of the rest of the school, rather than against the
administration.
Jewell Graham:
Describe the first ten years after the strike of ’73 vis a vis
the physical, emotional, and spiritual climate of Antioch.
During the strike I was associate dean of the college,
during part of the strike. Connie Pelekoudas was associate dean
of the college too. Connie and I were both working in the dean’s
office, and the dean, who was the head of the campus, was Ewell
Reagin. But it was very strange, because during that time I
also went on sabbatical, and in the ten years afterwards, from
’75 to ’79, I was going to law school at the same time as I
was teaching. I was going to law school full time and teaching
full time, so everything is a little fuzzy. I think my memory
is especially dulled because I try to forget that period, because
it was so frantic for me personally.
I think people were depressed during those ten years, there
was a lot of Antioch bashing that took place, and part of the
reason we went into a downward spiral, because we did go into
a downward spiral, is that people convinced themselves that
we were in a downward spiral.
Up until ’73, this was a very heady place. There were lots
of applications from students, faculty found it a very desirable
place to work, there was the air of vitality about it, and the
feeling of being in the vanguard of experimentation in higher
education. I think the strike made us more conservative, and
we became more prone to try to do the thing most colleges and
universities did, rather than be as creative as we once were.
I may be wrong about that, but I just got the feeling that
[there] was a feeling of wanting to pull back, retreat from
being out on the forefront.
Wanting to pull back or having to pull back?
Probably both. I don’t know that we had to pull back. Now,
that was confused by the expansion [of the Antioch
network].
I can’t remember when Birenbaum came.
’76, ’77?
Was it ’77? Because we didn’t really start to pull back
from the expansion into the world and all these centers and
campuses until he came. So maybe we were still in the process
of expanding during those early years. The expansion, it was
a different kind of educational creativity, and a lot of people
were very unhappy about it.
Faculty?
A lot of faculty were very unhappy about the expansion.
The other thing that probably puts me at a handicap is that
I think I’ve always had a kind of marginal position on the
faculty, because faculties, not so much now, but they’re kind
of an old boy’s network. I was black and female and teaching
from a practice perspective, because I was teaching social work,
and then after law school, law, or law courses. I think the
practice perspective is a little different from the theoretical
perspective. The focus in most liberal arts colleges is on the
theoretical perspective. So that made me a little marginal too.
So, I was an observer more than a participant in a lot
of the feelings of the faculty. I wasn’t feeling a lot of the
anger and despair I think a lot of them were. I personally was
not feeling that.
The anger and despair concerning the strike?
Yes, and the impact it was having on student enrollment.
I do think the strike precipitated the decline in student
enrollment. It was very traumatic and a lot of students left
the college during the strike. There were a lot of them
participating in the strike, but a lot left, and a lot of those
who left did not come back. They either went off on co-op and
didn’t come back, or they transferred to other institutions,
but they didn’t come back. Some didn’t come back because of
the turmoil, but I think some didn’t come back because they
were disillusioned.
Were a lot of the students who left financial aid students?
That I don’t know. That would be interesting to know.
How different was it teaching after the strike?
I didn’t find it different at all. My classes weren’t
smaller even, because social work was very popular. And to me,
the students weren’t different from before, it was just that
there were fewer of them. You can imagine this place with three
or four times as many students running around. It just has a
different
feel.
Do you think the strike affected the character of the student
body, not just immediately, but over years?
I don’t know. The college had already made a commitment
to increase diversity, and I think they kept trying after that.
I think the “selectivity” of the college probably went down.
There was a time when we were turning away four or five students
for everyone who was accepted, and I think that went way, way,
way, way down. But I think a lot of the selectivity at Antioch
is self selection. I’ve always believed that students select
themselves for most colleges. It’s the word of mouth and what
students believe about a college that draws them to a college.
So, at least for a long time, what students continued to believe
about Antioch, drew the same kinds of students to Antioch. That
means they were very brash, and challenging, and articulate,
and bright. It’s just that we couldn’t turn away as many as
we turned away before.
The physical climate, we went into deferred maintenance
with the decline in student enrollment. That meant there was
less money and things got really run down. They’ve improved
since Alan Guskin has come. Some of it had to with the
destruction during the strike. My office was not vandalized,
but there was theft from my office. I had some reports and some
photographs and some slides that were lost. But in some parts
of the college there was real vandalism, destruction of furniture
and records. We had a dean of students then, he was a black
man who was writing a novel.
Carl Clark.
Carl Clark’s novel was destroyed, and he had worked for
years on it, and it was gone. He never forgave the students
for that I don’t think. I think the strike had a long term
negative influence on the college and I think it was probably
as much our reaction to the strike as much as the strike itself.
You think the reaction could have been different and [cause
things] to maybe turn out differently?
Might have, I don’t know. We fed on [the strike] for years.
Fed on it in terms of decreasing morale and depression?
Decreasing morale, and blaming everything bad that happened,
everything negative that happened in the college, on the strike.
What did it do to faculty relationships?
My impression is that it created some hostilities that
lasted a long time. Because there were a lot of faculty that
participated in the strike. Some of them were more enthusiastic
about the strike than the students.
What I have heard, that I really feel strongly about, is
that in the subsequent years, it seemed to me that the strike
was being blamed on the black students, and it was not the black
students. It was students on financial aid, both black and white,
and some of the faculty who were almost inciting to riot. Some
of the faculty were encouraging the students, and supporting
the students, and speaking for the students, and some manned
the picket lines with the students— not many, but I think one
or two did. So they became scapegoats for the strike. People
have long memories around here. They were blamed sometimes.
I don’t know whether they were blamed, but people resented and
disliked them for a long time.
Certain faculty?
Mmmm-hmmm
Is it mostly the ISSP [Institute for the Solution of Social
Problems] faculty that you’re talking about?
Some of the ISSP faculty but some of it was regular faculty,
tenure track faculty.
Was there a purge of leftist faculty?
After that? Well, some of the strongest leftist faculty
stayed around for a long time. Some of the ones who were at
least supportive, or at least didn’t work against the strike,
are still here. I know there were allegations of a purge, but
I don’t know that that’s true. What might be true is that [when]
people came up for contract renewal or tenure, the whole array
of factors worked against them. I don’t think it was possible
to say that it was just their political opinions. There were
some people who were very, very leftist who were around for
a long time. People have probably mentioned Andy Winnick, but
there were other people who were around for a while. There were
also allegations of a purge of women, some of those leftists
were women, and there was something that looked like a purge
of women, because a lot of the women who were outspoken, their
contracts were not renewed. So, I don’t know if that was the
political purge that people are talking about. I didn’t know
enough about it to characterize it as that, and I don’t know
what went into whatever it was that led those people to leave
the college.
John
Ronsheim said it was “only the obnoxious ones” that were
purged.
Well, Andy Winnick was about as obnoxious as you could
get, but he was around for a long time.
Do you think the hostilities between faculty have stuck?
I don’t think so, but people have long, long memories.
I know that when James Dixon, who was the president before
Birenbaum, came just a couple of years ago to his alumni reunion,
f
George Geiger refused to go to whatever it was [the college]
held for him. George Geiger, he probably has a list of people
who participated [in the
strike], but George will never forgive
Jim Dixon, and he’s been gone for a long time.
What about the change in the relationship between faculty and
administration?
That’s hard to characterize because the administration
changed. I think James Dixon had pretty much used up his
credibility by the time he left, and the faculty was active
in trying to get him dismissed from the presidency. Then
Birenbaum came and he was a disaster from most people’s
perspective, and so the relationship between him and the faculty
was bad. We haven’t really had a dean of faculty for any length
of time, I think since Boyd Alexander, who was dean when I first
came. Between the faculty and the higher reaches of the
administration, like the presidency, things never really got
good until Alan Guskin came and I think that’s probably getting
holes now.
Did you come before Dixon or during Dixon?
During Dixon.
And [the faculty-administration relationship] was pretty good
for a while, wasn’t it, before the expansion? [Dixon] was pretty
well liked.
Oh, he was loved. He used to go in the student dormitories
and read [” Winnie the] Pooh” to the students. His door was
always open to students, he loved students, loved talking to
students. He was a medical professional and he had certain ideas
about experimentation in higher education. He was an idea person,
a very creative person, but I don’t think he was an
administrator.
When the invasion of Vietnam, or the bombing of Cambodia,
its terrible that I don’t remember what it was, but on all the
campuses in the country, there were a lot of strikes. So when
the students here started talking about striking, the faculty
and the administration, everybody joined in the strike. There
couldn’t be a strike against the administration because the
president was down there talking to students about their
concerns. I remember a couple of other students traveling through
and they stopped and went to these meetings, and there were
faculty and administrators, the president was there, and [they]
said “Who are you striking against? How can you strike, who
are going to strike against?” Because most of the students were
striking against the administration in some of the other
colleges.
But then [Dixon’s] relationships with the faculty started
to deteriorate. Part of that I think was [that] he was so popular
with the students that he drove a wedge between the students
and the faculty. At least that’s what some people have said.
Did the relationship between students and faculty change?
Afterwards? Students change so, every couple of years you
have a new generation of students. I think the relationship
between the faculty and the students regained its former
strength, but I don’t know whether I can remember enough to
characterize any kinds of changes in the relationships between
faculty and students.
Two questions regarding administration. One, do you think the
role of administrators has changed, or how they see their role?
I think during the Dixon years administrators saw their
role as initiating curricular innovations and social change,
more than just administering. They saw themselves as leaders.
I think Birenbaum saw himself as an educational leader, but
nobody else did. They didn’t and they never accorded him that
kind of recognition. I think the administration saw its
responsibility as trying to keep the place operating.
There were some very tough years. You’ve heard about the
years we went to the unemployment line. See that blue slip over
there? That’s my unemployment slip. That’s my application for
unemployment. I think the [Birenbaum administration] saw their
job as keeping the place open and going. We owned a lot of these
houses that you see around here (in Yellow
Springs], that they
used to use as faculty houses. [Birenbaum] sold those. He sold
the golf course, the playing fields to the village. He would’ve
sold Glen [Helen], I think, except that he couldn’t. But
Birenbaum lived in New York City, and spent lots and lots of
money traveling back and forth and having an office in New York.
Nobody that I know of, at least on the faculty, or in the
community, had a lot of love or respect for him.
What about Guskin? How do you think he sees his role?
What he articulates at least, is that he sees his role
to help the college grow. I think when he first came it was
restoring it to past glory, but I think realism has set in and
he sees it as building a strong liberal arts college, smaller
than the one we think about for past glory.
Do you think his focus is less as an educator and more as a
manager?
Right now its more as an administrator or manager probably,
but I think he would like to see himself as an educational
leader. But you have to work with the faculty to be an
educational leader in an institution, you just can’t be a leader
all by yourself.
What about attitude among administration and faculty toward
student dissent or student criticism? Has that changed and how
is it related to the strike?
Has it changed? I think students just don’t do that very
much now. Students now are remarkably docile compared to the
students back in those days. There were some arrogant students,
I tell you, back then. I mean, really arrogant students. My
impression is that the faculty, by in large, encourage students
to question and criticize, to go to the demonstrations in
Washington, but I think their support would be a lot less for
something really drastic like a strike. I don’t think there’d
be any support for that. People left with raw nerves about that.
What about administration?
I think that’s the one thing that’s more frightening than
probably anything else, for the administration, a recurrence
of something like that. Because they are acutely aware of and
sensitive to the long range impact.
I always wonder if, when something like the food service protest
happened last spring, if [the strike] is on the minds of the
administration.
I think so. If I were an administrator, that would be in
the back of my mind. Because the press still loves that kind
of happening at Antioch. We don’t get a lot of good press, but
if anything like that happens, if we had a strike, we would
be in the paper. We can create an international, cross-cultural
program, and do all sorts of wonderful things and we won’t get
much press for it, but let us have a strike and they will be
ready to bury us.
Quick way to get famous.
Quick way to get dead.
Speaking of this, what about the reputation and image of Antioch.
How was that affected by the strike?
Its surprising, because for a long time there didn’t seem
to much impact on the reputation outside of the college. People
still had the same perceptions of the college, [that it was]
a place where you have radical students, where you have a lot
of political activity, and educational innovation all over the
place, and that perception gradually changed. I think it changed
in part because we didn’t manage some of the grants we got very
well. We used to get a lot of grants, from the government, from
foundations. At least my perception is that we got quite a few.
But we didn’t spend the money on what it was supposed to be
spent on. I think we lost the reputation in some circles as
an innovative institution. But I think there are people out
there who still think, “Oh, boy, that’s a really forward looking
place.” But I think it affected the reputation. I see a fair
amount about Oberlin in the press nowadays. Antioch was seen
as a really educationally innovative place. It was widely known.
And that’s changed?
I think so. I think not to the extent that people here
think it so. But I also think it was gradual, even though we
had the strike and all the bad effects of the strike. Because
I was doing a lot of traveling, I’d go to a lot of conferences
and meetings, and people would say, “Oh, Antioch! What are you
doing
now?”
What about the difference in the commitment to innovation?
I think [the strike] made us a little less courageous,
that we really didn’t want to be that different, we didn’t want
any bad publicity, we didn’t want to be weird anymore.
Again, I’m wondering if this is because we had to due to economic
factors or that we just got scared.
I think we got scared, but there’s debate about that.
Because some people feel we would have been better off to be
really innovative and to stay out there on the cutting edge,
and that would’ve injected some vitality, that would’ve
maintained the character of Antioch, the old Antioch, and that
in itself might have reversed the downward spiral. Then there
are people who believed we had to pull back to attract the
students and faculty that we did have. Who knows.
How did the quality of the education change?
That’s hard for me to talk about. I’ve heard a lot of people
say the quality of education declined. In my own personal
experience I did not see that, and I don’t know how one judges
that. But we had the same faculty and they were teaching their
hearts out, we had lively students. I think one thing that
happened is there wasn’t money, and faculty didn’t get out to
go to meetings and conferences, and they began to shrink back
from national visibility, mostly because of money. I think that
probably had an impact on the way faculty felt about itself,
because it became more isolated from colleagues, but I cannot
speak to whether or not it changed the quality of education.
It didn’t for me.
In some ways it sounds like the faculty were working harder.
They were working very hard. Salaries were not going up.
They were working very hard for not very much money, and it
was the faculty working at reduced salaries that kept the place
open actually, for all those years. And we still sent a high
percentage of students to graduate school.
Do you think the faculty’s commitment has been acknowledged?
Oh, yes, I think so. I think in the beginning, when Alan
Guskin first came, there was an inordinate amount of attention
paid to new faculty, and he talked about building the faculty,
about increasing the faculty, which made the faculty who had
hung around for a long time feel very bad, resentful. But he’s
changed that over the past few years. I don’t think it matters
that much to new faculty, they don’t have that history, they
don’t worry about that. [Guskin] realizes now the contribution
that the old faculty made. In fact, last year or the year before,
I think he paid more attention to the faculty of full professors,
and most of the people who are full professors are the ones
who were here during those years. So I think he recognizes their
value now.
Why do you think people stayed?
I don’t know, I’ve often wondered. Of course some people
said they stayed because they couldn’t find any other
jobs,
but I don’t think that’s true, because a lot of people did leave.
Probably there were some who stayed because they didn’t have
anywhere else to go, but I think most of the people stayed
because they cared. They cared very deeply about Antioch and
it was more than just a job to them. It was an institution and
a culture that had to stay alive, and they would do whatever
they could to assure that.
Why did you stay?
Well, I think it’s probably a combination. I believe deeply
in Antioch. I don’t work for money. I mean, I like money, I
like to get paid. But if I worked for money, I would’ve been
gone a long time ago, I could’ve gotten a much better income.
That was part of it, and part of it was just convenience: my
husband works here, my children were in school here, I went
to law school while I was working here, I like Yellow Springs,
I didn’t want to move from Yellow Springs, I didn’t want to
commute anyplace else to work, I enjoyed my job, I enjoyed the
students. It may have crossed my mind once or twice that maybe
I should think about alternatives, but I never seriously
entertained the notion of leaving. But see, I was in a favorable
position because I have a husband who works, we were a two-income
family, and we could survive. Some people couldn’t.
Do you think the people who stayed were conscious of keeping
Antioch alive, that this was somehow a mission?
Oh, yes, I think they knew what they were doing, I think
we knew what we were doing. But one thing is that people seem
to forget is that its the faculty and the students who are the
center of the college or university. You can’t have a college
without students, that’s the reason for having it to begin with.
And you can’t have it without the faculty, because its that
relationship between the faculty and the students and the
teaching-learning process that is the central mission. And
administrators are people to help make sure that relationship
goes on. But administrators come and go, and people who have
been here a long time have seen many administrators come and
go. I have seen three presidents, and that’s not counting the
acting presidents in-between. I can’t even remember the names
of all the deans, the deans of faculty, or the deans of students
even. There have been so many people who have gone through the
business office and Michelle Genthon’s office, that if my life
depended on it, I couldn’t name all of them. But the faculty
and the students go on. There are changes, there are changes
in the students every few years, and there are changes in the
faculty, but there is a kind of continuity of these people who
feel the responsibility for what it is that goes on in the
educational process. I really believe that.
What did the strike do to the cohesion of community?
I think it was very negative for a long time. Because I
think people didn’t trust one another, didn’t want to talk with
each other. Evervbodv kind of retreated into their own lives,
their own teaching, were dedicated to teaching, but doing their
bit, not worrying about what other people did, or what the
institution was doing.
Did it break up the unity among faculty too?
Well, let’s not say unity, let’s say collegiality. I think
so. Although that’s hard for me to judge because I wasn’t really
a part of that collegiality before the strike, I don’t think.
Maybe other people think I was and I’m overplaying that. [But]
I didn’t start teaching until 1969. From 1964 until 1969 I was
in a special program. I was working as an administrator and
a counselor, and then in 1969, it was only a couple of years
after that that the strike happened. I didn’t have to take sides.
You were working in the counseling center?
No, it was a special program called the Antioch Program
for Interracial Education, and there were three or four of us
who were responsible in that program for the administration
and counseling, financial aid, admissions, everything.
What about the commitment to maintaining plurality of the student
body?
I think the college has tried. Now, that wasn’t a result
of the strike, but things that happened long before the strike,
starting back in 1940 with Jessie Treichler and Coretta King
and Higgenbctthum and that crew. Then, during the 60’s there
was a lot of involvement here in civil rights. You’ve heard
about that, people went to Mississippi with voter registration
on co-op, and some students spent their co-ops in jail during
the anti-Vietnam War protests. It was that fervor of the civil
rights movement that made the college look at itself and see
that it was deficient in its inclusion of, not just black
students, but also students below a certain socioeconomic level.
So they started trying to change that in the mid 60s. Since
then, we’ve maintained at least a philosophical commitment to
[diversity].
So you don’t think people’s attitudes have changed about it,
just the ability to realize it?
One thing that I don’t know about, because I’ve never been
privy to any discussion like this, I told you I had this feeling
for a long time that people were blaming black students for
the strike, so I think there might have been some trepidation
about having too many black students on campus. But that’s just
a feeling, I have no evidence for that.
Or students from a certain class?
That’s right, students from a certain class.
Well, I did
hear people talk about students from a certain class, but black
4-
students from a certain class, not white students from a certain
class. But I don’t think it decreased the theoretical,
philosophical commitment to diversity and pluralism, but maybe
its a narrow class definition of what that would be.
People I’ve interviewed have talked about an unwanted culture
being here.
There were lower class black students and lower class white
students here. But, its not unwanted culture, what it was really
was that they had some students who were, and we’ve had them
ever since actually, just unsocialized. Its not the culture.
They were ruthless. There were students who stole, sold drugs,
and we still have people like that around.
No matter what background.
That’s right, that’s right. But they were visible and we
created them because people allowed themselves to be intimidated
by them. They’d ask for money, loans, that people knew they
weren’t going to pay back. The institution made it possible
for them to behave the way they did. And then we blamed them
for it after they did it.
Why do you think this happened?
Why was the institution intimidated by it? White guilt.
Some of it may have been real fear because some of these were
tough
kids, but I think most if it was white guilt. So I think
the strike has altered our commitment to lower class students
of all stripes.
What about the mission of Antioch, not just our ideals but our
ability to realize them.
I think the strike now is retreating too far into the past.
I guess it was the faculty who proposed it originally, this
task force on the curriculum that was organized three or four
years ago, and the task force started with a discussion on the
mission of the college. I think the mission as it is now
articulated, is partly out of the experience of old faculty,
there are quite a old faculty on that task force. But in reality,
the mission of the college is being created now by new faculty
and new students, different students. There aren’t many of the
old,
[pre-strike] faculty left around to have much impact on
the college now. I think there’s a transition going on in the
curriculum changing from what we old ones perceived it to be,
to something that the new ones are creating. I don’t know what
its going to be yet.
What about the strike’s affect on the relationship between the
town and the college?
I think for a long time there was a decreasing impact of
the college on the community. I like to say that I’m basically
a townie, but I don’t know if I can continue to say that or
not. I grew up in Springfield and I lived here without working
here for seven years as a townie. I was in the League of Women
Voters and the human relations counsel, the this and the that,
and had two children at home. So my identity as a townie, and
my husband worked at Vernay’s, was set before I came to Antioch,
and I have a feeling about the town that developed before.
It seemed to me that the college was more important in
the life of the village early on, than it was during this period
after the strike.
[Then], there was probably not that much energy
to put out into the town. As far as I know, there’s never been
tension between the town and the college, the [two] have gotten
along
well. People in the college are active in the town, the
college always opens its activities to the town, and people
in the town like students by in large. They don’t always
understand them, but they like them. I don’t know how the
students think about people in the town, but over some of those
years we made real efforts to connect townspeople and students.
People would have a group of students over for dinner,
townspeople, not alumni or anything, just people trying to get
to know one another better. I think the town felt sorry for
the college, and the village government bought the [golf course]
property with an option for the college to repurchase it after
a certain period of time. It was a loan actually, with the
playing fields as security. I think the college has had less
impact on the town because its smaller. There are fewer faculty
living in the town because there are fewer faculty, and there
are fewer students. The students used to live in the town when
there were 2400 students and a thousand here at a time, and
there wasn’t enough room on campus for them. One year they had
so many students they were pitching tents till they found room
for students.
And some students were sleeping in the common room. [The
administration] thought there would be students who wouldn’t
come and more came than they thought. Students used to live
in town in these expensive places, people were gouging students
with high rents. So there was a lot more interchange, interaction
between the students and the town then, than now.
Do you think the strike had any positive affects?
I can’t think of any. Maybe you can count as a positive
affect that we would be very wary of letting anything like that
happen again… I don’t think it was very positive that we had
to scrounge, because we got used to scrounging, and for a long
time we didn’t know how to ask for the things we needed. We
didn’t learn that again until the new faculty came. We said,
“Oh, you can get that!” We got used to living on this bare,
subsistence level. I think there are lessons to be learned as
to what not to do, and what not to allow to happen, but I don’t
see that as particularly positive.
Do you think that it could happen again?
I think its a totally different era, and I think students
are different, and I think there wouldn’t be faculty supporting
and encouraging [something like the
strike].
Kenneth Olson:
I wasn’t walking in picket lines or those kinds of things,
nor was I a party to the people who brought an end to [the
strike] and went to court. My opinions at the time were fairly
divided as far as where I stood. Clearly, to me, the
administration had made a lot of mistakes in terms of making
commitments to people I felt they should have lived up to, but
it was not at all clear to me that the action of the strike
would have any desired affect on making a change, that it would
deal with those problems. [The strike] seemed, even as it was
going, that it was going to make those problems worse by the
amount of damage being done to the campus. Here was a place
that was in trouble because of limited resources to begin with,
that overextended itself to people, that made commitments to
people that it couldn’t keep because of poor financial
management. There was enough damage being done by students to
the campus that it was clear it was going to tax the resources
that were there. So I wasn’t that an active strike supporter
in the sense of “This is a good idea for us to be doing.”
At the same time, you’re kind of empowered. Students feel
like they had a measure of control over things that I think
we were all experimenting with at the time. When I came to
Antioch in the summer of 1970, and up through that quarter in
’73, I don’t think I was on campus at any time there wasn’t
some kind of strike going on. There was always something. The
first quarter I was here there was a part-time workers union
strike, so the cafeteria was all closed down. Well, “Where am
I going to eat?” and those kinds of problems. In one sense,
the strike [of ’73] is difficult to ascertain because all the
strikes sort of flowed together and the problems sort of flowed
together. It’s hard for me, in retrospect, to remember whether
a specific incident was an incident that happened during that
strike or during some other kind of confrontation.
Do you think people are false in their assumptions that the
strike of ’73 was the culminating force that led the college
in a downward spiral?
I think it was an era of events that culminated in that
one event, and that one event accelerated things dramatically.
When I came in the summer of 1970, there were on the order of
about a thousand students on each div, so we’re looking at a
total enrollment of about two thousand students. In my memory,
there was a gradual decline in enrollment between then and the
strike. People were leaving because of problems, but it was
precipitous. During and after that quarter [of the ’73 strike],
people left in droves. Half the people I knew on campus
transferred, or dropped out, or otherwise left within the year.
A lot of other people would’ve left, had they not felt
like, “God, I don’t know whether my courses are going to
transfer if I try to transfer someplace else. I’ve been here
for three years. I’ve got so many credits, if I have problems
transferring those credits, then I’m going to end up a freshman
someplace else. I will have thrown the money down the tubes,
so I’ll try to stick it out as long as I can in hopes that the
place will still be around.”
You stayed until ’75. What was it like in the two years after
the strike until your graduation? How different was it to be
a student at Antioch?
The students of my era that were here then, at least most
of my friends, we pretty much divorced ourselves from the
university. We were done. We were here from that point on. not
to so much^rexperience the university in what it had to offer,
but to meet our own personal goals: “I want to get a degree
and I want to go to grad school.” The next step was coming up.
So we lived off campus and stayed off campus. I had very little
to do, after that, with the politics of the campus.
I think there was a sense of total frustration, not only
with the college administration, but also with the political
forces that had brought on the strike. I felt like I didn’t
really have much to identify with in either group. I hate to
characterize people as strikers or non-strikers, because some
of the people who were involved in organizing the strike and
concerned about the issues were genuinely committed, real good
people trying to do the right thing. [But] it was also clear
that a tremendous number of people also involved with it were
really, despite their protestations to the contrary, in it for
the thrill of it. I think [the latter] were involved in a lot
of the destruction that took place on campus, those people were
a real destructive force to the university, those people
alienated an awful lot of the rest of us.
So, I became very politically apathetic when it came to
Antioch. My vision of Antioch that I had when I came, that it
was going to be this wonderful place where we all shared similar
kinds of values and things that were important to us, that a
lot of the rest of the world had difficulty with, was put to
death during that strike. A belief that the college
administration would have a vision, and a capability to carry
out the vision, was shattered. There may have been a vision,
but there was no capability to carry it out, and not even the
vaguest understanding of what it would take to carry it out.
Jim Dixon had a tremendous vision, he was a tremendous
innovator, a real terrific idea guy, but he didn’t have a clue
as how to finance it. Or if you made commitments to students…
The standard routine of the college was then to admit somebody
and say, “Here’s a year of education and you would never
otherwise have gotten
this.” If people thought what they were
getting was four or five years of education, and it was unspoken,
I think they had every reason to believe they were being offered
a deal that they could expect to be ongoing. Then [Dixon] would
come up with some new plan a couple of years later, and the
financial resources would go to the new plan.
The people who were here had thought they had a scholarship,
that they had some kind of support in aid, [now felt] the money
would suddenly evaporate, and people were in danger of not being
able to come back, even though they had put in two years here.
I was a financial aid student and there was never a year
in my five years here that [my aid] didn’t get cut. It wasn’t
because my family’s income was going through the roof, it was
because that was what Antioch did. Antioch enticed people in
with a reasonably good offer of aid, and then, as they progressed
through college, cut more and more and more and more. It’s not
clear to me that that was something done with a lot of intent,
but I think it was done without much planning. The people making
the financial decisions were much more interested in being on
the cutting edge and exploring something new, than following
through with a program they’d already put in place.
Do you think a lot of other students experienced disillusionment
with Antioch after the strike?
Oh, yes. That was the common sentiment. It’s very tough
to characterize your own experience at Antioch as being
characteristic of somebody else’s experience at Antioch, because
everybody’s experience was so different. What div you were on
made a huge difference. There was a running characterization
of the early 70s that one div was the political div and the
other div was the love, peace and happiness div. In one div
everybody did a lot of drugs and had a good time, and in the
other div there was always a strike. So depending on where you
were at a given point in time, whether you were on one div or
another, whether or not you went to co-op in Boston or TOpeka,
really made a big difference in how people experienced the whole
thing.
It’s very funny, I come across people very often that were
at Antioch at the same time I was there and I’ve never heard
of them, and they’ve heard of me. It was possible then, it
happened all the time. I came to Antioch with a very close friend
of mine from Massachusetts and we
came on opposite divs even
though we had both come to look at the school together. I entered
in the summer, he entered in the fall, and we didn’t see each
other for two and a half years, our paths virtually never
crossed. But that was fairly common.
What was it like on campus in the years before you graduated
physically, the climate in terms of morale, and the emotional
climate?
Over the five years that I was a student, there was a huge
deterioration in the physical plant. When I came I had a
financial aid job and I worked for maintenance mowing lawns,
and there was a big maintenance crew. There was a large group
of full-time of maintenance employees here all the time, and
a group of students that worked in maintenance, and the grass
got cut all the time, and the bushes got trimmed, and the place
looked pretty sharp. By the time I left, the effects of the
cutbacks in those areas were apparent in the way that the campus
appeared, in the way buildings appeared and were maintained.
When I came there were four squash courts in great shape,
everything looked terrific, there wfere full-time maintenance
people in the gym, and by the time I left the floor in one of
the gyms had completely buckled. One of the squash courts was
essentially, permanently shut down because of the water damage
from leaking roofs.
You saw that everywhere, in the dormitories to the
classrooms, to the quality of the equipment in the science
building. I had this co-op in Baltimore where I was working
in a lab, and I was just amazed at the equipment. It was a well-
equipped lab, but it stood out as a point of contrast to me
to Antioch where I realized just how bad, how outdated the
equipment was.
But it was deteriorating over time.
That’s my impression. It seemed that there were less and
less resources, it was always a question of “what’s there” in
the way of resources, and they seemed to get less as affiliated
organizations fell off. As Antioch’s relationship with the Fels
Institute fell off, as Antioch’s relationship with Kettering
Labs fell off, there were real losses, in terms of faculty that
had been teaching at Antioch and working at Fels.
Some very top people in psychology for instance, were
bringing in grants to their associated organizations, were
bringing students from their classroom. I was psych major, and
I spent a lot of time in the Fels Institute as an assistant
to one of my professors. He was doing research over there and
I would go over there with him, have access to all this hotshit
equipment. Those relationships fell off, as the college was
divorcing itself from them because of this or that or the other
reason, some kind of financial arrangement they didn’t want
to be involved in anymore.
For instance, the staff from Kettering Labs used to love
to come over and play volleyball and handball, and they’d always
been allowed to do that without buying CG passes. Money got
tight and somebody said, “Hey, I’m paying money to be a CG
member, and that’s because I like to use the gym, and these
people from Kettering come over here and use it any time they
want. That doesn’t make any sense to me, so let’s make them
pay CG fees.” [Kettering] had gone out of their way for the
college in a lot of ways and they felt like, “Well, screw you.”
What about the emotional mood of the campus, how do you think
the strike affected that?
It made everybody depressed that the administration could
not be moved. The kind of idealism a lot of us had had, was
lost in all that. Most of us had come to Antioch with this notion
that if we could just get the right people together in a big
group, we could make a really alternative kind of system work.
Some of that was our own naivete about what really works and
what doesn’t, and any time you come face to face with your own
naivete, it gets depressing. It’s hard to swallow and there’s
a real temptation to say, “Well, if I can’t have everything
my way, I give up and I’m just going to get apathetic.”
I think there was a lot of cynicism and sarcasm both towards
the administration and towards the heavy political types on
campus too.
What about the changes in the relationships between different
groups on campus? Did you see the strike affecting the way in
which faculty related to one another?
Whether or not a faculty member was politically active
was important to another faculty member who was politically
active, and vice versa. Faculty who were not politically active,
who were interested in their areas of academic study, felt very
threatened by events which threatened their jobs. A lot of them
left. A lot of them said, “My job is in danger, I’ve got to
think about my family and whether or not I can provide for them.”
At the time as a student, I felt like, “Well, they should
be committed to the political aims being identified as being
morally correct.” I think I was fairly blind to the fact that
these people, despite what their political agenda might be,
also had family responsibilities they didn’t care to risk. They
needed some kind of feeling of job security.
There was a moral problem for me too. I was working in
the psych department with various psych professors and we had
a bunch of animals over in the basement of McGregor, and the
building was locked up [during the strike]. The people who had
locked the building up said, “No, nobody can go in and feed
the animals,” a lot of whom were animals who had problems, who
had some kind of surgery. That was my first taste of, “Hey,
wait a minute. I’m not sure the ends justify the means.”
[The strike] was not espousing the kind of values I had
or expected people to have. “Okay, I understand we’ve got
problems here, that there may be some
justification for some
sort of strike action.” But there were a lot of things there
was no justification for. There was no justification for things
getting slashed and trashed, for trying to keep people out of
the psych lab and keep people from feeding the animals. That
made me not very sympathetic [to the strike].
Did all the animals die?
I know that one of my professors found a way in, he could
break into McGregor and he was doing that for a while. I don’t
recall whether he got them out, or whether he continued to
maintain them by going in. There were ways to get into almost
every building. I knew people at the gym, I got in the gym fairly
frequently during the strike, despite the fact that it was
padlocked.
But it was a pretty intimidating atmosphere nevertheless.
It was a very intimidating atmosphere. I knew people who
were spotted coming out of a building, who were chased by people
on the Dicket line with a lot of threats of
ohvsical harm. It
was a very, very scary time.
My most vivid strike recollection was the day the injunction
was served. I was living out of town in an old farm house and
I drove into town coming in Polecat Road, I was driving in that
way and where the driveway goes into Whitehall farm, it’s a
long driveway that goes back into Whitehall farm, disappears
under the railroad, has to be a quarter of a mile. There were
police cars, from what I could see, and as far as I could see,
there were police cars, two in a row. There had to be a hundred
and twenty police cars lined up there, clearly from all kinds
of counties. I realized that it was a very dangerous time, that
very dangerous things could happen.
A friend of mine at the time was walking with Russ Bradley,
he was the Greene County sheriff who served the injunction,
and this friend was a student who was involved in a lot of
paralegal stuff, so he had spent some time talking to the
sheriff. At one point, Bradley turned to my friend and said,
“I don’t know if I can control my officers. I hope you people
will understand how scary it is for these
cops, because we know
there are guns here, and we don’t know that somebody’s not going
to lean out of the window, or walk on campus and shoot somebody.
If that happens, I can’t promise what my officers are going
to do.”
It put the cops in a somewhat different perspective, to
have me realize the cops were just as scared as we were. I knew
he was right, there were guns around, and some people had them
who were scary people.
It was a frightening time, there were a lot of times I
would not have been willing to speak my mind about what was
going on. The person you were speaking to might become violent.
A guy I know who had been here in the counseling department
in the late 60s, around the time that college was recruiting
inner city black
kids, and some kids whose histories had been
fairly violent, who had grown up in violent circumstances, he
described it as, “You got these white kids from New Jersey and
their idea of an argument, is that you escalate, and you
escalate, and finally, at the top end of the argument, you call
somebody a ‘motherfucker’. You were taking those kids, and
putting them in a conflict situation with other kids, who were
from inner city ghettos, who started at ‘motherfucker’ and went
from there.” Those situations were very difficult to resolve.
New Directions students felt they had been assaulted by
the university and justifiably so. I had a number of close
friends who were New Directions students, who really felt like
the rug had been pulled out from under them. They felt a
tremendous amount of resentment towards the administration and
a fair amount of resentment towards students who didn’t support
them, that didn’t seem to understand that this was very real
to them. For New Directions students, this was the only way
many of them were going to get a college education. Their
financial circumstances were such that simply a full-tuition
ride with room and board was not going to do it. They needed
some of the other aspects of the program, like traveling
expenses, and books, and those kinds of things they were very
unlikely to get someplace else. In a sense, their education
was being taken away from them, they had every right to be very
angry about that. For them to listen to some student from Gross
Point say
“Well, you’re denying me my education,” when that
kid had all sorts of opportunities available, they had a real
problem with that. It affected some relationships between
students.
Whatabout the strike’s affect on maintaining that diversity
of the student body. Did it change Antioch’s commitment to ethnic
and economic diversity?
The college remained as committed to that as they could
be. I really don’t fault the administration for not trying hard
enough after that, because they have to operate within the
financial reality. Their mistake had been to overestimate their
ability to operate outside of it. They committed to too many
people, and what they needed to do was to commit to fewer people,
but be able to keep those commitments. My impression was that
[commitment to diversity] was followed with a certain amount
of good faith.
What about relationships between faculty and students, how did
those change as a result of the strike?
All I can really speak to are my own relationships with
faculty. I think it was during that time that I began to
understand faculty as humans, rather than as some sort of symbol
of authority. It’s very tough for me to say whether that was
just a function of my own growth and development, that at that
point in my life I was becoming an adult and beginning to
understand that these people had other responsibilities besides
just teaching in a university, or how much of that was a function
of the strike. I tend to think of it in more personal terms,
rather than having the strike have a big impact on that for
me personally.
I got into faculty’s homes more, because during the strike
you couldn’t have classes on campus, but you couldn’t meet off
campus, so we met in faculty’s apartments. That was
personalizing, sort of “We’re all in this together” for those
of us that were still trying to have classes.
But you didn’t see any general patterns of change in this
relationship?
No, the faculty who were interested in doing its work and
were alienated from the faculty that were heavily politically
involved, were just as alienated. I suppose they were maybe
more alienated afterwards than before, but they were pretty
alienated before.
The faculty didn’t resent the students because of the strike?
No, the faculty didn’t. Even the most anti-strike faculty
-tUa-t “T kiMUUj they ^i/ftjutf- always liXe individual students that
may have been active in the strike, but I never felt they blamed
them. They blamed the administration. The faculty felt the
administration let things get way out of hand.
How did that relationship change, between faculty and
administration?
I don’t think the faculty trusted the administration after
that. The really serious financial problems didn’t hit until
probably two years post the strike, I can’t recall exactly,
[but] there was a period of time when nobody got paid. A lot
of people who had been around for a long time, who had put up
with a tremendous amount of strife, who had gone for a long
time without seeing any kind of reasonable compensation system
in effect, went a long time without raises, went a long time
without changes in benefits and things like that. There was
a crisis in the faculty’s faith in the administration to deal
with the problems that were at hand.
Do you think that’s continued?
My perception of Guskin’s coming on board has been that
there was considerably more optimism from the faculty on his
arrival, and in his first year, than I had [seen] here since
since the early 70s. Not that there was much optimism then,
the level of belief was higher, but it was falling off at that
point. It’s funny living in town and yet not having so much
to do with the place.
How observant or close to Antioch have you been since your
graduation?
I feel pretty much out of touch. I catch things and I can
kind of smell the wind a little bit, but I don’t feel like I’m
right in there with it. A lot of things go on that I don’t find
out about until a lot later. It’s almost like [Antioch] was
so overpowering and did so much control my life for a long time,
that once I was away from it, [I said], “That’s okay, you just
go on over there.”
You’ve lived in town ever since?
Yes.
What about the relationship between students and the
administration?
The flavor that I get is that there’s a lot of
disenchantment among students now with [the administration],
but I don’t know quite what to make of that, because the kinds
of things I hear as the cause of this disenchantment are the
same kinds of things that caused…. To do what students want
now, may end up with the same kinds of problems that happened
in the early 70s. If you say “We’ve’just got to be more socially
responsible and get more students in here who are coming from
diverse social backgrounds, diverse economic backgrounds.” Well,
those are really laudable goals, but what’s the plan, how are
you going to do that, how are you going to attract enough paying
customers to subsidize the rest of this?
It’s very funny, college students are on the one hand,
the world’s most mistreated consumers. Where else do you spend
so much money and get treated so badly? If you operated a car
dealership the way that universities operate, where you’ve got
to stand in line for two hours to give them a check for ten
thousand dollars, your car dealership would not stay in business
for very long.
Students are purchasing a service, and it’s a
very expensive service, and I don’t think they are treated the
way that people who purchase expensive services are usually
treated.
That’s the one side. The other side is that the
responsibilities have got to be on students to offer alternatives
if there are things that they don’t like. If you don’t like
the way the economic structure of a college works, how do you
solve it? What is the economic structure that is going to work,
because while its very expensive to attend the college, its
very expensive to run a college too. Buildings and faculty and
all the things colleges are responsible for, and that contribute
to the quality of your education, cost money, and lots of it.
What about that relationship between administrators and students
in your years at Antioch after the strike?
I just don’t think we ever trusted anybody. When I came
we did. Jim Dixon, for a number of years, gave a speech to every
entering class, and the “fishbowl” speech was the famous speech.
The last entering class he spoke to was mine in the summer of
’70. He went on for about forty five minutes about Antioch as
an oxroast, “You can’t cook the whole roast at one time, you
gotta turn the thing, and there are seven sides to the ox and
this side was the…” It was complete bullshit but at the time
it was wonderful. I was grinning ear to ear, “Antioch the
oxroast, the metaphysical man is up there, he’s running the
show, I can’t believe it, this place has got to be great.” That
was pretty much all I could think about at the time and it was
only about an hour later when we were sitting around talking
and somebody was like, “What did he
say?” I didn’t have a clue,
I had no idea what this man was saying, or what implications
this had for program, or policy, or direction, or whatever.
But he was very charismatic, and the charisma was something
I bought into. This all sounded good to me, he could come out
and start talking about the New Directions program and it sounded
terrific and we bought it. I bought it. But what hadn’t been
thought through was “How are you gonna pay for that?” By the
time the network rolled around, I was less inclined to believe
that it was going to work, but it still sounded like educational
innovation to me, and anything that sounded innovative I was
generally supportive of at that time. I said, “Well, why not,
it’s going to take the education to the folks instead of bringing
the folks to the education, that sounds good.” But that was
an extraordinary drain on the financial resources, it was not
well planned.
So was there a gradual decline among students in trusting the
administration?
And finally to a point of essentially no trust. It was
the era of Richard Nixon, we didn’t really believe in much of
anybody who had any sort of power as somebody who could be
trusted to follow through with plans or ideals.
What about the change in attitude among administration and
faculty towards student dissent? Did that change as a result
of the strike?
It’s a little hard to speak globally about that. I think
that if there was a shift in attitude, it was towards a
limitation of [dissent], that like any value, it’s bound to
conflict with some other values. While I never heard anybody
abandon the notion that students have the right to dissent,
what I heard after was that the right to dissent cannot supersede
all other rights, can’t supersede people’s rights to fair
treatment, can’t supersede their rights to receive an education,
to receive a number of other rights. Prior to the strike, the
right to dissent was so revered that it had to supersede all
other rights, and after that, the faculty said “No. There is
a right to dissent, but it does not and cannot be presumed to
supersede all other rights.” Before that people may have felt
that, but because of the social climate, were reluctant to say
it, or if they did say it, they were sort of drummed out of
the corps. That was not something that was acceptable at Antioch,
to say, “No, there are limits to the right to dissent.”
Would you say that the students’ distrust of the administration
was accelerated or solidified by the strike?
By that point, it was solidified no matter which side you
were on. If you thought the administration
should’ve taken more
dramatic action sooner, you were pissed that the administration
didn’t do something about it, didn’t deal with the problem,
and either go to court and bring in the troops to open the
college back up again, or somehow stand up to the student
dissent.
The administration was damned if they did and damned if
they didn’t. I’m glad I wasn’t an administrator then. Poor Ewell
Reagin got a very bad rap on the whole thing, he just happened
to be the person in the wrong place at the wrong time, to take
a tremendous amount of heat for decisions he’d had no control
over, things set in place long before he was called in as a
figurehead.
If you felt the administration had made commitments to
people they should’ve kept, you didn’t trust them. If you felt
they should have taken some kind of action, after all it was
their responsibility to administer the college, it was, “Well,
we’re just going to sit back and wait for this thing to end.”
The resolution that took place when the college was
re-opened, the same resolution was available to everybody two
months prior to that. They could’ve done the same thing months
earlier and saved a tremendous amount of grief and loss. There
were real questions about whether or not [the administration]
was negotiating in good faith. So no matter which side of the
fence you sat on, it seemed like the administration was doing
a bad job. In a sense, it would have been better if they had
taken either position.
But they weren’t taking any?
None that was clear to me, and so nobody liked them.
What about the change in commitment towards innovation and
experimentation in education?
The ability to innovate is always at least partly related
to the ability to be financially viable. How are you going to
start a new program if you don’t have enough money to finance
the programs you already have? What’s the core of an Antioch
education? I don’t even know what the curriculum says that is
now.
When I was there, the core of an Antioch education had
to do with a certain amount of job experience in terms of co-ops,
a certain amount of credits in social science areas, humanities
areas, and physical science areas. This was what everybody who
came out of Antioch, no matter what they did, were going to
experience. And then there are some other intangible things
that people who came out of Antioch were also going to have,
which were probably even more central, this notion of just
blasting here and there, to be on campus three months, then
in Boston three months, then back here for six months, then
in Chicago for three months, then back here for three months,
then in Baltimore, constantly moving. In the first three years
at Antioch I could carry everything I owned, because I had to.
You have to be able to pick up everything you own and walk
through an airport and then live out of that for three months,
a duffel bag, and a suitcase, and a guitar, and a typewriter.
That experience was central to being at Antioch. You’ve
got to be able to fund that, you’ve got to be able to have those
central experiences solid, which means you’ve got to be able
to have a solid co-op program that has advisors, and available
jobs, and people who can match people up with jobs, that’s got
to be working. You’ve got to have a curriculum that exposes
people to a commonality of a body of knowledge. In order to
be innovative you got to have that, and I think they’ve had
to, due to money pressures, work very hard just to keep the
core together, to keep the core from disintegrating. In that
sense, it’s affected their ability to innovate.
One of the factors for me choosing Antioch was its creative
innovation. I wanted to be someplace that was innovative in
the way that it looked at education. I was not particularly
concerned about what would happen to me afterwards, whether
or not I would be in a position to step onto Wall Street and
make a lot of money.
It’s interesting that the conservative political climate of
the country has paralleled the decline of Antioch. But the
decline has been because of other reasons as well.
All those things interrelate. If your enrollment drops
off because of a changing political climate in the country,
then there’s less money available, and fewer programs that would
attract students.
And having people leave in droves because of something like
this strike accelerates that even further?
I think that’s pretty much exactly what my overall analysis
would be, that [the strike] accelerated the curve of [enrollment]
in Yellow Springs, and other things accelerated that curve too.
The network and the financial mismanagement of earlier
administrations caused a tremendous number of people who had
graduated around the time I graduated to never give a dime.
What students today may not be aware of is that that’s what
Al Guskin brought back, he brought back alumni who started giving
money back to the school.
I’m certainly not someone who’s made a lot of money, but
I can tell you that his return to Antioch resulted in the first
check I wrote to Antioch ever, as an alumni contribution. Because
for the first time I really felt like “Maybe this won’t get
thrown away. Maybe somebody will have some sense of how to manage
the
money.”
During part of the Birenbaum era, you couldn’t give money
that would go to the Yellow Springs campus. You could only give
money to the university, and then Birenbaum would spend it on
his office in New York. And a lot of people said, “No, I’m not
doing that.”
What gave you that sense about Guskin? Did he seem to have a
clearer vision?
None of this was first hand, but the flavor that I was
getting back from the people I knew that had some contact with
him, was that he had the courage to stand up to some Antioch
sacred
cows. He had established a set of goals and priorities
that I understood to place the rejuvenation of the faculty
as being a real primary goal. But even in doing that, he was
probably going to face a lot of faculty heat. He was going to,
for instance, try to get some quality people in and pay them,
because that’s what it takes to get quality faculty in, despite
the fact that it would cause a lot of resentment among the
faculty who had been here through a lot of hard times, and who
would not be making the same kind of money. Who would say, “But
I’ve been here through all the hard times, I’ve stuck by you.
How can you now get somebody from the outside and pay them more
than me?” That was going to be an attitude a lot of faculty
were going to have, but for him to stand up to that and say,
“No, I think its critical to get some really good people in
here, and the only way we’re going to do that is to pay them,
and we can’t afford to wait ’till I gradually build salaries
back up. Let’s get some really good people in here, they will
presumably attract some more students and some more positive
stuff in, then our second priority can be to rebuild current
faculty salaries,” I thought that was a gutsy plan. I have no
idea whether he came close to doing that or even tried to that,
but it was a plan.
Antioch has had too many
“Well, let’s try this plan,” and
you sort of stick your foot out there, and the minute six people
jump on it you say, “Oh, okay, no we won’t do that plan, we’ll
try this plan over there,” and you end up plan-less.
Do you think the role of administration has changed to a large
degree since the strike, because of the strike?
If by the role of the administration you mean their
priorities, then I think it has, it’s had to. It’s necessary
at a place like Antioch, to have somebody who can articulate
a vision and yet has a plan to go with that vision. We’ve had
visionaries and we’ve had some planners. I don’t know many people
who have been head of the college who have been visionaries
and planners. We may have not had one yet.
I think Guskin will be in trouble, if he’s not already,
if something doesn’t happen within a year or so, if there’s
not a real dramatic upturn in enrollment in the next eighteen
months. I think the trustees will lose some patience with him
and try somebody else. I wouldn’t want his job. I think its
a tremendously difficult position for anybody to be in.
What about the character of the student body? Have you seen
that change after the strike?
I think it was a more diverse student body than it is now.
By that, I might not mean the same thing some students might
think I mean. I was teaching for a while as an adjunct over
at UD and I think if you had gone into one of my classes at
UD and pulled a random ten students out and brought them to
Antioch it would be much more difficult for those ten students
to get along at Antioch today, than it would have been in
1972.
My impression is that the social pressure of political
correctness at Antioch is much higher now than it was then.
It was a lot then. But in that sense it was more diverse then,
there were students then who wore make-up. Maybe I’m wrong,
maybe I’m misjudging the students of today at the college, but
I think it’d be tough now.
What do you think about that? Would it be difficult for
some Catholic kids from UD to go to Antioch?
I think there could be a lot more diversity at Antioch in terms
of ideology, a lot more acceptance of other views. But I don’t
have any way of gauging in terms of then and now, because my
perceptions of “then” are kind of mythical and probably not
very accurate. But actually, I’m wondering if the New Directions
brought a more conservative element to the campus because they
did want some real skills and wanted a real standard
education
in some ways, whether they weren’t as interested in
experimenting.
That’s true. Believe me, you never saw a New Directions
student in “They Myth of Reality and Experience of
Consciousness,” or something like that, some class where you’d
go in and they’d show weird movies, a weird hippie class. They
were much more likely to be found in science classes, or business
classes, much more traditional education. They wanted an
education, that’s what they were here for, and a lot of kids
who had been exposed to the best in education who were here,
What about the quality of students, do you think that’s changed?
My impression, for what it’s worth, was that I came at
a time that [Antioch] was very difficult to get into, it was
very selective. I had a number of friends who had applied, very
bright people in my view, who were rejected. Antioch said no
to my brother who applied in ’66. I watched that change.
By
1975, if you could find the door and had the dollars,
you were going to get accepted. It became so hard pressed for
students, that you feel like you’re not going to have an academic
level admissions requirement.
It does seem to me that if you were going to design the
school of your dreams, you’d want to be able to be selective,
you’d want to be able to say “Well, what do I want here. I want
some people who are very creative thinkers, so I’m going to
look through these applications and I’m going to find the six
best creative thinkers in this whole group. And I want some
people who have had a lot of success educationally, because
they’ll help generate a value of studying hard and working hard,
so I’m going to pick six kids who have got great grades. I want
some people with some artistic ability…” But I don’t think
that you can get the best quality unless you’re being selective.
It sort of rubs me the wrong way to hear myself saying
that one person is somehow better than another person. My own
educational experience has been that it’s been at least as
important who the other students were in the class, as who the
professor was. You can take a seminar from the most brilliant
person in the world, and if the other members of the seminar
can’t express themselves verbally very well to discuss fine
points, make coherent presentations when its their turn to make
a presentation, you lose a tremendous amount. The quality of
the school suffers if you’re just forced to admit everybody
who wants to be admitted. You run this risk of becoming a real
homogeneous group.
What about the quality of the academic program, has that changed?
I’ve got to say it suffered just on the basis of looking
at the number of faculty. How many people are there in the
psychology department?
Three.
Three? There had to be at least eight when I came in ’70.
If the process of going through college has something to do
with choosing an area of study and finding a mentor in that
area, and I think it does, it’s hard to find a fit if you’ve
only got a couple to three people to choose from.
If you’ve only got three people in a department of
psychology, chances are very good that one of them is a
researcher that studies perception and is real interested in
the retina, and maybe another one has a clinical interest,
probably a specialty, maybe eating disorders, and the third
one may be somebody who’s interested in learning theory.
Well,
that’s terrific if those happen to be the things that you’re
interested in, but if you’ve got a real fire about clinical
work that has to do with schizophrenics, the clinician whose
focus is eating disorders, they’re going to be all right for
you, but only to a certain point.
I think colleges have got to be big enough to be able to
support a large enough faculty to have more diversity in
individual areas. You can take any department and make the same
argument, whether its geology or biology. I just don’t see how
you can keep up the level of quality when you’re reducing the
size of the faculty.
What do you think the strike did to the reputation and image
of the college?
The local reputation here, there was always this Southwest
Ohio notion of the college being a place of weirdos and crazy
people, and [the strike] just confirmed it for them. The local
take on the whole situation might be the most accurate one,
“These people are shooting themselves in the foot again!”
In terms of national reputation, it went to hell on a sled.
This was a place that had an extraordinary national reputation
going into the late 60s. I would start the period of decline
as being ’68-69. Before that, people’s heads turned around when
you said [Antioch] in far away places. It was considered a
competitive place, you had to be real bright, or real creative
in order to be here, and it had these various faculty who had
national and international reputations. I don’t know what to
compare it to today, but that was the reputation. You’ll still
find people who don’t know about the decline, who will still
have that impression every once in a while.
I’ve had people who graduated around the same time as I
did, who have said to me in the past three or four years, “I
don’t think I could recommend it to somebody. What would I say
to somebody who came to me and said,
‘My kid’s thinking about
going to Antioch. You went there and you know something about
the place, do you think that’s a good idea?'” People who went
here saying, “I don’t know if I can, in good conscience, say
that that’s a worthwhile investment.” That impression has been
changing in the past two years somewhat, it’s not quite that
bad. But those are among the people who supposedly would know,
the alumni. You’d think that that would be a source of support
and that alumni would be encouraging [prospectives] to go.
What about the relationship between the town and the college,
how do you see that changing?
When I was a student, I thought Yellow Springs was Antioch.
It was kind of arrogant, but it was fairly common for students
to think
“Well, without Antioch this town would be nothing.
It would just be a small version of Xenia.” And that’s clearly
not true, the town has a life of its own, [although] it’s
influenced by the college tremendously.
The boom at the college was a boom in real estate, the
decline at the college has been a decline in real estate. The
problems with declining enrollment in the public schools in
the town are related to the fact that a lot of young faculty
who had kids up and went. People who had jobs associated with
the college, whether it was direct or indirect, a lot of people
went as the college was in decline. The feelings for the college
from the town improved with Guskin.
Did they deteriorate because of the strike?
I don’t know. I wasn’t really a townie then, so I didn’t
get a real flavor of how people in town felt about the strike
or felt in its immediate aftermath. It was really a few years
after that I started becoming more a member of the town and
less a member of the college community. I think the sentiment
was more that the place was going to hell in a sled.
As long as I’ve been here, everybody’s speculated that
there were two years left [for Antioch] and that was it, since
the strike. “We’ll make it for the next couple years, but after
that I don’t think so.” Sometimes it seemed more serious than
others, and certainly [it was] at the time when no one getting
paid.
Do you think the strike has had any positive effects?
Certainly not in the long term. In the short term, I think
there are some students that probably were able to finish up
here, that without the strike’s support, some of them probably
would have not finished college. I tend to transfer things into
individual people terms, and those are really only the positive
things that I see coming out of it. There were some students
who, if the college had not been pushed to the wall, the college
would have just probably said, “Well, no money. You’re on your
own.” And pushed to the wall, [the college] was able to make
some accommodations here and there.
5
Connie Pelekoudas:
The decline, just numerically in terms of the economics and
consequences and the numbers of people, you go from a financially
healthy institution to an institution that’s in terrible debt,
in a ten year period. To go from an institution that has
something like 2400 students, which by the way was one of the
causes of the problems, to one with a little over 400 students,
an institution with 160 or so faculty members to one with 45,
that was the number for a ten or twelve year period, that has
a lot of consequences for the people who remained.
[In ’73], we had been bringing in 750 new students each
year in the fall for the last year or so, and were anticipating
another 750 or so and we wound up with only 350. So we lost
immediately about 400 prospective students in the fall of ’73
who didn’t come, who we were anticipating to come. We lost
another couple hundred students who didn’t come back, people
who were not graduating. In addition to the graduating class,
another 200 or so who didn’t come back as a consequence of the
strike. It put a real massive hole in the very first year in
the terms of numbers of student and the budget that has serious
consequences. And then its straight downhill from that point
on.
I think one of the most important consequences of the strike
had to with our natural constituency. Our natural constituency
up to this time had been liberal, it had been non-violent, it
had been professional in many
ways, and I think a natural part
of our constituency was lost as part of the violence of the
strike. [They] could not understand how we could allow that
to happen at a place like Antioch which had a tradition of
debate and argument, but non-violent resolution of conflict.
We lost a natural constituency of people which had a consequence
for years to come because it was the people from whom we would
have drawn successive generations of students. So we not only
lost the 6 or 700 students that year, but we lost students in
future years who normally came out of a bank of alums and friends
of the college who sent their children nieces and nephews,
convinced friends of
theirs’ to send their children to Antioch.
That meant that the pool from which we were drawing from also
shrunk, and that was generational. That blows a hole in the
pool for subsequent years.
You sound like you’re saying we alienated alums.
Not just alums but friends, people who admire Antioch especially
over other colleges and universities, who admired Antioch for
what it stood for got turned off by [it] at that point. And
it wasn’t just a matter where you just lost one entering class
which you could then make up the following year. We lost an
entering class and that entering class was for a generation,
hundreds of people because of that.
It’s curious, because [the strike] seems like such an obvious
phenomenon of the era, with everything going on at other
campuses, and Antioch having a liberal background, why alums
and friends didn’t necessarily see it as “Oh, its just the times,
it’s just the anti-establishment movement”…
No, I think they saw it as a breakdown of the value system,
and it was not just any kind of change, revolutionary change,
it was a total discontinuity. You had Antioch that was this
before and you have Antioch that was totally different, and
it wasn’t the nice ten-year transition to that new kind of
Antioch. I think they sensed that not only had Antioch lost
its traditional value system, but that everything was spinning
out of control, and there was just no way they could influence
what was happening.
There was an administration that had already physically
left the campus by moving its offices up to High Street. It
had already physically moved itself, and had turned the academic
and administrative leadership of the college over to the Dean
of the College, who really didn’t have the kind of administrative
clout, because all the important cards were in the hands of
the president and the vice presidents who were on High Street.
And there was nothing the local, campus administrator could
use, or do independently, to deal with the problems of the
college, and so there was no way for anyone on the campus to
be effective in dealing with the problems on the campus. It
all had to be done outside.
Did you start here as an administrator or a professor?
Faculty member, I started in ’62 as a member of the economics
department. I was an administrator in ’72-3, ’73-4, I was
associate Dean of the College and Jewel Graham by the way was
the associate Dean of the College in ’72-73 as well. I worked
on curriculum matters and she worked on faculty and personnel
matters. Ewell Reagin was the Dean of the College….
So I think it was a discontinuity that threw people outside
as well as here into a state of anxiety, uncertainly, loss of
a sense of direction and bearing in a way that you don’t if
you’re just evolving into a new model. You just sort of lose
all sense of place, time, [are] disoriented totally I think
[from] what Antioch was all about.
Sharp divisions among the faculty, that lasted for about
a ten year period, some still exist. The only thing that has
caused that to modify is that so many people who were there
now are no longer on the campus. But people who were on opposite
sides continued to simply not deal with each other for ten years,
so it meant that the faculty was splintered, and could not be
a force for change in the institution after ’73. The splintering
had already come before then, but there was a sense up through
about 1970 of some shared values among the faculty that began
to erode in
’70-71, ’72, and shattered completely during the
strike, and was never recaptured.
The loss of that shared sense of values among faculty at
a private liberal arts college in particular, means there is
nothing at the center to hold everything together; the students
do their four year thing, and they come and go on co-op and
they challenge the system, as they should do, but in effect,
there was really nothing to challenge, so students during that
ten year period got cheated. There was no central core value
represented by any particular body within the institution, which
could help the institution meet the challenges that occurred
after the 70s, and it meant there was no effective campus
response to the administration. An effective campus response
to administrative initiative normally comes from the faculty,
and that fits here…
Have you seen the new book that Dixon wrote about his years
at Antioch?
I haven’t seen Dixon’s book yet.
‘Cause he mentions that for a long time it was faculty
challenging administration and I guess students are pretty
critical now of the absence of that.
We still haven’t recovered, right to this very day and this
is almost twenty years after. Even though we’ve got an almost
new, entirely different faculty, most of our faculty have come
from 1980 now, still I sense [them to be] very timid, very
cautious, very wary about that role. Its too bad, ’cause a good
college needs that, needs the faculty playing that role and
we still miss that.
That’s one of the legacies of the strike. Even as new people
came in, there was no longer a way of socializing new faculty
into a received set of values, ’cause the older faculty were
already split; so new people came in, and were almost put on
a spot of having to choose sides within the faculty. That meant
they couldn’t evolve. It had tremendous consequences to that
notion of faculty leadership. I don’t buy the argument that
faculty are always necessarily right about everything, but
faculty in liberal arts colleges do tend to carry the traditions
forward into the future from one generation to the
next. Then
change normally comes about ’cause they get challenged by
administrators or students.
Administrators come in with a different vision, a different
notion about what should be done. Students come in challenging
most traditional values, but normally what happens in a healthy
institution those challenges to the traditions that are carried
by the faculty, result in a kind of debate that generates a
new model. If the faculty isn’t carrying those traditions, then
there is nothing to engage in the debate about, everything then
winds up in people, students and faculty, working the system,
manipulating the system for particular parochial ends, instead
of a debate going on about central issues and central values.
We lose the ability to grapple with the core issues, and end
up manipulating the fringe issues about who should get more
money, and we argue about nickels and dimes around the fringes
of the budget, instead of focusing on what the essential core
of the institution we should be supporting, in terms of our
budget discussions.
The long period of decline brings with it a kind of a
psychology of decline. A psychology of falling into decline
tends to lead to defensive behavior; protective of turf, closing
up and taking care of my own classes, and making sure at least
the economics program is going well, and not seeing that my
friends in psychology, or history need help. “I’ll just deal
with the administration directly, and make sure my program gets
taken care of”, that kind of psychology. That worked during
that time of decline, and it is very difficult to reverse that.
Referring to why people stayed, was there any sense that there
was a sort of a common mission, or goal to help the college
survive?
It’s a very difficult question to deal with, because in
retrospect, I suspect we would all look at that question, and
try to rationalize it in the best possible light. We talk about
commitment, we talk about saving Antioch. Realistically, you
had to look at what was going on in the academic world in the
70s; there weren’t any jobs out there. The market for faculty
members was shrinking, and in many cases, the question was “This
is it,” the sense of being trapped.
I don’t want to make that the central reason, but you can’t
ignore the fact that this was all happening in a period of
relative shrinkage of the market for faculty members nationally.
If someone had wanted to leave, they might not have been able
to leave. That isn’t to say that people who stayed didn’t have
a commitment, that isn’t to say that people who stayed are
somehow less worthy. I think each one of us who stayed during
that period could probably make an argument, that in addition
to the fact that the market was weak, there were good reasons,
positive reasons, for staying at Antioch.
One of the things that Alan Guskin has misread on his
arrival on campus, is this whole issue about why people stayed.
Because he treated people who were here when he arrived,
essentially as useless, he characterized them in very negative
ways, suggesting that they weren’t really very good, and that
the world would depend on the new group of faculty they were
going to bring in. And consequently, one of the problems we’ve
had in the past four years as we have been getting revitalized,
is that attitude that he brought in towards people who in fact
paid a high price for keeping this place going.
For many of us, I think, in addition to the fact that the
market was shrinking, there was a sense of wanting to experience
Antioch in a way that we did. We still had hopes, not to restore
everything to the way it was, we still had hopes that some of
those values could emerge, we still had some feeling that we
could try to heal the divisions that were tearing the place
apart. We still felt that, if there was any chance at all that
if Antioch, as an ideal as well as an institution, could be
salvaged, that we would like to be a part of it. It was different
for each one of us. There were some altruistic reasons for
staying. Some of us got, in the faculty, more or less into the
process of trying to rebuild the place, some of us closed
ourselves up into our own little programs, and, in effect, went
underground as it were, didn’t participate in very much and
trying to do much of the rebuilding, but focused our attention
on our own piece of the action. I’m not saying that pejoratively,
I mean that’s how they felt they could commit themselves to
saving Antioch, was by saving that piece of it.
The consequence of that, however, was very damaging, even
if we had stayed with the best of motives. I think there comes
a time, and its different for everybody, when you start
developing a psychology of self pity, almost. I did my share
of “Look at all
this, why doesn’t anybody appreciate it?”
Or acknowledge it.
Or acknowledge it, or appreciate it, and I think that’s the
nerve that Guskin hit when he came in. Whatever he might of
thought of people, he could have least acknowledged what they
did. There are people who still have not forgiven him from when
he first came in five years ago. I think for myself there are
a couple of things. One, at a minimal level, there was still,
in the economics program, a group of faculty members who had
worked together for a number of years, three of us, and we were
still able to have an active, good, interesting program,
attracting students. That in itself provided a support base
that made it possible to stay afloat, and that’s not unimportant
for other people who saw their college, and their programs
disappear.
The other is, I came in ’62 and I’ve said often that I
am happy I came then, because I’ve had four or five years of
association with people who are still linked to
Algo Henderson,
or even Arthur Morgan for that matter, who had been here in
those two periods. People like George Geiger, JD Dawson, Oliver
Loud, Irwin Abrams, and those associations were important to
me. I suspect that if I had come in ’68 and not had those kind
of associations, I don’t think I would have stayed, That
connection to that, particularly to those who had been active
during Algo Henderson’s years when we really developed a sense
of community, a sense of collaborative association, a sense
of a share of responsibility among students and faculty and
administrators. That was a tremendously powerful value and
message and I bought into that. I didn’t know anyplace else
that had that kind of commitment to that particular value that
Antioch had, and as a faculty member who
v/ent in and out of
the administration over the last 20 years, that value I have
felt has made it possible to be effective in those roles and
its, for me, more central to Antioch than anything else, that’s
the share of responsibility, the share of authority. That
students have authority, faculty have authority, we all have
responsibility…
The kind of community spirit that existed then…
Not just the vague community spirit but sense of shared
responsibility. Algo Henderson, when he sat on Adcil and when
he was president, participated in Adcil, was a member of Adcil,
sat equal with students and faculty; he was the one who brought
students into Adcil as a matter of fact. He believed literally
in the share of responsibility; he did not take the position
that there were presidential perogatives or overrode everyone
else, and if he differed with it, he did not simply assert
presidential perogative.
Jim Dixon, in his early years, had that sense of member
Adcil meetings in which literally, the group would stay there
until they talked out the issues, and it wasn’t a question of
“Well, lets get to vote.” The difference between settling an
issue by raising hands, and finding out that six people are
in favor, and four were against, and continuing to discuss until
they reach a point where they, the group as a whole, can say
“Yeah, that sounds right.” Its tremendous and its the latter
that attracted me, that model. I still believe in that and I
think that that is still, despite the fact that other
administrators have come and gone, and presidents have come
and gone who don’t share that… I still think its worth hanging
in there for and trying to recapture. And we may someday.
Do you think it has been recaptured at all in the last few years?
More or less sometimes. There have been times when it works,
and I have seen it work. I don’t think Guskin trusts it, and
that causes problems a lot of problems,
’cause its risky. I
don’t want to get into evaluating him, but he simply is not
comfortable with it, and he doesn’t want to take the risk, he
doesn’t want to go to that ultimate last phase. I think its
a mistake. You run the risk of maybe having some decisions come
out differently than you would like as an administrator, but
in terms of quality of life at the college, and the quality
of interaction…
And also how people relate to you and whether or not they trust
your interaction.
…One of the things that changed from pre-strike to post-strike
is that question of trust. Before the strike, people generally
trusted each other to take care of their interest, they didn’t
feel they needed to be in the room every time a decision was
made. After the strike, no one felt comfortable when a decision
was being made, unless they were right there and doing it
themselves, and making sure that somebody isn’t trying to do
them in.
Nobody meaning administrators, faculty….?
The faculty and administrators. Faculty don’t trust each other
enough to say “Okay, if I don’t go to that meeting, my colleagues
are not going to screw me, they’ll look after my interests as
well as the interests of the
colleae. I trust them to do that,”
I don’t think we trust each other to do that.
How did the strike change faculty interaction with students,
administration’s interaction with students? And then my question
which is also part of the same subject, how did the strike change
the attitude toward student dissent?
I think one of the things that happened in Dixon’s period of
presidency is that he lost confidence in the faculty, and so
what he did was talk [issues] to you in the way that split up
the natural collaboration between faculty and students. So he
drove a wedge that ultimately put students and faculty in
different political camps. I don’t mean political in terms of
social and political issues, I mean in terms of governance issues
on the college campus. He lost confidence in generating support
for what he wanted among faculty, so he would generate support
among students.
Issues like the network expansion?
The first year program, the expansion, and the strike exacerbated
that; it didn’t start it, but it made it worse. Even though
the student body wasn’t unified on the strike. It was students
who actually brought the axes and brought the sheriff on campus
to open the place up. There was a division within the faculty
involving the issues around the strike, and there was not
uniformity at all in terms of position.
But the consequence of the strike drove a wedge between
faculty and students, an ideological one which had not existed
before. Once it was split, it was more difficult to breach the
differences, and that was unfortunate. It also meant there was
an ideological split among the faculty as a result, and the
way in which the community generally viewed the union, that
really shifted.
You realize there was just not one strike. At first there
was a couple of union strikes and student union strikes and
then the student strike. There was some feeling among faculty,
and I think this still occasionally surfaces, that the union
was using students in an alliance, to get a response to their
issues; there was some feeling among faculty that the students
were being manipulated. I don’t happen to think that was the
case, but none the less, that was a perception. There was a
natural kind of alliance there; the unions did not particularly
actively support the student strike in a sense that would say
that anyone is manipulating anyone else.
There was a deterioration in the relationship between
students, faculty and the union members. I think administrators
have, in one way or another, been successful in manipulating
the divisions within the community over the years, to the point
where the unions have been pretty much isolated. Relatively
speaking, you don’t see any concern about unions and membership
of the union. Union positions have shrunk the same as the student
body has. But the kind of intense support between students and
union members is not what it used to be. Again, during the period
of decline, the administrators may have been able to manipulate
the situation so that they pit one group against the other.
So group A gets something out of a declining budget, B’s going
to get less, and that exacerbates problems. There is a lot of
healing that still needs to be done among the various groups
on campus as a consequence of that.
What about reactions towards dissent?
I think that there has been, but I don’t know if that may have
just been a social phenomenon, a post-Vietnam phenomenon. It
may be a consequence of the strike immediately, but I never
had a sense that, within the faculty, that was the case. I think
very much among administrators, that’s been the case for years.
They really don’t like dissent. I think it may be disturbing
to them, and I think that may be a consequence of the pressure
on them to think of public image when they seem to be coming
apart, and our image was declining. Trying to restore the image,
and trying to rebuild an endowment fund to try to pay off debts,
I think they had a tendency to be a little more concerned about
dissent.
I think its true for some understandable reasons, not
excusable reasons, but understandable reasons, [that] their
concern is more external. That’s one change, by the way, that
I haven’t heard anybody over the years focus on very much, and
that is the extent to which administrators since then have been
more focused externally, [rather] than internally. Administrators
do not seem to be viewed as much now as being a part of the
college community as they were.
That’s partly the creation of the University, and Dixon’s
move off campus, and Birenbaum’s move to New York City with
the university’s presidents’ offices, but its deeper than that.
It’s not just the physical separation. Since Dixon’s early years,
I think top administrators have wanted to distance themselves
from the internal functioning of the college, and that means
the risk taking about collaborative process, to leave themselves
more room to maneuver.
The second part of it is the extent to which they are
concerned with external image so much, [that] I think that they
get caught up with how they look to the outside world, and to
the national educational establishment, rather than how they
look to their constituents here. They’re operating with a
different constituent world than we are, and I think the college
suffers for that, for that reason. They never really feel the
values I think we sense in the community, in Yellow Springs,
which they can’t understand fully. I know Guskin thinks he
does,
but even when he is engaged, he is never really engaged in that
sense, and that’s a change in the last 20 years, since the
strike.
Would you call that the role of the administration?
Deeper than just a role, because you can define the role of
the administration in a lot of ways, in terms of the kind of
tasks they have to do. I think its a sense of how they see
themselves in terms of the job, and I think that’s more the
central issue here.
Alan [Guskin] came in saying “I’m moving to Yellow Springs,
making sure I put the college at the center of University and
that’s going to be the focus of out attention,” and he has done
all that and should be applauded for that. He helped give some
people some sense of hope about the ability to rebuild the
college, but not that final, personal kind of investment, the
risk taking and commitment to being really in the college, as
opposed to managing the college. I understand the kind of
pressure he is under, and I think that explains a lot of it.
But also there is a part that is not just explained by the
pressures, there’s a part of it I think he doesn’t really
understand, or if he understand it he doesn’t accept it as the
kind of thing he can commit himself to, and take the personal
risk of doing, ’cause it means giving up power, and I don’t
think he likes to do that.
What about the academic relationship between students and faculty
and how that changed? Not just in terms of political bodies
but also in classroom experience.
To some extent, the ideological split caused some tension,
because some people wouldn’t deal with other people. But on
the whole, I’d say one of the consequences of the strike is
students and faculty, in their academic programs, drew closer
together. I think that relationship was in many ways
strengthened, because right before the strike, and during the
strike, the ideological divisions were driving people away from
each other; you wouldn’t go take a class with someone who doesn’t
have the right ideological view, etc. But after the strike,
I think because this place was shrinking, I think students and
faculty in their academic pursuits felt support from one another,
and drew closer together in individual departments. So you have
the phenomenon of the art students and the art faculty doing,
as far as anyone could
tell, great work together, but closing
ranks within the arts, and that was happening in pockets all
around the campus. A great deal of mutual support being given,
and that’s not just faculty to students, but students to faculty,
who were staying in those programs.
In many ways it was tremendously beneficial, but in many
ways it was hurtful of the college program as a whole, because
it was so internal within individual programs. But I know a
lot of faculty members who might not have been able to get
through without that.
What about the change in the character or the quality of the
student body?
When the pool shrinks, they’re going to have less ability to
be selective and choose the students, and the consequence is
a different kind of student body. Part of the problem of talking
about quality, is you have to talk about what is the
measure
of quality yo’re using. It was a’ different kind of student body
because it was for some while, particularly in the late 70s
after the lengthy decline, maybe less academically oriented.
So that some great types of programs that would be dependent
on some kinds of students were hurt, because those kinds of
students were no longer coming. Through part of the 80s there
was a sense that we were attracting a different kind of student
body, [who] might have been looking more for a kind of supportive
atmosphere which would help them grow personally, rather than
an academic community that would challenge them academically.
And it meant that for some faculty and some programs they weren’t
getting the as many students as they had before, or they weren’t
getting the same kind of students as they were before.
Realize that some students were [still] coming for academic
reasons, and some students were coming for other reasons, but
I think it tilted the balance of the student body in a way that
may have been detrimental to our ability to continue to recruit
larger numbers of students. So that we can’t attract science
students, because the science program may have deteriorated
because fewer students were coming to Antioch looking for
academic challenge in the sciences, and as a consequence, we
have fewer science faculty.
So that change that was detrimental was not a change in
the quality of the students, but the change in the character
of the student body and its composition. Less diverse in a lot
of
ways, and I don’t just mean in terms of gender or race or
other characteristics, but less diverse in terms of the kind
of things they were looking for when they came to Antioch. In
order to have a well rounded liberal arts education program
that offers a lot of different kinds of learning, you have to
have a lot of different kinds of students. I think that is more
a problem than the quality question, that for a while we weren’t
getting a balance. I don’t know that we are now. I think it’s
better than it was, but I still think we are missing kinds of
students who are interested in science for instance. It doesn’t
just hurt the sciences program either, it hurts the college
’cause those kinds of students take other courses, and they
bring a different kind of perspective to how you deal with
community problems.
How was the academic program affected?
I think we lost the sense of what we were about collectively
as an educational institution, and I think that hurt us most
in general education. In individual programs people were still
giving very good programs in art, very good programs in history,
very good programs here and there, but where I think we got
hurt most was in a sense of trying to accomplish in general
education. Now I think that with the new curriculum, we’re
finally getting some idea. We talked about “What does it mean
to have a general education course in the social sciences? Why
is that different from just another economics class? Are we
trying to accomplish something different in the general education
course than we are in a field course in psychology?” I think
that’s important because it gets faculty to talk to each other
across the disciplines in a way that they didn’t have to in
the old general educational program.
What about the impact in terms of lack of economic and physical
resources?
Daily, its very depressing and debilitating. On the other had
its a sense of “By God, we’re going to do it anyway,” and it
energizes people. And “We’re in this mess and we’re going to
do the damn best we can and we’re going to focus our students”
and that same spirit of students and faculty was strengthened
by the sheer enormity of the physical decay around here. I think
to the sciences for instance, that
was important because there
they rely so much upon the physical facility itself, and it
brought them closer together. “We’re going to make this work
in spite of everything.”
The other kind of consequence of lack of funds for courses,
what it did to families and the consequential impact on people’s
motivation here, it affected our incomes. By ’79 there were
lots of payless paydays and they reduced salaries and no raises.
All of that for year after year after year. It meant that a
lot of people who came to Antioch in the mid to late 60s, were
reaching that part in their careers where they had been forming
families. I say that because we were mostly married people with
young families, and the inability to be able to deal with the
economic issues of raising a family was tough on people. It
weighed on them a lot, and had consequences for their attitudes
about the place. There are still some scars about that.
When Guskin came and talked about raising salaries, he
was talking about raising salaries for new people, it took us
a long time to say “Look, you’re talking about a number of
people, who have made a sacrifice over a number of years, that
has cost them a lot in terms of what they can do for their own
families.” Many of them, now, or at some point in the 70s or
early 1980s, were struggling to send kids to college. I estimated
at one point, because the trustees simply were not being
responsive to this concern, very conservatively, that in lost
pay, the faculty had contributed at least six million dollars,
over a ten year period or so. Probably more than that if you
think in terms of not only actual pay, because in addition,
you lose benefits in terms of money set aside for retirement.
It is much higher than that, the-number, ’cause you throw in
staff, who also didn’t receive pay increases, and the lost
retirement benefits that go along with lower salary, and that
is a tremendous and significant contribution to the survival
of the institution. Not only had they been here for whatever
reason, good, bad, or indifferent, but in fact, the financial
contribution from the faculty and staff kept the place afloat,
’cause its the single largest contribution to the institution
during those years when it could have gone under.
Do you think [Guskin’sj attitude towards older faculty has
changed?
Basically, no. We had to fight with him every inch on that.
Do you think the strike has affected our commitment to the
plurality of the student body in terms of class and ethnicity?
I don’t think the strike itself did, but that’s so difficult
to weigh, because it didn’t matter what our attitude for ten
years was; we were taking what business we could get. I think
it affected some individual people’s perceptions, but in terms
of the institution as a whole, I don’t think it did.
In fact, our resources don’t match our language. Of course,
other sources of financial aid were available in the 60s which
made it possible for us to go to 2,400 students. Federal grants
are not available in the way they were then, not really available
to many places in the same way. We don’t have our own resources.
A lot of places have endowment money that they use to finance
minority scholarships, which we don’t have. We actually finance
diversity, in terms of class and race, out of tuition.
ATG?
We have been doing that historically. In the 60s, we did have
some money from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation
and financial aid from the federal government, but we also
financed a lot out of tuition. But in the 60s that was
deceptively easy to do, because there were always a lot more
students out there wanting to come into private colleges than
there were places.
The student age population was growing like mad in the
60s, the baby boom from the 40s was hitting the colleges, so
you could increase the number of students easily to pay for
anything you wanted. You could use the extra tuition from
students coming in to pay for diversity, and they saw no end
to how fast you could raise tuition, ’cause there were so many
students wanting to come. In many respects, the ability to raise
tuition was made easier by the fact that federal grants were
more generous, and could take up a lot of the slack. So a lot
of the colleges, this one in particular, made the terrible
mistake of, instead of focusing on building endowments during
that period, we simply kept financing on a “pay as you go.”
And if we were running short, raise tuition, or increase the
number of bodies.
We never should have gotten 2400 students, this place
couldn’t handle 2400 students. Once we got the notion of
continually increasing tuition, we were bound to have a collapse,
some kind of traumatic event. We were bringing in so many first
year students that a large number of them were living off campus.
Hall Advisors were not living in the halls they were advising,
they were out in Yellow Springs. How do you build a tradition
and a sense of community?
I think that was a terrible mistake, to [finance programs
out of
tuition], instead of trying to build an endowment. The
problem was, in the 70s, we couldn’t do that anymore. We kept
raising tuition because the supply and demand was changing,
and until ’79 the number of high school graduates was still
going up, but not at the rate it was going in the 60s. Then
it stopped going up and it started going down.
Well, the
consequence of that is that the ability to push tuition up,
and the ability to draw in new students.
In our case, because all the strike issues we talked
about,the numbers were going down dramatically. In terms of
racial diversity, we may have peeked during this declining
period, simply because it was easier for financial aid students
than it was for upper-middle class white students. They would
take their money and go somewhere else because of our problems.
In any case, we continued to finance, and still continue to
finance, our diversity primarily out of tuition. We need to
get out of that. We need to find a way to shifting some of that
burden to endowment, instead of tuition. It would also ease
the pressure on tuition.
What about the
affect on experimentation and innovation
educationally?
I think that was particularly devastating. It is still difficult
to get a number of faculty to really want to be aggressive about
innovation. We couldn’t fund it for one, but we lost the spirit
of innovation under budget pressure. We put limits on students’
abilities because we didn’t want to see the money going out,
we wanted to keep it here. We didn’t want to try experimenting
in ways of effectively using the network in an educational way,
because it meant some of our students would have to go to some
of those places. People became afraid to take risks, and when
you’re afraid to take risks, the consequences are just terrible,
or less exciting than normal. A lot of that was a consequence
of budget, but over a period of time, if you don’t practice
the art of innovation, you lose the knack for it.
Partly as a consequence of the general replacement of
faculty, who don’t have the old history to worry about, as a
result of having a little more money to play around with, people
have been willing to take a few more risks working on designs
for new programs. They didn’t want to do that before, because
they would spend a lot of time working on a new program, and
then there wouldn’t be any money for it. I think there is a
more hopeful sense among faculty,
p.cv that we managed to put
together last year a couple of programs. One of the things that
Guskin did do that was helpful, was he re-created in a sense,
the Development program from an office that didn’t really work,
so that gave everyone the sense that if they did have an idea,
they had someplace to go with it, to see if they could get some
money.
One of the reasons I asked that question was my wondering whether
or not the failure of the New Directions program or the network
changed attitudes [towards innovation] as well…
The network expansion did several things. It siphoned off from
the college most of the people who were actually involved in
innovative education. They wound up going to San Francisco,
or Baltimore, or one of the network programs. So in a sense
we lost, during the expansion period, the kind of people who
were thinking innovatively. We also lost, as a consequence of
the decline, other kinds of innovative people who went else
where, and left the college altogether. And then because of
our experience with the network, people got turned off by the
idea of innovation, and that was reinforced by the budgetary
cutbacks. It wasn’t the budgetary thing itself, but there is
a spirit of innovation that got damaged, which was then
exacerbated by the budget cuts.
The New Directions question is an interesting one, because
I don’t think that turned us off to innovation. There were so
many cloudy issue around New Directions. What did we mean by
New Directions? In a sense, the New Directions was an admissions
program to dramatically diversify the student body. In another
sense, you could think about it as part of the network expansion.
[The expansion] was never called New Directions, but it was
similar in going into communities, dealing with populations
which normally would not have been able to participate in a
traditional liberal arts college. So in a sense they were similar
tasks.
The problem with the New directions program on campus is
that it lost the focus. On^the one hand, there was a developing
academic department that was called the Institute for the
Solution of Social Problems that was a left, meaning a
philosophical, ideological base for an education. There was
a New Directions admissions program, there was a Black separatist
movement, there was a poor people’s movement, all those sort
of churning around on the campus simultaneously. And it became
tremendously confusing which ones of those were parts of the
New Directions Program, and which ones were not. For various
economic and political reasons, they sometimes grouped together
and called the whole package the New Directions program. At
other times it was separated out.
When ISSP identified themselves as the educational wing
of the New Directions program, it meant that they then put the
cloak of left ideologies onto the New Directions Program, and
that created a problem with the way that the rest of the
community viewed New Directions. There was a Poor People’s
Alliance, which was a conglomeration of different organisations
on the campus which claimed to speak for New Directions students,
and then the Black Separatist movement, which clouded the issue
even further. Were New Directions students just Black students?
That makes it difficult to even talk about the reactions to
New Directions.
In the name of New Directions a lot of awful things
happened. In fact, there was on campus a group of people who
came in and became part of the program, who were serving their
own personal
ends. It led to a lot of violence on campus. The
college gave, in fact, the board of trustees gave to a group
of students, the Poor People’s Alliance was one of these groups,
several hundred thousand dollars, and said they should manage
that money, and that turned out to be a disaster. A small group
of people got control of that organization and used that money
for their own private ends, and [the rest of the ND students]
didn’t get the needed support. A classic case of a good idea
being corrupted.
[All] these things make it very difficult to get a sense
of a pure reaction to the New Directions program. I don’t think
a reaction to the program itself weakened our commitment to
our diversity. I think a lot of the other things that occurred
caused people to raise questions in their minds about whether
or not a residential liberal arts college was capable of dealing
effectively with certain kinds of students. We were literally
recruiting gang members from Inner City ghettos who, in their
home environment, played a certain kind of role, and we would
bring people here without any sense of how we were going to
change our program to deal with that. So we said to them, “Here’s
some money.” It raised some questions with some people about
whether a residential liberal arts college was capable of
building that kind of population into its ongoing program. And
the answer to that is obviously “No, it can’t without changing”,
and we
weren’t prepared for the change. We somehow thought we
could do that without changing, and then when it all happened
we thought, “My God, we have to change!” and it was too late,
too late to do it effectively. I’m not convinced that an
institution can’t deal with that problem, but it has to do it
with knowing that kind of change.
What about attitudes towards leftist ideology post-strike? In
the Record there are articles about the quarter cut of the
faculty referring to whether or not it was a leftist purge or
not.
One of the things we didn’t even talk about is the purge idea.
The emergence of this was after the first big cut back occurred
in the fall of ’73, ’74, when about 25 faculty members were
let go, tenured faculty.
I thought it was 25 percent.
Well, it was not 25 percent overall. Some left voluntarily,
but in fall quarter there was a cut back of about 25 faculty
positions again. In fact, the practice that was used was awful
to go through, but was not one, I don’t think, which could be
characterized as a purge of one group or another. The ultimate
decision was made by Adcil, but a lot of the recommendations
that Adcil acted upon came from faculty members in the various
programs.
Part of the confusion is that, simultaneously with the
cutback, there were also regular contract negotiations going
on. What you would find is people who lost their jobs had the
bad misfortune of coming under contract renewal that year. People
who, on two year contracts and were not coming up for review
that year, were in a safer position than people who were in
tenure. It is hard to explain; I think that was wrong but I
think that was a wrong reading by attorneys. They felt that
if you broke a specific contract you would have more problems
with damages than if you broke the tenure relationship. I still
don’t believe it. Of the tenure people who were let go, I don’t
think that any of them could be classified as left. If there
were an inordinate number of left faculty members who were let
go that year, it was because they were the ones who were in
the pool coming up for contract renewal.
But as far as general attitudes towards left faculty?
There was a tremendous split in the faculty, and the perceived
participation in that strike by some of the left faculty
solidified the ideological split. Before that, people still
tried to talk to each other over the ideological line, after
that people stopped…. From that point on, very few people
crossed the line.
How did the strike affect Antioch’s mission, both in terms of
vision and implementation?
The rhetoric remained pretty much consistent in terms of the
mission. Our ability to realize was damaged by the budget, by
the declining numbers, but I think the spirit of the vision
was also damaged. I think people were both shocked by, not just
the strike itself, but the events leading up to it for several
years, and the movement off campus and all the rest of that.
So I hate to say, “Just the strike”, but the strike was kind
of a crystallizing event. I think the sense of the mission,
and the spirit of the mission was damaged in that people started
turning inward instead of outward.
I like to compare the involvement of Antioch students and
faculty in the civil rights movement up to ’67, ’68, and the
involvement in our problems and issues surrounding the counter
culture movement in the Vietnam War in the later 60s. The spirit
of the civil rights movement was one of reaching out there in
the world, extending ourselves, students and faculty,
individually, and sometimes collectively. In the late 60s that
all turned inward, and we tried to focus too much attention
[on the] institution, Antioch College itself. I think in that
sense, the spirit was damaged, the mission was damaged.
Two more questions. One is how the strike affected the changing
relationship between the town and the college. The other is
whether or not there were any positive affects of the strike.
I think as a crystallizing event, the strike itself was very
damaging, but it was symptomatic of a whiple series of events.
The simple size of the college in a town which had a population
of 4000 people, in a village like that, where they had 2400
students, had a serious impact, and I think our relationship
deteriorated for a long time. …Anger in the way the [Yellow
Springs] community perceived the administration to be destroying
the institution that they loved, just difficulties about numbers
of people in town, students in town. I think there was a kind
of a backlash view that was raised because there was numbers
of minority students, and the perception that it was primarily
a Black student problem on campus, in terms of the strike and
that had some consequences. But none of that was very long
lasting. It was damaged for a while badly, but it was restored,
and I think its fairly healthy now.
On the positive
aspects…There are a lot of positive
aspects about what we were trying to do. We did it badly and
as a consequence, we had a strike, but what we were trying to
do had value. We just managed it so badly that li”‘ was bound
to blow up on us.
Nina MVatt: £
I realized when I was looking over the questions that a lot
of my feelings really go back, not to ’73 but to ’79, when we
almost went bankrupt and there was this great disruption in
terms of people’s lives and such real anxiety that we might
not make it. In ’73, my rememberance of that time is more of
a deep sadness, because of the effects of it on faculty members,
those who were dismissed, including tenured faculty who were
let go, and one of these happened to be a very close family
friend. And the kind of stunned disbelief that such a thing
could happen, especially when the tenured faculty were let go,
but some faculty with just two-year contracts were not because
of some legal thing. The two-year contracts seemed to have more
validity than the tenure. I guess the other remembrances are
less personal to me then. I think of it in terms of my husband
who was on the faculty and I know how he felt and how his
students felt and how he behaved after this. I was working here
then, but somehow that part of it all seems less important than
the bigger picture of the college or how it affected Don’s work
and his relationship with colleagues and friends.
Was he a professor then?
I think by that time, he was called maybe communications and
engineering. When he came, Antioch had a straight engineering
department and at the time that the college lost its engineering
accreditation, they switched, sort of took a step sideways and
continued to offer some of the undergraduate courses; and of
course co-op has always been important in the engineering
program. They also went into a dual-degree completion program,
because the college could not really maintain an engineering
department. They used to have an electrical, a mechanical and
a civil program, and those are fairly expensive to maintain.
So he, in some ways was an unusual engineer in that he really
had a broader outlook than the narrow field, and enjoyed dealing
with students who were in the
arts, always had friends among
those, the filmmakers and so forth. He shifted his focus to
teaching science courses for the non-science people.
Speaking of the larger picture, in the faculty relationships
can you talk a little about the effects on the relationship
between faculty, or faculty and students and what was wrought
because of the strike?
Okay, you know that there were a group of faculty who supported
the students in every way and they of course were censored,
but were not dismissed. First of all, they were fired, and then
they were reinstated.
You mean those seven faculty that were fired and rehired [on
May 22, 1973] ?
Yes, right. And I can’t help but believe that those teachers,
and Don was one of them, that continued to teach his classes
during the strike and a lot of faculty did not. I shouldn’t
speak for him, he’s not here to speak for himself, but I can’t
help but feel that certainly it must have changed their
relationship and how they dealt with one another. [In] the period
right after the strike, there was such a decrease in enrollment,
which meant a great decrease in money, which meant immediately
the beginning of laying off of staff, union people and non-union
people, and faculty were non-renewed when they were trying to
keep the faculty down to match the new, smaller enrollment.
It was a time of, the one word that comes to my mind is really
a deep sadness. Nobody really wanted it to end this way, and
there were really mixed feelings about the Tightness of the
cause of the students.
Over the cause or the tactics?
Yeah, the tactics got so rough that I think they lost a lot
of credibility, but there certainly was a realization that
Antioch had been very active in seeking government money to
bring students here, and in some ways we brought the problem
on ourselves by not carefully planning or just blindly assuming
that everything was going to work out okay. And [we were] left
holding the bag when the federal money dried up. It just seemed
like the students really did deserve something, but on the other
hand, no one could see how you could guarantee a five-year
program with this kind of wanting to do the right thing by the
students we brought in, and yet feeling that realistically it
was not possible to. I think that had a big part in the sadness,
that somehow we’d had a good idea to begin with and it had noble
purposes and [we] kind of flubbed it up.
Did the sadness continue for a long time?
Oh, I think so. Because really right after the strike the layoffs
began, and [they] just kept cutting back and cutting back.
It really wasn’t until Guskin came and said “You can’t just
keep cutting back. You have to be bold and say things are going
to get better and we have to hire faculty instead of trimming
down the faculty and staff to match the smaller and smaller
[enrollment].” It was like a catch-22 situation. The financial
situation got worse and worse and that was the period when James
Dixon fired [Frank] Shea, who was trying to negotiate a way
out of the network, and it ended up that Shea was reinstated
by the trustees and Dixon was fired. So the period after the
strike seemed to be one sort of turmoil after another, and then
when Birenbaum came he promptly started pulling in all these
fringey little parts of Antioch that had sprouted up all over
the country. I think when Birenbaum came there were thirty two
bits associated with Antioch. And then everything culminated
in ’79, the spring of ’79 when we had the cash-flow crisis and
the college couldn’t meet its payroll and so forth.
I was going to ask you about ’79. Do you think ’79 would have
h^p –.iod if there hadn’t been the strike of ’73?
Now, you know we probably would have really had to re-think
how much we could afford to do in terms of a New Directions
program, or minorities, but it would have happened over a period
of time that would not have caused such turmoil. The strike
was just very costly to the physical plant and everything else.
I wanted to go to my first question about what the emotional
and spiritual climate of the campus was like for the first ten
years or so [following the strike], and what it was like to
work here.
Well, it’s peculiar that so many of us stayed; I stayed, as
my husband had been on the faculty. He didn’t die until ’79,
so that was six years after that. But there were lots of staff
people who didn’t have any particular connection the way I did,
and yet they stayed too. We all had a decrease in our salaries,
not that we didn’t get raises, we actually had to take a five
percent cut in salary, which didn’t get made up for about three
years. People really supported the college immensely by sticking
with it. To this very day, which I think is some of the cause
for the anger that sometimes erupts among staff, probably more
than the faculty. Actually, there are very few people here now
who were here then in terms of faculty, and there are a few
of the senior faculty. Like here in the library, Joe was here,
Ruth was one of the ones who was laid off, or let go. But I’m
not sure there’s a community recollection about that period
now, because a lot of people were simply not involved in it.
Why do you think people stayed?
I think they really felt that Antioch was worth preserving.
The only reason I can think that people would willingly put
up with a cut in salary was that we just felt things had to
get better, and slowly they are.
What other kinds of things did you have to put up with?
I think it was probably sort of a demoralization that came from
extreme poverty, so that the grounds weren’t properly tended,
and the buildings were in terrible shape. We’re in much better
condition now, and even so we look pretty scrappy around the
edges to some people. But those of us who know how bad it was
for a while know we’re doing much better. It was just sort of
a family embarrassment, especially when students came, or when
the alums came and they were just horrified with how things
looked.
What about that in relationship to the changing reputation of
Antioch? You would probably know better than anyone, seeing
all the
newsclippings, how the strike affected our national
image.
Probably immediately, it affected it very strongly, just because
national periodicals had picked up the story, and I’m sure that
families could easily decide to have their kids choose a college
that didn’t look like it had such shaky underpinnings. Especially
when it’s an expensive school to go to; even then it was
expensive, although I guess if you look at it we’re not at the
top of the heap, I’m not sure we’re even at the top of GLCA
schools. I think it takes a long time to dispel some negative
something. It may be something that the families or the school
counselors couldn’t quite put their fingers on, what it was
that made them uneasy about Antioch, but I’m sure that continued
for a number of years. During that same time we didn’t have
a consistent administrative staff and admissions and I think
that probably hurt. That’s one of the things the College had
to do to stay within their resources, was to move faculty from
teaching positions to administrative positions to take up the
slack. That happened in admissions.
What about Antioch’s reputation before ’73?
I think its reputation has been different at different times.
I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned the first year program to
you. Some consider it the first crack in Antioch’s foundation.
By ’73 already even some of our faculty certainly thought we
were not what we once were and in bringing in students who were
just marginally qualified to go to school here, without really
having, being able to give them the full support services they
needed, that we had to then change our expectations of students.
And then, there was a long time [when] we had probably had to
minimal admissions work. The applications came in and you chose
as many people as you wanted to come. [After the strike] there
was a long time where we had to take anyone who looked as though
there was any possibility of them coming, and there were a lot
of those who probably never should have come because they added
to our burden, because they presented either emotional problems
or severe academic problems and we just weren’t able to deal
with it. I don’t know how other faculty
feel, if they feel they
had to change their way of teaching because of the students
they were dealing with, I’m not sure. I don’t know what Don
would have said about that.
That’s another question, how [the strike] affected the academic
program and the character of the student body. Could you touch
on that a little?
I think compared to the late 50s and early 60s when we had sort
of an elitist group of students here, very highly motivated,
highly academic types. Like Frank
Adler, that’s his vintage.
And it’s really different than when I was here. We were serious
about our schooling, but I think for the most part we were not
as competitive in an academic sense. I think we were stronger
in some of the other aspects of the Antioch program, in
community. We had a different kind of balance to the student
body, during that time, the time that I know. I have a feeling
they probably had more people then like I was, in that I would
say had an adequate brain and probably overachieved, worked
hard enough to maintain good grades or whatever we thought an
adequate student was. But I think probably in the late 50s and
into the 60s, they probably had students with much greater
intellectual ability than our group.
And in the last years since the strike?
I think through all the years we’ve always had a few good
students, it’s just that they’re fewer and farther between.
I think the faculty wouldn’t have stayed if they always had
students who needed remedial reading or whatever that they always
had some students who had capacity and who challenged their
thinking, or who somehow made them feel it was worthwhile staying
here to teach. Why would you stay if you felt like you were
dealing with people who really could not appreciate what you
were trying to offer in terms of academic programs?
What about community and the cohesion of community across the
barriers of different groups, you know, between students,
administrators faculty and staff? Did you see that change after
the strike?
I feel less comfortable commenting on that. In name, things
look the same, you have so many faculty and so many students
on Adcil. Adcil itself certainly changed in its power and the
kinds of authority it could exert once the University structure
came into being. Adcil used to directly select members of the
board of trustees, not nominate them, but select them, very
powerful.
I was reading about students in the early 70s trying to elect
Angela Davis.
Yeah, she was nominated, but some way or other it didn’t happen.
It seems, thinking back on it now, it seems there was more
political polarization. I think in the old days, there might
have been sort of faculty issues and student issues and those
were the two groups, faculty and students. And then, in this
later period, really before the strike, [with] all the political
issues going on, with the integration issues of the whole country
and the Vietnam War, the groupings were faculty and students
who had the same political agenda, and that probably affected
also the way the governance worked. If you paid attention to
who you voted for on Adcil, you could get the vote to have
certain political happenings come to
pass. Because you’d have
a certain number of students, or a number of faculty who’d make
up a majority.
So faculty and students were in agreement?
Yeah, around a political agenda. And I think that’s different
from the way it was in earlier years, where often students had
one set of issues they thought were important and faculty had
another. Certainly they could come together, but in the late
60s, early 70s, it was either Marxist political thinking or
whatever. Which I think was different.
Was it [some] faculty and students belonging in one political
camp versus those believing in a different ideology, warring
ideologies?
I’m not sure it was that clear, but certainly there were times
when Adcil had faculty and students whose agenda was either
to get the Marxist study program in, or to push for something
that was probably on the left. There was never a strong right
wing on this campus.
One of the really key issues I’m interested in is how the strike
affected the relationship between administrators and students
and administrators and faculty.
I think the administrators who are here now, except maybe for
Connie Pelekoudas and Bob Parker… I’m not sure that they make
any kind of connection. Have you gotten the feeling that the
administrators are nervous about student involvement in goings-
on at the college?
I’ve gotten the feeling that criticism is not welcome. Not
so much that they disagree on certain things but that [the
administration] just don’t appreciate critical voices existing.
I wonder if the economic downfall following the strike, which
snowballed to create a whole bunch of situations, I wonder if
it also created a distrust of student dissent of any kind.
Yeah, it’s possible. The one difference I see is there’s so
few students around. When there was dissent in the 70s, it was
a big bunch of people. Our enrollment on this campus was very
high, it was probably 800 on campus, not total enrollment. 800
on campus, which meant a let of bodies and if they were
organizing around an issue, it could be an goodly number of
people, would be very intimidating. One of the things that’s
different is that during Dixon’s time, he was an Antiochian.
I think that made a difference in how he looked at what the
students were doing. I’m wondering whether the newer
administrative structure we have coming from a more traditional
way of division of responsibilities, even though they talked
about student government and our literature- one would believe
there’s still great store put on having student involvement
in a lot of things. I have a feeling it makes [the
administration] nervous.
It’s very interesting how [the
strike3 keeps coming up.
I mean, you’re doing this on it, and practically every fall
when freshmen come in, somebody wanders up here and they want
to know about this thing they’ve heard about. Some sort of a
fascination with the period. I’m not sure I understand how,
what triggered that. They don’t seem to be wanting to pick up
the issues or anything, but just they’ve heard about the strike
in ’73 and they want to know what it’s about. It’s interesting.
Speaking of administrators I wonder if you’ve seen the role
of the administration change. You were talking about Dixon and
his more Antiochian background.
Well, there was a time, about the time of the strike, when Jim
Dixon and his administration literally moved off campus. And
that meant that we needed someone to run this campus. It seems
to me that the administrative structure’s gotten very
complicated, there’s a whole new level. Except for Al Guskin
taking over as head of this campus, supposedly as well as the
University. But on the other hand he had to have a sidekick
vice president, who is what used to be called the provost, or
chancellor, the name changes, but essentially, it’s the head
of this campus. I think there’s still another level of
administration in there, many more administrators than we used
to have.
But do you think their role is becoming more managerial, less
managerial? For instance, Al
Denman talked a lot about how
administrators had a role that used to be a lot more
educationally-oriented, that they were almost considered
administrators and faculty both, an interesting duality.
I get the sense from what I see going on, not really being a
part of it, that faculty and students
h