antirecord.org - "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." (Antioch College, 1859, Baccalaureate Sermon)

1950's And 1960's Problem Administrative Decisions Leading To Antioch College Ohio Shutdown In 2008? Antioch History Reexamined

David Allen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:08:03 -0500

August 22, 08 Hi from Tex (David) Allen, '66 (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): The annual and very depressing list of "Best Colleges In America" was just released by the US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, and Antioch College Ohio is not there, sadly. Here's the link: http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/105598/Best-Colleges-2009 What happened to Antioch? LIFE Magazine ran a big photo article in 1960 when I was in high school dreaming about attending Antioch and going to NYC and Chicago on co-op jobs....the article was titled "America's Top 100 Colleges" and of course, Antioch College, Ohio, was part of the list....LIFE Magazine mentioned the co-op program not at all, stated the "scholarship program is very good," and that "some students are careless about their appearance," but otherwise, Antioch College Ohio was "up there" and without doubt, one of the WORLD'S best schools. And it was. Why the collapse? A book (many books) should be written about "What happened to and at Antioch College Ohio...the 'Ozymandias' of colleges, once mighty, but disappeared into dust, just like Milton's poem about Ozymandias." (I think it was Milton). I think the VERY start of Antioch's fall was caused when President Sam Gould (1954-59) doubled the college's student population without doubling the dorm space or other facilities for the students of those and later times. Plain old crowding became a crisis problem never really addressed, and the dominos fell from there. Antioch College Faculty may or may not have had a retirement/ pension system before the early 1960's, but the Antioch faculty were BOT part of the famous and widespread "TIAA-CREFF" retirement system used by most higher educuation schools which boasted good retirement plans. Then, in the early 1960's, Antioch College "bought into" the TIAA-CREFF Retirement Program at a cost of roughly $6 Million. This occurred in roughly 1962 under the then new Presidency of Dr. James Payson Dixon (1959-75), who wrote about the subject in his autobiographical history of his time at Antioch College as President titled ANTIOCH: THE DIXON ERA 1959-75 (1991 Bastillle Books). The move put Antioch College into major debt, and created financial anxieties for Antioch administrators and Trustees never known before. Buying the Antioch faculty a TIAA-CREFF pension kicked Antioch's tiny financial resources into reverse during the early years of President James Dixon (1959-75), and THAT led to more nervousness and bad decisions aimed at getting "more money in gimmicky ways" (e.g. taking Rockefeller Foundation money refused intelligently by other major colleges to invite inner-city kids to invade and criminalize Antioch in the late 60's/ early 70's, and the whole out of control "network" thing which in time resulted in the current crisis of satellite schools and small time big shots like Toni Murdock....a satellite school leader...raiding and destroying the founding Antioch College Ohio to feed the satellites.....ungrateful children murdering their parents for gain! And now.....alumni like me get mass email communications about Antioch "surviving via classes held in scattered locations in Yellow Springs, Ohio away from the campus....just like the Strike of 1973 (classes were held off campus during the strike when the strikers closed down the campus for 6 weeks). How the mighty have fallen...and maybe always do. Best, Tex (David) Allen, '66 , SAG Actor

WAS ANTIOCH COLLEGE ASSASSINATED BY RICH ANTIOCH TRUSTEES PAID OFF BY OUTSIDERS TO CLOSE DOWN A NOTED ENEMY OF RIGHT WING POWER

David Allen — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:35:25 -0500

July 31, 08 Hi from Tex Allen '66 (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): The tragic Antioch College Ohio closedown is hard to explain, but Antioch College Ohio always had a lot of enemies, always was an embarrassing exception to the rule that cultural institutions agree with powerful political and economic leaders who seize power, as the right wing/ Wall Street people certainly did after Nixon was elected to office in 1968 (been 40 years of solid right wing Republican rule with the two Democrats in office since then, Carter and Clinton, lining up to support the right wing, and never seriously a problem the right wing/ Wall Street power people ever had). The Antioch closedown could be connected to bigger, darker issues like the fact politicos and power people want it gone.....military/industrial complex people in the Dayton area, old time Nixonites who got CoIntelPro chasing Antioch in the 1970's based at the Cincinnati OH FBI office, President Gerald Ford (who named Antioch as "America's enemy" from the floor of the House Of Representatives when he was Speaker before was USA President) ordering Antioch gone, and ordering his fed. govt. lawyer (HEW Dept) employee Larry Pearl '55 to disrupt Antioch College by publically humiliating the school (Larry Pearl '55 was the 1970's Chairman of the Antioch College Board of Trustees who fired long time Antioch College President Dr. James P. Dixon publically in 1975, the start of Anitioch's fall from prestige and prominance in American higher education...probably the worst PR thing to happen to Antioch ever...bigger than the Strike of '73...bigger than the Sex Permission Policy of '93...bigger than anything until the actual closedown of Antioch starting the first of the month, July 2008). Antioch has a lot of enemies, and the big money people on the AUBOT could simply be taking orders (and bribes) from big money Republicans/ Wall Streeters intent on cleaning up Amerika....finishing Reagon's promise to wipe out all traces and memory of the New Deal and it's ideals. Antioch is a symbol of all the crazy right wing ever hated, still hates and fears The death of Antioch could be an example of cultural warfare, pure and simple. Antioch just wouldn't go away, wouldn't stop marching to the beat of the different drummer. So....the right wing pays off the (rich people running) AUBOT and its leaders to assassinate the school......assassination from within is an old, old story. I'm currently screening (re-screening...I've watched it often) the Robert Graves I CLAUDIUS (1935) fiction account (BBC 1975 video of fame created based on the Graves' 1935 novel) of perfidy and back stabbing, assassinations by poison, hit-men, etc. in the Rome of Caesar Augustus, all "described" (fictionally) by Emporer Claudius, put on the Roman throne after Calligula was murdered by the Praetorian Guard, and the Guard put Claudius up to replace him to humilate the aristocrats and show up their degeneracy (Claudius was flawed physically, known as a famous fool and goof-ball type part of the aristocrats in Rome....grew up in Caesar Augustus' house, and watched the whole parade of relatives killing each other for power, etc.....Robert Graves wrote a book fictionally claiming Claudius' account of "what happened behind the scenes" was hidden, then discovered 1900 years later.) Anyway, ........ assassination by those in power to end the lives of OTHERS in power....old story....could well be part of the end of Antioch. Not all conspiracy theories are nutty and ridiculous, mainstream journalism and revisionist history notwithstanding.

Contribute to / Submit writing to ALL Antioch College Ohio cyberspace interest publications, including WWW.AntiRecord.Org

David Allen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:35:34 -0500

July 17, 2008 Hi from Tex Allen, Antioch College Ohio alumnus (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Even though Antioch College Ohio is now closed down (as of June 30, 2008), several Antioch College Ohio interest websites continue to keep memories and discussion about Antioch College Ohio alive. The oldest is WWW.AntiRecord.Org (est. 1998) and other have followed. One other site called THE BLAZE was started by the BLAZE COLLECTIVE (contact information below) and that site has requested contributions and writing pieces for its site. What follows is a reply I wrote to the Antioch College Ohio alumni chatline to a message posted by THE BLAZE COLLECTIVE today, July 17, 2008, urging Antioch College Ohio supporters and others to provide writing contributions to ALL Antioch College Ohio cyberspace and other publications so discussion and memories of Antioch College Ohio will be kept alive, even though the school currently (July 2008) is closed down: ------------------------------- Support THE BLAZE cyberspace publication and other Antioch College Ohio watchdog/ interest websites, and non-cyberspace publications if / when they exist and arrive (cyberspace could disappear overnight if/ when the phone companies which connect the world's computers crash or end for any reason...this could happen, and it would be baaaaaaaaaaaaaack to mass produced paper communications of the sort which started with Gubenberg and dominated mass communications until the 1990's!...Never entirely abandon the "bombshelter mentality" or REALLY believe, with Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's CANDIDE, that this is "the best of all possible worlds.") ALSO support OTHER Antioch College Ohio interest/ watchdog websites and communications efforts. Contribute writing, research, communications to 'em all! The OLDEST of these is WWW.AntiRecord.Org Antioch College Ohio interest/ watchdog website started in 1998 by Daniel Thomas "Yazz" Atlas, Antioch '97, who became a computer pro of great and high accomplishments after Antioch (see his impressive computer pro resume by searching WWW.Google.Com and hire him for well-paying computer comsulting jobs often!). The WWW.AntiRecord.Org site first had the controversial and dramatic title: WWW.AntiochSucks.Com and for a long time was the ONLY truly independent (i.e. NOT controlled by Antioch on-the-payroll workers/ officials) Antioch College Ohio website open to all commentators, friends or foes of Antioch College Ohio. Contribute to the WWW.AntiRecord.Org site and keep the memory and outrage about the wrong closing of Antioch College Ohio alive and out there in cyberspace. Articles which appear on the WWW.AntiRecord.Org site ALL get indexed and in time are available to search engines such as WWW.Google.Com sites available to researchers and others who want the truth about Antioch College Ohio unlikely to be provided by "official" voices controlling the school, or what remains of it. Subjects and personalities part of the Antioch College Ohio saga and story can be researched via WWW.Google.Com type search engines using only names or subject phrases as search terms once a substantial and well designed Antioch College Ohio interest/ watchdog website gets information, publishes it, and that information finds its way to search engines. All this keeps Antioch College Ohio ALIVE and REMEMBERED even though the bad guys have shut down the school, closed the buildings, kicked out the people, and turned the Antioch College Ohio campus we attended (alumni like me) and loved into a "has been" place. Again, good luck to and support THE BLAZE website and cyberspace publication, AND IN ADDITION support and never forget OTHER Antioch College Ohio interest websites available for YOUR words of wisdom and important information...including WWW.AntiRecord.Org Antioch College Ohio interest/ watchdog website, founded by and still managed by prominent California computer pro Daniel Thomas "Yazz" Atlas, Antioch '97 (site established in 1998...the oldest one!). Best wishes always, Tex Allen, Antioch alumnus and frequent contributor to WWW.AntiRecord.Org PS....The above was a reply to the Antioch Alumni Chatline publication of the following communication from the Antioch College Ohio interest/ watchdog group called "The Blaze Collective"....their communication was sent July 17, 08 to Antioch alumni and others, and appears below: > Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:58:38 -0400 > From: theblazecollective@blazenews.org > To: acan@antiochians.org; communications@antiochians.org; organizers@antiochians.org; alumni-chat@w3.antioch.edu > CC: > Subject: [Alumni-chat] Thanks Guys! > > Hey Y'all, > > We have had over 100 visit The Blaze since the last article "And the Oscar > Goes to…: Barbara Danley's Tenure: The Irreverent, Close-Enough, Razzie > Edition" (http://blazenews.org/47/and-the-oscar-goes-to). That's a new > record for us! > Here at The Blaze, we are very excited about all this attention! > > I just want to take a moment to remind everyone that we are always very > excited about getting more submissions. So if you have an article, or an > idea for an article, that seems appropriate for publishing in The Blaze please > drop us a line at submissions@blazenews.org we'd love to hear from you! > > Armed and Dangerous, > > The Blaze Editorial Collective > > -- > The Blaze Editorial Collective > > blaze@blazenews.org > http://blazenews.org > > "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should > afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, > contentedly, even happily wrong." > > - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006)

Antioch University Trustee Breaks Solidarity With Antioch College Ohio Closedown Supporters..Quits BOT...Tells Inside Facts!

David Allen — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:12:59 -0500

July 10, 08 Hi from Tex Allen (aka David Allen, aka Yazz Allen), Antich '66 (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Antioch University Board Of Trustee former member (until May 9....she quit very recently) Paula Treichler published the following in INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION today, July 10, 2008, about the Antioch College Ohio closedown which took effect June 30, 2008. She provides much "inside information" about the Antioch U. BOT worth reading. Here's what she wrote: ------------------ Antioch: Report From Ground Zero By Paula Treichler Antioch University was given an advance copy of the following op-ed, with the permission of the author, and offered the chance to respond with its own statement that would have appeared simultaneously with the publication of this piece, so that the university could offer its views and analysis of the issues discussed. After initially indicating that it would do so, and confirming as late as Wednesday afternoon that it would do so, the university stopped returning calls or responding to e-mails about the op-ed piece and indicated through an outside public relations official that it would not respond at this time. At the same time, the university’s lawyers sent a letter objecting to any use of the phrase “NonStop Antioch,” the former name of an effort mentioned in this op-ed. ------------------------------------------------------ Hundreds of Antioch College alumni returned to Yellow Springs, Ohio for a reunion in June, and they packed Kelly Hall for the Alumni Board’s update on talks to save the college. Even as the Antioch University administration was proceeding with its plan to close the college at the end of the month, Antioch faculty took the stage to tell the audience about what was then being called “NonStop Antioch,” an ambitious and indeed inspiring enterprise that will keep the Antioch spirit alive and in the village of Yellow Springs for the next two years: Without campus classrooms, dorms, or services, faculty will nevertheless design and teach courses in which students as well as community members will enroll while fund-raising staff work intensively with alumni to raise the money needed to reopen the college and begin its restoration to health. Several professors from surrounding colleges will teach NonStop courses and seminars gratis and individuals and organizations in Yellow Springs will provide teaching and study locations — which they aren’t calling “classroom space” but “sanctuary.” Longtime Antioch faculty member Hassan Rachmanian captured the spirit of the effort when he told the Kelly Hall audience that the university administration “may have taken the college’s body but we have its soul.” Ironically, the creators of this initiative cannot utter the words “NonStop Antioch” because the university has threatened legal action against any unauthorized use of the name “Antioch.” So old-fashioned call-and-response filled Kelly Hall: those on the stage shouted “NonStop!” and the audience, not subject to the university’s legal threats, roared back “Antioch!” Some professors will offer their favorite courses. Others will create new courses designed to capitalize on Antioch’s co-op tradition as well as the town/gown relationship. In one such course, combining political science with investigative journalism, students will track the presidential election by conducting videotaped interviews in traditionally liberal Yellow Springs as well as in nearby Clark County, long considered a bellwether district in nationwide voting. Inspiring as this weekend was, and brave as NonStop is, we have to ask: How did it come to this? How could the university’s Board of Trustees have decided to turn down three reasonable deals with great potential to save the college — and at considerably less cost and effort than will now be required? As a board member from October 2001 until last month, I can offer my perspective on events since June 2007 and on what’s happening now. As those who’ve been following the Antioch story know, the Antioch University Board of Trustees voted a year ago both to declare financial exigency at Antioch College and to suspend operations at the end of June 2008. Presented to the board by Toni Murdock, the university chancellor, the exigency and suspension recommendations were accompanied by a bleak financial analysis. I opposed both decisions, but an overwhelming majority of the board found the financial presentation indisputable. The chancellor’s presentation also included a sweetener — a plan to re-open the college in 2012. The plan had a couple of hitches: the chancellor would have to find corporate funding, and she and her “team” would direct the design of this “new Antioch College.” A lot of alums were skeptical the minute they heard “corporate funding” and “Antioch College” in the same sentence. And college faculty saw at once that the plan’s target date of 2012 would enable the university to terminate tenured appointments without violating AAUP requirements that faculty be rehired if the institution reopens within three years. (An earlier draft suggests that the plan’s original target date was 2011. If Murdock made the strategic change to evade AAUP censure, it would make sense. In her prior position as president of Antioch-Seattle, which like all of Antioch’s regional campuses operates without tenure, she had advocated eliminating tenure at the college and tried to ignore AAUP concerns about the dismissal of several Seattle faculty members.) Last year’s reunion took place just two weeks after the board’s closure bombshell and elicited from alumni on behalf of their alma mater an outpouring of love and commitment that university administrators and board members had claimed did not exist. With 250 alums scheduled to attend, more than 600 showed up and turned the reunion into an old fashioned revival meeting that raised hearts, hopes, and more than $8 million dollars. Over the following year, alumni submitted a series of proposals to the trustees that sought to keep the college open, establish its autonomy from the university, and create an independent board. The critical argument was that alumni and other significant donors would support the college under conditions of independence but not when it remained within the university structure. Then on May 8 of 2008, the board rejected the last of these proposals, a move that most trustees must have hoped would finally bring this fraught and exhausting year to an end. But this wasn’t to be. When the board convened on June 5 in Keene, New Hampshire, trustees found campus advocates awaiting them with statements, arguments, petitions, and media packets, and promises of more to come. Unexpectedly, at the end of the meeting, the board voted unanimously to direct the Antioch Alumni Association to develop a plan to save the college that would include taking over its operations for good. Thus this year’s reunion, too, came hard on the heels of a startling announcement from the Board of Trustees, and no one knew exactly what to think. While the June 2007 decision was the frustrated outcome of decades of heartache and hand-wringing by a series of boards about the college’s financial problems, this board’s vote in May 2008 to reject the last of the proposals not only acknowledged its own failure to solve those problems but also its stubborn determination to “stay the course” despite the massive re-engagement of alumni, the commitment of significant funds, and ongoing publicity critical of the university and the board. Though the board leadership spent incalculable hours and travel dollars in negotiations and acknowledged the college’s materially changed outlook, they treated the June 30, 2008 closure deadline like a holy grail. I joined the board in October of 2001. I resigned on May 7 this year, the day before that final negative vote, because I had violated the board’s cult-like oath of confidentiality that by then we were each required to renew at the beginning of every meeting and conference call. A number of trustees during the past year objected to the board’s secrecy, but largely in vain, and this helped doom all three plans to save the college. “Secrecy is for losers,” said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but secrecy was a winner in the decision to close Antioch. Of course, just about every board that hasn’t adopted radical sunshine laws conducts some of its business in confidence, notably personnel matters and especially the hiring or firing of chief executive officers. But our board, as the year proceeded, enlarged the cone of silence to encompass just about everything we did short of picking turkey or veggies for lunch. Was this destructive? Yes. It helped isolate board members at a time when we badly needed outside voices and independent expertise. Information technology, for example, was a fairly large line item in the university’s reckoning of college expenditures, but many campus community members said IT was a joke: Faculty, students, and even administrative staff told me that they often had to leave campus to find a functioning computer and Internet connection, and there seemed to be only one working copy machine available to the whole campus. A more serious discrepancy involved the role of the college’s assets in providing security for the university’s capital expenditures. Professors charged that the assets — including the endowment — were used as loan and bond collateral for buildings on the adult campuses, including Antioch-McGregor’s controversial building in Yellow Springs. The university administration and the board categorically denied this charge. Ironically, the board’s commitment to “transparency” served to obscure such discrepancies. True transparency, if such a thing can be achieved, is fine: It aims to illuminate what is not readily visible, acknowledge and articulate competing interests, identify the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped divergent positions, and vigorously articulate counter-arguments and interpretations. True transparency means less control, more contradiction, more openness. The board and administrative leadership and the university’s legal counsel repeatedly espoused and asserted transparency, with Exhibit A being the chancellor’s PowerPoint forecast of financial doom in June 2007. But as negotiations continued and pressures mounted, presentations became dogmatically non-transparent. They had their version of the truth and selected facts, arguments, and documentation to support it. Sometimes the efforts were laughable: With hundreds of alumni and others loudly protesting Antioch’s closure each week in letters, e-mails, and national media, and with Google Alert making updates immediately accessible, board members would be forwarded only expressions of support for their decision: An e-mail complaining about the college from an embittered 1980 alum, a letter from the pissed-off mom of a recent college drop-out, a George Will column. More disturbing were the memoranda prepared for us by the university’s lawyers with their relentlessly narrow and corporate interpretations of our fiduciary responsibility and duty of care, the nature of trusteeship, and our risk of personal liability. The chancellor at one point characterized the college’s alumni as “chaotic” because they do not speak with a uniform or unified voice. These cautionary directives from the university’s legal counsel, in contrast, were designed to promote a unified voice on the board. In part as a result of this controlled information flow, most board members have known little of the chancellor’s behind-the-scenes aggressions against the college this past year. She would no doubt say she was just doing the job we told her to do: closing down the campus. At first it just seemed like coincidence that when events took a pro-college turn, the chancellor would scorch some campus earth. But after awhile these actions began to look deliberately and unnecessarily hostile. Or, at least with regard to the first example, just callous. Just after the June 2007 announcement of closure and the negative outcry in the local and national press, a homeland security simulation had been scheduled by one of the chancellor’s minions. To be held in beloved Olive Kettering Library on the Antioch campus, the scenario called for several Antioch students to simulate being dead; even the Yellow Springs cops thought that under the circumstances this was a tad insensitive and offered alternative space. No, said the minion, the SWAT team wanted to practice in the library stacks, so — as documented in the film “Antioch Confidential” — the simulation went forward. At the end of August, the board, together with the university administration, scheduled two days in Cincinnati to hear testimony from most of the college’s constituencies. By the end of the meeting the board, quite moved by the presentations, voted all but unanimously to step onto the slippery slope and support the Alumni Association’s efforts to keep the college open. So that the alumni could assemble a proper proposal with fund-raising targets and a business plan, the chancellor was directed to share all necessary financial data and to help. I left that meeting optimistic and full of respect for my fellow board members who, it seemed to me, genuinely wanted this initiative to succeed. And Steve Lawry, president of the college, said he was satisfied with this turn of events and would now be able wholeheartedly to resume his visits to potential donors. Within days came frantic phone calls and emails from Yellow Springs: the chancellor had returned from Cincinnati to campus, fired Steve Lawry, and prohibited contact with alumni and donors. She also, via the minions, sent home staff members in Alumni Development and Institutional Advancement, changed the locks on their office doors, and put automatic reply messages on their computers: “I am out of the office ‘til after Labor Day!” In other words, the chancellor took the steps that would most immediately and directly impede communication, development, and fund-raising activities, precisely the activities most urgently needed to complete the plan and save the college. The minions then created a management-sanctioned alumni newsletter, as though the professional alumni development staff were irresponsible cranks: In place of the familiar graphic of the Antioch towers, alumni opened their e-mails to the inaugural issue of “Good News!” with its upbeat account of the “positive” and “collaborative” meeting in Cincinnati. Alumni, also receiving the “real” alumni newsletter from the college development staff as well as the Yellow Springs News and the Antioch Record online — all with reports of what had already been dubbed the Labor Day Massacre — were understandably astonished and outraged. Yet when they, and I myself as a board member, asked Art Zucker, the board chair, to account for these actions, he denied their significance and impact. He characterized Steve Lawry’s dismissal as the decision any responsible CEO might make, changing the locks as “standard operating procedure,” and campus reactions as “over-reactions.” A member of the board’s executive committee chided me privately for questioning the chancellor’s actions; she was “following our mandated process” and was quite in order to take control over an unruly college staff. Whenever you shut down a division, he added, “you gotta expect anxiety and fallout.” In this instance, and thereafter, “fallout” was rarely discussed formally by the board, but the leadership did start issuing regular statements of praise for the chancellor, while “the board’s mandated process” became a familiar mantra. Then in November, following a regular board meeting in Yellow Springs that seemed to last forever, the board voted to lift the suspension of operations. Students rang bells in the campus towers, but the vote turned out to have changed nothing: With financial exigency still in place, the chancellor argued, there could be no student recruitment, no renegotiation with the Ohio Board of Regents of the college’s degree-granting and accreditation status, no extension of faculty positions or student graduation dates. The chancellor had her marching orders and it was her legal and fiduciary duty to honor the timeline, no matter how many bells were ringing. Legal counsel chimed in. In a 2006 essay on communication at Antioch University (posted on the Antioch Papers Web site), the chancellor clearly expressed her preference for top-down, fully controlled communication, with everything authorized or supervised by the chancellor. So when the alumni leaders scheduled an open meeting to talk with the campus community, the chancellor wanted to close the campus to them, and to outsiders in general — anyone who might foster the free flow of information and specifically deliver misleadingly hopeful messages about the college’s future. As one of the minions said, “Hope is creating the problem.” Trying to close the campus to the alumni leaders also reflected the university’s position that they were not a group of alumni but a rival corporation seeking to engineer a hostile takeover of the college. In the same spirit, the university even forced the Alumni Association to rent back its own campus buildings for this June’s reunion and, with dorms already shut down, alumni had to sleep in tents or off campus; there was no cafeteria service because the university is suing the village over its chiller unit. Such ways of thinking are common in corporate culture and most of the board seemed familiar and comfortable with them, but they’re at odds with academic principles and practices. While the university is, indeed, a corporation and the chancellor is its CEO and the members of the board are its directors, an academic institution is distinct in many ways from other corporate bodies. Not only Antioch but most American colleges and universities subscribe to principles advocated by the American Association of University Professors, widely regarded as a leading authority on sound academic practices. Most famous is the AAUP’s 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which the Antioch College faculty references in their lawsuit against the university. Like other academics who’ve served on the board (sadly, a shrinking constituency), I’m an AAUP member who’s raised issues about academic practices, including “shared governance,” the association’s principle that the administration, board, and faculty of an academic institution should work together to shape its life and future. But the board and chancellor appear to have rejected shared governance, declaring financial exigency without prior or subsequent faculty consultation and even stating at one point that “shared governance may apply to the Antioch campus but does not apply to the relationship between the campus, the university administration, and the board.” I believe the AAUP would consider this interpretation incorrect. As the scorched earth campaign continued, the chancellor found new ways to disrupt fund raising and alumni relations, and board deadlines came and went. College support staff would find their corporate credit cards canceled, so they couldn’t schedule fund-raising trips or meet with alumni chapters (in June 2007, eight alumni chapters existed; today there are nearly 50). Or they would be told that as college employees they couldn’t raise money for an outside corporation, or their reservations for meeting rooms would be canceled without notification, or they’d be prohibited from contacting certain donors or accessing certain records, or a minion would be installed as their supervisor, or they’d be threatened with being audited or fired. Alumni leaders were regularly summoned to mediate conflicts, further delaying progress. And the campus grew dimmer and grimmer. Housekeeping and security services on campus were sharply curtailed, buildings were closed, long-time faculty and staff members were fired. The Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom, opened in March 2007, was closed, and a funding proposal from its director was rejected. When the chancellor learned that many of the confidential documents posted on the Antioch Papers Web site had not been leaked by insiders but legitimately acquired by members of the public from Antiochiana, the institution’s archive, where board materials were routinely sent for storage, she changed the archives’ locks and restricted its hours and access to the public, including the alumni who have donated many of its holdings. Some actions were taken without full board notification, consultation, or approval. Although many of them will radically increase the financial and administrative burden of re-opening the college and its campus, the full board never directed her to explore putting off the deadline for closure. They just let her run out the clock. So now it’s July 2008. Students, faculty, and staff have left, retired, taken other jobs, or moved to the NonStop campaign, while the physical plant is on a forced march to oblivion. Historic G. Stanley Hall Hall has been razed along with the huge trees that surrounded it. Heat and air conditioning have been turned off. Furniture, equipment, curtains, and carpeting will be discarded. The buildings will accumulate moisture all summer and be subjected to a hard freeze when cold weather comes. The minions found algae in the campus pool and drained it, depriving the Yellow Springs community of a long-shared facility. Next year zero-occupancy rules apply. If, or when, the Alumni Association’s plans for the college come to fruition, the buildings may not be permitted to reopen unless they meet current construction codes. Of course we’re joyful that we still might get our college back. But are we like Charlie Brown, eternally wooed by Lucy’s promise that this time will be different — this time she won’t pull the football out from under him, this time she’s on his/our side? Or is the chancellor determined to wreck the college by any means necessary? As one of my Antioch friends channels her, in a screech, from the Wizard of Oz: “I’ll have your college — and your little dog too!” Some alumni believe that if they can raise enough money, the board will now cooperate. I agree about the money. And I agree that the board has moved in a significantly different direction. But the reign of terror against the campus and its ongoing human cost, which I have sketched briefly here, are significant realities as well. Scholars of conflict, like anthropologist Victor Turner, tell us that during prolonged conflicts, especially under conditions of structural inequity or ambiguity, the less powerful are likely to paint the more powerful in apocalyptic terms. In writing here about Antioch, I have likened the chancellor to the wicked witch, hinted that the board and university leadership share qualities with the George W. Bush administration, and even used “ground zero” in my title. But when I look coldly at the outcomes of this past year, I see something more mundane: a failure of imagination, an aversion to risk, a regime fixated on management instead of governance, and ultimately an overall pattern of incompetence. “The chancellor calls the alumni chaotic,” said one community member recently: “This is a woman who can’t even change a lock without throwing the whole campus into chaos.” Whether apocalyptic or mundane, the college struggle has not unfolded on the flat playing field trumpeted by Toni Murdock’s idol Thomas Friedman. The chancellor is still the CEO of this corporation. The board is still the decider. The university is still the entity its legal counsel prioritizes and protects. Against such odds, alumni and Antioch’s other friends must continue financially and politically to support the activities and organizations that can still provide direction and leverage: Direct action, legal services, NonStop, the Alumni Association and the College Revival Fund, the Antioch Papers, and the many creative projects that help document the Antioch story. Even as we hope for a happy ending, we have to stay vigilant. In the largest sense, this means we all have to be involved, NonStop. ------------------------------ Paula Treichler, who graduated as a philosophy major from Antioch College in 1965, grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio; her parents served on the Antioch faculty for 34 years. With a Ph.D. in linguistics and psycholinguistics, she has held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1972. She has published numerous essays on higher education.

Antioch College Ohio History: Part Two.....The Prosecution Makes Its Case...The Sexual Offense Policy details. SAT. NITE LIVE

David Allen — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:23:05 -0500

July 6, 08 Hi from Tex Allen, Antioch College Ohio alumnus (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Attacks on Antioch College Ohio by media personalities who themselves were Antioch College alumni were used as ammunition by naysayers anxious to support the Antioch College Ohio closedown which finally (and tragically) occured last June 30, 2008 (7 days ago!). People part of the Antioch alumni community dissatisfied with events and power personalities part of Antioch College voiced objections, and this was used by Antioch College Ohio critics and enemies to justify support of the Antioch College Ohio closedown. Antioch College Ohio was closed down importantly due to media attacks supporting the closedown (national right wing political writer George Will wrote an infamous attack in Fall of 2008, and there were many others by right wing writers and personalities of both fame and obscurity). Understanding the history of Antioch College Ohio, why it was shut down, and what part recollections of controversies part of Antioch College Ohio's past played, requires a knowledge and review of "Anti-Antioch public writing." What follows is a dredging up of the infamous Sexual Offense Prevention Policy of 1993 by a radio talk show host and journalist named David Benzion, who was (and is) an Antioch alumnus, class of 1994. He recounts the spoof of the Antioch SOPP on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, the famous national TV comedy show, which used and named Antioch College in a now famous comedy skit. The point of the skit was to ridicule and defame Antioch College, and Mr. Benzion's writing about the subject is an example of public writing by Antioch alumni of media fame whose disapproval of parts of Antioch's past were used to justify the Antioch College Ohio closedown which occurred on June 30, 2008. Antioch College Ohio history can only be understood if the attacks on it (selective and self-interested) are studied carefully and also understood. What follows is a recent example which appeared in national media during the Fall of 2008, after the announcement of the Antioch University Board Of Trustees to close down Antioch College Ohio in 2008 was made, but before the final event occurred. Read it carefully. Students of Antioch College Ohio history must know how attacks on the school worked, what ideas were presented to support the attack in major media. --------------------------------- David Benzion, Antioch '94, now works in Texas as a radio talk show personality and also as a journalist. He responded to the Antioch Closedown crisis last Fall 2007 by providing readers with a transcript of the 1993 famous SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE comedy show spoof about the then new Antioch College "SOPP" policy which dealt with date rape and efforts to stop it. Benzion also recalled particulars about events and campus politics which led up to the policy achieving status and national notoriety, and recalled his own (failed) efforts to challenge the policy while he was an Antioch student. Below is a transcript of the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE show about the Antioch SOPP (stands for "Sexual Offense Prevention Policy"), followed by David Benzion's recollections about his time as a student at Antioch and effort to challenge the policy. ------------------ Transcript of the SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (1993) TV broadcast skit about Antioch College's then new widely publicized rules about sex between students: -------------- Is It Date Rape Dean Frederick Whitcomb.....Phil Hartman Ariel Helpern-Strauss.....Shannen Doherty Mark Strobel.....Chris Farley Male Date Rape Player #1.....Mike Myers Female Date Rape Player #1.....Melanie Hutsell Male Date Rape Player #2.....Tim Meadows Female Date Rape Player #2.....Ellen Cleghorne [ open with the theme from "Casino Royale" ] Announcer: Live, from Antioch College in Antioch, Ohio.. it's time to play.. Audience: Is.. It.. Date Rape?! Announcer: ..with your host, the dean of intergender relations - Dean Frederick Whitcomb! [ Dean Frederick Whitcomb enters the game show stage ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, students and faculty! We've got an exciting show! Back with us is our defending champion, she's a Junior and a major in Victimization Studies. Say hello to Ariel Helpern-Strauss! [ show Ariel at her podium ] And our challenger - he's a nose tackle and a Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother. Say hello to Mark Strobel! Mark Strobel: S! A! E! Yeah, yeah! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Welcome, players. Let's take a look at our board. The categories are: "Halter Top"; "She Was Drunk"; "I Was Drunk"; "Kegger"; "Off-Campus Kegger"; "She Led Me On"; "I Paid For Dinner": and "Ragin' Kegger". Alright. Ariel, you're our champion, the board is yours. [ lights bounce across the board squares, until Ariel presses her buzzer and stops the light on one of the squares ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: "She Led Me On"! [ reading card ] "It is the last day of school, a female student asks a male student to help her move her futon-" [ Ariel buzzes ] Helpern-Strauss? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: Date Rape! [ sound effect dings for a correct answer ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Well! [ laughs ] I didn't even finish the question.. but it is Date Rape! Okay, for those of you not familiar with the rules to our game, it's quite simple. Antioch College defines date rape as: any sexual contact or conduct between two or more persons, in which consent of such contact, which includes: the touching of thighs, genitals, buttocks, or the breast/chest area is not expressly obtained in a verbal manner. If the level of sexual intimacy increases during an interaction: ie. if two people move from kissing while fully clothed to undressing for direct physical contact, and the people involved do not express their clear verbal consent before moving to that level, that too is.. date rape." Alright! Mark.. you get the board! Mark Strobel: Come on, "Halter Top".. [ hits buzzer, lighting up one of the squares ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: "I Paid For Dinner"! [ reading card ] "She orders a steak and a shrimp cocktail.." Strobel? Mark Strobel: Not Date Rape. Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Ohhh.. sorry! Helpern-Strauss, would you like me to finish the question? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: Date Rape! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Correct! Mark Strobel: Come on! Surf 'n Turf?! That's like forty BUCKS, man! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Alright, let's move on.. Helpern-Strauss. [ Ariel hits her buzzer, lighting one of the squares ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: "Halter Top"! [ siren sounds ] Oh.. that siren means one thing. Here to help us with the question are the Antioch College Date Rape Players. [ curtain parts to reveal the two players in a scene together ] Male Date Rape Player #1: May I compliment you on your halter top? Female Date Rape Player #1: Yes. You may. Male Date Rape Player #1: It's very nice. May I kiss you on the mouth. Female Date Rape Player #1: Yes. I would like you to kiss me on the mouth. [ they kiss on the mouth ] Male Date Rape Player #1: May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks? Female Date Rape Player #1: Yes. You have my permission. [ Male touches Female's buttocks ] Male Date Rape Player #1: May I raise the level yet again, and take my clothes off so that we could have intercourse? Female Date Rape Player #1: Yes. I am granting your request to have intercourse. [ scene ends ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Contestants? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: [ buzzes in ] Date Rape! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Ohhhh.. sorry! Mark, what do you say? Is it date rape? Mark Strobel: Uhhh.. oh, man! [ beats himself up ] Uhhh.. Date Rape? Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Ohhhh.. sorry! We were looking for "It is not date rape.." Not Date Rape. Mark Strobel: [ pounds his podium ] Oh! Man! I KNEW IT!! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Alright.. let's meet our contestants. Mark Strobel, you have been charged in three hazing deaths.. with two counts of hate speech, and one instance of sexual harrassment when you referred to the women's field hockey teams as, "a bunch of lezbos." Mark Strobel: [ smiling ] Glad to be here, Dean! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Alright! And over here, our lovely young champion. Ariel Helpern-Strauss: [ pounds her buzzer ] Take your hands off me! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Very good! That's good for 10 points, Ariel! And.. you've got the board! [ Mark hits his buzzer, lighting one of the squares ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: "Ragin' Kegger"! [ siren sounds ] Alright.. once again, the Date Rape Players. [ curtain parts to reveal the two players in a scene together ] Male Date Rape Player #2: I sure had a nice time at that ragin' kegger. May I kiss you on the mouth. Female Date Rape Player #2: Yes. Kissing me on the mouth.. is sometihng I feel.. com-fort-a-ble with. [ they kiss on the mouth ] Mmmm.. that.. was nice! Male Date Rape Player #2: Would you mind if we had sexual intercourse? Female Date Rape Player #2: No.. [ Ariel buzzes in ] Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Helpern-Strauss? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: Date Rape! No always means no! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: That's correct! Good job, Ariel! A bit of a trick question there! [ final game buzzer sounds ] Well.. it looks like the round is over, and, Ariel, you are still our champion! Now, it's time for our Bonus Round. You know how it works, Mark. You have thirty seconds to win Ariel's consent. Are you ready, Mark? Mark Strobel: Okay.. Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Go! [ timer plays down, as Mark tries to win Ariel's consent ] Mark Strobel: I was wondering if, uh.. you're not busy, uh- Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No! Mark Strobel: There's gonna be a party at the frat house- Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No! Mark Strobel: Can I.. kiss you..? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No! Mark Strobel: Can I put my hands on your buttocks..? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No! Mark Strobel: Do you wanna do it, or what..? Ariel Helpern-Strauss: NO!! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: Alright! Ariel! Congratulations! You win a trip.. for you and Mark to.. Acapulco! Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No-oh! Mark Strobel: Whoooooo!! Yeah! Hah hah hah! Whoo! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: You will spend two nights in Acapulco, at the Lover's Hideaway Beach Hotel! Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No! This is so wrong! Dean Frederick Whitcomb: I want to thank our contestants and the Date Rape Players. Come on, everybody! Let's give them a big kiss goodbye! Ariel Helpern-Strauss: No... no.. please.. [ fade ] ----------------------------------- Here is David Benzion's (Antioch '94) account of his time at Antioch College Ohio as un undergrad and connection with and opinions about the SOPP policy.....other aspects of Antioch College Ohio, it's history and its troubles, were ALSO included in his writing done in Fall 2007: ------------ The widely-publicized date-rape policy that catapulted Antioch onto Saturday Night Live and into nationwide ridicule in 1993 was a kind of object lesson in what can happen when demographic implosion (reducing the student body to its most radical core) unites with a laissez-faire administration philosophy that consists of giving even the most extreme factions everything they want. The extremists in this case consisted of a group of student feminists who called themselves “Womyn of Antioch” (a title that might have sent up a red flag to administrators elsewhere) and claimed to be reacting to two incidents of date rape on the Yellow Springs campus in 1991, which they said the administration had ignored. No Antioch students were ever charged with those offenses either formally or informally, much less found by a college tribunal to have committed them, much less prosecuted for any crime by outside authorities. Antioch’s archivist Sanders said that the alleged rapes might have been more a matter of “perception” than reality. Nonetheless, when the Womyn “stormed” (the word comes from Antioch’s website) an Antioch community meeting and insisted on pushing through the policy they had drafted regardless of parliamentary niceties, the administrators and faculty who were supposed to be on at least an equal footing with the students at those meetings, if not their superiors on the basis of maturity and experience, said, oh, okay. I have the distinct honor of having been booed and hissed (hyssed?) by the “Womyn of Antioch” at that exact meeting– my sins consisting of … Being a man; Speaking out in favor of due process and civil liberties; In the course of my comments using the phrase “don’t want to open a ‘Pandora’s Box’” (“BOOOO!! HISSSS! How dare you employ a patriarchal, misogynistic trope!”) The Womyn-drafted sexual-offense policy read: “Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it. Asking ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’ is not enough. The request for consent must be specific to each act.” The penalty for even being accused of failing to obtain consent for one of the “levels” was immediate expulsion without a hearing or any other rights. Not surprisingly, when word leaked out (it took a while) that Antioch’s board of trustees had actually approved the policy and made it official, the reaction of the non-Antioch general public was . . . laughter all around. One wag estimated that Antioch required a student seeking a home run in the baseball game of sex to ask for the consent of his beloved a total of 150 times. A few years later, after much media mockery and several threatened legal challenges over the lack of due process, Antioch modified the policy to bring it into line with other colleges’ procedures for handling accusations of date rape and related sexual offenses. One of those “threatened legal challenges” was from a foreign exchange student who was accused of rape by a woman whose romantic interest he had earlier declined… and who had a self-admitted history (sorry, “herstory”) of false rape allegations. Self. Admitted. The night she was supposedly wrestled, pinned-down and violated, the man in question was in fact recovering from an accident that kept him (in full-neck brace) in bed and being fed a steady supply of high-octane pain-killers from the school nurse (an honorable woman, classic Vermont liberal, who insisted on telling the administration that the accusations against the man were “complete crap”). Could a Hollywood screenwriter even contrive a scenario in which it was more clear that a man was being falsely accused of rape? And yet, the p.c.-bureaucracy at Antioch allowed this psychologically-agonizing farce to grind on for months, afraid of staring down the Womyn who ideologically had them by… well, I’m just going to say it, by the balls.

Antioch College Ohio History: Part One.....The Prosecution Makes Its Case...Selective "history" to make Antioch look bad!

David Allen — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:49:31 -0500

July 6, 08 Hi from Tex Allen, Antioch College Ohio alumnus (email directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com)! The tragic closedown of Antioch College Ohio residential undergraduate program in Yellow Springs, Ohio which took place on June 30, 2008 (7 days ago!) by the Antioch University Board Of Trustees (aka "AUBOT") headed by Antioch University chairman Arthur Zucker, Antioch 55, and Toni Murdock, Chancellor of Antioch University, was accomplished in part by selective "histories" part of attacks by media professionals hostile to Antioch College, Ohio and anxious to support the efforts to close the school down. Those interested in the history of Antioch College Ohio and the reasons for its closedown (and the justifications for that closedown in the eyes of the school's many enemies) would do well to examine the following well and carefully written account of the Antioch College Ohio "closedown crisis" submitted by journalist Charlotte Allen, famous for her work attacking "liberal" education approaches and schools like Antioch College Ohio. Ms. Allen (no relation to me) helped close down Antioch College Ohio with the following article which provides scholarly detail about Antioch College Ohio, selectively and self-interestedly presented, de-emphasizing important facts and accomplishments of Antioch College Ohio and its leaders over the years she covers, and making the "case for the prosecution" in November 2007 when the "jury was still out" and the fate of Antioch College Ohio still hung in the balance, was not yet decided. Ms. Charlotte Allen recalls severe problems and controversies part of Antioch College Ohio history during the past 40 years as told by recalling internecine and uncomplimentary accounts by famous Antioch College alumni (Ralph Keyes '67, noted book author, and Bernard Goldfarb '70, National Public Radio personality of fame), and by mass media recording controversies part of recent (past 40 years) Antioch College Ohio history. Antioch College Ohio accomplishments during recent decades (both general and specific), it's refusal to cave into the "McEducation" movement and corporatization of American cultural institutions, and its support of free speech, examination of all points of view in all cultural areas, and toleration of these are not mentioned, and neither is the collapse of American culture and higher education which has clearly occurred during the roughly 40 year period covered by Ms. Charlotte Allen. What follows is VERY slick defamation of Antioch College Ohio, and celebration of its travails under the guise of "objective journalism." Many details about events and personalities connected with Antioch College Ohio over the years are provided (and useful to those unacquainted with details of recent decades Antioch College Ohio history), but the overall point of what follows is to ensure that Antioch College Ohio is shut down, and that the end of Antioch College Ohio (1852-2008) is celebrated. Antioch College, Ohio (1852-2008) is indeed shut down now, likely never to return, and that result was importantly assisted by forces far beyond the spotlighted Antioch University Board Of Trustees which ordered the closedown, and rightfully came under attack by most Antioch College Ohio alumni as a result. But defamation in the form of selectively and self-interestedly presented "history" of the sort written by Ms. Charlotte Allen (a right wing writer and apologist) was and is an important factor in explaining why Antioch College, Ohio is now gone. Read what follows carefully. Those who come to explain what Antioch College Ohio was and why it was important, why its closedown was unjust and unnecessary and a terrible tragedy for all of American and world culture, should understand the enemies of Antioch College...understand and be familiar with "the case for the prosecution" of Antioch College Ohio. What follows appeared in national media last year during November 2007: ------------------------ Death by Political Correctness Who killed Antioch College? by Charlotte Allen Yellow Springs, Ohio It is 9:30 on a sunny Monday morning in October, a time, day, and month when most college campuses bustle with activity: students hurrying to class or relaxing between classes on library steps or tree-covered lawns. Here, on the 200-acre campus of Antioch College, a 155-year-old liberal-arts institution best known nowadays for a campus culture that long ago drifted from the progressively liberal to the alarmingly radical (people still talk about the anti-date-rape policy that required a separate verbal consent for each step of an amorous encounter, famously parodied on Saturday Night Live in 1993), the phrase "bustling with activity" is not what comes to mind. What comes to mind is the neutron bomb. There are plenty of trees on Antioch's historic campus in Yellow Springs, a town of 4,600 about 20 miles east of Dayton in rural southwestern Ohio--soaring oaks, walnuts, maples, and firs, many likely more than a century old. And there are plenty of buildings--dozens of residence halls and classroom facilities, along with a library that has seen better days and a turreted Victorian-era main building designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of the Smithsonian Institution's landmark castle in Washington, D.C., and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. As for Antioch students, however, there are none to be seen this morning, except for an occasional shadowy figure moving silently among distant trees like one of Ohio's long-vanished Miami Indians on a solitary hunt. A visitor to the campus might infer that ultra-radicalism doesn't sell, at least when the price is the nearly $40,000 per year it costs to attend Antioch College. On June 9, 2007, the trustees of Antioch University, an adult-education offshoot of Antioch College that now dominates the college administratively, financially, and in terms of overall student population, announced that Antioch College would suspend operations on July 1, 2008, with a possibility of reopening in much-altered form in 2012, and that its entire faculty, including tenured professors, would be laid off. The reasons for the shutdown given by the trustees and by Tulisse Murdock, Antioch University's chancellor since 2005, were many: years and years of incurable deficits, this year totaling $2.6 million on an annual college budget of $18 million; an extraordinarily low endowment of just $36 million (neighboring Ohio liberal arts colleges Oberlin and Kenyon boast endowments of $700 million and $167 million respectively); and a chronically low student enrollment that topped 600 only once during the preceding 25 years (compare that with Oberlin's enrollment of nearly 2,900) and has declined precipitously since 2003. During the 2006-07 academic year, for example, only 330 full-time students were enrolled in Antioch's bachelor-of-arts and bachelor-of-science programs--once so highly regarded that Antioch could boast that it had more graduates who went on to obtain Ph.D.'s than any other college in the country. This fall, after news of the pending shutdown decimated the incoming freshman class, there are just 220 Antioch College undergraduates left. That represents a decline of almost 90 percent from the 2,000 or so young people who attended Antioch during its peak enrollment years of the 1960s and early 1970s. Antioch's students, its faculty--whose numbers have also drastically shrunk (just 37 today, down from 140 during the early 1970s)--and many residents of Yellow Springs, a pleasant college town of handsome old houses and businesses that advertise their liberal-leaning, Antioch-friendly "green" and "fair trade" consciousness, are fighting to save the college, citing its long and illustrious history. Antioch's first president, in 1853, was the famous education reformer Horace Mann, and until things went bad, Antioch regularly turned out graduates who went on to become stellar public figures, writers, and scholars: Coretta Scott King, wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the District of Columbia's Democratic congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and, most recently in the news, Mario R. Capecchi, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for his work on embryonic stem cells in mice. (This was Antioch College's second Nobel; José Ramos-Horta, president of East Timor, who had received a master's degree in 1984 in a peace-studies program now incorporated into Antioch University, won the Peace Prize in 1996.) A group of Antioch College's chronically lethargic alumni says it has rushed to raise $18 million in donations and pledges in a last-ditch plan to save the college, and at an emergency meeting of the university's trustees in Yellow Springs on October 25 presented a $100 million business plan (based on an aggressive five-year fundraising drive) designed to cure their alma mater's deficit, keep its doors open, and revive its attractiveness to high-school seniors. The trustees had been expected to issue a decision on October 27 whether to accept or reject the alumni plan, but they declined to do so, leaving Antioch College in an even more precarious state, given that autumn is the time when colleges and universities do their most aggressive recruiting and prospective high-school graduates start filling out their college application forms. Discussions among trustees and alumni were continuing on November 2, as this article went to press. Antioch College's declining fortunes and uncertain future are reflected everywhere you look on the Yellow Springs campus, which gives the impression of having been swept some years ago by a sudden and devastating plague. Campus plantings are mostly dead, dying, or choked with weeds (most of the maintenance staff was dismissed soon after the closing was announced in June, although a plumber and electrician who have yet to be laid off still manage to mow the lawns). The crumbling sidewalks leading from deserted Antioch building to deserted Antioch building resemble the ruins of Roman roads, with grass sprouting lushly from their numerous cracks, and the murky windows of an abandoned greenhouse display rows of withered plants. An inviting cluster of wooden benches outside a classroom building seats . . . no one at all. The fact that Antioch, nearly alone among U.S. private and public colleges, forbids journalists to roam the grounds or enter buildings without an officially designated escort adds to the general air of isolation and contamination. (Antioch says the minders are a holdover from the Saturday Night Live era, when reporters and television crews from all over the world flooded the campus in search of amusing sexual anecdotes, disrupting academic life.) Antioch College no longer even has a president. The last holder of that office, Steven Lawry, a former Ford Foundation executive who assumed the helm in 2006, tendered his resignation as of December 2007 and then abruptly went on administrative leave at the end of August. Neither Lawry, contacted by telephone, nor anyone still at Antioch would comment on his hasty departure, but news stories in Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest that Lawry, although popular with faculty and alumni, was for all intents and purposes fired by the university--and also banned permanently from the Yellow Springs campus--after a heated argument with Murdock that seemed to stem from his efforts to bypass the university hierarchy and contact the trustees on his own. One key plank of the alumni proposal to save Antioch College is to give the college its own board of trustees with the power to hire and fire presidents. Antioch College has not had its own board since Antioch University was formed in 1978 in a merger of the college with the adult-education campuses. An archaeologist called upon to estimate just when the plague swept through--that is, when the college reached its peak of flourishing and then abruptly stopped--might come up with, say, the year 1965, judging from the vintage mid-century look of the brick-and-plate-glass "newer" buildings. Indeed, the college did then enjoy a sustained and impressive growth spurt and a frenzy of construction. The school, which had never enrolled more than 1,000 students in its history, nearly doubled in size from 1954 to 1964, and it continued to grow after that, reaching its all-time peak undergraduate population of 2,470 in 1972. Even during the 1950s, Antioch had a reputation as a "beatnik college." It had phased out varsity sports starting in the 1920s (it had once fielded football and baseball teams) and historically eschewed fraternities and sororities. It had no dress code, unlike most colleges in those days, and students tended to be arty overachievers with avant-garde political views. Antioch's pioneering work-study program, called "co-operative education" (shortened to "co-op" and part of the curriculum to this day), and the college's practice of giving students a voice in its governance drew earnest, highly individualistic young people who liked the idea of obtaining real-world job experience, often in science labs or on archaeological digs but also in private businesses, when still in school, while also being able to take time off to enlist in political causes. During the heyday of the civil rights movement, for example, Antioch was famous for its students who traveled to southern states to help register black voters. A graduate student, Alan E. Guskin, later to become president of Antioch College and chancellor of Antioch University, formed a student organization in 1960 that inspired John F. Kennedy to set up the Peace Corps. The favorite campus entertainment on Friday nights was that echt-1950s bohemian pastime: folk-dancing. Nonetheless, Antioch also had a reputation for academic rigor and was nearly as competitive in admissions as Harvard. It accepted only one out of four applicants (the average combined SAT scores of those who got in was 1350 in 1960), and students had to pass a stiff comprehensive examination at the end of their first year. Today that test is long gone; Antioch does not require its applicants even to submit their SAT scores, which are said to hover around 1075, and it admits a majority of those who apply. It was during the glory years of the 1950s and early 1960s that Antioch produced its most famous and distinguished graduates. Although political views at Antioch might have tilted leftward even back then, the students of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s prided themselves on their willingness to hear out their more conservative classmates in lively all-night dorm discussions on politics and philosophy, inspired by professors who encouraged them to test all their assumptions against the evidence. "We were completely respectful of every point of view," recalled Rick Daily, a Denver lawyer who graduated from Antioch in 1968 and is treasurer of the alumni committee that is struggling to save the college from closure. "We even had a Goldwater Republican in our graduating class," Daily said in a telephone interview. That was Antioch then. Antioch now might be fairly represented by a September 21 article in the student newspaper, the Record, consisting of a gloating account of the invasion by 40 gay and lesbian Antioch students (a full fifth of the current student body) of an evangelical Christian book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble store located in a mall in nearby Beavercreek, Ohio.. Record reporter Marysia Walcerz described the hours-long "Gay Takeover," whose participants wore rainbow-tinted bandannas, ostentatiously held hands and kissed, and did their best to shock both authors and customers in this socially conservative sector of Ohio, as a "success . . . for direct action executed in style." A July 20 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Ralph Keyes, author of the bestselling Is There Life After High School? and a 1967 graduate of Antioch who moved with his family back to Yellow Springs some 20 years ago, described similar adventures by Antioch students in the intimidation of people who do not share their views. Keyes took pains to reassure the Chronicle's readers that he himself had been proudly "left-wing" as an Antioch student, but he also detailed a once-tolerant campus culture that had deteriorated since his student days into "insults, name-calling, and profanity." As Keyes described it (and others connected to the campus corroborate his observations), Antioch students regularly engaged, both inside and outside their classrooms, in the practice of "calling out" (public humiliation followed by social ostracism) their classmates for even the most trivial violations of an unwritten campus code of ideological propriety. One of the called-out was a Polish exchange student who had made the mistake of using the now-taboo word "Eskimos" instead of "Inuit" in reference to Alaskan aboriginals. Another called-out student had worn Nike sneakers, verboten among the radically sensitive because they are supposedly products of Indonesian sweatshop labor (the Nike-wearer was so demoralized by his treatment that he transferred). Keyes lamented what he called the "crack-house décor" of Antioch's student union, whose second floor features a 30-foot wall of student-painted graffiti with themes and language running the gamut from revolutionary to obscene. The Antioch school "uniform" for many students seems to consist of as many tattoos and piercings as the human dermis can hold (a tattoo parlor in downtown Yellow Springs looks designed to accommodate this student fashion statement). Of the eight student organizations currently listed on Antioch's website, only one, the Antioch Environmental Group, is not focused on identity politics of one sort or other. The others are By Any Means Necessary for students of African descent, Unidad for Latinos, the Third World Alliance, Kehilla (formerly the Jew Crew) for Jews, two separate groups for gays and lesbians (the Queer Center and Queers of Color), and the Womyn's Center. (The spelling looks like another Saturday Night Live parody, but it is in fact the center's official orthography, although "wombmen" is also in current use on campus.) The only Antioch College students who do not have a campus organization listed in their name are white, heterosexual, non-Jewish males. Traditional college clubs centered around student interests--say, French or music or film or chess or debate--seem to be entirely lacking. Even the events featured for this fall's "Community Day" on October 16--an Antioch tradition in which classes are suspended to accommodate student hayrides and other social events--seemed obsessively focused on identity. The evening events, for example, consisted of a queer lecture followed by a queer movie followed by a dance to the music of a queer band--leaving one wondering what Antioch's non-queers were supposed to do with themselves. You might call the current sad state of Antioch College death by political correctness. The rigorous academic programs that fostered Nobel laureates such as Capecchi are no more: Antioch scrapped its 40-odd traditional majors in 1996 in favor of eight vaguely delineated interdisciplinary programs that allow the students themselves to design their courses of study. The civic activism of yore--registering African American voters, starting a proto-Peace Corps--gave way to in-your-face street theater at shopping malls. It has been a long, slow death, and it would be unfair (although certainly tempting) to blame the current crop of students for the pending demise of their alma mater. The blame might be more fairly placed on four decades of decisions made by Antioch College faculty and administrators in the name of keeping Antioch at the forefront of "progressive" academic fashion, which led inexorably to today's campus nearly bereft of students and treasury nearly bereft of funds. The adults who could have and should have intervened to put a lid on the excesses of a culture created by 18- to 22-year-olds with little experience of the outside world in fact let that culture run untrammeled and amok, all in the name of Antioch's vaunted ideal of "community." The very existence of Antioch University, the chain of adult-education satellite campuses that morphed into Antioch College's parent institution during the 1990s and now threatens, Cronus-like, to devour its child, contains a bitter irony: The satellite campuses came into being 40 years ago because Antioch wanted to get in on a bit of late-1960s radical chic known as "bringing education to the streets." Hard as it may be to believe, Antioch began its existence as a Christian college. Its founders belonged to a Second Great Awakening movement that called itself the "Christian Connexion" and eschewed the creeds of mainline churches in favor of what it viewed as a strictly Bible-based faith.. Antioch College got its name from the city in ancient Syria that was an early center of New Testament Christianity. Antioch was one of the first coeducational colleges in the United States, among both students and faculty, and from the beginning it admitted black students. The standard curriculum, required of all students, would come as a shock to most of today's undergraduates: Latin, Greek, foreign languages, and a stiff array of science courses. Antioch was actively involved in the abolitionist movement, and when the Civil War broke out, the college shut down temporarily so that students and professors could fight on the Union side. Antioch's Christian affiliation did not last long. Horace Mann, who served as president from 1853 to his death in 1859, was a Unitarian, and he and a group of Unitarians on the board quickly turned Antioch into the secular institution that it remains to this day. Arthur Morgan, a professional engineer who served as Antioch's president from 1920 to 1936 and put Antioch's co-operative education system into place, had a Quaker wife for whom he built a Quaker chapel on campus. Antioch also maintained a campus chaplain until 1973, when the last person to hold that office, Al Denman, a Presbyterian minister, decided to leave both the ministry and the Presbyterian Church and become an Antioch philosophy and religion professor. The Jewish student group, Kehilla, and the Quakers who still worship at the meeting house constitute the only religious practice of any kind associated with the Antioch campus. For the first seven decades of its existence, Antioch struggled, shutting down twice for lack of funds and seldom enrolling more than 200 students, often fewer than 100. Arthur Morgan and his co-operative system, modeled on engineers' training that combined theoretical learning with hands-on experience building bridges that wouldn't collapse, proved to be the galvanizing forces that turned Antioch's fortunes around in a fashion that looked to be permanent. During Morgan's first year in the presidency, enrollment at Antioch nearly doubled, from 203 students in 1920 to 393 in 1921; by 1923, it had risen another 50 percent, to 598, and it climbed more or less steadily after that, even during the Great Depression and World War II. Antioch students, combining terms on campus with as many as five different "co-ops" (terms and summers spent at paying jobs arranged by the college) had to stretch their time as undergraduates to five years from the usual four. Antioch has since switched to a typical four-year matriculation with fewer co-ops, and the co-op idea is no longer quite what it was, since it competes with internships, service-learning, and other such opportunities for students. Back then, Antioch's co-ops not only allowed students to get out of rural Yellow Springs and into big cities for a few months but gave them the self-confidence of functioning on their own as adults capable of doing work for which someone else was willing to pay. The combination of liberal idealism and down-to-earth practicality appealed to many young people, and after the war, Antioch's enrollment continued to mount the growth trajectory that led to the spree of campus construction--1,122 students in 1955, 1,583 students in 1960, 1,851 students in 1965, and so forth--until a series of avoidable catastrophes struck during the late 1960s. The first was Antioch's disastrous experiment with affirmative action. Armed with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Antioch began in 1965 to recruit impoverished "high-risk students" from "high-risk schools"--which usually translated into black graduates of inner-city high schools who, unlike the middle-class, high-achieving blacks who had sat side by side with whites (albeit in very small numbers) in Antioch classrooms for nearly a century, were not prepared for college work. They were also not prepared for life in sleepy, artsy-craftsy Yellow Springs, or for coexistence with bookish, highly competitive classmates preparing for careers as physicists, lawyers, and doctors. Many of the Rockefeller students were older than the traditional college age, and some had children (Antioch obligingly provided them with free daycare). "There was a lot of tension," said Antioch's archivist, Scott Sanders, in a telephone interview, "and these were inner-city kids, so there was a certain amount of lawlessness. They brought skills to Antioch that they'd learned on the streets: fighting, drawing guns. There were specific instances of violence that were very alien to the other students." While all this was going on, as alumnus Michael Goldfarb, a writer and former public radio correspondent who matriculated at Antioch in 1968, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them." Goldfarb described having a gun drawn on him in a drunken rage by "a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her." The guiding spirit behind all the conflict--if "guiding" could be said to be the appropriate adjective--was Antioch's 15th president, James Payson Dixon, a 1939 graduate of Antioch whose 16-year reign, from 1959 to 1975, spanned both the college's apex in prestige and its nadir. Within two years of Dixon's departure, Antioch had lost half its student population after a devastating student strike in 1973 and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Dixon had been a focused and energetic administrator during his early years, but his philosophy during the late 1960s seemed to be "Whatever." By 1969 Antioch, under his direction, had abolished letter grades in favor of individualized written evaluations by professors (the idea in those anti-Vietnam war days was to help otherwise low-ranking students avoid the draft) and also abolished required freshman courses, a move that left some science professors complaining that their students were no longer prepared for advanced-level work. Meanwhile, the number of black students subsidized by the Rockefeller program (which Antioch titled "New Directions") grew to constitute as much as 20 percent of the student body. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, many of those students became actively separatist. The Black Panthers were role models for some, a development tacitly encouraged by Antioch itself, which contributed enthusiastically to legal defense funds for Panthers accused of murder and other crimes. Antioch's militant blacks demanded--and obtained from the ever-compliant Dixon administration--an all-black, no-whites-allowed dormitory that they named "Unity House, or "Nyambi Umoja" in Swahili. They also obtained a separate curriculum of all-black classes taught by Antioch professors and, at least for a while thanks to Dixon's compliance, control over Antioch's disbursement of the Rockefeller scholarships.. During the spring of 1972 campus militants held captive for several hours a University of Pennsylvania administrator who had been offered the job of associate dean, in an effort to force Antioch to hire a black Marxist economist instead. Unity House eventually came a cropper when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which oversaw federal grants to colleges, ruled that the racially segregated residence hall violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the all-black classes remained in place. The Rockefeller money ran out in 1973, the same year the Nixon administration cut direct funding to colleges for student loans, so Antioch, which even then had a tiny endowment and depended on tuition for 85 percent of its revenues, terminated New Directions. That led directly to the student strike in the spring of 1973, precipitated by black militants who demanded that Antioch somehow continue to fund the program, and by a sizable number of Marxists among the white students, who saw the conflict as an opportunity for waging class warfare. There had been a series of strikes by Antioch employees seeking higher wages earlier that year, and Antioch's more radicalized students had sat on the employee picket lines. The new strike amounted to a student-enforced lockdown that shut down all campus operations for six weeks. Professors who tried to teach their classes on campus (some moved their classes to their homes) or even get into their campus offices were barred, threatened, and in one instance, maced by striking students. A fire "of a suspicious nature" (as Antioch put it) ravaged a dean's office, and there were several suspected firebombings of classroom buildings. The campus became piled with trash left in situ by sympathizing employees who refused to cross the student picket lines. Many other campuses had experienced student strikes during the turbulent late 1960s, but those strikes had typically been of short duration, terminated when the college presidents called in the police. Dixon, ever true to laid-back form, declined to involve law enforcement, and instead engaged in weeks of dithering and palavering with the demonstrators. The strike ended, in late May 1973, only after a group of students who wanted to graduate in June got a court injunction against the strikers. A few days later the local sheriff's department tore down the barricades the demonstrators had erected at Antioch's gates and opened up the campus. Antioch never really recovered from those weeks of massive disruption, or from the irony that one of the most liberal-minded colleges in America had suffered one of the most devastating student protests in history. The revolution was televised, and all over the country high school students who had been accepted by or had considered applying to Antioch watched the pickets, barricades, fires, and mountains of refuse on the nightly news, as did parents who were expected to cover Antioch's tuition bills. The year 1973 was chronologically late for student strikes, which had seemed cutting-edge on Ivy League campuses in 1968 and 1969, but had come to be regarded by most people as merely self-indulgent. When classes at Yellow Springs resumed that fall, 145 students had transferred elsewhere, and about 200 students in the expected freshman class failed to show up. So began years of a steadily declining student population. Antioch's enrollment last topped 1,000 in 1978, and 1990 was the last in which it topped 600. Applications also dropped off dramatically; in 1974 fewer than half as many high school seniors applied to Antioch as in 1973. "Every year, fewer students came to Antioch," recalled Sanders, the archivist. Many faculty members left, too, disturbed by the administration's fecklessness during the strike or demoralized by what they perceived as Antioch's deteriorating academic and admissions standards as the college scrambled for bodies and tuition checks. Further blotting the financial picture (the strike had cost Antioch more than $1 million in property damage and lost tuition and plunged the college into deficit) was another late-1960s, radicalism-friendly venture of Dixon's: the far-flung adult-education campuses that would become Antioch University. In 1963, seeking to bolster its handful of graduate programs, Antioch had purchased the Putney School, a slated-for-shuttering school in Vermont that survives today, after a move to Keene, N.H., as Antioch University New England. Later in the decade Dixon, with the enthusiastic backing of some Antioch faculty members, decided to get in on an academic fad known variously as the "university without walls" and the "bringing the university to the streets" movement. The idea was for Antioch College to set up branches designed to provide liberal-arts courses to "underserved" populations: adult working people in inner cities. It was a kind of outreach equivalent of New Directions. Soon enough, Antioch professors were flocking to Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, and elsewhere to set up satellites, sometimes just because they wanted to get out of poky Yellow Springs. (It was always arguable whether, say, San Francisco, crammed with institutions of higher learning of every variety, could really be said to be "underserved.") In Washington, D.C., at the instigation of Edgar Cahn, a public-interest lawyer who had served as an aide to Robert F. Kennedy when the latter was attorney general, Antioch set up a "people's" law school designed for applicants who couldn't get into any other law school. The idea was to turn out social-justice activists as well as attorneys; students were required to spend their first two weeks, for example, learning about poverty by living with an impoverished Washington, D.C., family. By the mid-1970s the number of satellite Antioch campuses, called "learning centers," had blossomed to somewhere between 32 and 37 (no one at Antioch today knows the exact number). In 1978, the college and its congeries of satellites adopted the collective name of Antioch University; the president of the college was now the president of the university as well. Extension campuses marketed to working adults are not unknown in higher education. Because they almost never grant scholarships, rely heavily on non-tenured and part-time faculty, and are not burdened with the overhead of dormitories and related facilities for young people, the satellites are expected to function as profit centers for their mother colleges. (Johns Hopkins University, for example, presides over a veritable empire of part-time business, creative writing, and other pay-as-you-go advanced-degree programs that trade on the prestigious Hopkins name.) The problem from the very beginning for the Antioch satellites, however, was that they were quite the opposite of profit centers. Impossible to supervise from Yellow Springs and frequently staffed by impractical idealists, the dozens of hastily opened satellites were money sinks. Many of Antioch's traditional professors resented the branch operations and their drain on a flagship campus that was already deteriorating physically and in terms of student quality. That was the beginning of the tension between Antioch College and Antioch University, and also the beginning of a certain amount of alienation among Antioch College alumni regarding their alma mater, alienation that translated into reduced giving. "We didn't like seeing our school split up," says Meg Rosenfeld, a class of 1969 alumna and veteran Washington Post reporter who is writing a book about Antioch. "We saw these things happening, and we didn't know what they were. So we started feeling disengaged." By 1979, just six years after the strike, a debt- and deficit-beset Antioch could not make payroll and was on the verge of bankruptcy. In a wrangle over control of the law school, it had fired Cahn and his lawyer-wife, Jean Cahn, as administrators, and the couple had responded with a round of time- and money-consuming lawsuits. Back in Yellow Springs, Antioch worked out a deal with its creditors to pay them 25 cents on the dollar and officially laid off its professors, which allowed them to collect unemployment while continuing to teach their classes (they called the arrangement "payless paydays"). A new president, William Birenbaum, began a process of closing down or selling off all but four of the dozens of satellite campuses, including the law school, which had been bedeviled from the beginning by its graduates' lack of success in passing bar exams and the fact that even poverty-law professors want to make comfortable salaries. The law school was purchased by the University of the District of Columbia in 1986. Yet another Antioch irony is that none of the four campuses deemed financially viable enough to escape the ax--Antioch University New England plus campuses in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara--is located in one of those inner cities to which professors had so eagerly sought to bring the benefits of liberal-arts education during the heady days of Dixon-generated expansion. Indeed, although the Seattle and California facilities offer bachelor's-degree completion programs to small numbers of part-time undergraduates, the four campuses today are mostly graduate schools with a vocational focus, offering advanced degrees in education, social work, psychological counseling, and other soft-edge fields congenial to the Antioch progressive ethos. Like the flagship campus in Yellow Springs, the other Antioch campuses eschew letter grades and hew to the Antioch "core values" of "social justice" and "diversity," in the words of Mary Lou -LaPierre, Antioch University's vice chancellor for university advancement. "The Antioch DNA transferred," LaPierre said in a telephone interview from the Antioch University Seattle campus. The financial crisis of 1979 triggered a further drop in enrollment at Antioch College (as well as further departures of professors), but the Birenbaum-instigated budget cuts seemed to stabilize the Yellow Springs campus. Its student population remained at a more or less steady, if not especially healthy, 500 or so for more than two decades. The widely-publicized date-rape policy that catapulted Antioch onto Saturday Night Live and into nationwide ridicule in 1993 was a kind of object lesson in what can happen when demographic implosion (reducing the student body to its most radical core) unites with a laissez-faire administration philosophy that consists of giving even the most extreme factions everything they want. The extremists in this case consisted of a group of student feminists who called themselves "Womyn of Antioch" (a title that might have sent up a red flag to administrators elsewhere) and claimed to be reacting to two incidents of date rape on the Yellow Springs campus in 1991, which they said the administration had ignored. No Antioch students were ever charged with those offenses either formally or informally, much less found by a college tribunal to have committed them, much less prosecuted for any crime by outside authorities. Antioch's archivist Sanders said that the alleged rapes might have been more a matter of "perception" than reality. Nonetheless, when the Womyn "stormed" (the word comes from Antioch's website) an Antioch community meeting and insisted on pushing through the policy they had drafted regardless of parliamentary niceties, the administrators and faculty who were supposed to be on at least an equal footing with the students at those meetings, if not their superiors on the basis of maturity and experience, said, oh, okay. The Womyn-drafted sexual-offense policy read: "Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it. Asking 'Do you want to have sex with me?' is not enough. The request for consent must be specific to each act." The penalty for even being accused of failing to obtain consent for one of the "levels" was immediate expulsion without a hearing or any other rights. Not surprisingly, when word leaked out (it took a while) that Antioch's board of trustees had actually approved the policy and made it official, the reaction of the non-Antioch general public was . . . laughter all around. One wag estimated that Antioch required a student seeking a home run in the baseball game of sex to ask for the consent of his beloved a total of 150 times. A few years later, after much media mockery and several threatened legal challenges over the lack of due process, Antioch modified the policy to bring it into line with other colleges' procedures for handling accusations of date rape and related sexual offenses. Meanwhile, Antioch's 17th president, Alan Guskin, who had succeeded Birenbaum in 1985, engineered a massive reorganization of the college-university governance structure in 1994 that reduced Antioch College from its position at the apex of the Antioch University pyramid to a mere subsidiary of the chain of campuses it had brought into being, all of which by then were breaking even (if just barely) financially and had higher enrollments than the college. Under Guskin's lead, the trustees created a new university position, chancellor, which was filled by Guskin. Antioch College got a new president, James E. Crowfoot, who reported to Guskin, and the other four campuses got their own presidents as well. In another move that led some to accuse Guskin of empire-building, he stripped Antioch College of its graduate-level and adult-extension programs in Yellow Springs and consolidated them into a new, juridically separate, entity named Antioch University McGregor (after Douglas McGregor, Antioch College's 13th president). McGregor got its own building on campus and also its own president, so Guskin now had two presidents reporting to him in Yellow Springs. The Antioch University "family" now consisted of six units. Guskin, who retired in 1997, was also responsible for Antioch College's getting rid of traditional majors and adopting the self-directed, interdisciplinary courses of study in effect today. The change in the major configuration attracted applicants who liked the idea of doing whatever they wanted in college but gutted one of Antioch's remaining appeals to other kinds of applicants: its still-strong specific programs in such fields as astronomy, environmental science, and the fine and performing arts. Antioch now had to scramble, for example, to provide its students who wished to attend medical school (and there were fewer and fewer of those) with enough core science courses to qualify. The change in academic emphasis, coupled with the date-rape policy, whose main effect was to alter Antioch College's male-female student ratio from 50-50 to 40-60, coupled with a growing public perception of the college as a haven for crazies, made it difficult for the college to increase its enrollment. Figuring that the financially strapped school needed a critical mass of 800 students in order to generate the minimum revenue necessary to maintain academic quality, the administration adopted the mantra "800 by 2000." When that goal was not met (enrollment in 2000 was 515), the mantra changed to "800 by 2002" (enrollment in 2002 was 577). All of the above factors conspired to attract a certain kind of Antioch student apt to generate a certain kind of Antioch monoculture. For example, not only does Antioch lack varsity sports, but there are only two intramural sports left on campus: co-ed soccer and women's rugby. "That means Antioch attracts students with a disdain for athletics," said Lawry, Antioch's recently ousted president, who once told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Antioch had fostered a "toxic" student culture. "These are kids who in high school were not part of the social scene," said Lawry. "Many of them are highly intellectual but socially awkward and troubled. They feel deeply estranged from the larger culture. There are a lot of interesting, engaged, articulate, smart, perceptive people at Antioch. But it's also been a refuge for people who felt aggrieved and oppressed by mainstream society, so they were very resentful of people who didn't make it clear that they were on their side. We were losing good students because of the pressure on them to conform. It's not what you'd expect of a liberal-arts environment." It was, however, the sort of environment in which a convicted murderer and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, could be invited by students to deliver the commencement speech in 2000. There had been plenty of evidence supporting Abu-Jamal's conviction in 1982 for shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner five times in the face and back at close range--such as the five spent casings in Abu-Jamal's gun that matched the five bullets lodged in Faulkner's body--and even some leftists have questioned the rush by their fellows to turn Abu-Jamal, currently awaiting the outcome of one of several appeals of his death sentence, into a political prisoner who had been framed by racist cops. When Maureen Faulkner, widow of the slain officer, sent a letter protesting the honor to be conferred on her husband's killer to Robert H. Devine, an Antioch communications professor who had succeeded Crowfoot as the college's president, Devine wrote back, "As educators, it is our responsibility to provide an environment where widely varying points of view can be expressed." (Devine, who stepped down in 2001--he was rumored to have been eased out--and returned to teaching, did not respond to an emailed request for an interview.) Abu-Jamal delivered his commencement speech via a prerecorded tape from death row. It was preceded by a live speech delivered by transgender activist Leslie Feinberg, who characterized Abu-Jamal's conviction and death sentence as the "persecution of a U.S. intellectual." According to alumnus Ralph Keyes's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a student speaker declared that Antioch was a home for "freaks" and anyone who didn't get that could "f-- off." The Abu-Jamal debacle, protested by hundreds of police officers from around the country who picketed the Yellow Spring campus, was nearly repeated when the 2005 crop of graduates selected as their commencement speaker Ward Churchill, the since-fired (for scholarly plagiarism) ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado who became a leftist hero after declaring that the victims of the World Trade Center massacre of September 11, 2001, were "little Eichmanns" who deserved to die. For once, it would seem, Antioch's administrators and faculty actually managed to talk the students into rethinking a rash decision; Churchill was disinvited. Particularly persuasive was Beverly Rodgers, an anthropology professor of genuine Native American descent (Ohio's Miami tribe, forcibly relocated to Oklahoma during the 1840s) who did not care for the fact that Churchill had used an honorary membership in a Cherokee tribe to pass himself off as an Indian for purposes of advancing his career. The next year, when Steven Lawry, newly hired after the college had gone through four presidents and acting presidents in eight years, decided on Raphael Warnock, pastor of Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, in order to mark the death of Antioch alumna Coretta King, the idea of a clergyman on campus alarmed some members of the class of 2006.. One of them asked Lawry to write a letter to Warnock telling him he was not to preach on sexual morality while at Antioch. Lawry, in fact, was the first Antioch president in three decades to apply the brakes to the college's runaway student culture, an effort that alienated many students who were used to doing and saying exactly as they pleased, no matter how outrageous. In a speech on campus in 2006, Lawry announced that he wanted to see a campus marked by more mutual respect and less "indulgence." A few weeks later, he expelled four first-year students caught dealing marijuana on campus. The student handbook expressly forbids all illegal activity, with expulsion as the explicit penalty for trafficking in drugs or alcohol on campus, but the students claimed nonetheless to have been "blindsided." One said, "We were led to believe by all the upper classmen that based on previous experience at Antioch, as long as you were respectful of others with your use of marijuana, it's not a big deal at all." Lawry's next move was to put an end to anonymous personal ads in the Record soliciting sex or threatening violence (such as an ad promising to remove the testicles of an Antioch visitor who had expressed disapproval of some campus vulgarity). That move, too, shocked the students, who complained that Lawry was trying, not only to censor free speech but to tame the campus in order to attract more conservative young people. One student sent Lawry an email saying, "F-- you, a--hole." Lawry had the student disciplined. Even some of the faculty complained that the new president was heavy-handed and should have employed the classic Antioch method of trying to talk to the students at community meetings. But Lawry was an energetic fundraiser--the first Antioch College president in years to take seriously the idea that raising money was part of the job--and he won the support of many professors and alumni by trying to break the college free of the Antioch University stranglehold. There were other serious problems he had to deal with. In 2002, the North Central Association, the accrediting body for colleges in Ohio, had issued a report that was highly critical of both Antioch College and Antioch University. Antioch College came under fire for its incurable deficits, its deteriorating physical plant, its obsolete science laboratories, its chronic failure to meet enrollment goals, its extremely high attrition rates (partly due, some students said, to the confrontational campus culture) and low graduation rates, its thinly stretched faculty (which had shrunk to 60 professors), and even its no-grades policy. Antioch University had its own set of problems, the accreditors noted, partly stemming from the fact that the five adult campuses were by then subsidizing Antioch College to the tune of $3 million a year. None of the adult campuses employs tenured professors, relying on a small core staff of full-time instructors working on contract and an army of part-time adjunct professors paid a few thousand dollars per course. The non-tenured professors, who were expected to teach year-round, in contrast to their tenured counterparts in Yellow Springs, complained about low salaries, inadequate books, little time for scholarly research. Antioch University Seattle, where Chancellor Murdock had served as president since 1997, came in for particular criticism over a series of cost-cutting "partnerships" it had formed with out-of-state for-profit educational entities, some of which were not properly accredited. (Murdock, interviewed in Yellow Springs, said the partnerships had been set up before she arrived at the Seattle campus and that she had phased them out.) And in truth, as the university itself concedes, the adult Antioch campuses, while financially viable, are not exactly thriving; none has more than about 900 students. During this time, it is fair to say, relations between Antioch University and Antioch College were strained, with mutual recriminations to spare. The college's faculty and alumni accuse the university of starving the college into extinction, refusing, for example, to allot sufficient funds to the admissions office to recruit more students, and charging the college depreciation on its aging buildings (which makes the financial condition look even more hopeless), while failing to take into account the college's illustrious history and name, on which the university still trades. University spokesmen in turn accuse the college's alumni of refusing to support their alma mater despite a series of desperate fundraising drives (alumni counter that they are stingy because they don't trust the university) and blame the college itself for a history of chronic mismanagement and a head-in-the-clouds attitude on the part of many Antioch presidents who considered begging for money to be beneath their dignity. "I've sat at trustees' meetings for ten years," said Murdock, "and I and the presidents of the other campuses never got the time we needed because the trustees always had some problem with the college on their hands. It took up all their time." Meanwhile, Antioch's trustees had inadvertently issued a death-blow to Antioch College's enrollment numbers in May 2005, when they unveiled an ambitious "Renewal Plan" that they had hatched on their own for a new first-year curriculum that looked properly progressive (it was modeled on that of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., famous for its leftist politics and outré course offerings) but was actually designed to cut costs by downsizing the Antioch faculty by a third. Instead of 60 professors teaching 500 students, there would be about 40 (retirements and layoffs were expected to accomplish the reductions, and they did). Starting that fall, instead of enrolling in the usual plateload of beginning courses, each taught by a different professor, all first-year students would be organized into 45-person "learning communities." Each learning community would be enrolled in a single, term-long interdisciplinary course with a name such as "Gaia" or "Sense of Place" or "Cool." The class would be team-taught by a relay of professors from different disciplines ("Cool," offered this fall, features lessons in physics, psychology, and music), so that Antioch would appear to maintain the 15‑1 student-teacher ratio that expensive liberal-arts colleges like to boast about, while actually offering a 45‑1 student-teacher ratio more typical of a state college. Words can scarcely express the disaster that the Renewal Plan wreaked upon Antioch College's enrollment. Professors, given a single summer to scrap courses they had taught for years and design new ones, had to throw themselves--and all their teaching time--into the Renewal Plan, ignoring upper-level students who needed specific courses to prepare them for graduate school. The diminished number of professors meant that Antioch was left with just one philosopher, one historian, one mathematician, and so forth. Many of those advanced students in turn, feeling abandoned by their teachers, transferred out of Antioch. Students slated to enter Antioch, instead of feeling enthusiastic about joining a learning community and taking a course called "Gaia," felt chiseled, especially if they didn't get into their first-choice learning community, and ended up studying, say, physics, instead of the biology classes a recruiter had promised them. Many of those disappointed high school graduates enrolled in college elsewhere. Perhaps worst of all, some professors found that the team approach meant they simply could not teach all the material they had covered in their separate entry-level courses. "I can't teach calculus in the Renewal Plan, because I want to teach all of calculus, and I can't," said Elizabeth Nettles. "So I teach something else." The effect of the Renewal Plan (plus a reduction in the recruiting budget) proved to be the opposite of renewal, when only 53 new students showed up during the fall of 2005. Despite aggressive recruiting by Lawry that doubled the entering class the next year, beefed-up science labs, and an improved grade from the accreditors in a 2006 visit, Antioch College's enrollment continued to slide: 377 students in 2005, 330 in 2006, and an expected 304 this fall that crashed to 220 when the university trustees announced in June that they planned to close down Antioch College entirely, at least for a while. Given those numbers, the announcement, if not inexorable, was certainly not a bolt from the blue. It is hard to know which side to take in the dispute over Antioch College's future. Chancellor Murdock's vision for a new Antioch--few to no tenured professors, private-industry "partnerships" (again) responsible for some facets of teaching, distance learning, a co-op arrangement that would look more like part-time classes for working adults, and turning at least part of the campus over to real estate developers possibly to build condos and a conference center--seems less like a liberal arts college and more like a clone of the five other Antioch University branches. This fall Antioch McGregor moved off the historic Yellow Springs campus entirely to a brand-new, multimillion-dollar building, giving rise to the worst fears of some alumni that the old Antioch would simply be abandoned. On the other hand, what exactly is there of the old Antioch that is worth saving? A fine main building. Some dedicated teachers on the order of Rodgers and Nettles, and likely some dedicated students, too, underneath the tattoos and rhetoric. And the trees. Interviews with faculty and alumni revealed a continuing reluctance to rein in the student culture and its obsession with gender identity and violating cultural norms--coupled with the assumption that simply throwing more money into recruiting can boost enrollment numbers significantly. A fall alumni get-together reported in the Record sounded like deck chairs on the Titanic, with the showing of a documentary depicting the strike of 1973 as a good thing and frettings over whether the word "alumnus" is sexist. "We certainly don't want Antioch to be seen as just for transgender people," said Nancy Crow, a Denver lawyer who heads the college alumni association negotiating to keep the doors open. No, Antioch College certainly doesn't need more political correctness du jour. What it needs, in order to save it from turning into the ghost campus of Yellow Springs that it nearly is today, is a few more liberals.

Antioch College Ohio obituary posted on WWW.StormComing.Org and worth reading...Published July 1, 08, after the June 30 shutdown

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:49:11 -0500

July 3, 08 Hi from Tex Allen, Antioch College alumnus (Email me at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Antioch College Ohio undergraduate residential college was totally closed last Monday, June 30, 2008, and the follow very well written and touching obituary was posted on the WWW.StormComing.Org website...worth reading. Here it is ---------------- They murdered our college, Mann Category: Uncategorized (A picture of “Hassle Castle.”) By way of my title, I am referring of course to Antioch College, and Horace Mann, the abolitionist, visionary educator, and social reformer; Antioch’s first President. Mann was a champion of public education. He believed that in a democratic society, education should be tuition free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, accessible to both men and womyn. He argued that all citizens, regardless of race of economic status must have equal access to a quality education provided for by a tax-supported public school system, only then did he believe could true democracy be achieved. He viewed such as a crucial tool to ‘break down the troubling hierarchy of class in American society’. (Lest you go thinking the man was some kind of ‘pure saint’ think again, his Temperance and anti-tobacco moralizing sermons alone should give present day Antiochians more than merely a pause.) Mann was perhaps most known for his simple challenge presented to Antioch College students in the conclusion to his final commencement address at Antioch College not long before his death: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Yesterday, June 30th was the date slated by Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock and the Antioch University Board of Trustees to turn Antioch College off. It is no understatement to say that losing Antioch College can only be counted as a loss for humanity. Horace Mann’s dream does not die with the murder of Antioch College, but with it, his greatest legacy falls silent, the campus shuttered. While Antioch College has long been in the clutches of those adamantly opposed to what he stood for, it was not until yesterday, when the last vestiges of life that still inhabited the College were finally crushed and efforts to save the existing Antioch College came to an end. The College has been closed before, but never so viciously at the hands of those who actively wanted it dead. Non-stop (Antioch), see below, is gearing up for next Autumn, but whatever comes next, it will be under an entirely different set of circumstances. Apparently everything from the ADA grandfathering of the College facilities, on through to institutional accreditation now changes. Whatever comes next, with or without the horribly abused and neglected campus, by its own University (mis)management, will face a very different climate in which to work. Further, very crucial pieces of the college have been essentially looted, as the University, (originally spawned out of Antioch College now cannibalizing it), has made off with both our history, and our good name. We Alumni only half jokingly point out how the University has trended towards an economy of ‘McEducation’, based more on the University of Phoenix model (highly pay for play) than anything Horace Mann ever envisioned. We have also watched (despite the best efforts of many) the likelihood of a salvaged Antioch College go down the drain with the ‘in bad faith’ pseudo negotiations designed to keep Alumni busy while the work continued to kill the College. With our recognizable name, once synonymous with innovative educational methodologies, Community based governance, the Antioch co-operative education program, and a core commitment to social justice , now reduced to a marketable brand more closely associated with graduating those working within the various systems to reform not working for structural change, we are left with little more than the charred remains of what was once a noble institution. (But that ‘in every crisis an opportunity’ Chinese wisdom? My .02 comes down to ‘we had the name “Antioch” due to the particular history of our institution. Rather than fighting like mad over something the University has intentionally devalued, maybe now is finally the right moment to actually evaluate it in the light of day. “Antioch” is not a linguistic piece of terminology that represents what the college had evolved into. It is a thoroughly corrupted linguistic accident of history that in modern times has not related to the modern Antioch College nor many of its students. So perhaps rather than clinging vainly to a brand the University has shat upon, AND will defend to their dying breath as their stolen legacy and name is really all they’ve got going for them, let it go. Walk away. Evolve into terminology that better represents the reality of who and what we are. ) We can only hope for a future with some reworked version of a Phoenix Arising in Yellow Springs, as opposed to yet another clone of the University of Phoenix dropped down into a reworked Yellow Springs with the Antioch brand name stamped on it. (And to think, currently, the nearest University of Phoenix to Yellow Springs is a full 24 miles away in Dayton.) The students, alumni, (often previously tenured) faculty, and (union busted) staff of Antioch College, along with other ’stakeholders’ and last but not least the town of Yellow Springs, Ohio never wanted this fight. The battle came to us- in the form of the neocon, ‘Succubus from Seattle’, Chancellor Toni Murdock and the traitorous University Board of Trustees. Chancellor Murdock’s fawning praise of batshit Thomas Friedman’s notions of destroying everything that got you where you are today, “The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh” back in Feb 2006, certainly foreshadowed everything that came thereafter. (Those looking into breadcrumbs along the trail may also want to look more deeply into some of the details provided in this Free Press article and this piece in the Blaze.) Perhaps eventually, I will write about what my Antioch College education meant to me. I am not an Antioch graduate, but I do hold the distinction of being an Alum, having dropped out not once, but twice. My time spent at Antioch, both good and bad has had everything to do with the person I have grown to become. There I continued my journey of learning about both the crucial importance of living in accord with one’s conscience, and a healthy cynicism of how power actually tends to play out in practice. Most of all, it reinforced my already strong tendency towards questioning, and trying to get to the ‘why’, along with understanding how systems are at play, not only what is readily seen, but what often lies beneath the surface. The intentional murder of Antioch is entwined with my own biography in ways difficult to express on a day like this. How can I possibly find the words to describe what it meant to be part of non-violent civil disobedience trainings at Antioch in the lead up to 1991 ‘first gulf war’, talking with Steve Schwerner (who is a legend in his own right, but is also brother to Michael, ‘Mickey’, Schwerner, one of three murdered civil rights workers killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi back in ‘64. Here’s an older 2005 Yellow Springs News piece that embodied how Steve also, always understood that systems of power and powerlessness laid at the core of his brother’s murder.) Something as simple yet profound as someone of my generation connecting with someone of his and learning from one another is larger than I relate today. That was the kind of place Antioch College was, it had roots, and despite the ongoing contortions and gyrations, even back in my day, I came away with more than I can put words around, despite my time at Antioch being shorter than most students’. The destruction of Antioch is both profound and ultimately just one of the drops in the deluge of what has been and continues to be done both to our country and throughout the world at this very moment. The murder of Antioch College is but one of MANY microcosms in the current macrocosm. For all the flowery language and high ideals, though, the consequences of the loss of Antioch College are ultimately more personal and more immediate for those directly affected. Be it the administration’s crass union busting, or calling into question the very idea of tenure for all professors, not ‘merely’ Antioch’s, people are losing their jobs, their ability to continue to live in Yellow Springs, and thus the very unique character of Yellow Springs itself is being eroded. The loss of the college is going to have an immediate and dramatic effect on Yellow Springs itself. (A place that if you’ve never been, you can’t possibly understand.) Individual students have been left to live out the current American paradigm of “you’re on your own” or ‘yoyo’. They have been forced to make hard choices about their own educational futures while simultaneously trying to fight to win that ‘victory for humanity’ by making every effort to keep Antioch College open. (This banner sits upon the theater building, which I once spent a long hot day sweeping pigeon shit out of as part of the effort to bring the theater back to life.) I ’ll leave you with the tormented words of Jeanne Kay, an Antioch College student, anguishing over what it feels like when ‘that victory that needs winning for humanity’ (with apologies to old Horace) lands on your head, prior to your own graduation. The most important battles sometimes come to you when it’s inconvenient, when you don’t think you can possibly handle it, and when you simply flat out don’t feel like it. Sux that. This final round in the epic battle for the soul of Antioch College came to us, a fight we never wanted. The problem is it’s not only Antioch that we’re losing. The same ideology of hollowing out existing structures, mining them for assets, then selling off the chaff all to the corporation’s benefit and the individual people’s loss is fractal like, from the (important) speck that was Antioch College on up to American foreign policy globally. Ultimately, though, Antioch was killed off because the very College itself, like so many of us who once haunted its halls, are counted among Hunter S. Thompson’s “doomed”: “Let me ask you a question sir, what is this country doing for the doomed? There are two kinds of people in this country, the doomed and the screwheads.” - Hunter S. Thompson, from “Where the Buffalo Roam.” It was for us, and we were for it, and neither of the two could be counted among the screwheads. Those populating Antioch University, on the other hand, they are another matter altogether. R.I.P. Antioch College 1852-2008 *”Buy the ticket, take the ride. Mahalo.” May the University choke on your bones. *** In closing, I include a set of links where you can read the writings of people who are the genuine voices of what was Antioch College, and places where documentation about what is really going on can be found (unlike the propaganda spouted by ‘legitimate and authorized’ University spokesleeches.) Non-stop (Antioch) is aiming to fire up this fall, with classes and professors who remain true to the authentic Antioch College 3 “c” ideals of Community, Classroom, and Co-op. The Antioch Papers The Blaze Antiochians.org Antiochians Community Wiki The College Faculty Listen Up Antioch Antioch College Action Network The Record AntiRecord Antiochiana And more broadly, a few links from Yellow Springs itself; The Yellow Springs News (lots of Antioch College related coverage here as well) The Village homepage And a typical promotional site or two (be sure to check out businesses, they’re going to need support from other sources now that the College has been killed off.) Explore Yellow Springs Yellow Springs.com 3 Comments so far Art Dole July 2nd, 2008 8:24 am Out of failure can come the seeds of accomplishment. Let’s learn from the murder of Antioch. It took 40 years for Antioch to die. Now salvage the best and move on. dawn, Antioch Class of '83 July 3rd, 2008 1:10 am I liked much of what you had to say but, I do take issue with the notion that the college is dead. Antioch is a community which lives in our hearts and minds, our deeds and actions. A bunch of corporate a**holes cannot kill the community our activism, the non-stop planning and the students who won’t leave YSO. It lives in the staff people who stayed on that falling down campus because they too were part of our community. Antioch lives because we do. Stay tuned for the part where we take our college back…these people didn’t realize what we were made of! “Be Ashamed to Let it Die!” stormcoming July 3rd, 2008 2:32 am Thanks Art and Dawn, glad to see both your comments. Just a quick point or two; Art- actually, it took roughly 156 years for Antioch to “die” (yeah I know, not counting the previous periods it was out of commission, I’d have to dig out the dates.) Folks can date the seeds of destruction to various crucial points along the way, but ultimately, varying forms of Antioch College stood firm for more than 100 years. I take issue with the term “die” though, as this was not a natural death. This was intentionally put down- by people. And before moving on, I think it’s important to do the autopsy- it’s important to learn the lessons of how this was done, why, and by whom. ‘Salvaging’ without pausing to learn from this would be a crucial error in my view. Sounds like on that, we might agree. Dawn- on taking issue with the notion that the College is dead, I can only say Antioch College as it existed before June 30th is no longer with us, it was murdered. The University may someday open a new college, but it will not be the Antioch College we knew. As for those keeping the flame so to speak- non-stop (Antioch,) as I said in the paragraph I’ll quote below- whatever comes next (re- bourne of that spirit of the genuine Antioch College like a ‘Phoenix Arising’) will have certain core differences- the loss of our name and Antiochiana to name but two. As I said in the piece- “Non-stop (Antioch), see below, is gearing up for next Autumn, but whatever comes next, it will be under an entirely different set of circumstances. Apparently everything from the ADA grandfathering of the College facilities, on through to institutional accreditation now changes. Whatever comes next, with or without the horribly abused and neglected campus, by its own University (mis)management, will face a very different climate in which to work.” But yes, that which lives on in us is by no means dead or murdered- no matter how hard some would try to kill it. After I walked out of the meeting with Murdock and the Board of Trustees (those who could be bothered to show up) at reunion a year ago, I got cornered by a Dayton local news crew. They interviewed me and I said plainly that Antioch lives on through us. We are Antioch now. That said, I think these people DO know what we’re made of- and that’s precisely WHY they did everything they could to make Antioch College as small and weak and broken as possible, so that they could (to turn Neocon Grover Norquist’s words back against them) drown Antioch and Yellow Springs in a proverbial bathtub. They want Antioch College and Yellow Springs, dismantled, overrun, and changed out from under us precisely BECAUSE they understand it as a point of genuine resistance- thus to their minds it must be co-opted, dismantled, or defunded into oblivion. To go forward, we need to not let them set the terms and the agenda, but instead to do the end run- if they want Antioch for their own purposes because it was a ‘hard point’, then it’s time to go build the REALLY hard point. If the ‘bootcamp for the revolution’ was what they feared, then let’s start getting serious about what we lost in the previously existing Antioch College. Time to build our way forward on the real values of what Antioch College was to its core. Being free of the (corporate neocon) University has certain advantages- provided we can understand that and act accordingly going forward. But as I said above, it takes understanding what happened here, and learning from it, to genuinely carry that community in our ‘hearts, minds, deeds, and actions’ going forward. It’s also as I alluded to above, an opportunity, to re-evaluate things like terminology. “Be Ashamed to Let it Die” for some in the narrow view means “Antioch College” under that title those buildings, etc. But “Be ashamed to let it die” also carries the broader meaning- the heart and soul of what Antioch meant, the challenge to community (with all that entailed, participatory democracy, etc), and it’s radical (to the root) core of social justice. Horace Mann’s parting words,and how we live that out. THAT is what we must be ashamed to let die. Not words like “Antioch”, nor structures that have been co-opted to the point of meaninglessness. Now being an architecture buff, it breaks my heart what these fuckers have ALREADY done to our campus. The historic and unique architecture deserves so much more. Gross, (perhaps even criminal?) mismanagement. Not at all in accord with promises made in order to secure the support for the new McGregor across town. That said, it’s critically important not to lose sight of what matters most here. Keeping that which lies at the core of the community is the fierce dedication that yes, keeps students on in Yellow Springs, and people working towards ‘non-stop’. Antioch University can slogan up “Because the world needs you now” but for those of us who ARE Antioch College we never needed a slogan to tell us such, we felt a deep and abiding personal responsibility to do what we could to make the world a better place. We were willing to tackle Horace Mann’s challenge winning a “victory for humanity” because we were ALREADY involved in that work in various forms and fields. A “Victory for Humanity” is and continues to be a lofty goal. But for many of us our day to day is already occupied by the ’struggles’ on so many fronts, from Queer viability in societies, to fighting for science education, from housing for people with AIDS to media reform. That is what they can’t kill unless we let them, and that is what we must be ashamed to let die- our commitment and ongoing work. And that is what must lie at the core of any non-stop going forward, far more than fighting over mere words like “antioch college”, what we must be afriad to let die is the very ’soul’ of what Antioch is- a daily resistance in our lives to the world so many would create.

Antioch College Ohio June 2008 Reunion Ends With Hopes For 2009 Reopening Of Antioch Or Possible Lawsuit: Details

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:22:07 -0500

July 26, 08 Hi from Tex Allen, Antioch College Ohio alumnus (email me at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Here is a report from the Yellow Springs NEWS describing the events of the the June 19-22, 2008 Antioch College Ohio reunion and discussion/ plans aimed at re-opening Antioch College Ohio and/or pursuing a lawsuit regarding the closedown of Antioch College Ohio. At present, the entire Antioch College Ohio undergraduate campus is set to be closed down completely on June 30, 2008. ------------------------ At their annual reunion in Yellow Springs last weekend, about 400 Antioch College alumni took steps to move ahead quickly to reach an agreement with the Antioch University Board of Trustees for an independent college. The alumni also expressed strong support for Nonstop, the college faculty’s effort to continue Antioch’s educational mission without a campus. In a resolution passed on Sunday, June 22, the alumni called on its board of directors to “continue conversations, with all due haste,” with the university trustees to achieve “the complete separation of Antioch College from Antioch University” and the transfer of college assets. At the event’s end on Sunday, alumni Matt Derr of Massachusetts and Lee Morgan of Yellow Springs announced that they will meet with representatives of the board of trustees sometime the first week of July to continue a conversation about reaching an agreement to separate the college from the university. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Trustee Dan Fallon, one of the board’s representatives, declined to comment on the conversations at this point. The alumni leaders agreed that time is of the essence, since the college campus will be officially closed on June 30. In a later interview, Derr stated that he hoped to achieve an agreement with the trustees within six weeks. Morgan stated that his own goal is “to have the college up and running as an independent college by January 2009.” At the reunion many alumni expressed confidence that they will succeed in achieving independence for the college. The event took place only weeks after university trustees surprised college supporters by passing a resolution calling for the alumni to present a process and a plan for separating the college from the university. The alumni have the capacity to respond quickly, many said. “The most significant thing to come out of the reunion is recognizing that out of the chaos of a year ago, we have generated a system that includes a coherent strategy, an organization, and a fund-raising team that is already in place, and that we have the energy to go forward,” said Alumni Board member Catherine Jordan of Minneapolis on Sunday. In her address to the alumni at the close of the reunion, Alumni Board President Nancy Crow called the current situation “an exciting process. We are not starting over. We are building on the tremendous work that many of you have engaged in last year. We will secure the college.” Reunion redux The 2008 reunion took place after a year of intensive alumni efforts to save the college. In June 2007 600 alumni converged on Yellow Springs only weeks after the university trustees announced that, due to financial exigency, they would suspend operations at the college as of July of this year. At that event, the alumni sprang into action, launching a fund-raising effort that resulted in raising $18 million for an autonomous college. After the first major effort to secure an independent college fell through last fall, in December a group of former university trustees and major donors formed the Antioch College Continuation Corporation, or AC3, with the intention of negotiating with the university for an independent college. However, that effort fell apart in May when the trustees rejected the AC3’s final proposal of $14.5 million for the college and university in exchange for a reconfiguration of the board of trustees. Plans to close the campus June 30 moved forward, and most college buildings are now locked. The university has announced its intention to turn off air conditioning at the end of June and the heating plant has been shut down. According to Antioch University Chief Financial Officer Tom Faecke in a recent interview, only the library and the Kettering Building, which houses university offices, will remain open after June 30. At their regular June board meeting in Keene, N.H., the university trustees surprised the college community by passing a resolution which called for an independent college and requested that the alumni present a process and a plan for severing the connection between the college and the university. At last Friday’s State of the College address, Alumni Board President Nancy Crow, who is a nonvoting member of the board of trustees, said that the trustees are sincere in their desire to achieve an autonomous Antioch. “I’m not cautiously optimistic. I’m boldly optimistic,” she said, stating that at the June board meeting, “the feeling inside the room at Keene was, there will be an independent college in Yellow Springs.” It is important for alumni to realize that alumni leaders and trustees are not adversaries in this recent effort but are working together, Crow said. “This is different,” she said. “We are working in a collaborative way with the board of trustees.” In response to a question about why the trustees are now seeking independence for the college when previously they opposed the plan, Crow said that the change in the trustees’ attitudes has been gradual, and that the AC3 deserves credit for helping to bring about that change. “It’s been a process of the university coming to the understanding that it would not be able to bring the college back without alumni support” and their understanding that only an independent college would have alumni support, Crow said. Plan B: litigation A second portion of the State of the College address, presented by Ellen Borgersen, the acting president of the College Revival Fund and Alumni Board vice-president, focused on Plan B, or possible litigation should the current attempt to reach agreement with the trustees fall through. While some alums urged litigation last fall, those who are attorneys did not, she said. “Lawyers know better than anyone that litigation is always a last resort,” she said. “It is costly, nasty and anything but short. However you calculate the costs of this past year of negotiations that have yet to bear fruit, one thing we gained is this: no one will ever be able to say we didn’t do everything possible, and more, to avoid litigating.” An attorney who previously taught at the Stanford University Law School, Borgersen stated that she does not practice in Ohio and acts only as the coordinator of potential lawsuits. The Wall Street law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton, which employs Antioch alumna Judi Church, has taken on the Antioch College alumni case pro bono, according to Borgersen, who said that firm has put in about $350,000 worth of time on the case so far. Possible future lawsuits include a “derivative” suit on behalf of the Antioch University corporation itself, claiming that the administration and board have inflicted injuries upon the institution through damaging the college’s reputation and its ability to recruit students. Those who bring the suits would have to be sitting trustees, Borgersen said. Other potential suits include those from donors who contributed to the college at a time when university personnel knew it would be closed and failed to disclose that fact to donors, claims by students who were awarded scholarships for a four-year education and claims on behalf of donors of restricted funds that may have been misappropriated, according to Borgersen. The claims would be difficult to win, according to Borgersen, who said that to do so, plaintiffs have to prove that trustees breached their fiduciary responsibility to both the university and the college. However, Borgersen stated that she believes the claims would survive motions to dismiss the pleadings, and therefore the college supporters would be allowed to hold discovery proceedings. The lawsuit with the greatest potential to win may be the faculty lawsuit, which has already been filed, Borgersen said. That suit is a simple “breach of contract” suit, which asserts the university breached the requirements set out in faculty contracts that said trustees could terminate tenured faculty only if there were no less drastic means to relieve the college’s financial problems, and only after consulting with faculty, which did not happen. More than 90 percent of civil lawsuits settle out of court, according to Borgersen, who said, “In my personal opinion, we will get our college back. The university now agrees with us that an independent college is in the best interests of both the college and the university and we will achieve that goal — it’s a question of how long it will take and how much money will be diverted from the task of bringing Antioch College back to life as a thriving, residential undergraduate institution...” In the resolution passed on Sunday, alumni called on alumni, faculty, staff, students and the Yellow Springs community to help raise the necessary funds for three priorities, which are “1) funding to support an independent Antioch College, 2) Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, and 3) litigation; and call to action for all necessary support to continue the operations of Antioch College.” Nonstop wins hearts If there were rock stars at the reunion, they were the former Antioch College faculty members who presented their plans and visions for the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute to an enthusiastic audience, twice garnering standing ovations. “The Nonstop faculty blew everyone away,” said Borgersen. Formerly known as Nonstop Antioch until threatened with legal action by Antioch University, Nonstop is the effort by former Antioch College faculty to continue the educational mission of the college even after the campus closes June 30. “They got the body of Antioch,” said Nonstop faculty member Hassan Rahmanian at a presentation Saturday, referring to Antioch University’s move to close down the campus. “But we got the soul.” The soul of Antioch, according to Nonstop faculty, is an educational experience rooted in the “interconnections between classroom learning, co-operative education, and community self governance.” In practicality, it is the collaborative efforts of the 22 Antioch College faculty members, plus volunteers, staff and students, who have committed themselves to the Nonstop effort. While the group hopes for an agreement between the alumni board and university trustees to create an independent college and return to campus, in the meantime they are moving ahead. Over the past several months they engaged intensely with each other in creating a new curriculum and new ways of presenting information in venues across Yellow Springs. Currently, organizers are considering about 20 possible venues for classrooms, including village churches, businesses and cafes. “When you find yourself in an impossible situation, you forge creative solutions,” Rahmanian said. “If this is not Antioch, what is?” While there are still unknowns regarding Nonstop — such as where, exactly, the classes will take place — organizers plan to begin teaching the week of Sept. 4, the same time they would begin if Antioch College were open, according to Nonstop faculty member Chris Hill. Organizers do not know yet how many students will take part, according to Hill, and consequently they have fashioned classes that they hope will appeal to villagers as well as traditional students. Organizers are currently seeking rental homes in the village to house students. Students who need financial help may be able to take advantage of co-op work opportunities in the village, according to Ecklund-Leen, who said tuition for traditional students will be minimal, ranging from $1,500 to $2,000 for a semester. While some aspects of Nonstop remain unclear, what is clear is that the faculty members are excited and passionate about their new enterprise, which is as ambitious as it is creative. Along with regular classes, Nonstop will offer a weeklong learning festival in October and evening courses and workshops that comprise “Nonstop Presents,” the “public face of the performance aspect of the curriculum,” according to Hill. “People will see that Antioch is alive,” she said. The “Nonstop Presents” segment will include a lecture series, the Al Denman Friday Forum series, a film series, workshops, and a performance series. Tentative evening courses and one-day workshops for the fall include computer literacy with C.T. Chen, the Art of Political Discourse with Scott Warren, Ecology and Feminism with Colette Palamar, The Quaran, Mohammed and Islam, with Al Denman, Reclaiming the Body’s Wisdom, dance workshops with Jill Becker, the History of Jazz and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, with Steve Schwerner, a comparative anthropology study group with Beverly Rogers, and the Art of Storytelling with Harold and Jonatha Wright. “Creativity and innovation abound,” said Ecklund-Leen. “My colleagues have acted to reclaim the ownership of Antioch.” For more information about Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, contact Ellen Borgersen at 415-509-2725.

Will Antioch College Ohio Reopen After Closing In June 2008? Probably not, sadly. The facts...without tears....

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:56:31 -0500

June 16, 08 Hi from Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen '66 (Email me at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): Antioch alumni I've been in contact with have emailed me recently and asked if Antioch College Ohio will reopen after being closed down by the Antioch University Board Of Trustees in June 2008. I've replied to several people, and laid out the facts as I see them briefly, and hopefully without tears. The closing of Antioch College Ohio is a terrible (and unneccessary) tragedy, but it appears to be a done deal. Time to face up to that, and move on....respectfully. Here, FYI, is the text of my summary of what happened, and why. I may not be correct and Antioch College Ohio may indeed re-open again soon or at least someday. I hope that happens. Meanwhile, here's what I've replied to Antiochians who contacted me, asked if Antioch will re-open, and "what happened?" ------------------- I think it's very unlikely Antioch College will survive the current closedown imposed by the Antioch University Board Of Trustees. I wish it weren't so, but I see no evidence to the contrary. The current Trustees seem intent on closing the school down (for a variety of no doubt unstated reasons), and no serious challenge to their closedown decision has been mounted after one year. When they announced the closedown decision last year (June 2007), they (the Trustees) were on extremely shaky ground and quite vulnerable to challenge and displacement. The passage of time (one year by now) has changed that. The Trustees now hold the "high ground" and the closedown news is no longer new and shocking. I believe the Trustees anticipated the violent reaction to their closedown decision, and stage managed things effectively, also recruited allies in the camp of those who seized leadership in the challenge to the closedown. They waited things out, set up ground rules and overall assumptions never challenged or overturned or even widely disputed, networked with key opposition people with great success, and otherwise "pushed the buttons" of Antiochians active in the challenge to the closedown decision in ways beneficial to the Trustees. I wish the final results were otherwise, but I don't think things will change. The passing away into history of Antioch College, Ohio is sad, but it is one of those occurances which any student of cultural and educational history knows about. Immortality isn't part of the history of cultural institutions like Antioch College, Ohio....nothing lasts forever. Best not to let you heart be broken about what's happened. Antiochians who valued what Antioch gave them will keep the memory of Antioch at its best alive, at least during our lifetime. Best wishes always, Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen, Antioch College, Class of 1966 (Education Major)

Antioch University Board Of Trustees Tentatively Offer Antioch College Ohio To Antioch Alumni Assn. Leaders! Doubtful? Yes!

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:15:39 -0500

June 9, 08 Hi from Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen '66 (Email me at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): The President of the official Antioch College Ohio Alumni Assn., Ms. Nancy Crowe '70 (a tax lawyer in the Denver CO USA area), sent an email to all Antioch College alumni dated June 7, 08 stating that the Antioch University Board Of Trustees has offered to "give" Antioch College Ohio to the Antioch Alumni Assn. and disconnect the Yellow Springs Ohio residential college from the other schools and administration part of "Antioch University," with three west coast USA campuses, one in New Hampshire, and one in Ohio (the McGregor Business School). Here is the text of Ms. Crowe's message, followed by analysis I provided today to the Antioch College chatline in reply to an Antioch alumnus who asked "What does this all mean?"...... ------------------------ Antioch College Alumni > Breaking News > > ANTIOCH UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES UNANIMOUSLY CALL FOR PROCESS TO > CREATE INDEPENDENT AND SEPARATE ANTIOCH COLLEGE; > > -- News Stuns Alumni, Faculty, Staff In Depth and Breadth; Timing -- > > Keene, NH, June 7, 2008-Today, in a surprise announcement, the Antioch > University Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution calling for > the Alumni Association to create the process to secure Antioch College's > independence from Antioch University, with its own board of trustees. > Additionally, the resolution calls for the Alumni Board to craft a > business plan for the transfer of assets from the University. > > "The Antioch College Alumni Association stands ready to continue Antioch > College as a residential, undergraduate four-year liberal arts program > with shared governance and a tenured faculty," said Nancy Crow, President > of the Alumni Board. "We thank the University Board of Trustees for making > the decision to turn the process over to the elected representatives of > the College alumni. By doing so, they have ended ten months of anguish." > > Matthew Derr, a member of the Executive Committee of the Alumni Board, > said, "As Antioch College moves forward with plans for its independent > future, we acknowledge the accomplishments of the University campuses and > their programs. We hope that they will continue to flourish as they follow > their own paths." > > When asked how this resolution differs from previous agreements, Crow > replied: "This is startlingly different. This is a resolution supporting > complete independence from the University. Additionally, the Board of > Trustees is asking the alumni to create the process, not to work within a > prescribed process." > > She continued, "I know I echo the feelings of many alumni when I say how > grateful we are for the courage demonstrated by the Board of Trustees by > this decision. We look forward to ensuring our process moves forward > swiftly." > > This resolution comes two weeks before alumni around the world are to come > to Yellow Springs for the College Reunion, June 20 - 22. Crow said, "We > need alumni to come to campus to help the Alumni Association Board craft > the plans needed to create a well-funded, vigorous and vital Antioch > College for the next 155 years-at least!" -------------------------------------------- The above message seemed to me problematic, and I wrote the following bit of analysis for the Antioch College chatline, submitted today (June 9, 2008), which dovetails with disapproving words I've provided to this website in the recent past....the "official opposition" to the AU BOT are not good guys, any more than the people who form the AU BOT itself are. This is a time for critical thinking and "realpolitik," not unrealistic "feel good" emotions or conclusions. Here are my words about it all submitted and published today on the Antioch College Ohio alumni chatline: ------------------------ June 9, 2009 Hi from Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen, Antioch College alumnus! What follows are words of reply to Ms. Crowe's call to Antioch College alumni to support the most recent offer of the Antioch University Board Of Trustees made to the group Ms. Nancy Crowe '70, heads, the Antioch College Ohio Alumni Association, which has been "offered" Antioch College disconnected from it's present owner, Antioch University, and that University's embattled leaders...... Can anybody sensible trust the Antioch University Board Of Trustees, especially regarding Antioch College, Ohio and what is to become of it? Puh-leeeese! These are NOT sincere or honest people, or at least the main leaders aren't....Art Zucker '55, AU BOT Chairman of millions and guile, electronics man of wealth from North Carolina....Toni Murdoch, CEO of Antioch University....top on the payroll person at Antioch, anywhere. The thing to due is look for hidden agenda items. What can they be? Well.....let's not forget about money...the AU BOT never does, and claims that's the main reason they shut down Antioch College, Ohio. If/when they actually turn over Antioch College Ohio to anyone, not much of monetary value is likely to be left..."Yes, you can 'have' Antioch College, Ohio....No, you can't have everything, certainly nothing hockable!" It's very likely the AU BOT will WITHHOLD important parts of traditional Antioch College Ohio property....and only give what's left over to...well...to whom, actually...is the Antioch College Alumni Assn. a group of educators and administrators likely to do well at making a horserace out of Antioch College Ohio after all the battering of the past year? The AU BOT may just be dumping unwanted garbage sans good stuff the Antioch Alumni leaders agreed to fork over but haven't yet admitted or announced. Let's think about obvious issues part of the whole saga of recent times: Toni Murdock, Antioch University CEO of fame, wants to run a modern, internet "Phoenix University" type place which is what's selling these days to no-money people....school w/o dorms or any undergrad life....classes and credits and jobs like teachers and lab managers at the end of the tunnel. She wants money to fund it all...and raiding Antioch College, Ohio's residential campus is way to do it. How much of Antioch College Ohio is she (and her allies on the AU BOT) willing to give up? She's got plans for the valuable part of Antioch College, Ohio....it's unlikely the plans include giving valuable parts away. Who knows what "conditions" the AU BOT demanded (and got) from the always user friendly (to the Antioch U. BOT) official Antioch College Alumni leaders. Last year, John Feinberg, then president of the Alumni Board, kept the 2007 Reunion from turning into a revolt against the AU BOT. He stage managed the Kelly Hall meeting he ran on June 22, 07 to favor the Antioch BOT and Mr. Art Zucker, whom Feinberg treated not as the rat Zucker is and with the contempt Zucker deserved, but with all the reverence and high diplomatic protocol reverved normally for an ally and good friend at the ambassadorial level. A true revolt might have broken out during the 2007 Reunion, but it didn't, thanks largely to the expert stage management of Mr. Feinberg and the Antioch College Alumni leaders, and the fact that the title of "official opposition" to the AU BOT closedown threat was seized by people quite respectful of the AU BOT and willing to go along with ground rules the AU BOT demanded and set up.....this accounts for why the AU BOT closedown plan went off a month EARLIER than scheduled (June 2008 rather than July 2008) after a year of failed "negotiation." The same thing will happen with the coming (two weeks) 2008 Reunion, now run by Alumni Board leadership who want to sell the new AU BOT offer to visiting alumni, and who will STOP revolt, as the same group did last year. Once again the stage management welcoming potentially peskey and revolutionary Antioch College Ohio alumni will stop the revolt, and after the steam is drained off from the 2008 Reunion group meeting, the AU BOT can back down, again. Just like they did before. They promise plenty, play for time, deliver nothing. None of this is pleasant to state or think about, but it IS a realistic assessment of what's happening and who Antioch College Ohio alumni are dealing with. This is a time for critical thinking and hard boiled decisions difficult to make....not "feel good" joyousness and the conclusion that the bad guys (and their friends part of the Antioch Alumni Assn. leadership, who have such an obvious track record of enabling the power of the AU BOT, and never seriously challenging that power) are after all not such bad guys after all. I've written more about all this on WWW.AntiRecord.Org and haven't been flattering in summing up the failed work of the "saviours" who saved nothing over the last year. Visit the WWW.AntiRecord.Org site for details, which are not optimistic. I gave bad reviews to the "leaders of the opposition" and I still think those reviews are justified, and explain why the AU BOT has once again proposed to draw out the current soap opera by playing "Let's Make A Deal" with these same discredited (by me on WWW.AntiRecord.Org) leaders. Best wishes, Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen '66

Despise BOTH the Antioch University Board Of Trustees for closing down Antioch College AND those "led" the efforts to stop them

David Allen — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:13:41 -0500

May 3, 08 Hi from Tex (aka Yazz aka David) Allen, Antioch alumus (Email me at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): I'm getting email messages from Antioch alumni I've been in touch with during the past year who write now about attending their "last Antioch Non-Stop meeting" at various cities around the USA. The good ship "Antioch Non-Stop" is grinding to a halt. The networking, cyberspace and other communications between affronted Antioch alumni and others trying to stop the Antioch College closedown will be over soon, almost completely....it certainly won't continue with the numbers and passion seen during the past year before the closedown became a "done deal"....now the case, sadly. Those of us who wanted Antioch to remain open "non-stop" and have been part of the networking during the past year are now left with the history of what happened. The obvious bad guys are the Antioch University Board Of Trustees, who slit Antioch's throat. These people should be despised...few disagree with that. It's also important, I think, to despise the leaders who faced down the Trustees and lost the battle. They need to be called to account for their colossal failure of vision, strategy, tactics, and their willingness to treat the Trustees with a respect the Trustees did not and do not ever deserve. Let's not forget who closed Antioch College down....and equally, let's not forget who failed to stop them after claiming leadership in the battle of opposition, then led us all to defeat. Let's not honor the loser activists, and most especially, if and when the crusade to keep Antioch College alive (revived) begins again, let us refuse the leadership of those who lost the battle just ended. Let's not repeat the mistake of letting losers get power, and risking being led to loss once again. These people do not deserve honor, and any accurate history of the closedown of Antioch College should state that emphatically. Of course, I'm saddened by how the whole thing has played out. But I'm not surprised. The bad guys (the Trustees) had the upper hand from the start, and were never seriously challenged. The people who got leadership of "the opposition" played by the Trustees rules and assumptions ("Antioch needs more money") and could always be vanquished by the Trustees refusing raised money because "it's not enough." It was a no win game from the start (June 12, 2007...the date the Trustees dropped the bomb). The only thing that would have worked was a head on attack on the Trustees, a legal challenge to their status as people required by law to hold Antioch "in Trust" and guide it responsibly. Legal proof and adjudication was (still is) needed that the Trustees were (and are) irresponsible, and therefore not legally engaging in doing what's best for Antioch. That could have been done, but it would have meant NOT "playing nice" with the Trustees from the start...declaring them bad guys from the start, and engaging in an Unconditional war! The war could have been won, but it never happened...wimpy Pacifists got control of the Opposition, and they lost (as Pacifists engaged against stalwart militants always do!). Sincerely, Tex (aka Yazz, aka David) Allen, Antioch College Alumnus

Antioch is going out with a whimper, not a bang

David Allen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:20:34 -0500

Hi from Tex Allen (aka David Allen, aka Yazz Allen), Antioch alumnus (TexAllen@Hotmail.Com): It looks like Antioch is going out with a whimper, not a bang. The "bang" potential got drained away with all the exhausting "negotiations" (after the people who declared themselves the leadership of the opposition to the AU BOT accepted the AU BOT contention that "not enough money" was available for running Antioch...a total lie....running Antioch on almost no money was and still is quite possible), the silence and wimpy acceptance of Antioch's decreed fate thanks to the AU BOT is ominous. Everybody and most media are talked out. The closedown of Antioch is old news, like the invasion of Iraq, another outragreous event nobody objects to or even discusses any more. I remind any who read this that this close-down did NOT have to happen, and is based on the false premise that only monster money can run valuable, historic social institutions like Antioch. The closedown of Antioch College Ohio is a coup for big money, of which the AU BOT zillionaires are zealous cutthroat representatives and advocates. Warmest wishes, Tex Allen

Leap Year Day Statement about the tragedy of Antioch College Ohio being closed down in June 2008 by th AU BOT!

David Allen — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:39:26 -0600

Feb. 29, 08 Happy Leap Year Day from Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66 (Email me directly at YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com): Here's my "Leap Year Day Statement" about the tragedy announced last week via AU BOT press release that Antioch's REALLY "final days" will come in June 2008! Just what the AU BOT guys and gals stated LAST June 2007...how about that? Some people NEVER change their minds or their ways, and the AU BOT folks are examples of note, and fame! Over the years, I have stated my personal objections to the mis-management and problems never solved or heeded, the bad and clearly corrupt Trustees at Antioch, and further detailed pointed criticisms regarding a VERY LONG laundry list of problems at Antioch that seemed to me to constitute a train wreck a'comin! I was right! Everybody always said I was one of the smartest fellows they ever met, from before I arrived at Antioch at age 18 in 1962, and up to today, Leap Year Day, which marks the one month annivesary of my 64th birthday (been getting Social Security pension money and also Family Trust monthly money much bigger than SS money for more than a year,and "the livin' is easy," finally, I'm glad to say!......my ex-wife [an Antioch grad] can't grab inherited money because it's in trust set up to stop her greedy ways...she got a NEW rich boyfriend, soon to be her husband, I heard).. The closedown news is depressing. "I told you so," say I, and check out the wonderful beyond my words to praise it WWW.AntiRecord.Org Antioch College Ohio enthusiast/ watchdog website (est. 1998...the oldest one.......older, wiser, smarter, and run by better people than such as the Johnny-Come-Too-Lately Antioch College enthusiast/ watchdog websites such as, but not limited to WWW.TheAntiochPapers.Org and WWW.Antiochians.Org ) For those who don't know (because they NEVER did their homework and didn't track trouble brewing at Antioch College Ohio until the national press announced the AU BOT slit the school's throat in June 2007), the original name of the WWW.AntiRecord.Org site was WWW.AntiochSucks.Com and the founder and still manager of the site, the wonderful beyond my ability to praise him Mr. Daniel T. "Yazz" Atlas '97 changed the name recently. Well, Dan "Yazz" Atlas '97 (different "Yazz" than David Roger Allen '66, the movie actor...see Yazz Allen's movie credits, life, resume, photos acting as US Senator from Maryland ["John Henry Howard..Frederalist Party at George Washington's first 1789 inauguration!]) should change the site name BACK to "Antioch Sucks" because it sure does! The proof is in the total and not a little ridiculous FAILURE of Antioch alumni to stop the gangster Antioch University Board Of Trustees led by Zillionare Art Zucker '55, and mentored by bull dyke of fame, Dr. Toni Murdock, "Chancellor" of "Antioch University".....heiress of Dr. Alan Guskin, former Antioch College president, and man of perfidy NEVER identified as a villain through the last year of talk talk talk talk on this website...even though Guskin IS that and more...truly the father of the power of the "tail to way the dog"...the ding-bat former President of "Antioch Seattle" getting power she got, and helping to do what she's done! Senile Mr. Art Zuker is a sucker for a pretty face, even a bull dyke face like football player sized Toni Murdock! Insulting words from David Roger Allen '66 (aka "Yazz Allen, '66" the SAG movie actor you can read all about on WWW.IMDb.Com..just used "Yazz Allen" as search terms on the sites home page, click "Go" for photos of Yazz in JOHN ADAMS [2008 HBO...first episode of the series is Sunday, March 16 at 8 PM and posters are in every post office in the USA, including YOURS showing Academy Award winner Paul Giamatti, JOHN ADAMS lead actor...Paul is the son of Bart Giamatti, youngest President in the history of Yale U., and Yale U. was my very very last Antioch College co-op job before my academic studies at Antioch were completed). Yes, folks, insulting words, but....I'm insulted Antioch is closing down. "I told you so" and if you don't believe me, visit WWW.Google.Com and use "David Allen Antioch College" and also "Yazz Allen Antioch College" for search terms and you will pull up many many dozens of articles I wrote about the coming (now accomplished for sure) train wreck at Antioch College Ohio...wrote it all for WWW.AntiochSucks.Com and the same site re-titled WWW.AntiRecord.Org. and ALL were sent to Google gladly and intentionally by the site founder/ manager, Dan Atlas '97, bless him. Right! Well...as I promised (threatened?) ....a few (really!) final words before Antioch is sold by the AU BOT for space taken up by the NEW (watch for it coming) Yellow Springs Ohio USA WalMart Supercenter, bought with WalMart zillions which make WalMart currently the biggest USA company of all! I wrote a book review about WalMart and it's bad reputation for Amazon.Com and 35 OTHER book reviews....just go to WWW.Google.Com and input DAVID ROGER ALLEN AMAZON and you can read 'em all. Add "WalMart" to the list of search terms, and the book review about what's wrong with WalMart and why it is bad for Amerika comes up alone! Read it all. It's good, if I do say so myself. I'd like to throw MORE rocks at the people who got control of the "Save Antioch" crusade...the "Official" (and always AU BOT friendly!) Antioch College Alumni Association and it's officers, and ALSO the richest people on the ACCC which will go down in infamy as the final failures of note regarding "why the helpers sent to help Antioch months before it closed down didn't do a good job and Antioch College Ohio closed down ANYWAY ...to make way for the new and wonderful...complete with grocery store part of WalMart..YSO WalMart SuperCentre...probably about #4576...almost 5000 WalMarts world wide these days..when WalMart closes its doors, the shit will REALLY hit the fan, more so than is the case when Antioch College Ohio closes its pathetic doors in June 2008). First, the ACCC and the zillionaires sent to fight the zillionaires on the AU BOT: Lee Morgan '67. Heir to the Arhur Morgan mega-fortune and biggest single landlord , along with his wife, Victoria Neff Morgan '67, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, owner of the "Antioch Company," which used to be the Antioch Bookplate Company which befor that was the plain old "Antioch Press." Lee's BIG money is real estate, land owner ship money he inherited. Lee was never bright during his undergrad days. Not the guy to save Antioch or even get to be Community Manager, which he ran for often and lost often because he was clearly NO leader and clearly NOT BRIGHT. Went to expensive Scattergood Prep School, Indiana, before Antioch and got in trouble. I heard he got thrown out, but I could be wrong. Fast forward 40 plus years and LEE advances to the plate to "save Antioch" as a key ACCC member (due to his money...his big credential!) and screws it up. Antioch closes ANYWAY! Lee wasn't good enough to save it. NO surprise to people who watched and knew Lee and the other Morgan heirs in YSO in the 1960's. Arthur E. Morgan was the LAST smart and competent Morgan. He married Lucy Griscom, rich but stupid, Antioch got a chapel built with Lucy's money, and religion returned to Antioch in the form of the Quaker Meeting House for the Yellow Springs Ohio Monthly Meeting on the Antioch College Ohio campus, part of the Ohio Quaker Yearly Meeting! Lucy got Antioch religous. Poor Arthur Morgan, stuck with Lucy, and those related to her..including Lee Morgan. All like Lucy...rich, but stupid! Right! Well, folks, lets move on to ACCC superstar David Goodman '69, zillionaire inheritor of mega-Jewish money from NYC, now based in New Jersey, the brother of fallen martyr Andrew Goodman who got murdered along with Steve Schwerner's ('60) brother, Michael "Mickey" Schwerner.....see MISSISSIPPI BURNING movie which shows both Antioch connected white guys along with African American James Chaney getting murdered by red-necks in Mississippi and the bad guys getting caught by Gene Hackmand and Willem Dafoe! David Goodman '69, one of the rich ACCC guys like Lee Morgan who couldn't win the battle against the AU BOT, is ALSO an heir, ALSO somebody who didn't earn a dime of the huge money he controls. Charming as hell..one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet..I was a guest in about 1965 at Dave Goodman's family apt. on the upper West Side in Manhattan (I was born in Manhattan myself), and saw the monster 14 room palace Dave Goodman came home to between Antioch College Ohio co-op jobs. BIG MONEY went to both Dave and Lee. But neither were bright. Just born under a lucky star, and rich their whole lives. THESE GUYS became key ACCC players and leaders..and the ACCC screwed it up which led to the press release last week from the AU BOT stating Antioch College Ohio is closing down in June 2008, which is/ was ALSO what the June 2007 press release the AU BOT put out said. True both times! The ACCC and it's rich but not very smart and able leaders? Lost the battle! Lee Morgan and Dave Goodman are two of the reasons why...BIG money mixed with SMALL brains and administrative competence and intelligence....loses the battle every time! Don't know others on the ACCC but with Lee and Dave Goodman on the ACCC, I'd say the other ACCC members were in BIG TROUBLE, and the results are there for all to see. Well...final words about the Antioch College Alumni Association which promises/ pledges to "keep fighting!" This is a direct quote from the Yellow Springs OHIO NEWS...the weekly newspaper in YSO which has covered all this....when the story of the Antioch College Closedown is researched, archives of the YS NEWS will tell the story in detail of the final year Antioch lived before the June 2008 successful execution by Art Zucker, Toni Murdock and the renowned Antioch University Board Of Trustees, most ....all without exception,...turncoats regarding their Antioch College Alumni support status...all people Antiochians who love Antioch should and must hate (justifiably) forever, and never forgive! So...the YS NEWS states the Alumni Board and Association will "keep fighting." They fought a lot..nobody doubts that. BUT....even though they fought hard, and should be commended for that, the didn't fight SMART! So...they lost, and Antioch College Ohio lost. Stupid people in high places. Big tragedy which explains in a five word sentence why Antioch College died died died even though it should have lived, lived, lived...for another 155 years and more! OK, folks! This is MORE "Cassandra" talk, and few have written more "Cassandra type paragraphs" bewailing the coming train wreck and end of Antioch College if things didn't change than your humble writer...David Roger Allen '66 aka Yazz Allen '66, the SAG Movie Actor and founder and manager of the Movie Actors' Co-op and editor of the 4x monthly Movie Actors' Co-op NEWS for mentoring of about 500 Mid-Atlantic USA Movie Actors! I have spoken! A lot of good it's done me! A lot of good it's done Antioch! I am smart, the ACCC and the Alumni Board were and are stupid..I was never consulted or invited to join either group. Wasn't asked to help out, even though I knew things and had the talent others like Lee Morgan and Dave Goodman DIDN'T have to stop Art Zucker where he lives, to stop the whole BOT where they live, to stop bull dyke Toni Murdock, even though she outweighs me by at least 50 pounds, yet is shorter than I am (I am 6 feet tall and weigh 160 lbs). Sayonara Antioch! It's been real! Warmest wishes, David Roger "Yazz" Allen, Antioch College Ohio, Class of 1966, Education BA diploma holder (later MLS from the U. of MD. where Joan Straumanis got her PH.D!).

Antioch Confidential – Now Online

yazz — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:17:13 -0600

Early today I received a press release from Timothy Noble. "The video and companion article "Antioch Confidential" examine the closed control and destabilization of Antioch College by Antioch University. "Antioch Confidential" documents the damage to educational processes when "control" is mistaken for "leadership," and "command" is confused with "vision." The events taking place at Antioch College are a case study of recent trends in higher education today. The article and video are available for free use by librarians, teachers, educational workers and citizens concerned with the seizure of shared resources for private interests. THE ANTIOCH PAPERS http://theantiochpapers.org/ theantiochpapers@gmail.com

Why Antioch College, Ohio, is definitely going down the tubes for good! Bad alumni!

David Allen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:13:22 -0600

Why Antioch College, Ohio, is definitely going down the tubes for good! Bad alumni! Feb. 26, 08 Hi from Yazz Allen, Never Gives His Grad Year Date To Fight Ageism (complaints answered OFF LINE to YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! Well, the game is over. Yogi Berra of the NEW YORK YANKEES once said, accurately, that "the game isn't over til it's over"....but it seems to me, THIS game is over. The AU BOT have won. Smart, bad guys. Too bad for Antioch College and all who like it, including me. This was a set up from long, long ago. It started when Larry Pearl, 55, a Yale Law School grad lawyer working for the USA Federal Government was ordered in 1974-5 to make Antioch College look bad. His (Pearl's) boss at the time was USA President Gerald R. Ford, who in roughly 1973 made a speech from the floor of the USA House Of Representatives (Horace Mann was part of that...he was the successor USA Congressman from Massachusetts to John Quincy Adams, and well respected all over America during his 1848-52 terms in the USA Congress) which condemned Antioch College, Ohio in clear terms. EVERYTHING was done by the USA government Nixon and his successor Ford ran to assassinate Antioch College. The FBI office in Cincinnati OH was detailed to engage COINTELPRO assassination activity against Antioch in the 1970's before and during Pearl's arrival as Antioch BOT Chairman, and did so. Pearl worked for Ford. Pearl hired Ford's enemy, Antioch College President James Payson DIxon, Antioch '38, Harvard Med. School ''43, Antioch College and Network President from 1959 - 1975. Ford wanted Dixon out. Pearl used his office and got rewards from Ford and his people to get rid of Dixon. THAT was the start of the closedown of Antioch College we see completed by Pearl's fellow 1955 grad, Arthur Zucker, who became a millionaire in the electronics business after 10 years working as a travelling salesman for the Square D electrical parts company, then started to import electronics from foreign sources, and became a big time, very, very rich capitalist internationalist businessman of great wealth. A "malefactor of great wealth," as Teddy Roosevelt would have said. An "evil capitalist" as Karl Marx did say. And Zucker bought the AU BOT chairmanship with his substantial money from ANOTHER 1950's big money Antioch grad, Robert Krinsky '57, who had become Chairman and main owner of the Segal Co. of ONE PARK AVE. NYC NY USA and himself "bought" the Antioch BOT chairmanship in the 1980's and 1990's. The crisis meeting last at Antioch College last June 22-24, 2007 discussed and publicized NONE of this. The perfidy of AU BOT leaders and those who came before starting with Larry Pearl '55 and his firing of Jim Dixon '38 in 1975 was NOT discussed or recognized as an issue. The mire of corruption of Trustee leadership at Antioch College for more than 30 years went unchallenged and not at all publicized by Antioch Alumni who gathered at Antioch in June 2007. Good friends of the AU BOT had gained leadership in organizations claiming to represent alumni. Nobody talented or brave challenged the impudent meeting held in Kelly Hall, Antioch Hall, Antioch College, YSO on June 22, 07 between 9 AM and 12 Noon. The video taping of that meeting offered by the Antioch Library AV crew for free (I have a copy of that and have screened it often) shows the closedown plans of the AU BOT was unchallenged and not skillfully opposed in ANY way! The meeting was covered by major USA mass media, and no report of serious opposition by Antioch Alumni or their representatives was made....because....NO opposition of a serious or challenging or intelligent or skillful nature was offered. Right! Soooo,.................the AU BOT dragged the whole thing out, let the stream built up objecting to what they announced they would do...close down Antioch College after 155 years....drain off and die down. And THAT is what has happened. The AU BOT waited it out. That was their plan, and it worked. The Antioch Alumni screwed up. NOBODY is reponsible for the closedown of Antioch College more than the sons and daughters of Antioch College. If it were otherwise, the OBVIOUS case against the AU BOT and its key players and movers and shakers, the OBVIOUS history of malfeasance starting in 1975 with the very wrong and illegal but then unchallenged firing of President James Payson Dixon '38, and other obvious evidence in need of exposition and exposure...would have been brought forward. And the bad guys...the AU BOT ...would have been vanquished. But...the game ended up being played by rules the AU BOT set up...played their way on their turf with no serious challenge to them. They never lost power, and still have it. Folks...this whole thing has been ALL about power! Take it away from the bad guys ASAP, and the good guys come back and win. Didn't happen here. Antioch is gone because of that. Yazz (DAVID ROGER) Allen

History Of Antioch College Presidents from 1853 to 2008 By Yazz Allen '92, son of David Allen '66

David Allen — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:06:08 -0600

Feb. 15, 08 Hi from Yazz Allen '92 (Email: YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com): Here's a complete list of Antioch College presidents taken from the 2007 Antioch Alumni Directory (still available for purchase from Texas' PSI Publishing Co. for a price YOU can afford! GET ONE! NOW!) from 1853 to present times (!). Unfortunately, incomplete because the list doesn't include "interim presidents" (Andre Bloch is the current one, and many others had that hard, demanding job over 155 years of Antioch history, including Barrett Hollister and Morris Keeton, famous Antioch staffers from the 20th century!). ANOTHER unmet neeed exists for a detailed book about "interim presidents" at Antioch....the Weston family suppled several during the 19th Century! Interesting folks, all. The whole subject of how to run an emergency presidency on no notice, and usually no resources or support from anytone is interesting. An "Interim Presidents" book would be a great "how to" book for the likes of people like Andre Bloch and his successors! Might be a good morale booster. The Interim guys were all saints...got the work but didn't get the glory or fame...probably didn't get the money, either! The PAY both Antioch Presidents and also Interim Presidents got, one by one, should ALSO be reported...also the perks (and lack of perks!). A serious unmet need exists for a good (very thick and well indexed) history book solely about Antioch presidents....ALL of 'em! Robert Straker's HORACE MANN AND OTHERS (1963 Antioch Press) book profiles Horace Mann (so do all encyclopedias in the entire world!) and also Thomas Hill, Mann's successor who went from Antioch to the Harvard U. presidency, and Austin Craig, who followed Hill after the Civil War (and who taught GREEK at Antioch during Mann's watch in the 1850's!...My collateral ancestor, William Francis Allen, 1830-1889, ALSO taught Greek at Antioch...Latin, too in 1866-67...famous 19th century Antioch teacher in all the encyclopedias!) OK....here's ANTIOCH PRESIDENTS HALL OF FAME LIST (all entering Antioch College freshman and transfers should be required to recite this list out loud and write it out in longhand as a degree requirement!): In memoriam (Lest we forget!).. (NOTE: Large typeface names [4] were Antioch's greatest presidents, as guys like George Washington and Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan were the USA's greatest presidents...there ARE differing views about this, of course, but I submit mine, and honor the challenges of others, Voltaire style!): 1. HORACE MANN (1853 - 1859) 2. Henry Hill (1859 - 1862) 3. Austin Craig (1862 - 1866) [Note: Unclear description in 2007 alumni directory about Craig..I THINK 1862-66 is right, but maybe not!] 4. Geroge Washington Hosmer (1866 - 1872) 5. Edward Orton (1872 - 1873) [Note: Orton was ALSO president of Ronald Reagan's Eureka College in Illinois...one of MANY ties to the Republican Party Antioch has!....An unmet need exists for a book titled "Antioch College And The USA Republican Party!" Sure to be a best seller!] 6. Samuel Carroll Derby (1876 - 1881) 7. Orin J. Wait (1882 - 1883) 8. Daniel Albright Long (1883 - 1899) 9. William Allen Bell (1899 - 1902) 9A. Samuel Francis Westen (1902 - 1906)..Had the title "Dean," not "President" 10. SIMEON DAVIDSON FESS (1906 - 1917) (Elected to US Congress in 1913, became US Senator from Ohio 1920's-1930's...very important part of the Ohio Republicans behind Warren Harding presidency) 10A. George Douglas Black (1917 - 1919) Had title "Acting President" 10B. William Marcus Dawson (1919 - 1920) Had title "Acting President" 11. ARTHUR ERNEST MORGAN (1920 - 1936) Last three years were "in absentia" due to founding and running the TVA for the USA govt. Founded Antioch co-op program. Stopped disasterous floods in Dayton OH area. Lived in YSO til his death in 1976 at age 97. Antioch's tallest president, ever. The Antioch equivalent to Abe Lincoln in many, many, many ways! 12. Algo (aka Algernon) Donmeyer Henderson (1936 - 1947) 13. Douglas McGregor [NOT "MACGregor!...spell it right!] (1948 - 1954) 14. Samuel Brookner Gould (1954 - 1959) 15. JAMES PAYSON DIXON (1959 - 1975) 16. William M. (no full middle name given in 2007 Alumni Directory) Birenbaum (1876 - 1885) 17. Alan E. (no full middle name given in 2007 Alumni Directory...a TRULY awful directory....editing and preparation stinks!) Guskin (1985 - 1994) 18. James E. (again, no middle name given) Crowfoot (1994 - 1996) 18A. Robert H. (again, no middle name given) Devine, Had "Acting President" title. 19. Robert H. (again, no middle name given, but probably stands for "Heavenly") Devine (1998 - 2001) 20. Joan Cole Straumanis (2002 - 2004) 20A. Richard Jurasek (2004 - 2006) Had title "Acting President" 21. Steven Lawry (2006 - 2007) 21A. Andre Bloch (2007 - 2008) Had title "Acting President" [ Antioch's first Polish born and/or non-USA born President...ANOTHER "Antioch first!"] OK, folks! THAT's the list. Read it and weap! How about some books on these guys (and gal...let's have MORE gals as Antioch Prez, and ALSO, let's invite Joan Straumanis BACK to continue the good job she did during 2002 - 2004!)? ANTIOCHIANA should be ENDOWED with big money from mega-money Antioch alumni and benefactors, but given the ENTIRE OK Library building JUST for Antiochiana (build a bigger, better Antioch College Library and name it the Joe Calle "Don't Fall Down...THAT's The Key" Library). Money should be provided JUST for the cranking out of Antioch history books, and books about the Antioch presidency, and those who dared to attempt it (and what they faced!) should be at the top of the list. Warmest regards, Yazz (David) Allen '92, Son of David Roger ("the Geezer") Allen '66

ANTIOCH COLLEGE, OHIO, STUDENT MADE MOVIES AND COLLEGE MADE MOVIES! WHERE ARE ONES FROM PAST YEARS NOW?

David Allen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:32:36 -0600

Feb. 5, 08 Hi from Yazz (David) Allen '92, son of geezer David Allen '66 (Email me at YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com): Does ANYONE reading this have information about or (better yet) actual copies of ANTIOCH content movies OTHER THAN the two famous "Antioch Adventure Part One and Part Two" of 1967 and 1988 respectively. OTHER movies about Antioch and made by Antiochians exist, and should be discussed and exchanged! I've heard an "Antioch Adventure Part THREE" movie was made, but never learned more about that. In 1963, my father, David Roger Allen '66, starred in an Antioch College student movie titled THE EASTER PARADE made by then Antioch College student film-maker of fame, Mike Mideke '66. [ A third Yazz? Oh now this is going to get confusing *evil grin*. Read the rest of the store, and enjoy. - Yazz D. Atlas ] The movie was shot in Winter Quarter in 1963 Chicago, and screened for a huge student crowd in Kelly Hall auditorium, Antioch Hall Main Building during Spring Quarter. David Allen '66 was asked to give autographs for his memorable role as "Jesus In Chicago" and he did! What an ego that man had (still does!). During my father's stay at Antioch in the 1960's, he states that OLD OLD Antioch movies from the 1920's were screened for students. "Young" Arthur E. Morgan, still in his 40's and not yet crowned with grey hair was seen in these silent movies (16 mm probably). The "Antioch Bluejays" baseball team of the 1920's (undefeated, no doubt!) was also seen. My father also reports that Antioch student movie makers filmed Antioch protesters in Columbus, Ohio during the Fall Quarter 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis....the movie about the Antioch student CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS OF 1962 protestors was screened at AMPAC one week later. Mike Mideke '66, Rick Patton '66, and Mike Houghton '66 were sort of the "three musketeers" Antioch movie makers of fame back in those times. They made a LOT of movies then, and about Antioch with Antioch students and the campus as part of it all. If ANYONE knows of ANY Antioch related movie film anywhere, please post what you know on this site. The subject of "Antioch Apocropha" movies is interesting and important...by this I mean movies OTHER than the two famous ANTIOCH ADVENTURE movies made in 1967 by Marc Stone '67 and in 1988 by Thanos Fatouros '89 respectively. Hopefully, ANTIOCHIANA has a film collection/ video collection. What we need is a guy like Robert Straker, Antioch '25 who was one of the GREAT Antioch memorabilia collectors (he wrote HORACE MANN AND OTHERS published by the Antioch Press when you and I were Antioch undergrads in the 60's.....Louie Filler wrote the Forward to that....I have a copy!). I also remember seeing a Kelly Hall screened student movie during maybe Fall '62 (my very first quarter at Antioch) by a student film-maker named, I think, "Nick Dorsky." Something like that. I should check m Antioch Alumni Directory. The movie was about the digging of the Curl Gym Swimming Pool, and was a nutty, just for fun black and white movie, probably shot in 16 MM. The CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS OF 1962 movie was likely done by the trio of Mike Mideke (my Chicago Il co-op roommate in Winter Quarter of 1963), Mike Houghton, and Rick Patton. I think Steve Gould (who marched objecting to the crisis, etc.) is seen in the movie those three shot! All the high profile Liberal Activists of that time on campus went to Columbus OH for that, and were seen "standing vigil" with grim looks on their faces in that movie. Mike Houghton, Antioch 66 may have copies of that and other movies he helped make. Mike has been in contact with THE ANTIOCHIAN Alumni Publication in recent years. Thanks. Yazz (David) Allen '92

ANTIOCH (COLLEGE, OHIO) ADVENTURE STUDENT MADE MOVIES COMPARED (1967 PART ONE and 1988 PART TWO)

David Allen — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 11:52:04 -0600

Jan. 20, 08 Hi from Yazz (David) Allen '66 (Email me at YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com): There is definitely a physical difference in students who attended Antioch College in the 1960's and were filmed in the 1967 produced ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART ONE movie, and students who attended Antioch College in the late 1980's who were filmed in in 1988 in the ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART TWO. 80's Antiochians are heavier in overall body build and definitely more expensively dressed. Dental work 1980's Antiochians display in the many "mouth closeups" in ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART TWO (1988) is definitely better than is true of 60's Antiochians. I've screened these two movies a lot since last June 2007 when I took it upon myself to supply anyone who asked with copies (I ask a $10 donation to help cover costs, but sent many free copies to people who can't afford that, which, being an impoverished performing artist Antiochian out of Antioch 40+ years and STILL poor, I well understand and sympathize with). Just watched (screened) both ANTIOCH ADVENTURE (1967 and 1988) movies yet again today (also the Antioch College official promo movie made in 1989, an excellent portrait of Antioch during the 80's period). I made a copy for an Antioch grad physician now living in Hawaii (class of 1970, he probably treats a lot of Hawaii people for sunburn, tropical diseases, and for upset stomachs after eating too much Hawaiian party food!), and, as often happens, ended up watching all three Antioch movies (the two ADVENTURE movies and the promo video) while the copying process took place. Mom Dick (Miriam Dickenson) opens the ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART ONE (1967) movie, and that always grabs me....she was my Dean when I entered Antioch in 1962, and the 1967 "Mom Dick as Leo The Lion" which starts out Marc Stone's great PART ONE movie shows here exactly as I remember her. I've probably watched all three movies more than 100 times, and I see new things each time I watch them. This time I paid attention to body types and dental work differences shown in Antioch students in these movies. Also clothes they wore....not just styles, but the expense levels of the clothes. 80's kids seem richer as reflected in clothes and dental work, and overall appearance of "beatiful people" types as compared with the 1967 movie. The "Bingle Bangers" sequence in both movies is sort of a controlled experiment to pay attention to. The differences in the two sets of kids (one from 1967, one from 1988 are interesting and telling....the 1988 movie included a sheep [a live sheep!] not seen in the 1967 movie, among other differences of note). The two leading male actors of 1967 respectively, John Draper for 1967 and Steve Oliver for 1988 tell the teeth/ dental work tale! John has bunched up teeth in closeups, otherwise drop-dead handsome as his was and no doubt still is. Steve Oliver has dental dream come true teeth, perfect in every way! I won't comment in any details I noticed about Antioch girls since that gets touchy, but I did notice the 60's Antioch girls look...well.......much skinnier and less shapely than the 80's Antioch girls. I'm a movie actor, and I pay attention to such things. Hope no-one is offended. Anyway, the girls in the two movies are quite different. These movie are important and worth seeing often. The Antioch Book Store sells (or used to sell) both ANTIOCH ADVENTURE movies (1967 and 1988) by mail order, and alumni should get copies while it's still possible (who knows how the present psychodrama battle between the AU BOT and the AC3 Good Guys In Shining Armor And White Horses Trying To Save Antioch will come out....the bad guys could STILL win and the bookstore will close down along with the rest of Antioch College!). Each of the two Antioch Adventure movies lasts about 45 minutes and the Antioch promo video from 1989 (not for sale at the Antioch bookstore as far as I know....collector's item!) lasts about 30 minutes. THAT is a total of 120 minutes of filmed and videoed imagery and commentary about Antioch College in Ohio...........more than 175,000 separate still frames all run together as all movies/ videos are at 24 frames per second, but.......each of the 175,000 frames tells it's own story! You gotta re-screen these movies OFTEN to get ll the stories or even start to. One final comment. In my opinion (I'm a movie historian, college professor...part time adjunct professor.....lots of glory and praise but almost no money in paychecks I get for what I do............. teaching movie history in Baltimore MD USA colleges....ahem!), the ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART TWO (1988) is the BETTER of the two movies, even though Marc Stone's groundbreaking PART ONE movie is more famous, and, of course, very important in its own way. The acting, dancing, visual images, sound track, music (WAGNER's RIDE OF THE VALKEYRIES is included) of THE ANTIOCH ADVENTURE PART TWO (1988) are all better, smoother, than is the case of PART ONE. PART TWO includes reprise performances by PART ONE lead actors Jessica Lipnack and John Draper who play parents of the two lead actors of the 1988 movie. Interesting to see what happens visually to Antiochians "as time goes by." Lipnack plays the Yenta Jewish scolding mother of the female lead of the 1988 movie, and Draper plays the show biz impressario mogul in charge of 80's Michael Jackson superconcerts in the 1988 movie. Both 60's actors turn in great performances in the 1980's movie. Both are seen as parents the poor 80's Antiochian lead actors have to 'put up with." Both 80's leads do a lot of "eye rolling" and sighing as parents from the 60's ignore them while lecturing them. Just like my parents when I was at Antioch! Best, Yazz (David) Allen '66 (Note: I'm different than Yazz Atlas '97 who operates the WWW.AntiRecord.Org website...he's younger and probably richer).

Antioch RECORD (Student Newspaper) "We Have Your Back" Story Demands Removal Of "Financial Exigency" Status By AU BOT

David Allen — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:49:35 -0600

Hi from Yazz (David) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! The following public statement appeared this week (11/16/07) in the Antioch RECORD Student Newspaper, and was signed by Antioch College alumni leaders. The statement emphasizes support of Antioch College, Ohio, alumni for current Antioch College, Ohio, students, and emphasizes the critical need to remove the "Financial Exigency" status imposed on the College last June 2007 by the Antioch University Board Of Trustees. The statement further calls for immediate re-staffing of the Antioch College Admissions Office, and the start of work to recruit new students and transfer students to enter Antioch College, Ohio, for the year starting in Fall 2008. Here is the text of the statement: ------------------------ WE HAVE YOUR BACK A Message from Supporters of Community Governance For every generation of Antiochians there comes a defining moment – a moment to stand up for our shared values and to use our strength in the service of our vision. This time is now. We want the Antioch College Community to know that we, who have engaged in Community Governance, have your back at this critical time. We acknowledge the difficulty of doing so while not being there with you, but wish to make our intentions clear. As the campus Antioch Community, you are showing the world the value of an Antioch education. You are taking action to enable people you may never know, people you may never meet, to access an Antioch education and go on to win victories for humanity. One alum, Edith Bagley, sister to the late Coretta Scott King said that “Antioch has to live. It gives hope to the world.” You give others such hope with your presence, your thoughts and your actions. You are taking a risk. And we are here to offer assistance. The risk is worth it because Antioch is worth saving. Today’s Antioch education in classroom, co-op, and community is as valuable and true to the Antiochian ideals of egalitarianism and community responsibility as any since 1852. The undersigned of this letter are educators, organizers, artists and activists who are leaders in our chosen professions and communities. We have fought for social justice wherever we have gone and now we are fighting for justice for the students, faculty and staff of Antioch College. We ask you to not give in. We ask you to not give up and we ask you continue to fight. We ask the same of ourselves. DECLARATIONS What We Want, What We Believe The Students are the Reason for The School We are committed to do everything in our power to maintain an environment at Antioch College that makes it possible for current students to stay enrolled with confidence, and for new students to enroll. The students must be recognized and respected throughout the process of revitalizing the College. No Tenure, No Peace Retaining the faculty is necessary to support a vibrant academic community and to provide the course offerings that current students need to graduate. Faculty retention is essential to student retention. We oppose all faculty cuts, and we oppose any imposition of curricular changes on the faculty. The college must trust the faculty to determine the curriculum, and must rebuild an atmosphere in which the faculty are appropriately respected and valued. This is necessary to retain current faculty, and to attract new faculty as the college grows. Stop Firing, Start Hiring We oppose further cuts to staff and student services and any attempts to undermine the unions. Antioch College cannot shrink further without sacrificing the basic functions of the campus and leaving students without the support that they need to thrive. The college must focus on revenue growth rather than expense reduction, and where cuts are absolutely needed, non-human resources should be considered more expendable than human beings. Exigency is Academic Martial Law We call for an immediate explanation of the specific conditions under which financial exigency will be lifted and the threat of suspended operations will cease to be held over Antioch College. We call for a justification for maintaining financial exigency, besides the apparent function of allowing the university to violate tenure and other contractual obligations. If such justification cannot be satisfactorily provided, we call for an immediate lifting of the state of financial exigency. Tear Down the Obstacles to Recruitment The admissions department must be promptly restaffed and ready to begin an aggressive outreach and recruitment program for new, returning and transfer students, as soon as permitted by governing bodies. We know that there are thousands of students for whom Antioch College is the right place. We need to capitalize on the momentum and publicity of the College Revival and help at least several hundred students find their way to an Antioch education in the coming year, and years to come. Support Shared Governance We call for a participatory decision-making process in the college’s tradition of community self-governance, in which decisions are not imposed from above, but are made through open public discussion, actively seeking the meaningful input from everyone affected who wishes participate. This will strengthen the community and renew the college’s reputation. We are committed to advocating these positions to the Antioch University and College administrations, to the Antioch University Board of Trustees, and within the Alumni Association. We are committed to fighting for these positions as an independent collective dedicated to a vibrant, humane, self-governing and self-sustaining Antioch College. In Solidarity Matt Baya ‘92 Beth Gutelius ‘00 Megan Rosado ‘97 Tim Eubanks ‘00 Chad Johnston ‘00 Michael Casselli ‘87 Nick Szuberla ‘95 Jennie Knaggs ‘01 Shelby Chestnut ‘05 J. Greg Williams ‘95 Judy Wolert-Maldonado ‘05 Brandy Ellis ‘02 Dawn Scribner ‘83 Amina Warfield ‘94 Dan Shoemaker ‘92 Tim Noble ‘02 Ed M. Koziarski ‘97 Shannon McCarville ‘02 Rowan Kaiser ‘05 Caitlin Finn Daoust ‘04 Karen Kotiw ‘98 Ed Trippel ‘92

Antioch University CEO Dr. Toni Murdock & Antioch College Interim Pres. Andrej Bloch Re: Lifting Financial Exigency Benchmark

David Allen — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:24:13 -0600

Hi from Yazz (David) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! The AU CEO and the Antioch College Interim President jointly issued the following statement today regarding the tenure of Antioch College faculty and the lifting of the "Financial Exigency" status of Antioch College (which is a declaration of financial emergency which has justified extreme measures including the plan stated last June 2007 to close down Antioch College in July 2008....now tentatively lifted pending receipt of money from Alumni....and also removal of tenure obligations to tenured faculty at Antioch College) The statement informs the "Antioch Community" that the meeting between Murdock and Bloch, and the Antioch Faculty and Alumni Board reps was "facilitated by Jay Rothman of the Aria Group." Who is Jay Rothman, and what is the "Aria Group?": -------------- Subject: Letter to the Community from Toni and Andrzej To: Faculty List College Staff Announcements Cc: Leslie Bates November 15, 2007 Dear Antioch College Community, We spent the day today meeting with Hassan Nejad, Pat Mische, Steve Schwerner, Nancy Crow, and Al Denman to address the concerns we’re hearing on campus. The meeting was facilitated by Jay Rothman of the Aria Group. The goal of today’s meeting was to reach an understanding on how the planning for this next year can go forward in a cooperative process. As a result of today's meeting, there is greater clarity around the issues and how they can be addressed. Our goal is to retain as many faculty as possible. Also, in accordancewith the faculty personnel policies, those faculty who continue throughthe period of financial exigency would return to their tenure positions assoon as the state of financial exigency is lifted. We expect that the College Advisory Body will be appointed in early December. We will be working with this advisory body and the Board of Trustees to determine benchmarks and criteria for lifting the state of financial exigency. We are pleased that the AdCil process has already begun the work of defining academic needs, budget needs, and student services for the next academic year, and that this process includes faculty, students, and staff. We will continue to act expeditiously in our work with the OBR and the NCA to ensure the College’s ability to continue granting degrees. We will need the assistance of the faculty and it is critical that they beincluded in these efforts. Beginning immediately, we are making all efforts to improve communication and share information with you. Sincerely, Toni Murdock, Chancellor and Andrzej Bloch, Interim President

San Francisco CA USA Antioch College Alumni Chapter Sends Detailed Protest Message to Antioch U. Board Of Trustees 11/12/07

David Allen — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:47:18 -0600

Hi from Yazz (David) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! Here's a copy of a public protest message sent by San Francisco CA USA Antioch College Alumni Chapter head Barrie Grenell '65 to the Antioch University Board Of Trustees expressing grave dissatisfaction with the present (11/12/07) state of affairs at Antioch College. She cites the continuation of the Financial Exigency status "declaration" which justified the firing of Antioch College tenured faculty, and keeps them from being re-hired. She cites the failure of the acting Antioch College President and the CEO of Antioch University, Dr. Toni Murdock, to work toward recruiting new students for the entering class of 2008, either Freshman students or tranfer students, and the problems the school faces retaining the small population of students presently (11/07) enrolled as full time students at Antioch College. Here is the text of the communication, FYI: ---------------------- From: (Ms.) Barrie Grenell '65 Subject: San Francisco Bay Area Alumni Fundraising for Antioch Since June, the alumni of Antioch College raised $18 million in gifts and pledges IN OUR SPARE TIME! This was no mean feat, and many of us are exhausted. At first we were happy to hear that the Trustees had voted to rescind the vote to close the college, but I don't know if you are aware of how your vote is being rolled out on the ground. It's a disaster! I and others spent weeks calling alumni from our list of 2731 Bay Area Antioch College Alumni, and with rare exception, they all cared deeply aboutthe college, it had meant a great deal to them in their lives, and they were happy to reconnect with the extended family of Antiochians. The other day one alum who had pledged one million dollars called me to seeif they should go forward. It seems that the first order of business is to use the money to pay back the University for loans the University made to the college operations. I think this is not what you ordered or what anyone else thought to be the first priority. They are also upset that the financial exigency is still in place and that you are not recruiting students. I don't know what this person will do; they may be gathering with other major donors to withhold their gifts until some improvements are made; I hope this is the case. Andrzej's talk at the announcement stressed the three R's: Recruitment, Resources and Retention. Now I hear that the students are fed up and will leave; you are not allowing recruitment of new freshmen and not putting resources into recruiting transfer students; you are doing nothing to retain current students with the cutbacks in faculty and facilities. Your folks on the ground - Andrzej and Toni - are running the college into the ground!They are using OUR money to do what they intended all along, yet I have NEVER seen their plan for this so-called 21st Century Educational Institution. These people do not belong at Antioch! They do not understand Antioch! What are you going to do when the students and faculty are gone and the alumni won't give money any more? Please, I urge you, STOP this madness. Stop your adulation of Toni Murdock, she is clearly the Jack Kevorkian of higher education. Don't let this wonderful extended family go by the wayside. Many of us ignored the College all these years because it became the University and spread its seed everywhere while the parent tree was abandoned, and the governing structure, the huge bureaucracy that grew up around the Universityand its Chancellor had a life of its own-something we could not connect with. As soon as we thought we had a chance to save and revive the College we knew, we jumped it. DON'T YOU SEE THIS? WE HAD A GLIMPSE OF THE COLLEGE WE KNEW AND LOVED AND THOUGHT WORTH SAVING, NOT THE HODGE PODGE THAT WAYLAYERED ON TOP OF IT AND SMOTHERED IT. In spite of all this, the faculty continued to hold their high standards and teach students in ways that were meaningful for the students in their lives.The recent graduates, of the last 15 years, are wonderful. They are smart, engaged, doing good in the world, and they are fun; this recent organizing has helped us cross generational lines to recognize each other as Antiochians. Three weeks ago, I went to Los Angeles to meet with Paula Treichler and Robin Lithgow to talk about a huge fundraisier, perhaps in LA, NYC and YSO, for "Theater at Antioch-Past, Present and Future." I got this idea after hearing about then watching a DVD of movie stars giving thanks to Roy London(an alum) for all that he had done to help their careers- Sharon Stone, Gary Shandling, Patrick Swayze, Calista Hendrickson (Miss Piggy's designer and analum), Patricia Arquette, Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis. I have a list- surely incomplete- of 100 (!) Antioch alumni who are doing well in theatre (most in theatre, some are authors or doing well in related arts, or arts financing). I have talked or emailed several of them and they are excited about doing something significant for theatre at Antioch. I CAN GUARANTEE YOU THAT THEY WILL HAVE ZERO INTEREST IF YOU CONTINUE TO LET TONI AND ANDRZEJ DO THEIR DAMAGE. CALL TONI AND ANDRZEJ OFF, NOW! Two days ago I met with three alumni and got more names of very wealthy people to ask for money for the College or the Antioch Theatre Department. Yesterday, I gathered all the names on the various notes I have made over the weeks into an organized spread sheet; I Googled several to see what I could find out about them; I contacted Matthew Derr and Ina Frank about acouple. DON'T YOU SEE WHAT YOU ARE JEOPARDIZING? DON'T YOU CARE? This is not what we understood the agreement to be. Please get rid of thosevery UN-Antiochian folks you have working for you. And the faculty! These are the folks who have done the heavy lifting throughthe various nutty administrations, who have given consistency to an Antioch education, who have been taken for granted and abused. LIFT THE FINANCIAL EXEGENCY AND STOP THREATENING FACULTY WITH LOSING THEIR JOBS OR ENCOURAGING THEM TO GO ELSEWHERE. INSTEAD LET TONI AND ANDRZEJ GO ELSEWHERE. I can't begin to tell you how wonderful it has been to reconnect with Antioch College alumni. I do not think the San Francisco Bay Area Antioch College Alumni Chapter can sustain ourselves if Antioch College dies, or even if it becomes some commercial enterprise of Toni Murdock's dreams. HER DREAM IS OUR NIGHTMARE. STOP HER NOW!! I feel at such a loss about what I can do. I thought writing to you all might help. I hope it does. Sincerely, Barrie Grenell '65 (San Francisco CA USA Antioch College Alumni Chapter member)

Antioch College To Remain Open......Maybe! Trustees Refuse Change "Financial Exigency" Label, Demand More Millions By Dec. 07!

David Allen — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:12:41 -0500

Nov. 3, 07 Hi From Yazz (David) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! The Antioch College closedown crisis set into motion last June by the Antioch University Board Of Trustees is not over. The Trustees demand $6.6 Million additional (more than already raised) by Dec. 15, 07....about six weeks from now (Nov. 3, 07). About $18 Million has already been raised. That means they (Trustees) want about $1 Million per week for the next 6 weeks. The crisis continues. Here is the text of a public announcement issued today by the Antioch Trustees and Antioch Alumni Board, posted on the WWW.Antiochians.Org site: YELLOW SPRINGS, OH – The Antioch Board of Trustees – in historic collaboration with the Alumni Board – passed a resolution today to lift the suspension of operations of Antioch College scheduled for June 30, 2008. This decision which follows intensive discussions between Trustees and members of the Alumni Board, enables the College to continue offering academic credits and degrees to current students, subject to approval by accrediting bodies. At the same time, the declaration of financial exigency will remain in effect given the serious financial challenges facing the College. “The decision of the Trustees is only possible because of the substantial changes that have occurred since the June ’07 Trustees’ meeting”, said Board Chair Art Zucker. “These new developments,” Zucker continued, “included recognition by the Alumni Board of the need for financial exigency declared by the Trustees in June ’07. Other developments included: the open and cooperative relationship that developed between the Trustees and the Alumni Board; the resurgence of Alumni support; and the alumni’s ability to raise more than $18 million in cash and pledges in just a few short months. The alumni’s success in fund-raising is a fantastic and unprecedented accomplishment – particularly because it includes a large number of first-time donors.” Nancy Crow, president of the Alumni Association, called the fund-raising effort “a magnificent start. This effort to raise a significant amount of money will preserve the very special and unique aspect of Antioch College. We are overwhelmed with the outpouring of support from the Antioch College community, but we have much, much work ahead. With everyone working together, we will be successful.” Continued operations of Antioch College will require the closing of some facilities, a reduction of faculty and staff, and the curtailment of some student services that are currently offered to give the College the necessary time to address the facilities and curriculum. Furthermore, the Trustees action is dependent on the Alumni Board meeting these specific financial benchmarks: Raising and transferring to the College the following: 10 days from the date of this agreement: at least $2 million No later than December 15, 2007: at least $4.6 million For a total of $6.6 million by December 15, 2007. In addition and, with the support and full cooperation of the Antioch University Board of Trustees, to raise $12 million by May 31, 2008; $26 million by June 30, 2009; and, $19 million by June 30, 2010, for the support of Antioch College. The Board of Trustees passed two additional resolutions: one, expressing overwhelming support of Toni Murdock in her leadership as Chancellor and two, appointing Andrzej Bloch, current COO and Chief Academic Officer, to the position of Interim President for Antioch College. During the joint deliberations, the following agreements and understandings between Trustees and the Alumni Board were reached: The College will remain a residential liberal arts college committed to the principles of academic freedom and tenure;The rationale for the declaration of financial exigency was sound; There must be continued Alumni support—it is critical for the survival of Antioch College long term; The College will continue, and it will be rooted in its historic core values and mission; Accreditation is crucial to the future of the institution; nothing will be done to threaten Antioch University’s accreditation, or create an event of default in any existing bond, lease or other legal obligations of the University. The financial model must be sustainable; There must be a vibrant Antioch University, with fully explored opportunities for inter-campus collaboration and programs; The state of financial exigency will remain in place. Trustees and the Alumni Board agreed on a series of action steps to move forward collaboratively, including: 1) A commitment to further develop the plans for a separate Board of Trustees for the College, which was recommended by the Trustees’ Governance Committee and during the interim to put into place a College Advisory Body. Members of this advisory body will be appointed jointly by the President of the Alumni Association and the Chair of the University Board of Trustees. 2) The Alumni Board and the Antioch University Board of Trustees will continue to raise funds to meet the benchmarks, thus ensuring that the College can continue to remain open. 3) The Board of Trustees authorized the Chancellor, in consultation with the Office of the President and other appropriate stakeholders including the President of the College Alumni Board, to establish a team to design the planning process for ensuring Antioch College’s future as a distinguished institution of higher education rooted in the College’s historic educational mission and values. 4) The Trustees also authorized the Chancellor to initiate a building assessment study and recommend appropriate actions for building refurbishment– with the intent that said construction be “green,” environmentally friendly. 5) A long term effort will be developed to ensure academic excellence, the hallmark of the College. Chairman Zucker noted that the newfound, unprecedented collaboration among members of Trustees and the Alumni Board is “essential to the future of Antioch. I am most pleased at the transparency and openness developed over the last few weeks and months.” Following the June vote by Trustees to declare financial exigency, the Board worked with the Alumni Board to conduct a Town Hall meeting in Cincinnati so all interested Antiochians could voice their thoughts on the suspension of operation which laid the foundation for working together. Early in October a few Trustees and members of the administration met with a subset of the Alumni Board to review progress on their business plan and share essential financial and academic benchmarks. “An enormous amount of work remains to be done,” said Alumni Board President Crow, “but we are energized and ready to rise to this challenge. Our goal is nothing less than the regeneration of Antioch College as a leader and innovator in liberal arts education. Antioch’s unique blend of academic excellence, real-world experience, and shared governance will continue to produce engaged global citizens trained to lead in the 21st century, just as it has for the past 155 years.”

The Antioch University - University Of Phoenix No-Qual Non-Residential Adult School Connection: What May Be Ahead!

David Allen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:27:20 -0500

Hi from Yazz Allen ' 66 (contact YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! If the Antioch College, Ohio residential undergrad program is closed down (as Antioch University Trustees announced in June 2007 would happen by July 2008), a group of adult ed non-residential schools bearing the name "Antioch University" will remain...and these schools may well increasingly provide "University Of Phoenix" type education, even though the "Antioch" name remains. Here's information about the Unversity Of Phoenix, and why persons interested in Antioch College, Ohio, past and present, should consider the connection between the two educational "institutions." What follows is information from the "Univeristy Of Phoenix" Wikipedia profile article, and also from an independent website critical of the University of Phoenix called WWW.UOPSucks.Com . The death of residential colleges, of which Antioch College, Ohio undergrad residential institution may or may not be the next victim is connected to the oncoming of go-getter "get educated fast and without pain" type places like..."The University of Phoenix." People who ask "what happened to Antioch?....why would anyone want to assassinate it....especially it's own Board Of Trustees?" need to know about the new guys on the block in higher ed., and the biz part of it....big money, slick promises, no integrity (just like big business in Capitalist Amerika, with standards and ideals carried forward by millionaire Trustees on the Antioch U. BOT and their non-millionaire friends also on the BOT who agree that "money talks!") Sooo........ as a sort of information feature, I provide some details about the University of Phoenix, the "Harvard of No-Qual Adult Ed. Schools" which what remains of "Antioch U." will certanly emulate and aspire to if and when pesky, naughty, and irritating Antioch College, Ohio's residential program with tenured faculty is dispatched. The U. of Phoenix was started by a go-getter Ph.D. from California in the 1970's, and now has a 2.3 Billion Dollar Year operating budget and 190 "campuses" in the USA (and elsewhere?). From the Wikipedia re: U. of Phoenix: University of Phoenix University of Phoenix Motto "Thinking Ahead" Established 1976 Type Private, For-profit President Bill Pepicello Faculty 20,000+ Staff 12,000+ Undergraduates 220,000+ Postgraduates 60,000+ HQ Location Phoenix, Arizona, USA Campus Urban Locations 190+ campuses Website phoenix.edu University of Phoenix (UOP) is a for-profit educational institution specializing in adult education, with campuses located throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. UOP was founded in 1976 by Dr. John Sperling and is now owned by Apollo Group, Inc.. The University of Phoenix is the United States' largest private, accredited university with programs on campus, online and through flexnet programs. Contents 1 History 3 Modalities 4 Accreditation 5 Criticism 6 Controversies 6.1 Faculty 6.2 Lack of AACSB accreditation 6.3 Graduation and retention 6.4 Federal investigations and lawsuits 7 References History: In the early 1970s, at San Jose State University in California, John Sperling and several associates conducted field-based research in adult education. The focus of the research was to explore teaching/learning systems for the delivery of educational programs and services to working adult students who wished to complete or further their education in ways that complemented both their experience and current professional responsibilities. At that time colleges and universities were organized primarily around serving the needs of the 18-22 year old undergraduate student given that the large majority of those enrolled were residential students of traditional college age, just out of high school. According to Sperling, working adult students were often "invisible" on traditional campuses and treated as second-class citizens.[1] It should be noted, however, that many public urban universities with universally accredited degree programs specifically address the needs of non-traditional students.[need citation] University of Phoenix is the nation's largest private university, with 250,000 students, most of them working adults. Its parent company had $2.3 billion in revenue last year, ranking it among Arizona's largest companies. -------------------------------- From: WWW.UOPSucks.Com : (which opposes the University Of Phoenix and levels harsh criticism at the institution): (Everything which follows to the end of this article is from this website) THE FOLLOWING IS FROM THE U. OF PHOENIX INFO/ WATCHDOG WEBSITE TITLED WWW.UOPSUCKS.COM (this site debunks the idea the the U. of Phoenix is a good place....urges people to question it!): "You go to UOP for a degree, NOT an education!" -UOP Enrollment Counselor "Choosing a college or university is an incredibly important decision because it involves making a commitment of large amounts of time and money. If you are considering the University of Phoenix, please be sure to review this entire site before making your decision. Read and experience actual student and employee's accounts about things the University does not want you to know. Be sure to read and check out the USER FORUM. This is the most important feature of the site because it is composed of input and stories by students and faculty like you! --------------------------------- NEW 4-21-06! There are several Discrimination Class Actions pending against UoP and other Apollo Group subsidiaries. This includes lawsuits for discrimination based on race, religion, gender and ethnicity. To be added to the class, please contact Josh Rose (202) 331-8556 or josh@roselawyers.com. There is also a an Overtime Class Action Lawsuit for Academic Counselors. All salaried Academic Counselors are eligible for this suit. Please contact Josh Rose (202) 331-8556 or josh@roselawyers.com. You may also contact the following researchers for more information about other lawsuits pending against University of Phoenix and Apollo Group: Mike Starr (202) 232-4311, mstarr@corpinfoserve.com or Oliver Pritchard (917) 592-6983-->NEW 12-25-06! The Apollo Fraud and Ethics Violation Hotline is now available! Check our news page. --> NEW 10-18-07! UOPSucks.com exposes ANOTHER unqualified facilitator! Click Here! NEW 10-12-07! New blog entry about the "You Get Out Of It What You Put Into It Fallacy! Click Here! NEW 9-30-07! UOP Proves How Cold Hearted They Can Be! Think UOP Will Have Any Sympathy For You If Something Bad Happens? Click Here! NEW 8-30-07! EEOC Settles Claim with University of Phoenix! Click Here! NEW 6-14-07! New Employee Forum! Visitors may post in either forum; however, the new employee forum is specifically aimed toward employee complaints and communication amongst employees.Click Here! NEW 4-1-07! New page for shocking emails from UOP! NEW 2-24-07! UOP issued an internal response to its employees for them to discuss the NY Times article with students and prospects. We cut through the propaganda and put things into proper perspective. Click Here! NEW 2-14-07! CALL TO ACTION! UOP has started a letter writing campaign to refute the charges in the NY Times article. Here's what you can do to help oppose this action! NEW 2-11-07! Sam Dillon of the The New York Times has written a great article which does a fantastic job of summarizing many of UOP's educational quality problems. NEW 2-11-07! New Forum Quotes page featuring some of the most interesting and revealing commentary about UOP from the user forum! NEW 1-16-07! New FAQ page and website graphics! NEW 12-4-06! Arizona Republic Reports Intel Drops UOP from Tuition Program! Check our news page. NEW 12-3-06! UOP Internal Memos! Intel drops UOP from tuition reimbursement program! State of Tennessee restricts UOP Nursing program! Check our internal memos page. NEW 11-6-06! Apollo Group Lawsuit alleging securities fraud announced! Check our news page. NEW 9-28-06! New UOP Lawsuit alleging discrimination announced! Check our news page. NEW 9-27-06! New website BLOG! Those who run this website have created a blog with important bits of information, news, and commentary. Be sure to check it out! NEW 9-5-06! The AP reports that the UOP lawsuit regarding defrauding the US Government of hundreds of millions of dollars is revived! Check our news page. NEW 1-26-06! Something happened to the previous User Forum so we had to start over. Sorry guys! Please check it out and post your comments and experiences! NEW 9-14-04! The Arizona Republic reports that UOP agrees to pay $9.8M to settle charges of illegal and unlawful recruiting tactics! Check our news page. NEW 6-18-04! The Arizona Republic reports that UOP settles a lawsuit for $2M to employees who were not being paid for their overtime! Check our news page. --> --------------------------------- The major complaints with the University of Phoenix are as follows: Lack of Professional Accreditation for Most Degrees "Boiler Room" Recruiting Practices Use of Spam to Recruit Misrepresentations and False Guarantees by Recruiters, Counselors, and Financial Aid Poor Customer Service Poor Quality of Instruction Poor Technology Infrastructure Poor Quality of Classmates Financial Aid Carelessness General Lack of Respect for the Customer (Student) Education Does Not Meet Federal Guidelines Abysmal Graduation Rates Accreditation: When you ask UOP if they are accredited they will respond that they are regionally accredited. UOP relies on the fact that most people do not understand accreditation or how it works. University of Phoenix has regional accreditation but they do not have top rated professional accreditation for many of their majors... in particular the ever popular MBA. When looking for an MBA program, make sure it is accredited by the AACSB. Check to see if your school is accredited by the AACSB at http://www.aacsb.edu/General/InstLists.asp?lid=2. For more info refer to http://www.onlineuc.net/warning.html . Recruiting Practices: Working at the UOP recruiting center is like the movie Boiler Room. Recruiters have high goals and are rewarded by how many students they enroll. As such, they use high pressure sales tactics and do anything to get you to enroll. As such, turnover is very high at UOP. Check out how they operate. Spam: If you've had an email address for the past few years, chances are University of Phoenix has spammed you. Do you really want to patronize any company that uses spam to advertise? How legitimate is a university that uses spam to advertise? Misrepresentations and False Guarantees: Recruiters and Counselors have been known to make false promises and guarantees to get you to enroll and stay enrolled and they may hide or downplay consequences. They may represent that credits will transfer into UOP, transfer from UOP to another school, that you can start and stop the program at any time, etc. Be careful! Many students have been burned by false representations about financial aid and end up with ruined credit. Poor Customer Service: Because of the high turnover rates and because of how poorly University of Phoenix treats its employees, it is hard to find someone competent to resolve your problems if you have one. Often, the employees are overworked and unable to give you the time needed to help you properly. Failure to return phone calls, inability to reach supervisors and higher level managers, and the incompetence or powerlessness of the lower level staff will frustrate you to no end. Poor Quality of Instruction: While there are a few great instructors at University of Phoenix, most are mediocre business people who have no business in a classroom and are there simply to supplement their income. Most will give you an A or B for showing up and turning in all the work. Few instructors care enough to read submitted work carefully for proper grading. Those that do take the time to grade carefully care more about whether or not the formatting and appearance of your report meets guidelines rather than the quality of the content. When you're paying over $1000 per class, you should expect an education worthy of the price you're paying! Poor Technology Infrastructure: UOP has been in the online education business for several years now. For all of the money that you're paying, you would expect UOP to have adequate bandwidth and server resources to handle the loads, but they never seem to have enough. You're paying thousands of dollars per class - can't they at least get enough servers and bandwidth? Poor Quality of Classmates: With UOP's learning model, at least half of your instruction comes from interaction with your peers. The biggest problem with this concept is that there is no screening of who your peers are (i.e., no admissions test) and your peers don't know much more than you do (that's why you're all taking the class to begin with). A great deal of your course work is group work, and getting stuck with a bunch of idiots will ruin your educational experience. Additionally, chances are great that potential employers have hired other graduates from UOP that have been less than desirable, and that bad experience has now diminished the reputation of the UOP degree for that employer. Financial Aid Carelessness: We get a TON of email from people whose financial lives have been ruined by the misrepresentations of the financial aid and counselors at UOP. When you owe UOP money, it is impossible to get things straightened out because you can never get the right person on the phone. If you plan on using financial aid, make sure that you are approved and everything is setup and confirmed BEFORE you start classes. Make sure you get all representations in writing. Realize that if you stop classes or change classes your financial aid is likely to get cancelled or screwed up and YOU will end up paying the bill. UOP is relentless in debt collections, and they do not like to straighten things out even if they are to blame. General Lack of Respect for the Customer: Once University of Phoenix has you enrolled, they could care less about keeping you happy. They DO NOT guarantee customer satisfaction. In some cases they will allow you to re-take classes for free, but who would ever want to spend the time to do that? UOP's financial aid department does not return phone calls and counselors and help become hard to get a hold of once you have a problem. Education Does Not Meet Federal Guidelines: In order for schools to qualify for financial aid, degree programs must meet certain requirements, one of which is a minimum number of hours of class time. UOP meets these requirements by requiring half of the total required time to consist of independent group study. While there may be a few legitimate study groups out there, most students can vouch for the fact that they rarely meet outside of class for the required time. Group study records, if any are necessary, are often falsified. The educational value of group study time is also highly questionable. This applies even moreso if your study group is comprised of incompetents. Abysmal Graduation Rates: UOP's graduation rates are terrible! As low as 2% for the West Florida campus, and averaging only 16%! You can research them here. A University with graduation rates this low definitely has a problem!

Independent Regional "Antiochiana Alumni Interest" Groups Should Be Formed As The Coming Antioch Alumni Diaspora Approaches!

David Allen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:21:17 -0500

October 17, 2007 -- Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania USA Hello from Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66! (Email me at YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com) Here's help for those who desire to form Antioch College "Antiochiana nostalgia/ alumni mutual support" groups which will last beyond the current (October 2007) Antioch College closedown threat crisis. I have the current 2007 Antioch College Alumni Directory CD ROM version (of the directory), and can provide regional lists of Antioch alumni particularized down to USA state and city (town) areas. This can be used for those who desire to gather nearby Antiochians for alumni meeting/ nostalgia/ mutual support groups. Antioch may or may not be going down for the third time thanks to the dreadful Trustees now in power. I'm not hopeful. What will be left for Antioch alumni is a sort of "diaspora" population numbering more than 14,000 living Antioch alumni worldwide, all listed in the recently published 2007 Alumni Directory. I got a print copy of this, and also the CD Rom version, which allows print outs of alumni in particular geographical areas, with contact information for alumni, most with email addresses. The CD Rom print out capability which is localized is a good basis for organizing regional and local Antioch "Antiochiana nostalgia" groups which could engage in remembrance of Antioch (even if it's shut down), and also in mutual support by Antioch alumni. This is just a thought, but I could print out, for intance, a list of all alumni residing in Massachusetts, and/or particular cities/towns in Massachusetts, which could be a basis for organizing an alumni group in that area (for non-Boston area Antiochians). If you have thoughts of setting up a more permanent Antioch alumni group in your area than just one intended to help with the current crisis, let me know. I may be able to send you lists of area Antiochians near you to invite for future alumni group meets/ parties (ALL "meets" should be "parties" will planned and jolly to be part of.....alumni events need desperately to be attractive socially...fun and friendly and interesting...the sort of meetings people will likely want to repeat). The Trustees and their friends part of the "official" Antioch alumni assn. leadership may or may not close down Antioch due to their perfidy, hidden agendas, neglect, and plain naivete. But 14,000 Antioch alumni still survive around the world many of whom should stay in touch, keep supporting each other, and should keep alive the memories and ideals of Antioch College at its best. Regional alumni groups NOT connected to the "official Antioch" College should be set up. Of course contact with "official Antioch" should always be an option, but one justifiably disillusioned Antiochians can take or leave, as they choose. Independent regional Antioch College alumni interest groups should NOT be regarded or in fact be an outreach of "official Antioch," now headed by the likes of AU Chairman Arthur Zucker, and AU CEO Toni Murdock, two names which shall always live in infamy when the complete story of Antioch College is told by intelligent people, regardless of how the present closedown crisis comes out. As things stand, both will STILL be in control of Antioch College, even if the school remains open, contrary to the original plans and dreams of these two doubtful individuals. Let me know if you need help. I'll try to use my CD ROM alumni directory to get lists of nearby Antiochians (to you) who can invited to join you is setting up a "post-2007 Antioch Closedown Crisis" alumni group near you. Contact me (Yazz Allen '66) at YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com. Best wishes always, Yazz Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)

Founding Fathers Of Antioch College: A Short History Of "Judge" William Mills (1814 - 1879)...Yellow Springs Go-Getter!

David Allen — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:00:14 -0500

Here's a history I wrote about Judge William Mills (1814-1879) and it mentions the Antioch School, which got its start using Mills' brick house (torn down in the 1960's) located behind the present (2007) Mills Lawn Elementary School, FYI. Antioch College came to be located in Yellow Springs, Ohio because of "Judge" (an honorary title) William Mills (1814 Connecticut - 1879 Yellow Springs, Ohio) after whom both "Mills Lawn" and the "Mills Hall" dormatory at Antioch College are named. Mills was the man responsible for convincing the Christian Connextion sponsors of Antioch College to locate the school in Yellow Springs, Ohio rather than in one of 7 other competing town locations in southwestern Ohio (the other seven possible locations not chosen in the end included Conneaut, Mt. Vernon, Lenanon, New Carlisle, eaton, Milton, and Union OHIO). He was 38 years old in 1852 when Antioch College was located in Yellow Spring, Ohio, was a signer of the Articles Of Incorporation for Antioch College on May 14, 1852, was elected a member of the first Board Of Trustees on Sept. 4, 1854, became Treasurer that same year, and in 1856 became president of the executive committee of the trustees. He served on the Antioch College Board Of Trustees until 1859. He came to be known as "Judge" Mills through being retianed by county judges to settle ordinary non-legal, local cases. 1826 seems to be the "founding year" in which "Yellow Springs, Ohio" was settled, first as a summer resort, then later as a permanent settlement. William Mills' father was Elisha Mills, a Huntington, Connecticut lawyer who opened the only summer resort in Ohio in what came to be the village of Yellow Springs. His resort was called The Watering Place and included a Mansion House which had a 200 foot long porch, six cottages, a billiard house, two bowling alleys and a stable for riding horses....all built for $7,000 (which went a long way in 1826). Three stages from Cincinnati OH arrived in Yellow Springs, OH daily. Mail from Baltimore MD USA and Washington DC USA arrived in 5 days, from Philadelphia in 6 days, and from NYC NY USA in seven days. William Mills was 12 years old in 1826. He later attended Kenyon College OH after preparing with a private tutor in Springfield OH with whom he studied Greek (a requirement for Kenyon College entrance then), and Miami University of Ohio after that. In the late 1830's, Elisha Mills gave his son, William, 600 acres of land in Yellow Springs, Ohio and in 1840, the newly married Mills built the first brick house in the village, called "Mills House" by locals. In 1921, Antioch College acquired the property and "Mills House" building, which for many years thereafter (until 1951) housed the Antioch (private elementary) School. In 1951, the large lot which contained Mills House was presented to the Yellow Springs School Board and the Mills Lawn (public elementary) School was built on the front part of the lot. The "Mills House" building was used for additional classroom space and administrative offices. "Judge" William Mills (1814 - 1879) left Ohio for US Army service during the Civil War of 1861-65, relocated in Tennessee during his Army service, then to Kansas and after that to Chicago, IL where he engaged in real estate business activity. He returned to live in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1876 and lived there until his death in 1879 at age 65. He delivered an account of the history of Antioch College at Xenia, Ohio, county seat of Greene County, Ohio during his Centential Historical Address For Greene County (commemorating the 1776 founding of the USA). He stated that then young Antioch College, Ohio, was known worldwide already in 1876, "thoughout our own land, and also on the continent of Europe, in all the famous seats of learning and schools of art, from the Louvre to the Vatican, from Leipsig to Berlin.......famous because statesmen and scholars went forth from her halls, and because because one of America's greatest advocates of human rights and all practical reforms, Horace Mann, lived and died there." More details about the life of Judge William Mills (1814 - 1879) are available from a book titled HORACE MANN AND OTHERS (1963 Antioch Press) by Antioch alumnus Robert L. Straker (1899-1959) which includes a great forward by Dr. Louis Filler, Emeritus Professor Of History at Antioch College, and also a Louie Filler writter Afterward Chapter titled Antiochana At The Olive Kettering Library, which is "must read" for all who care for Antiochiana, and the documents and memorabilia part of Antioch College history

Performance Art ANTIOCHIANA: Folk Dancing At Antioch College, Ohio from the 1950's to the 1970's..A Brief History!

David Allen — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:12:24 -0500

Hi From Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! Here's Antiochiana information about folk dancing which was widely popular at Antioch College, Ohio 40 years ago! Antiochiana includes memorabilia about folk dancing in past decades at Antioch College, Ohio, popular from the 1950's through the 1970's (Antioch's so-called "Golden Age"). Oddly, very little information about folk dancing at Antioch College, Ohio, is available or part of the formal Antiochiana Collection presently located in the Kettering Library at Antioch in YSO. Friday night folk dances in the ’60s at Antioch were by far the most popular single weekly social event on Antioch campus. People disagreed about a lot, but almost everyone liked folk dancing, and the weekly Red Square Folk Dances were attended by hundreds: advanced dancers, beginning dancers, and onlookers. We danced around the tree, which grew in the center of Red Square and was outfitted with floodlights and a single loud speaker. Antioch Community Government sponsored the dances and owned the phonograph record collection used, DJ style, to program the evening’s dances. Typically we did 60 different dances, never repeating a single dance. A blackboard equipped with several pieces of chalk was always part of the folk dance set up, and people quickly filled it up with requests. The most popular single dance was The Salty Dog Rag, a partner dance done to music sung by Rod Foley (Pat Boone’s father-in-law), which featured fiddle music and a hokey country melody. Other popular dances included Mayim, an Israeli circle dance traditionally taught in the early 60s to all freshmen during orientation activities, along with Miserlou, a Greek line dance. U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton ’60 mentions Antioch folk dancing in her recent biography, Fire in My Soul (2002). During the ’60s, Antiochians often attended folk dances held by groups in large cities during co-op jobs. New York City, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC, all had several groups each, and co-oping Antiochians were famous in folk dance circles all across the country as unusually skilled folk dancers. They were always welcomed enthusiastically at big city folk dances. Antiochians sometimes taught folk dances popular at Antioch at these off-campus dance locations. People learned to folk dance at Antioch during orientation sessions; during Saturday afternoon, two-hour, folk dance workshops sponsored by Community Government; and during Physical Education classes (these classes were very popular, and difficult to get into). In the course of each Friday night event (held on Red Square in warm weather and in the Gym during cold weather), there were three or four advanced dances performed, including a Russian partner dance called Yablotchka, meaning “Little Apple,” and a German partner dance, astonishing for its intricacy, called Ziller Teller Laendler. On the other end of the spectrum were a half a dozen simple but beautiful dances almost everyone knew, most of them line dances. On warm spring and summer evenings, literally hundreds of students would join in these dances, which formed concentric circles around the Red Square tree and sometimes spilled off the Square due to such large numbers of dancers. Folk dancing was led each quarter by a single person who acted both as Friday Night Dance DJ and as teacher during orientation and during Saturday Folk Dance Workshops. Names of Folk Dance Leaders included Steve Edison ’60, Stan Isaacs ’62, Dave Sommer ’63, Ernie Brody ’64, Mark Post ’66, and Andy O’Hare ’66. I led in 1964-1965. Folk dancing at Antioch is no longer the wildly popular mass phenomenon it was in the ’60s. The Community Government Folk Dance phonograph record collection still exists, and is stored on campus but almost never used. During the 1999 Antioch College reunion I attended, I got access to the Antioch folk dance record collection and I recorded (on audio tape I took home with me) about 60 folk dance songs/dances popular in the early 1960's when I was DanceMaster for Folk Dancing at Antioch College Ohio (1964-65). During the 2007 Antioch Alumni Reunion, which I attended, I folk danced with mostly non-Antioch College students at a dance held in the "South Gym" part of Antioch's Curl Gym (the gym on the lower level, not the "twin" gyms on the upper level. The dance was programmed by one of the still existing folk dance enthusiasts who live in Yellow Springs, and hold monthly folk dances seldom attended by Antioch students. Folk dances at Antioch were wonderful, even magical experiences. No one who ever saw them or joined in will ever forget them. Perhaps, someday, folk dancing will return to Antioch as a weekly event, and resume its popularity of decades past.

Underground Antiochiana! It Deserves YOUR Respect...even if it doesn't seem...er...."respectable!"

David Allen — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:27:10 -0500

Hi from Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! Here's an essay I wrote about "Underground Antiochiana," which means controversial (as opposed to socially acceptable and non-controversial) history about Antioch College, founded in 1852 by Horace Mann in Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA.....America's greatest college in history! Some would disagree about that, but...read on!

UNDERGROUND ANTIOCHIANA Antiochiana includes the adventures and accomplishments of alumni and community members who explored unapproved solutions to social problems, did unusual and controversial things not universally cheered and praised by acceptable society. This "Underground Antiochiana" is interesting, revealing (both about Antioch College and the large society in which it functions, and which Antioch College and its alumni have always served in ways other colleges have not), and deserves attention and recollection when the incredible instances of Antioch College history are recalled and examples of it examined. CAMPUS TRAMP (1960 Nightstand Books) by "Andrew Shaw" is a famous example but not the only one. Lawrence Block '60, now a famous millionaire mystery writer based in New York City (he'll be 70 years old next year) wrote the book CAMPUS TRAMP under the pseudonym "Andrew Shaw" which name belonged to the Hamling/Greenleaf Publishing Company of New York City which specialized in soft-core porn paperback books published in the late 1950's and 1960's (Nightstand Books, Midnight Readers, Bedside Books, etc.). Lawrence Block was the first of several "Andrew Shaws" and accounted by many as the best. According to a biographical profile article (available on the Internet) written by Lynn Munroe titled THE FIRST ANDREW SHAW, Block dropped out of Antioch, went to NYC, hooked up with the Hamling/Greenleaf Publishing Company, and said that he wrote two adult novels a month for three years. Block '60, continued to write using pseudonyms until 1975 when he was in his late 30's (he was born in 1938), and became an established, and widely respected and praised author of mystery books, often winning the coveted "Edgar" Mystery Books award for his successful novels in the years that followed. I met a now retired Library Of Congress lifer during Washington DC Antioch Alumni Chapter meetings in recent years who recalled being friends with Laawrence Block at Antioch College in the late 1950's and keeping then young Block company at the now closed down "68 Cafe" (famous all night eatery and coffee place for truckers which operated in Yellow Springs, Ohio during the 1950's and 60's). My Library Of Congress friend spoke of watching Block pen part of works he (Block) sent on to NYC publishers at the 68 cafe while the two guzzled coffee with tough truckers heading both North and South on Rt. 68 (main road from Cincinnati to Detroit). CAMPUS TRAMP (Nightstand Book #1505 - 1959) was famous among Antioch College undergrads of my years (1962-66) at Antioch, and was once read in its entirety over the school radio station, WYSO-FM, then located on the second floor of the Antioch Union. Community Manager Steve Perry '66 and his then girlfriend Barbara "Bonnie" Beman '68 read the book aloud during late night broadcasts. CAMPUS TRAMP introduces us to Clifton College in Ohio, a thinly veiled Antioch College, which biographer Lynn Munroe reminds us is the alma mater of Lawrence Block '60. The story takes place partly in Schwerner Hall. Munroe states that Block's roommate was named "Schwerner" (a Dean Of Students named "Steve Schwerner" during the Behrenbaum and Guskin years had finished at Antioch College in 1960, but the entire name "Steve Schwerner" isn't provided by Block biographyer Lyn Munroe). Linda Shepherd and Ruth Hardy are "Clifton College" co-eds from the 50's whose adventures and travails are described in the Lawrence Block potboiler. Later "Andrew Shaw" novels of fame following CAMPUS TRAMP included HIGH SCHOOL SEX CLUB, SIN HELLCAT, CROSSROADS OF LUST, LUST CAMPUS, and just plain TRAMP. The terrific cover art of these books (complete with early 60's Rosslyn Carter type hair styles on the lusty heroines of the stories) is available on the Internet, and worth taking a look at. The cover art for CAMPUS TRAMP actually includes sort of a bastardized image of Antioch Hall (aka Main Building) at Antioch College with its familiar brick facade and matching towers, though without the noble proportions of the actual building. A 1950's couple are shown on the lawn in front of the building fully clothed but passionately interacting. The terrain is not at all as flat as the actual front campus.....much hillier with the large college building in the distance behind the amorous couple sort of up on a hill looking down Iin disaproval?) at the Clifton College couple. Unerground Antiochiana is interesting and needs to be given the respect it deserves. CAMPUS TRAMP is famous, and well known to Antioch College history enthusiasts, but perhaps sanitized by the financial and literary success of its author, Lawrence Block '70, who went on to become rich (which washes away so many sins) and to stock public libraries and bookstores across the land (and the world) with mystery books of fame. Less acceptable but still noteworthy accomplishments of Antiochians over the decades and beyond also need to be explored and gathered by Antiochiana enthusiasts. Yesterday's and today's scandal can become tomorrow's clue to some important new direction, and evidence of accomplishment ignored by the past, but praised rightly by the future. Best always, Yazz (David Roger) Allen '66 (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)

Antioch College Alumni Assn. Rick Daily '67 Provides Details About Antioch U. Board Of Trustees Contact w/Alumni Assn.

David Allen — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:02:22 -0500

Hi From Yazz Allen (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! Here is the text of a message released (Sept. 3, 2007) to the Antioch Alumni chatline by Antioch College Alumni Assn. Treasurer, Rick Daily '67 regarding negotiations and planning the Antioch College Alumni Assn. is currently engaged in with the Antioch University Board Of Trustees regarding the efforts of Antioch alumni to keep Antioch College open without interuption beyond July 2008, the date the AU BOT announced on June 12, 2007 that Antioch College would be closed down. Antioch College alumni have protested the closedown decision, and are working to get the Antioch University Board Of Trustees to reverse it. [Slightly modified by Yazz Atlas since this was submitted Sept. 3 2007 and I only got around to posting it today. Sorry about that. ] ---------------------- "by Rick Daily, Treasurer, Antioch College Alumni Board of Directors. Monday, September 3, 2007 "Thursday, September 6, Alumni Board Treasurer Rick Daily will be in Yellow Springs to receive the first “data dump” from the University -- information the Alumni Board needs to prepare a business plan aimed at keeping Antioch College open and developing a more self-directed College governance structure. "This follows an August 27 University Board of Trustees announcement reporting that the Trustees had passed a resolution “to work with the College Alumni Board to allow the Alumni Board to demonstrate, by the October, 2007 Board of Trustees meeting, the financial and academic feasibility of the College Alumni Board’s proposal for the continued operation of the College.” "The announcement was made after the Trustees meeting in Cincinnati August 25-26 during which Daily and Alumni Board member Catherine Jordan presented the Alumni Board proposal. Also at the meeting were Antioch College faculty, former trustees, staff, students, Community Government leaders, and others. All urged the Trustees to enter into talks with the Alumni Board. Aside from agreeing to share information, the Trustees agreed to accept an Alumni Board offer to share the cost of maintaining a College development office. "Friday, University officials locked the doors of the development office to staff and ordered them home early. On Tuesday, September 4, Alumni Board Chair Nancy Crow will discuss with Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdoch and Trustees Chair Art Zucker details of the Alumni-Trustees agreement to share development office expenses. "The Trustees’ August 27 announcement further stated that to assist with the creation of the Alumni Board’s plan, the Trustees resolved to “work closely with the Alumni Board to provide due diligence access to all appropriate data, consistent with state and federal regulations.” The University has cited Ohio laws aimed at protecting trade secrets. "Daily, assisted by attorney and alum Jason Fregeau are currently reviewing a confidentiality agreement under which the University proposes to share information with the Alumni Board. "Daily will be coordinating the development of the Alumni Board business plan and will be making reports on his efforts periodically."

Antioch President Dr. Steven Lawry Quits, Effective Immediately (Aug. 31, 07)! Press Release Issued By Antioch Alumni Assn.

David Allen — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:05:28 -0500

Hi From Yazz Allen (YazzAllen@Yahoo.Com)! The following press release from the Antioch College Alumni Assn. was posted today (Aug. 31, 07) announcing the departure effective immediately of Dr. Steven Lawry, President Of Antioch College for the past 18 months. Dr. Lawry had earlier announced he would depart from his present job as Antioch College President on December 31, 07, but now has announced he will quit immediately. Here is the test of the Antioch College Alumni Assn. press release posted today on the Antioch College Alumni chatline: --------------------- ANTIOCH COLLEGE PRESIDENT STEPS DOWN; WILL CONTINUE TO WORK WITH COLLEGE ALUMNI BOARD AND REVIVAL FUND Contact: Rick Daily, (720) 318-5880 • press@antiochians.org President Steven W. Lawry has stepped down as the President of Antioch College effective immediately. This announcement came from Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock. Lawry will, however, be working with the Antioch College Alumni Board to ensure the uninterrupted academic operation of Antioch College as an institution of higher education with a tenured faculty. “We have appreciated working with Steve, his many good ideas and his efforts in working with us in developing plans for the revitalization of the College,” commented Nancy Crow, President of the Antioch College Alumni Board. “Steve has been a strong advocate for a College with its own Board of Trustees and a clearer relationship to the University.” “We welcome the opportunity to work with Steve. There is a daunting amount of money to raise,” added Rick Daily, Treasurer of the Alumni Board. “We are going to keep Antioch College open and restore it to its proper place of prominence among American colleges.” On July 26, 2007, Lawry had announced to the Antioch community his intention to resign from the presidency effective December 31, 2007. He had made this announcement in light of the decision of the University Board of Trustees to suspend operations at Antioch College as of June 2008. Since the suspension was announced, Antioch College alumni across the country have raised more than $8 million in cash and pledges to maintain continuous operations with a tenured faculty at the 155-year-old Yellow Springs, Ohio institution. The Alumni Board’s plan proposes the establishment of a separate board of trustees to oversee Antioch College. During the weekend of August 25-26, the Alumni Board presented its plan for keeping Antioch College open to the University Board of Trustees. The University Board of Trustees approved a resolution to work with the College Alumni Board to allow it to demonstrate, by the October 2007 Board of Trustees meeting, the financial and academic feasibility of the College Alumni Board’s proposal for the continued operation of the Antioch College. The Alumni Board is continuing with its fundraising efforts and development of a full business plan for the College. As part of this effort, it is working with the university to utilize and augment the full resource of the College’s Development Office. For additional information on the Antioch College Alumni Association and its Revival Fund, visit www.antiochians.org. ###

Results Of Cincinnati OH Antioch University Board Of Trustees "Emergency Meeting" According To Press Release from BOT

David Allen — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:16:30 -0500

Hi From Yazz Allen! Contact me directly at YazzAllen@Yahoo.com Here is the text of the official press release from the Antioch University Board Of Trustees sent out today (Monday, August 27, 2007) following the "Emergency Meeting" the AU BOT held this past weekend in Cincinnati, Ohio: ---------------------- "ANTIOCH COLLEGE "NEWS RELEASE" "August 27, 2007 "ANTIOCH BOARD AND UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP TO WORK WITH ALUMNI BOARD Productive weekend results in intent to work together "YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO – Following an extraordinary and special meeting focused on listening to the Antioch community, the Antioch University Board of Trusteesapproved a resolution to work with the College Alumni Board to allow the Alumni Boardto demonstrate, by the October 2007 Board of Trustees meeting, the financial and academic feasibility of the College Alumni Board’s proposal for the continued operation of the College. "The Trustees stipulated that the Alumni Board’s proposal will need to develop a realistic business plan with required benchmarks as established by the Trustees, the Chancellorand the University Leadership Council and created in cooperation with the CollegeAlumni Board. "To assist with the plan’s creation, the Board resolved to “work closely with the AlumniBoard to provide due diligence access to all appropriate data, consistent with state and federal regulations.” At the Board of Trustees’ direction, Board Chair Arthur Zucker willappoint representatives of the Board of Trustees and University administration to work inconjunction with the Alumni Board. "Chair Zucker emphasized the basis of the decision focused on the unprecedented energy, sharing of constructive ideas, and commitment of time and money to the College by itsalumni and other stakeholders. “We want to engage the alumni,” he said, “and take advantage of the opportunity this renewed enthusiasm presents and to see if the Alumni Board can further develop theirproposal to ensure the continued viability of the College.” However, Chair Zucker also cautioned “in addition to a business plan, there is much more work that needs to be done, not the least of which, is the need to raise millions of dollars in a very short time period to assure that there are sufficient funds to pay for the continued operation of the College.” "The Trustees accepted the College Alumni Board’s offer to contribute to “various costsincluding, but not limited to, the support of the efforts of the current CollegeDevelopment office.” "Further, the Board affirmed through their resolution that no actions will be taken by the Trustees to endanger the financial stability and academic excellence of Antioch University McGregor or any of the other University campuses. "In a separate vote, the Board of Trustees stated its commitment, through the work of its Governance Committee, to consider the possibility of establishing a board of trustees for Antioch College with significant authority within the framework of a larger Antioch University. The Committee is scheduled to provide a progress report to Board of Trustees in October. "Chairman Zucker strongly emphasized his appreciation to the entire Antioch community for their constructive input, energy and willingness to participate in support of the College."