Leave it for others to score the winning touchdown, or to be crowned Queen of the May. The high point of my young life (I was 17) was to join the gang of merry pranksters who stole all the toilet seats out of North Hall, the girl’s dorm at Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio, to string between the twin towers of the main building
We were careful and discreet and we put ‘em all back in the morning, and I think folks had a good laugh, although surely not as good as we had ourselves. Life changes; these days I suppose we’d have to register as sex offenders.
Life changes for the folks at Antioch, too: they’ve announced that they are closing up shop in 2008 (link). They say they’ll try to regroup and reopen in 2012. One’s first thought is: yeh, and pigs will fly. But I wouldn’t write them off just yet. In fact, this is Antioch’s second near-death experience: the college was on its uppers in the early 20s when the trustees made a Hail-Mary pass and all but deeded the place over to Arthur Morgan, a bull-headed visionary engineer. Against all expectations, Morgan more or less single-handedly brought the school back from the brink and set it on a generations-long course as one of the primo small experimental colleges.
But it didn’t last. Indeed, people tend to think of Antioch as a child of the 60s, whereas in truth Antioch’s great days had ended before the 60s ever began. Most of the showcase alums graduated no later than the early 60s. Starting in the late 50s (that would be, ahem, just about the time I left), the school fell into a spiral of lunatic management decisions, coupled with large dollops of bad luck, from which they have never really been able to scratch back. In my day, we liked to compare ourselves to Oberlin, Swarthmore, Reed. Even then it might have been a stretch, but as the years went by, the others held their place or gained ground while Antioch dripped slowly, slowly, slowly away.
Many of Antioch’s wounds were self-inflicted, but in a sense, Antioch was a victim of its own success. Antioch liked to think of itself as “experimental.” Indeed it was: in my day, you could do lots of things at Antioch that you couldn’t do elsewhere, and I’m not thinking just of staying in your girlfriend’s room until 3 a.m. By the 60s, everybody was experimental; everybody was a little Antioch—or a big Antioch, ready and able to take advantage of Antioch’s blunders, and to eat Antioch’s lunch.
When I started at Antioch, it claimed to be 101 years old. My classmate Bryce Hand said he could confirm that this was true because when he went into the tower to string up the toilet seats, he found 202 layers of pigeon shit (Bryce was a geologist). By my count, that means we now have Antioch at 155, not quite dead but on life support, while I assume the trustees are out with binoculars and a large net, searching for the new Arthur Morgan. But no, don’t bother to call, I’m happy with my memories here in Palookaville.
2 comments:
Alas and woe! I loved that place. But in 1986 I went back for my 25th class reunion and could barely recognize it.
Then, as now, it was looking down at the heels, underpopulated, and sad. There were graffitti in the office where I (and you, BUCE) once produced a disciplined weekly newspaper that often scooped the local press on local issues) and generalized rot that indicated a complete lack of productive discipline.
Most of my classmates has kids of or near college age at the time. I remember several of us looking over the turf and muttering, "Not for MY kid."
Along with maintenance disasters and the chaos of graffiti, there was a sense that the college was rejecting the values it taught me. Instead of revolution for a purpose, a study of the college paper revealed even in 1986 that the students seemed to be espousing revolution for the sake of revolution, a sort of wildly nihilistic and completely narcissistic student Al Qaida.
So my kid not only was discouraged from applying (he did fabulously well at Johns Hopkins anyway) but I stopped contributing. I was furious at the deterioration. You can't permissively allow students trash a place and then ask people whose values you've rejected for handouts to fix it.
Shortly after my 25th reunion, the parent University's CEO (or was it the college president?) pretty much declared the problem fixed, the college was financially stable again.
Yeah, sure.
Antioch's biggest problem was that one president tried to top Arthur Morgn in the 1960s, and others kept wishing they could top the topper.
Sure, other colleges had somewhat picked up and followed the "old" Antioch model. So what?
Two rules:
1. If it ain't busted, don't fix it.
2. If you must change things, for the love of mike, zig when the world is zagging. Other colleges were going experimental? If Antioch had to change to compete, perhaps it should have going less experimental and more traditional, focusing on the classics and ancient verities, not on third world revolution and finding ways to justify bloodletting if an anti-imperialist label could be attached to it.
By getting more, and more, and still more experimental, Antioch grew so weird that hardly anybody wanted their kids to come near the place.
RIP Antioch. At any rate, RIP Antioch circa the 1950s and earlier. Somebody let me know when they knock down the Main Buiilding towers and start breaking ground for a housing development. Any day now, I suspect
Yours crankily
Like NY Crank, while I'm saddened by this turn of events, I can't say I'm entirely surprised. I attended Antioch in the late 70's. I used to like to joke that the '60's didn't end at Antioch until sometime in the 1980's. But while I certainly had interesting experiences on co-op and during my extracurricular activities on campus, I can't really say that the coursework offered at that point was outstanding--good, even very good, but not the reason to go there. And it certainly didn't help my career to have attended Antioch, despite all the college's hype to the contrary.
Among my other activities while there, I served on AdCil. In retrospect, it was a bit like the first 6 years of the current US Administration (and pardon my leftist political analysis): no real checks or balances on a President who viewed the College as existing for his benefit only. So perhaps a period of self-induced coma might indeed be salutory, a kind of opportunity to re-boot the system.
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