Since I have made myself a one-stop shopping center on the death of Antioch College, I should link to the best single piece I've seen on the topic (link). I've never met Michael Goldfarb; if mine were "the golden years" at Antioch, perhaps his were "the gnarly years." Evidently, he evidently knows at first hand some stories that I've only heard about.
I do remember my then-wife and my still-daughter reporting on a visit to Antioch back during the college-shopping days: must have been late 70s. Their reaction was pretty much "eeuw."
OBTW, setting aside the utopian castle-building (mine) and the paranoid fantasizing (others) I suspect that the most likely potential use for this facility would be some kind of Bible college. Chorus of "eeuw."
3 comments:
I'm still voting for "Antioch Acres" housing. The towers building and some of the dorms become condos. The classroom buildings get split into rental units. Everything else gets divided up into quarter acre tracts for development-style ranch houses.
Turns out,by the way, that Antioch had already sold off some of its land, south of the main campus for just that.
Once you start down the slippery slope, you might as well just close your eyes and yell, "Wheee!"
Crankily yours,
The New York Crank, Antioch '61
I had a conversation about this recently. I think Bible college seems pretty likely. You could sell it all for housing but it would be hugely expensive to tear down or remodel all those buildings and who will want to live in Yellow Springs now that there is no Antioch? It seems to me that the character of the town will be shattered.
It looks like nobody else noticed the crossword puzzle in the NY Times Magazine for Sunday, June 17 (same day as Michael Goldfarb's Op-Ed article).
56 across, clue: "Handi-Wrap alternative". Answer: "Saran" (invented by Ralph Wiley, Antioch College, 1930 (approx)).
I worked for Ralph, "the father of Saran" on a summer job in Midland, MI in 1968. Ralph was a real Rube Goldberg type with 50 patents already by then.
Ralph chose Antioch because of their, at the time, radical concept co-op program.
How about establishing the "Yellow Springs Institute of Technology"? Endowed by Google?
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