dude, if you think that is bad....check out antioch college...



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.)


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.

__________________
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

H. L. Mencken


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