Congratulations to The Board of Trustees of Antioch University, on which body I once served, for taking a very difficult decision, voting to close my alma mater, Antioch College, effective July 1, 2008. Dayton Business Journal reports at 4:29 PM EDT Tuesday, June 12, 2007:
Burdened by declining enrollment and financial problems, Antioch College will suspend operations at its Yellow Springs campus July 1, 2008.
The college's board, which voted June 9 to close the Yellow Springs campus, said it intends to possibly reopen a "state-of-the-art" campus in 2012 if sufficient financial funding can be secured.
"The decision was taken in light of the college's very fragile financial circumstances, resulting from low enrollments and insufficient funding from other sources, including endowment income and gifts," Antioch President Steven Lawry said in a statement Tuesday.
The college has 330 students for the 2006-2007 year, down 36 percent from its 1997 enrollment of 522.
Tuition at Antioch College costs $26,492 per year.
Antioch College has been synonymous with alternatives in higher education for nearly 200 years. Horace Mann, the Bostonian who married Mary Peabody of The Peabody Sisters as in Megan Marshall's fine book, founded Antioch College in 1852.
When I attended Antioch in the '60s, there were 2,000 students, alternating work and study programs around the world. In five years, I went from Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the college is situated, to New York (sold books at Barnes and Noble at 18th and Fifth), to Los Angeles (worked as admin in USC's grad psychology program) to Yellow Springs (managing editor of the Antioch Record, the college newspaper) to Oxford University (studied Elizabethan drama and philosophy) to the Yucatan, Mexico (studied Mayan culture) and back to Yellow Springs to graduate. Education like this is hard to come by.
Antioch has fallen to the pressures of maintaining a small liberal arts college with an even smaller endowment in the 21st century.
Specifying four years to come up with a state-of-the-art plan for a new college is quite a challenge, a radical one. But Antioch is deserving of nothing less.
Standing O to the board for having the guts to do this.
NB: The college's closing will not imperil the fine Antioch University graduate schools across the US. In fact, it may strengthen them as the graduate schools have been subsidizing the college for many years.
