The College Faculty

We the faculty of Antioch College support and appreciate the efforts of the Antioch College Alumni Association and the former members of the Board of Trustees to keep Antioch College open as a viable independent liberal arts college. We are joining them in these efforts.

News Release

The latest breaking news on the struggle to save Antioch College

The American Association of University Professors, the largest and most prominent advocacy organization for higher education faculty in the United States, acting on behalf of the faculty of Antioch College, has submitted a statement of concern to Tullisse A. Murdock, Acting University Chancellor, Art Zucker, Chair of the Antioch University Board of Trustees, and Antioch College President, Steven Lawry.

The Antioch University Board of Trustees voted in June to suspend operations at the historic liberal arts college in Yellow Springs as of July 1, 2008. The AAUP raises serious questions as to whether long-established and widely-practiced principles of academic government, laid out by the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, were adhered to by the administrators and the Board in the process of deciding to close the college.

The AAUP, “deeply disappointed” at the Board’s lack of consultation about the alleged budget crisis, calls the Board’s plan for suspension “highly unusual.”

Please see the full text of the letter below.

For further information:

Anne Bohlen, Professor of Communications
atbohlen@gmail.com

Susan Eklund-Leen, Associate Professor of Cooperative Education
susaneklund@gmail.com

American Association of University Professors
aaup@aaup.org 202-737-5900

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August 7, 2007

Dr. Tullisse A. Murdock
Acting Chancellor
Antioch University
150 E. South College Street
Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387

Mr. Arthur J. Zucker
Chair, Board of Trustees
Antioch University
2012 Prescott Pl
Raleigh, North Carolina 27615

President Steven Lawry
Office of the President
Antioch College
795 Livermore Street
Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387

Dear Chancellor Murdock, Chair Zucker, and President Lawry:

Members of the faculty at Antioch College have sought the advice and assistance of the American Association of University Professors regarding the actions taken by the Antioch University Board of Trustees on June 7, 2007, to declare financial exigency, and on June 9 to suspend Antioch College’s operations effective July 1, 2008, with the stated intention of reopening the college in 2012. They have shared with us a considerable amount of information about these recent events, which have also received a good deal of coverage in the media. We understand that all faculty appointments are to terminate by the end of June 2008. We were deeply surprised and disappointed to learn that members of the faculty were not consulted prior to the board’s actions with regard either to the declaration of financial exigency or to the suspension of operations, and that, in fact, they were not informed of these actions until three days later at a campus meeting on June 12. Faculty members allege that the board’s lack of consultation is part of what they perceive as a pattern of disregard for the faculty’s legitimate role in institutional decision making for the past several years.
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Dear friends, former students, fellow alums, friends of Antioch,

I am writing to you all to create a picture of what is happening on the ground at the College.  Thank you for reaching out soon after the announcement of the Board’s intention to close the College.  We have gone through the arc of shock, heartbreak, outrage, and back again and will continue to do so.

The Reunion was an amazing experience.  Six hundred people were standing up with us and saying “NO! This can’t happen.”  So many recent (90’s-2000”s) grads came back to organize the defense who were Photo and Media Arts students.  It was pure sweetness to see them, to introduce them to each other, (they knew each other by reputation alone), and to dance with them until 3:00am.

Hundreds of people are working tirelessly across the country to organize and confront the decision to close.  (Thank you for your sustained efforts on behalf of our loved College).  People are organizing chapters, fundraisers, writing letters to counter the negative press that has been provoked by the announcement.

Soon after the first few days of grief, the faculty started meeting and have agreed to consult legal counsel regarding a case to keep the College open.  We question the legality of declaring financial exigency for one unit of the University, of not following due diligence in their decision to close the College without consultation with the Faculty or ADCIL, as per our Personnel Policies.  The decision to close the College for four years conveniently eliminates the necessity of offering jobs to tenured faculty if the college is re-opened. The faculty are the holders of the institutional memory, deeply committed to self-governance and democratic processes, (as messy and difficult as they can be).

Probably the most outrageous factor in this decision by the Board and the University leadership is the intention of designing the “New  (Renewed) Antioch” using “experts” and focus groups.  Current faculty, students, our very active Alumni, and a broad cross section of Village interests have not been invited to participate in the planning process.  This replicates the Renewal Commission constituted in 2003, that included only two Antioch Faculty (among a total of seventeen) national experts in Higher Education to craft a curriculum for the 21st Century in a nine-month period, which was then handed to the faculty to implement.   As resistant to a mandated curriculum as you can imagine we were, we took on the task, with good faith, and worked to make the idea of an interdisciplinary curriculum our own.  We struggled with a highly intensive “learning community” model that engaged most of our senior faculty in the first year Core program for the two years of implementation,
while simultaneously delivering the upper level “old” curriculum, and inventing the “new” upper level interdisciplinary program, We were problem solving making the program attractive, challenging, and affordable, and voted to reduce the co-op program to three terms with another “summer of choice” option, taking out a big chunk of what constitutes our (as alumni) experience of an  Antioch education.    We feel proud of the first year program we created, that reflected our traditional commitments to social justice, development of critical thinking and writing skills, global perspectives, community-based learning, and familiarity with a number of forms of creative expression.

The Board promised us five years to make the program economically viable. They recognized there would be shortfalls in revenue in this transition.  They also promised to raise twenty million dollars to renovate the Student Union, dorms, and the Library.  That never happened.

Our first year entering class was 65 students, brave souls who were ready to participate in an experiment, or who had no idea what they were coming to, since we hadn’t had time to design, and advertise it.  On June 9th  of this year, the Board of Trustees pulled the plug on the process.

As a faculty member who taught twice in the new Core program, I would have liked the Board to have come to campus this spring to talk to students and faculty about the new curriculum, its successes and difficulties, rather than asking a consultant to run enrollment projections for the next five years, which was their basis for making such a momentous decision.  They might have heard from students about their level of satisfaction with the vitality of the program, the level of challenge and engagement.  They would have seen a highly effective team of Community Government leaders providing responsible and heart-felt leadership in some of the most difficult circumstances I have experienced here.  My biggest sense of loss comes from not getting to continue working with those students from American Identities, Fall 2006, where we worked deeply and closely on understanding the complexities of race, class, representation, cultural understanding, and expression of those complexities through literature.

Antioch is not a place that you can attend, work at, or teach at casually.  It demands a level of energy, resilience, creativity, critical examination, and courage that is hard to find in most work environments.  It also means that the rewards are enormous, in participating with students as they discover their passions, talents, their “path”, in working with colleagues and staff who share the core belief that our efforts matter.    I will have this love and dedication and gratitude for the rest of my days.  Thank you all for being a part of my Adventure.

So what can you do?

**Go to antiochians.org for news, local chapter information, actions, and ways to donate.  The point of donating, or pledging to donate, is to empower the Alumni Board to be able to negotiate with the Board of Trustees to GIVE UP THE COLLEGE to an autonomous board of oversight, that is committed solely to the operations of the College, and who would organize a Revival of the College based on principles of academic freedom, self-governance, and would use the life skills of Antioch alum, faculty, students, and Villagers in designing a college that is sustainable, vital, engaged in theory and practice in the local community and the world.

**Donate to the Antioch Faculty Legal Information Fund account at: Yellow Springs Federal Credit Union 217 Xenia Ave. Yellow Springs, OH 45387 Contributions to this account are not tax deductible, but are most appreciated at this time.

**Contribute your testimonial – how Antioch gave you tools and direction to do the work you are doing today.  We are using these to lift up the power of an Antioch education – over the past decades – to demonstrate what might be lost if the College closes.  Help us name the “it” in “Be Ashamed to let IT Die”.  Send testimonials to me at: deagleson@antioch-college.edu
<<  We need them FAST!!! >>  BEFORE the August 23rd Board of Trustees Emergency Board Meeting (despite Toni Murdoch, Chancellor of the University saying recently that the decision to close was not reversible).  We need to persuade them otherwise, and visibly and vocally support the Alumni Board in their negotiations.

**Adopt a current student.  They are feeling heart-broken, (and maligned) and need to know they live in a larger web of concerned alumni and friends of the College.  Our Associate Dean of Faculty, Eli Nettles, and our Associate Dean of the Core Program, Janice Kinghorn, have been contacting first year and continuing students over the summer.   Between fifty and seventy first year students intend to come to Antioch this fall, perhaps because they didn’t have time to make other arrangements after the announcement on June 12th, OR they saw something pretty compelling when they came to visit last year, and want to be a part of what may be our last year in this iteration.

**Contribute your vision, energy, and wisdom to the effort to keep the College open.

Much love to all of you!
Dennie

July 23, 2007
To The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I would like to respond to Ralph Keyes’s essay “Present at the Demise,” which offers his observations on what has led the Antioch University Board of Trustees to announce the closing of Antioch College. I have been teaching literature full time at Antioch College since 1994. While Mr Keyes makes some comments that strike me as valid, on the whole my experience here has been quite different.

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July 20, 2007

To Antioch alums and friends of the College:
The Antioch College Faculty voted this week (7/18/07) to affirm our will to work to keep the College open.

You can help us by contributing to the Antioch Faculty Legal Information Fund account at:

Yellow Springs Federal Credit Union
217 Xenia Ave.
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

Contributions to this account are not tax deductible, but are most appreciated at this time.

Jill Becker, Susan Eklund-Leen, and Chris Hill
Antioch College Faculty

For further information, please contact:

Prof. Susan Eklund-Leen susaneklund
Prof. Jill Becker

Please set aside time to watch this video. With their jobs on the line, it took incredible courage for the faculty to speak up like this. For those hungry for information on how we got to this difficult position, this video is maybe the best source yet.

The Antioch College faculty press conference during reunion at 1:00pm Saturday, June 23. It is offered in its entirety, minus the first 5 seconds or so.

June 19, 2007

Statement

The faculty of Antioch College wish to share their perspective on the
closing of the College. I am an Emerita faculty member speaking at
their request because current faculty are in a position of great
vulnerability at this time, no longer protected by tenure. The
narrative supplied by the Board of Trustees contains important
omissions, questionable assumptions and misrepresentations.

We are providing an alternative to that narrative because our dignity
as faculty is at stake as is the preservation of tenure as a principle
and as a promise, and Antioch’s current and historic definition is
hanging in the balance. The College’s considerable assets are at risk
and our sense of justice is offended as decades long practices of
governance and decision making have been ignored.

Antioch College has been in financial crisis since its inception.
Ironically, several years ago the Board imposed a drastic curricular
revision, the Renewal Plan, on the College at a point when the
enrollment had actually been increasing. The College articulated some
of the many challenges it faced in its Strategic Plan of 1997 but the
overall shape of the curriculum was not the central problem, nor was
it perceived as a problem by the NCA in a recent accreditation
review.

The Board’s imposed Renewal Plan was disastrous in terms of admissions
and retention. The student body plunged from 650 to 300 in two years
despite faculty’s considerable efforts to make the Plan work. The
Board mandated the change with great speed scarcely giving time for
the faculty to develop courses and consider the profound implications
of the changes, much less market them. At that time they promised 5
years of financial support to see the College through the Plan’s
implementation.

In brief, the Board risked the College’s well-being with the
imposition of an ill-considered Plan, failed to provide promised
support, and then closed the College. To make matters worse the
Renewal Plan and the College’s deepest financial difficulties
overlapped with the Board’s authorization of a new building for
Antioch McGregor, a branch of Antioch University which had previously
shared a campus with the College in Yellow Springs. At the time of
its greatest need the College’s borrowing capacity was seriously
constrained and it was the College’s assets that provided much of the
collateral for the extensive borrowing necessary to develop the new
McGregor building. How is it that given their role in creating the
College’s grave difficulties the Board did not take responsibility to
raise additional funds, consider the College President’s plan to merge
the College and McGregor, or consider liquidating part of the
College’s endowment?

We must ask who benefits from this? What is Antioch University
without the College? The College is the only one of the University’s
branches with tenured faculty, a unionized staff and self governance.
What of Antioch’s identity do they care about preserving? If they
can’t raise funds now, how can they start from scratch four years from
now with abandoned buildings and an entirely new faculty and student
body to recruit? What will become of the abandoned employers in the
Cooperative Education program, Antioch’s mark of distinction ? How
financially healthy are the other campuses of Antioch University – has
the College become a convenient scapegoat? Again we need to ask who
benefits from this? In fact, the University stands to receive all the
College’s assets – the Glen (a 900 acre nature preserve), the library,
the endowment, the buildings, the land, the legacy of Antioch.

Can the Board and University administration which conducted their
review of the College’s recent situation in secrecy, in violation of
our governance policies, without consulting faculty and staff who
stand to lose their livelihoods and professions, be trusted with the
College’s current assets, its legacy and its future? We might further
ask what is the Board’s responsibility to the town of Yellow Springs?
The loss of income to a small town where Antioch is one of the major
employers, the disappearance of an intellectual and cultural center,
the abandonment of land and buildings are all terrible blows.

The faculty will be exploring legal action to stop the College’s
closing and preserve tenure and the college’s assets. We seek the
support of alumni in this endeavor.

Dimi Reber