Antioch board turns down effort for antiwar vote

Six fourth-year students at Antioch College submitted an antiwar referendum to the college’s Community Council (ComCil) on Thursday, Feb. 6.

But after nearly two hours of deliberation, the council decided not to allow the referendum to be put to a community-wide vote in its current form.

Instead, ComCil agreed to “take an active and aware commitment to educating ourselves on the current international situation and the potential war with Iraq. This will be actualized through 1) Requesting that Independent Groups have meetings to discuss the issue, 2) Having it be the topic of a Community Meeting on Feb. 18, 3) Asking faculty, the Advisory Council, the Union, etc. to consider this subject in a meeting, and 4) Continuing to promote and hold forums on this topic with the hope that a more informed community referendum may result in the future.”

It may seem unlikely Antioch would not initially support a resolution that asks community members to “declare that we will not support a war without boundaries, without rationality and ultimately without just cause,” but many ComCil members had spirited objections to putting the proposed resolution to a community referendum.

Several ComCil members complained that the group that authored the document — fourth-year students Kelly Connolly, Mike Hogan Jr., Micky Morris, Dave Palmer, Matt Penfield and Justin Price — was not representative of the Antioch community.

ComCil member Danny Solis said that given the likelihood that any resolution passed by the college would not change the policy of the U.S. government, the focus should not be on the resolution, but on the process of crafting one.

Hogan, who worked last fall at the News, said that the students wrote the resolution out of frustration with “our government’s policies.” ComCil’s decision not to allow the community to vote on the resolution was similarly frustrating, he said.

—Brian Loudon