June 22, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

As Antioch University McGregor prepares to build a new $15 million campus at the northwest edge of Yellow Springs this fall, the views about the move on Livermore Street are varied. While many McGregor faculty, students and staff are supportive of the initiative to relocate, there are some who have significant concerns about the move and feel they did not have ample opportunity for input in the decision making process.

With McGregor poised to break ground this fall and scheduled to begin classes on the new campus in January 2008, opposition to plans that were set in motion over three years ago and that have been consecrated by the Antioch University Board, the Village of Yellow Springs, and state lending institutions may seem too late. A new facility will attract more of the professional adult students many of McGregor’s programs aim to serve, and it will help McGregor establish its own identity linked to but separate from Antioch College, some faculty say. A bigger space will also accommodate future growth and parking issues for the mostly commuter school.

But other faculty members are still doubtful of McGregor’s ability to finance a new building while the current programs seem to be strapped for funding. Several students said they oppose the move because they chose McGregor for its proximity to the historic Antioch College campus, and they believe moving would reduce the school’s appeal for many prospective students. And both faculty and students expressed frustration over what they see as the lack of open and inclusive dialogue that took place before the decision to relocate was made.

McGregor student Charlotte Dungan, who recently surveyed McGregor’s undergraduate studies program (formerly called the Weekend College) about the relocation, said that concerns are being voiced now because the plans aren’t just concepts anymore, they’re going to happen. One of the things she learned from her survey was “how the pain of feeling excluded from the process of decision-making hurts people so profoundly. They want to be heard in a real, sincere way,” she said.

Financing a new campus
The fact that the Ohio Higher Education Facilitiy Commission approved a $12 million bond for the building means to McGregor President Barbara Gellman-Danley that McGregor is perceived as having the fiscal stability to finance its new building, she said. McGregor has also raised $1.5 million, half of its $3 million capital campaign goal, to help cover the rest of the building and infrastructure costs. Of the funds already raised, a total of $370,000 has been pledged from individuals, organizations and private companies in Yellow Springs, and McGregor faculty and staff have committed an additional $62,000 toward the move, Gelman-Danley said.

The 30-year low-interest bond was predicated on 5 percent annual revenue growth for McGregor, which currently operates on a $7.4 million budget, according to Gelman-Danley. Over the past decade, McGregor has shown as much as 12 percent growth some years and other years no growth at all, but Gelman-Danley expects that programmatic expansion in the management school, and new licensure and certification courses in the education and conflict resolution programs, in addition to the excitement of a new school building, will all help raise enrollment, she said. McGregor eventually hopes to reach an enrollment of 1,000 students, she said, from a current enrollment of just over 600.

Gelman-Danley also plans to raise revenue through grants and business options, such as leasing space in the new building to companies and institutions of higher learning who want a presence in Greene County, she said.

“Our pattern in the past has made us feel safe about taking on the debt,” she said.

The feeling at McGregor’s undergraduate program, often called the Weekend College, is not quite so confident. Of the 621 graduate and undergraduate students at McGregor, 162 attend the Weekend College, where students come to campus on Saturday and stay all day for classes. According to Joseph Cronin, chair of McGregor’s Undergraduate Studies program, few of McGregor’s programs, except the education program which is the school’s single largest program, are stable enough to grow.

“We need more resources in virtually all of our programs; there isn’t a single one that’s structurally sound,” he said. “Relocating increasingly begins to look like a luxury we can’t afford.”

A similar concern was expressed by Gina Paget, chair of the Community Change and Civic Leadership program. “I’m concerned about our going into debt when our current enrollment in many departments is flat,” she said.

Former faculty member Kathy Hale resigned from McGregor last year as director of the conflict resolution program because the reorganization that combined her department with the school of management took too much energy away from teaching and developing her own department she said. She was feeling stretched thin, and she was being asked to cut her program budget that supported just two and a half faculty members, according to Hale.

“I wondered where the money for the relocation was coming from, if it was coming from the cuts,” Hale said. “In my view, we were not in a financial position to build a building.”

“My fear is we’re going to end up with a huge building over there that we can’t pay for whereas had we stayed here we could have paid attention to upgrading and increasing the service potential of both campuses at once,” she said.

But the move must be contextualized within the competitive atmosphere of higher education in general, several faculty members said. There are so many schools and online courses for adults to choose from that the only way to survive is to “be innovative without sacrificing academic standards and rigor,” Susanne Fest, chair of the Individualized Liberal and Professional Studies (ILPS) program, said. The new campus might prove to add vitality to the whole university, she said.

Jerry Holt, dean of the School of Liberal Studies, came to McGregor last year partly because of the excitement of the new campus and the opportunities and growth it represented, he said. He feels the programmatic innovations will cause enrollment in the conflict resolution program to double, and he also expects to see “dramatic growth” in the ILPS program because the current cultural climate encourages people to seek higher levels of education, namely master’s degrees, he said.

Opportunity for input
Beyond the right and wrong of the decision to relocate McGregor, some are also disgruntled because they felt their voices and concerns were either not heard or not addressed to their satisfaction.

Gelman-Danley said that from the beginning she provided different venues for comment, beginning with a comprehensive survey of the current and prospective student body and McGregor alumni conducted in 2003 to assess how students felt about McGregor’s facilities and programs, and what attracted them to the school.

Gelman-Danley said the raw results of the survey could not be distributed because they were compiled with other private budget information, but she said the research indicated many of McGregor’s students wanted a modern, professional setting and many wanted the school to be in Dayton, she said.

“Our research told us to leave Yellow Springs, to move to Dayton,” Gelman-Danley said. “But we made a commitment to Yellow Springs to stay here because this is the home and the place we should be.”

The faculty was included early on in discussions about McGregor’s future through a large school community forum, where people were welcome to express all of their views, positive and negative, she said. In addition to the regular monthly staff meetings where the full-time faculty was updated on plans for the move, Gelman-Danley also said she held a luncheon for the faculty last year, and a series of open office hours meant for faculty, students and staff to voice their opinions.

“No one came during my office hours and not one Weekend College faculty member or student ever made an appointment with me to complain,” she said. “Every possible question has been asked over and over again and was answered prior to the board’s decision to build the building. Why are we looking back? The conversation about the location is done.”

Fest felt she had lots of opportunities for input, and that if the school community wanted something more, it could have been more effective in organizing to achieve it, she said.

But Hale and another professor who did not want to be named were both involved in a review of the student survey, and they found the choice of questions and the wording of the questions to be biased and “flawed.” Their advice to have it altered was ignored, they said.

According to Dungan’s own survey, which she conducted as a class project on about a third of the undergraduate studies students and faculty this spring, most of the students and about half of the faculty who completed the survey felt they were not given the opportunity to be involved in the decision making process.

“There was a forum held, but people with dissenting opinions were railroaded and not listened to, and if they aren’t open to dissent, you have not asked people what they really think,” Dungan said.

Paget said she wished the faculty and staff had discussed the advantages and disadvantages of moving off campus into a new building and going into debt.

Even now, Dungan thinks that involving people in a public process to review the new McGregor building and the grounds would be a step in the right direction. Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear to her that both faculty and students are needing help through the transition, and allowing a “true and honest dialogue on campus about what is happening,” she said, is her goal.

“Let’s not just say it’s done so we’re moving on, let’s facilitate this process and get the public involved,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done this [survey] if this wasn’t a college worth people’s time to attend. The education we receive is wonderful, and I would hate to hinder its purpose by alienating professors or losing the history of the programs.”

Proximity to the college
The history of the Antioch College campus, out of which the adult education programs at McGregor grew, is for some students an attractive reason to come to McGregor. Undergraduate student Brady Burkett, who was nominated as the Undergraduate Studies program commencement speaker and who plans to speak against the move at this Sunday’s graduation, feels that the richness of the interactive learning style and seminar-based courses where students are evaluated as people is directly tied to the experience of attending McGregor on the Antioch campus. Being able to study the classics and “walk through history” on a campus where past students have solidified their commitment to Antioch’s humanist values is irreplacable, he said.

Weekend College graduate Abdul Hamidullah (formerly Monty Wright) feels that building a new building and putting the school at the edge of town will make it look “like a shopping mall.”

“There are so many options for that kind of school all over the place, if I was a student I’d ask why should I go there when I can go elsewhere for less money and less hassle?” he said. “If we try to make McGregor more like those places, it won’t be long before it’s gone.”

The uniqueness of McGregor’s programs won’t change necessarily just because the school relocates, according to Fest, who said McGregor will be clear about maintaining its connection to the college campus, to its library, to Glen Helen and downtown.

There are also risks to staying so close to the college, according to Fred Bartenstein, who was involved as a concerned local resident in early discussions to keep McGregor in Yellow Springs and is now the co-chair of McGregor’s capital campaign.

The college has had a historic lack of parking space and the space to expand or build new buildings in the residential neighborhood is limited, particularly if McGregor intends to grow, he said. The options to renovate existing buildings or raze current buildings to rebuild are both more costly than building on an empty lot, he said.

The other issue, and perhaps the main one, is that McGregor is ready for its own identity, “as a member of Antioch University’s portfolio of institutions,” Gelman-Danley said.

“Right now, on this campus, we’re not seen as McGregor, we’re seen as part of Antioch College,” she said. “We’re proud of Antioch College, but we’re a separate institution, we’re not a branch of the college.”

The good of the whole?
There is risk in building, and there is risk in not building, Fest said. But the larger picture is of most concern to Cronin, who wonders if in all the plans to relocate, anyone is considering what is best for Antioch University as a whole. Antioch College is conducting a capital campaign separate from but concurrent with McGregor’s capital campaign, which might appear as though Antioch’s parts are competing with each other for resources, he said.

“What we do is have these little parts that are all self interested, where McGregor and the college are rivals for resources across the street from each other,” Cronin said.

In Bartenstein’s view, McGregor’s move is for the good of the whole. It provides new facilities for McGregor to “grow and flourish,” and it opens up space for the college to use the space adjacent to its historic campus creatively, to suit its own needs, he said.

Holt agreed that there is a way to look at the whole thing positively. “If we get some creative people together, there’s some way to have it all — to integrate the new structure into the great mosaic that is Antioch Yellow Springs,” he said.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com