September 28, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

Three weeks ago four first-year students at Antioch College were expelled for handling a large quantity of marijuana on campus. The following week the Record, the Antioch College newspaper, was censored for the first time in recent memory for material that was deemed “inappropriate.” Recently the informal practice of providing alcohol at campus parties was stopped. And at the end of last term a student was suspended for directing profanities toward a college administrator in a campus-wide Internet forum.

All of these events are the result of a change in the way the college community has functioned since Antioch’s new President, Steven Lawry, announced during the State of the College address in June that he was “troubled” by the current governance system at Antioch and by a campus culture that was lacking in mutual respect. In a recent interview, Lawry said that he is “challenging” the college to create a campus that is “committed to intellectual freedom and mutual respect” and an environment in which “good students can learn.”

“There’s been an impression of an indulgence, which we’re working very vigorously to counter,” he said. “We’re not indulgent.”

In the past, Antioch has been lenient, some students say, on those on campus who violate the college community standards, and they appreciate students being held accountable for their digressions. But the shift in administrative attitude toward the Antioch campus has also created fear among some students that the new disciplinary intolerance could rob Antioch of its embrace of passionate and independent students looking for a space to experiment with radical ideas and free living.

Culture shock
When first-year Antioch student Dan “Stubby” Carroll left campus with three of his friends one day in September to buy marijuana for themselves and five to 10 other students, he did not think he was taking any extraordinary risks. They pooled money from their friends, Carroll said, made a bulk purchase and distributed without profit to those who had paid.

When they were called into the office of the dean of students several days later, they told the truth about what had happened, Carroll said, and were soon notified they were being expelled after their first two weeks of college. Carroll, who said he came to Antioch for its open and experience-oriented program that would allow him to take personal responsibility for his academic pursuits, was “blindsided” by the college’s disciplinary actions, he said.

“There is no precedence for anything like this,” he said on Monday. “We were led to believe by all the upper classmen that based on previous experience at Antioch, as long as you were respectful of others with your use of marijuana, it’s not a big deal at all. We were sure it was a place it was cool.”

Around the same time period, Record layout editor Foster Neill experienced a similar disappointment when he learned that an editorial board would oversee the content of his college newspaper. The Record has always had an editorial board, in theory, but it was inactive, according to Don Wallis, former newspaper editor and current mentor for the Record. That is, until a sex education column called “Nookie with Niko” and a “DeClassified” ad indirectly soliciting sex both printed in this fall’s first issue of the Record became potentially offensive, Lawry said, to some in the Antioch community.

“We’re speaking [in the Record] to staff, the community, children, faculty, and we need to speak in ways that are convincing of our social maturity,” Lawry said last week. “Ads soliciting sex, drugs, drug use, these are acts of violence against the community.”

However, Wallis said that he sees the actions as censorship and feels strongly opposed to them.

Several students said that not only were they not offended by the material in the Record, they felt the criticism of the column threatened to strip them of their rights to a free and open dialogue about very real issues that affect them. And sex in particular, according to fourth-year student Meredith Root, is an issue that students feel they have won the right to address through the Sexual Offense Prevention Policy (SOPP) enacted at Antioch in the 1990s.

“The spirit of the SOPP policy is to have an open, honest dialogue about sexual issues in an appropriate forum, but the implication of Steve’s actions is that talking openly about sex is inappropriate,” she said. “These are things that have been accepted at Antioch, and people are very proud of having a safe space to talk about uncomfortable issues. To say it’s inappropriate goes against everything they’ve worked for.”

Revising campus culture
Part of the Antioch College Renewal Plan, according to Lawry, was to first put the college on a sound financial base and then to reenforce a challenging and rigorous liberal arts curriculum. Thirdly, he said, his goal, and the goal of the Antioch University Board of Trustees, was to “create a culture and a climate on campus that is committed to intellectual freedom.” In Lawry’s view, the task involves the college taking some amount of responsibility for the ethical education of its students.

“Higher education has shied away from ethics, but we need to revisit ethics, because it’s an educational opportunity for discussion,” he said. “That youthful experimentation can still go on, but when people say ‘maybe it’s just a step in the process of growing up,’ my response is, what’s the next step?”

Helping students embrace the full spectrum of ideas and opinions without prejudgment requires students to be respectful of each other, Lawry said, even in the face of those who, for instance, might unknowingly support sweatshop labor by wearing Nike shoes. And students who are sincerely engaged in intellectual growth can do so in a drug-free environment, without menacing language, and without threatening others in the community, he said.

“There has been too much dissidence, too many behaviors that are anti-intellectual, behaviors that close down inquiry,” Lawry said. “You’re not going to convince anyone that your views have credibility and merit if you speak in irresponsible terms.”

Levi Cowperthwaite, one of Antioch’s Community Managers, has heard Lawry describe students’ way of engaging in discussion about salient political and social issues as a “culture of confrontation” and “toxic campus culture.” But Antioch students use passionate words as tools to challenge each other intellectually, several students said, even if it is sometimes aggressive. Cowperthwaite has grown a great deal personally and academically over his four years at Antioch by learning to confront sensitive issues, he said.

Root agreed. She remembers the discomfort as a less radical student of trying to be chemical-free during her first year at Antioch. She was frequently put in the position of having to defend her views, which was stressful and difficult at times, she said. “It was hard to find spaces where people were just happy and socializing with each other,” she said. But it was because of the discomfort, she later found, that she was able to see that her place of privilege in the world had allowed her to judge others with different experiences.

“Because we talked things out, because we were confrontational, I now have a better sense of my place in the world,” Root said. “It’s a culture of discomfort, and yes, it can be hard. But it’s not all bad.”

Keep Antioch values with change
A less threatening campus, from Lawry’s perspective, will help the college retain some of the students who tend to leave Antioch because they feel attacked by other students. Toning down the confrontation doesn’t mean students don’t deal with important issues, but that they do it in more appropriate ways, he said.

Melody MacKoviak, one of Antioch’s Community Managers, came to Antioch in 2002 with a class of about 180 students and graduated four years later with less than half that number, she said. She believes the college lost a lot of students who felt threatened by its highly political environment and the constant threat of being challenged about their views.

But MacKowiak doesn’t think Antioch has to abandon its commitment to self investigation in order to be more tolerant of others’ views. “We are being asked to be more conscious of what we say and especially how we say it,” she said. “There are ways of getting your point across and still be intelligent without screaming it.”

Beverly Rodgers, professor of anthropology and interim director of the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom, feels part of the college’s challenge lies in learning how to confront in a productive and beneficial manner. “We are not being asked or encouraged to ignore racism, sexism, classism, agism, ableism, or any other ‘ism,’ ” Rodgers said. “Particularly with the King Center we are taking steps to bring those issues to the fore and look at how we as individuals and as a community can contribute to change.”

Ivan Dihoff, professor of languages, understands the attempt from “higher administrators” to change campus culture in order to acquire the number of students Antioch strives to attract, he said. But he is skeptical about the attempt to persuade students to be less radical in their feelings, consume fewer cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana, and be “much less preocupied with matters of a sexual nature in their public conversations or presentations,” he said.

“There are many colleges that uphold those standards, and they graduate many people we now admire in our political arena, churches, major industries such as oil and automobile manufacturers, not to mention insurance salespeople and owners of ‘free cash on pay day’ stores that adorn our best neighborhoods,” he said.

Cowperthwaite acknowledges that perhaps there is a need for students to be less accusatory in their communication style. “Maybe there’s something wrong with the culture at Antioch — that we’re needlessly mean to each other and angry, but we’ve never asked why it is that way,” he said. “I don’t think we can solve something as deep rooted as the culture at Antioch by just saying, “It will not be tolerated,” he said, paraphrasing the disciplinary method he feels Lawry has taken with students.

“You don’t stop drug use by expelling users; that totally misses a teaching moment,” Cowperthwaite said.

The problem in the larger context, according to Carroll, is that the college administration isn’t communicating with the student body about the disciplinary policies it is beginning to change and enforce.

Root didn’t know there was a drug policy in the student handbook, and she was not aware of any recent discussions about a change in disciplinary policy on campus, she said. “In an effort to deter people from violating community standards, instead of a calm, rational procedural enforcement, it’s been this incredibly harsh backlash,” Root said.

According to the student handbook, trafficking in alcohol or drugs on campus is grounds for expulsion, Cowperthwaite said, adding that those rules haven’t been strictly enforced for a long time. “I don’t necessarily think it should be like that, but there has to be a balanced approach to change.”

Antioch student Julie Phillips agreed, adding that all the students want more resources for the school, she said, implying that the college’s attempts to create a tamer campus and a slightly more conservative student body might attract more money from donors. But greater financial security will come at a price, she believes, and that price is robbing students of their voice in favor of top-down campus governance.

The president’s policy, according to third-year student Sarah Buckingham, has been to do whatever is necessary to make the college more marketable to a broader number of students to increase money for Antioch. But the new rules have been implemented so hastily that some students doubt their president has taken the time to see the value of the culture they and those before them have established here. They fear Antioch as they know it will be forgotten, and with it they will lose the social education many Antioch students cherish about their school, several students said.

Recruiters want a more mainstream campus, Cowperthwaite said, but Antioch’s radical openness to the fringe “serves a certain ostracized type of student who at Antioch feels they’ll be valued for their quirkiness,” he said. “It’s a place to put their passion and hone their deep commitment to their values.”

Campus dialogue
While students have requested open community meetings to address their concerns to Lawry, there has been little response directly from the president, Root said. So far he has not seen students push hard enough for the kind of community meetings they want, he said, and they haven’t gone so far as to organize them. But the college is planning to hold campus-wide meetings beginning this fall to address some of the concerns students have.

Carroll said he has been disillusioned about Antioch, which he believed to be about radical activism, dissent, and passionate people standing up for the things they believe in. He still believes in Antioch’s legacy and wants to return to campus, but he doubts the college’s willingness to tolerate dissent, which is what he thinks makes Antioch so special.

He and the four other students have appealed their case to the college president and are scheduled to be notified this week if they will be readmitted, he said.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com