March 8, 2007

By Lauren Heaton

Last week, due to budgetary constraints, Antioch College announced it will eliminate 10 staff and administrative positions from the college, among them long-time Dean of Students Jimmy Williams and Executive Vice President Rick Jurasek. The cuts have nothing to do with job performance, College President Steve Lawry said on Thursday, but they are a necessary step to avoid going deeper into debt over the next five years.

In order to finance the college Renewal, a plan implemented last year to deliver a new curriculum and raise enrollment, the college anticipated a debt of $20 million over a five year period, Lawry said. The college secured $15 million through two major gifts last year, leaving what should have been a $5 million gap to close. But after reviewing tuition revenue projections over the next several years, the college anticipated, instead of $5 million, an $11 million unsecured deficit.

“We scrutinized our assumptions about enrollment growth and retention projections, and we wanted to be more prudent,” Lawry said. “Our growth and enrollment projections have been overly optimistic.”

In accordance with a directive from the Antioch University Board of Trustees, the college instituted $1.5 million in annual budget cuts, of which $1 million is in personnel costs and $.5 million in operating costs.

According to Lawry, 20 positions in all were eliminated, 10 of which were already vacant. The vice president’s position will be consolidated with the dean of faculty position, formerly filled by Andrzej Bloch, who will resume his role as director of Antioch Education Abroad on July 1. The responsibilities of the dean of students will be rolled into the job of auxiliary services director Milt Thompson under the new position of vice president for student affairs and services, effective immediately. Jurasek, who came to the college in 2003, will leave at the end of June. Among the other positions eliminated were administrative, library, bookstore, admissions and security staff.

Students feel loss on campus
On Wednesday of last week, the day the personnel decisions were announced, a mass of students gathered in McGregor Hall to comfort each other and discuss how to respond to the administrative actions. According to fifth-year student Foster Neill, many students were angered by the decision to cut staff, and many in particular felt the acute loss of Williams, who had been their dean, their advocate and their friend, he said.

Williams, who came to the college as dean of admissions in 1989 and has been the dean of students for over 10 years, understood that he was a voice for students when no one else would listen to them, Neill said. He came to campus community meetings, he made himself available in the middle of the night if needed, and he supported many students who needed personal and emotional guidance, he said.

“He did things it wasn’t his job to do, and he was trusted because he was real with students,” Neill said. “Jimmy is someone I don’t think is replaceable.”

But at Antioch, placing the responsibility for students’ disciplinary and social/emotional needs on one person’s shoulders is unfair, Lawry said. Though Thompson will perform some of the duties of the former dean of students, Lawry anticipates faculty, staff and the whole institution will share the burden of supporting students in what he sees as a more holistic way.

Cuts will not affect faculty
While Lawry found the staff cuts necessary to keep operating costs down, he remained committed to retaining all current faculty members and refilling four tenure-track positions in the history, music, chemistry and biological and environmental science departments. He also announced the college’s plan to establish a clearer curricular identity by capitalizing on Antioch’s strengths in the fields of environmental science, the arts and global citizenship.

The college is committed to strengthening strategic areas such as faculty and curriculum, admissions, and development, which are needed to keep recruitment and retention numbers high, according to American history professor Julie Gallagher, who attended part of last month’s meeting with the University Board of Trustees.

“We are a tuition-driven school, and when enrollment is down it causes a fiscal crisis — that’s our bread and butter,” Gallagher said.

Student enrollment and retention for the past two years has been lower than expected, particularly for the first class to enter under the new curriculum in 2005. According to Lawry, that class of 63 dwindled to about 30 in the first year, and the class of 120 students who entered in fall 2006 has lost about 25 percent of its students in just six months.

These numbers bring the total current enrollment to 325, according to the college registrar, and the total faculty to a low of 45, yielding an unsustainable student to faculty ratio of 7:1. While the goal of the Renewal plan is to eventually attract enough students to bring enrollment to 700 with a student/faculty ratio of 15:1, the budget will remain tight until the college can promote itself widely enough to attract and retain more students, Lawry said.

The college is also still committed to going ahead with capital projects to rehabilitate the library and the student union, he said.

Gallagher, who has been at Antioch for four years and watched it struggle with financial instability, feels the college is finally looking ahead and making a reasonable plan to get out of debt.

“It breaks my heart that this institution can’t get on its feet, because it has so much strength and so much potential,” she said. “But I feel very hopeful and there’s a sense of solid leadership in Steve, who is willing to make unpopular decisions and say, ‘these are our challenges and here’s our plan of action to go forward.’ ”

The chicken or the egg
The question of how much money to give to a Renewal program that has potential but hasn’t yet proven itself is a difficult one. On the one hand, Lawry acknowledged, the college’s potential donors could say, “Fix the college and then we’ll give you the money.” But the college also needs the support now in order to move ahead with the transition to a bigger and stronger institution, he said. And there is some sense in the college community, according to one professor who preferred not to be named for job security reasons, that the Antioch University Board of Trustees is hedging on the support they agreed to provide to see the Renewal plan through to completion.

According to the Renewal Commission’s final report to the board of trustees in June 2004, “The fundamental premise of this financial plan is that Antioch College must make substantial investments in its program, faculty and staff, community facilities, student services and technology in advance of planned gains in enrollment and tuition revenue.” The college would need a total of $55 million to support the Renewal, according to the report, which later states that the “transformation” of the college will require “a major infusion of new capital… .” In addition, the plan assumes that the university would subsidize an ongoing one third of the college’s operating deficits until 2010, when the college is expected to break even.

Yet the report calls the Renewal an “unfunded vision,” and offers no promises as to the source of the funding to support it.

Still, according to Bloch, there is hope that the college’s four-year financial plan will lead to a more stable footing, a place from which, instead of continuously sliding backward, the college will finally be able to keep building.

Lawry is optimistic that his plan is a viable one for Antioch.

“These cuts are about repositioning to secure our future, ” he said. “There’s every reason to be confident in the college’s future and its stability.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com