June 14, 2007

By Diane Chiddister

Antioch College, started in 1853 as an innovative experiment in higher education, will close in a year with the intention of re-opening several years later, according to a statement from Antioch University Vice Chancellor Mary Lou LaPierre released on Tuesday.

Antioch faculty, staff and students were given the news Tuesday at an afternoon Antioch community meeting at Kelly Hall on the Antioch campus by College President Steve Lawry. The meeting was closed to the press.

The college will officially suspend operations on July 1, 2008, according to the press release, which states that the college is projected to reopen four years later, in 2012, with a “state-of-the-art” campus.

While Antioch College has struggled financially off and on since its inception, the last decade has been especially difficult, and the last few years even harder. After a high enrollment of about 2,000 in the early 1970s, the college struggled with dropping enrollment throughout the 1990s, and for the past several years sometimes had less than 500 students. Two years ago, after a sudden redesign of the curriculum, the entering class was comprised of about 60 students.

But Antioch’s fortunes seemed to be changing for the better, according to Associate Dean of Faculty Eli Nettles, who said that faculty members were stunned by Tuesday’s announcement.

“Although it’s always been a struggle, no one thought it would come to this,” she said.

The decision to close the college, at least for several years, was made last weekend during a meeting of the Antioch University Board of Trustees, according to LaPierre and Antioch College Director of Public Relations Lynda Sirk on Tuesday afternoon. Lawry was unavailable for comment.

“There isn’t the financial wherewithal to continue the situation as it is now,” Sirk said. “The enrollment and the endowment are not enough collectively to sustain the college on a year to year basis.”

Sirk said she did not have figures as to the extent of the college’s debt.

Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock will establish a design and development commission to determine “the long-term future of the college with the intention of opening a re-developed undergraduate campus,” according to the press release, which also stated that the design team “will be appointed to design a new undergraduate curriculum reflecting the college’s strong traditions and values while meeting the needs of today’s students.”

Asked what those needs are, LaPierre stated that today’s students care especially about facilities, and Antioch College “does not have state of the art facilities.”

“Students today have vibrant student unions, high technology and resident halls that are more like hotels,” she said. “We don’t have any of that.”

All current college buildings “will be maintained,” after the campus closes next year, according to LaPierre, who said that college officials “are not far enough along in the process” to determine if current facilities will eventually be torn down.

LaPierre and Sirk said that plans for the redesign are not far enough along to determine how the college’s curriculum would change.

The college’s first priority now, according to LaPierre, is to meet the needs of its current students. Antioch students will be offered degree completion opportunities at Antioch University McGregor for the 2008–2009 academic year, according to the press release, and students who have completed their first two years will be offered “reasonable opportunities” to complete their degrees at the university’s other degree completion programs, at Seattle, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

The college has accepted about 100 new students for next year, who will be notified of the upcoming suspension, Sirk said.

Students will not go on co-op next year so that they can be provided as many opportunities as possible to finish degree requirements, LaPierre said.

According to LaPierre, faculty members will lose their jobs when the college closes in 2008.

That loss to the college will be huge, retired Antioch College faculty member Al Denman said in an interview Tuesday evening.

“Many faculty members have gambled their professional lives on the continued viability of the college,” he said. “They threw themselves courageously into keeping the college running while trying to invent a new curriculum that was thrust upon them by the trustees.”

Nettles was one of many faculty members who could have worked somewhere else for higher pay but chose Antioch instead. “I believe in Antioch,” she said.

Many Antioch faculty members are angry, according to Nettles.

“They feel we’ve taken on a project we weren’t sold on but we made it work,” she said, referring to the mandate by the university trustees two years ago that faculty members completely overhaul, in a short time, their curriculum to fit an interdisciplinary, learning community model.

The irony, according to Nettles, is that the new curriculum, after a rocky start, is now working well and starting to attract more students. While the number of new students dropped substantially two years ago, after the introduction of the college’s new curriculum, student numbers had recently seemed to be bouncing back, according to Nettles, who said that in talking to prospective students, she found great enthusiasm for the new Antioch model.

A longtime faculty member who was head of the college’s religion department, Denman traced Antioch’s most recent financial problems back to student strikes in the early 1970s, when a quarter of the faculty quit and the same percentage of students left campus. In 1979, the college suffered through several months of insolvency, during which faculty members did not get paid.

“It’s been down, down, down ever since,” he said.

While he also felt shocked by the decision to close the college, he could see the necessity of doing so.

“It’s about as responsible a decision as can be made now. It was clear we were headed for bankruptcy,” he said.

Denman said that he felt hopeful that the college could, perhaps, reinvent itself and re-open in a stronger position. However, he said, to do so the college’s governance must change, and it must once again become an independent college rather than under the rule of the larger university, in which the college’s needs become secondary to those of the other university centers. Currently, Antioch University has five nonresidential campuses across the country.

The college must also have stable and substantial funding before it opens again, he said.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com