June 21, 2007

Shock, sadness, betrayal: responses from Antioch faculty

By Diane Chiddister

This week, Antioch College faculty members approved a statement that says that they may take legal action in response to the Antioch University Board of Trustees’ decision last week to close the 154-year old college in July 2008. (See faculty statement on page 4).

Last week the board announced the college’s upcoming closing due to financial problems and dwindling enrollment. It also stated its hope to reopen the college in 2012. However, almost all college faculty will lose their jobs when the college closes in 2008.

The faculty statement questions whether the board exercised due digilence in pursuing all available options in keeping the college open; whether the board is guilty of breach of promise in not supporting the college through the board-mandated Renewal Plan for five years, and whether, in the face of the college’s deep financial need, the board was negligent in overextending its borrowing capacity on other projects, including the new Antioch University McGregor building on the western edge of town.

The statement was written by a subcommittee following a faculty meeting last Thursday, during which most faculty members supported taking the action. It will be read by retired faculty member Dimi Reber at this week’s Antioch College alumni reunion.

The closing of Antioch College is relevant to all of higher education, partly because it involves a university taking away the jobs of tenured faculty, according to Reber.

“This is an issue that has national reverberations,” she said.

Didn’t see it coming
The faculty statement follows a week during which faculty members first felt shock, then sadness, then anger at the board’s announcement, according to six faculty members interviewed by the News last week.

All of the faculty members interviewed said they were blindsided by the news, delivered by Antioch College President Steven Lawry on June 12, that the college would close.

Yes, everyone knew Antioch was struggling with low enrollment and shaky finances, the faculty said, but the college had struggled financially for decades. After enrollment took a steep drop two years ago, the numbers were beginning to climb again. And faculty members believed they had been assured by the board two years ago that they had five years to turn the enrollment numbers around.

If faced with such a crisis, the trustees should have communicated with college faculty and staff, and they never did so, according to faculty member Chris Hill. Normally, Adcil, the advisory body of faculty, staff and students that traditionally has been deeply involved in the college’s governance, would have seen a copy of the university’s budget, but this year the trustees never showed the budget to Adcil.

At Adcil’s last meeting this year, Antioch College President Steve Lawry told the group that the university board of trustees was considering a plan to merge some functions of Antioch College with those of Antioch University McGregor, Hill said. However, he did not communicate the possibility that the college might close altogether.

The announcement last Tuesday, in which college faculty and staff were told of the plan at the same time a press release was submitted to the media, seemed orchestrated to make it impossible for the college to consider any other option than closing, according to faculty member Louise Smith, who said that once the national media announced the closing, the college couldn’t attract new students.

“It seemed both deliberate and swift on the part of the board,” she said. “I question how seriously other options were considered.”

Longtime faculty member Bob Devine, who is also a former Antioch College president, also questioned whether the college pursued all other options before taking the drastic step of deciding to close the college. Facing bankruptcy several decades ago, the college requested wage concessions and got them from faculty and staff, he said, but this board never made that request. There also seemed no evidence that major donors had been contacted to cover a funding gap, and perhaps give the college more time to complete its turnaround.

Faced with a similar financial crisis several decades ago, former University Chancellor Al Guskin chose to close the university’s law school rather than the college, but there’s no evidence that this board considered the option of closing another financially-ailing university campus, such as Antioch University Los Angeles, instead of the college, according to Devine.

“As a good leader, Guskin chose to save the college,” he said. “Antioch has a 154-year legacy. It’s a momentous event to close it. It affects higher education generally as well as Yellow Springs.”

Good soldiers
After the initial shock and sadness, some faculty members felt not only anger but a sense of betrayal. Three years ago the trustees mandated that the faculty quickly and thoroughly revamp the college’s curriculum to create new multidisciplinary courses, with the hope of increasing enrollment. That effort, called the Renewal Plan, was initially unpopular with faculty, at least partly because the college’s curriculum, always the domain of faculty, was being mandated by the trustees.

But faculty, understanding that the Renewal Plan was an effort to increase enrollment, ultimately went along.

“We were good soldiers,” Devine said.

The effort required countless hours of extra work as faculty members rethought and redesigned their courses to create totally new “learning communities.” The Renewal Plan took over their lives, according to faculty member Denny Eagleson, but faculty members dove in and did what had to be done. And they did it quickly. While the trustees had initially given faculty two years to redesign the curriculum, they ended up doing so in only one.

“It was an enormous amount of creative energy,” Eagleson said. “We were delivering the best curriculum we could with dwindling resources. We did it because we care about the place and the students.”

The Renewal Plan’s start, in fall 2005, was a rocky one, and student enrollment plunged. That year’s entering class of only about 65 students lost even more students, since many hadn’t known, when they signed up for Antioch, that the curriculum had changed.

But gradually things began working, according to Eagleson, who became an early advocate of the multidisciplinary approach after visiting Evergreen College, which pioneered the curriculum. In her own course, “American Identities,” she collaborated with literature professor Jean Gregorek and anthropologist Beverly Rodgers in a course which examined the intersection of African-American, Native American and Appalachian cultures.

In the program’s second year, the college attracted almost double the enrollment of the year before. And the new courses seemed to be working. Many faculty members became energized by the collaborative efforts with their colleagues, according to Eagleson, and many first-year students thrived with courses more intensely focused on them.

“It was a joy to see it working,” she said. “It was exciting and creative, what we did with it.”

The downside of the Renewal Plan involved students having fewer choices with their courses, and some left for that reason, according to faculty member Chris Smith, who taught psychology at the college for four years. And the program posed problems for upper level students, who sometimes felt stranded without teachers when the faculty members they had become close to instead had to devote their time to the learning communities, which focused on lower-level students.

The decision to close the college seemed linked to projected enrollment figures for the fall 2007, which, at 110, fell short of projections. But the new curriculum seemed to be stirring interest among future students, according to math professor Eli Nettles, who said last week that in her talks with rising high school seniors across the country, students expressed enthusiasm about coming to Antioch.

Trustees had promised that faculty had until 2010 to meet projected enrollment figures, according to the faculty members, and said they understood there would be an initial drop in enrollment.

However, “they pulled the plug,” after two years instead, according to Devine, who said that the trustees should take responsibility for having created the situation which led to the college’s demise.

The trustees had also promised to do their part in helping the Renewal Plan succeed, by raising $22 million for the renovation of the campus’s physical facilities. While the school’s science building benefitted from an extensive renovation, none of the other planned renovations materialized.

“I don’t think the board had the will or the vision or the guts to see us through,” Eagleson said. “I’m deeply disappointed.”

A culture war?
When the college closes in 2008, almost all faculty will lose their jobs, and the trustees are making no provisions to retain any faculty for the college’s possible reopening. The action seems an attempt by the board to get rid of all tenured faculty members, who are not only expensive but powerful and opinionated, according to Hill, who said that while Antioch University McGregor has offered to help Antioch College students complete their degrees, McGregor is not offering any jobs to college faculty.

“I think they want to get rid of tenure,” Hill said. “I think they want to get rid of us.”

Other Antioch University campuses do not offer tenure to faculty members, and it seems reasonable to assume that, if the college does reopen, it won’t either, according to Louise Smith. That change could lead to a lowering of academic standards, since tenure is the standard at liberal arts colleges.

“You can’t attract the kinds of minds you want if you don’t give tenure,” she said. “The best minds will go elsewhere.”

Antioch faculty are famously opinionated and used to playing a significant role in college governance. In contrast, even full-time faculty members at McGregor have little say in how the institution is run, and many fear for their jobs if they openly disagree with McGregor’s administration, according to Hill. While running a school with disempowered faculty may be easier, doing so makes for a less vibrant, intellectually stimulating environment, she believes.

Students, who have traditionally also played a large role in self-governance at Antioch but who have no role at McGregor, learn huge lessons from having that responsibility, Hill believes.

“It may be cumbersome, but it’s a participatory democracy, and that’s part of the education at Antioch,” she said.

In the past few years, some administrators, and especially Lawry, have criticized the culture of Antioch College students, who have been portrayed as lacking respect for authority and also engaging in destructive discourse with each other. Lawry and others seem to view the faculty as “enablers” of what is perceived as students’ destructive behavior, Hill said.

It’s true that the students’ culture became “funky” and that there was little accountability in recent years, according to Eagleson, who cited the college’s six presidents since 1991 and 12 deans of faculty as indicative of a lack of stable leadership that helped undermine college culture.

Lawry, while sometimes provoking strong negative responses from students, also held them to a higher level of discourse, and this demand challenged students in a positive way, she believes.

“The past two years we’ve had very strong and responsible student leadership,” she said.

Some of the faculty said they fear that the university administrators’ statements about the “new millenium” student that they hope to attract when the college reopens indicates that the trustees want a different sort of Antioch College student, one who is more mainstream and perhaps less questioning and opinionated.

But the college’s current students are very bright, interesting and delightful to work with, according to Chris Smith, who said that working at Antioch was always her “dream,” and that even in the turmoil of the last few years, that dream largely came true.

“I had wonderful students,” she said.

These students are also dedicated to Antioch College, and came here because of the college’s historical values. In fact, told recently about the college’s closing, most students said that they plan to return to campus next year anyway, according to Smith.

“That speaks volumes,” Hill said. “Where will these students go without Antioch?”

What’s next?
Most of the faculty members interviewed expressed skepticism about the possibility that, if the college reopens, it will still hold the values and traditions of the last 154 years.

“I worry about its integrity,” said Hill.

One who disagrees is current Dean of Faculty Andrzej Bloch, who as head of Antioch Education Abroad is expected to be able to keep his job. Since the college has such strongly defined values, it may attract faculty with like values when it reopens, he believes.

But others wonder how the college can possibly be “reborn” with an entirely new set of faculty and students.

“I don’t think it’s credible, and I feel alarmed about that and disheartened,” Eagleson said. “If the trustees didn’t have the will to do this with us on the ground who loved the place, how can they do it without us?”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com