Antioch College Closing?

Antioch College staff anticipated layoffs, but grieve anyway

By Lauren Heaton

Few of the 21 Antioch College employees who were laid off last week due to budgetary constraints were surprised about the decision. But many find it difficult to leave a place whose mission to prepare young people to change the world they believe in wholeheartedly.

faculty contracts to behonored through 2007–08 The 21 layoffs that Antioch College instituted last week as a result of its pending closure did not affect faculty positions. Though the college was considering executing its policy of giving non-tenured faculty six months notice, according to college assistant professor Colette Palamar, last week the college administrative council (AdCil) formally requested that all faculty be retained for the 2007–08 school year in order to support those students who will be returning to the college next year. On Thursday, College President Steve Lawry and Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock, agreed to honor 12-month contracts for all tenured and non-tenured professors through the coming 10-month academic year. Though faculty will keep their jobs for another year, according to Palamar, there is no severance package beyond the fulfillment of their contracts.

In spite of Antioch University’s intention to close the college in July of next year, admissions counselor Valerie Blackwell-Truitt still wants to support the students she had a hand in recruiting. Archivist Nina Myatt still needs to make sure the college’s literary collections are preserved. Coretta Scott King Center employee Ona Harshaw is still vested in helping the young center begin its mission to educate about social justice and diversity. They and others like them may no longer work for the college, but as part of the Yellow Springs community, they are still and may always be bound to Antioch.

Last week’s layoffs, which did not affect faculty (see sidebar page 6), constituted the second wave of layoffs following the 22 employees who were let go in February, which included long-time Dean of Students Jimmy Williams and College Vice-President Rick Jurasek. Employees who were let go last week included those from admissions, the physical plant, the library, academic support, student services, institutional advancement, dining services, the Coretta Scott King Center and the gym.

Thirteen were fulltime administrative staff who were let go on Friday, June 29, with a severance package that was “commensurate with the time they served at the college,” according to public relations director Lynda Sirk. Harshaw, an administrative staff member who had been with the college three years, received one month’s pay and two months of health insurance coverage.

Eight of the employees were union staff, who were notified last week of their dismissal, effective Aug. 7. According to the college’s contract with United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, employees with one to three years of service receive two to three weeks severance pay. Those who have been with the college for three to 10 years receive 12 weeks of pay, 10 to 20 years of service equals 18 weeks of pay, and over 20 years of service equals a week of pay for each year of service.

The staff transitions
Nina Myatt, a 1953 Antioch graduate, first began working at the Antioch College Library part-time in 1969 and soon after joined Jane Cape in the Antioch archives on the second floor of the library. After Cape died in 1975, Myatt cared for the archives alone while her husband taught engineering and then general science at the college.

In her time at the college Myatt nursed along the papers of Horace Mann, Antioch’s first president, and helped catalogue the papers of Arthur Morgan, who began the co-op program during his presidency in the 1920s.

Myatt left the college on Friday as the curator and acquisitions assistant, not terribly surprised that her position was cut, but very worried that without adequate staffing, the college library will no longer be able to serve the students and researchers from this community and other communities who need to use its collection of over 300,000 books and 1,500 periodicals.

“It’s pretty distressing, and I’m especially concerned about our valuable special collections which we should suggest new homes for,” she said. “I don’t think the university has any idea of their value or has an interest in maintaining the Horace Mann and the Morgan papers. That’s my concern now.”

Working for Antioch College felt like home for local resident Roberta Perry, whose family has worked for the college since the 1950s, when her mother-in-law, Betty Perry, worked at the Antioch Inn and her father-in-law, Kingsley Perry, worked at the physical plant. Her sisters-in-law Patricia and Genevieve Perry were the second generation to work there in the 1960s, and most recently her son, Brandon Frye, worked in the cafeteria while taking classes in preparation for enrolling at the college.

Roberta Perry worked for six years in admissions and then spent nearly a year in the dean of students’ office, where she said she truly felt a sense of purpose in helping the students navigate their way through school and doing her best to be a supportive listener and a caring friend, she said.

“It’s not about me, it’s not about the trustees, it’s about the students, and when they come back to campus they will look for a familiar face they can trust to take care of them,” she said.

Blackwell-Truitt felt a similar connection to the students she met during the 11 years she worked for Antioch. Beginning in 1992, she worked in the college’s financial aid office, and then spent a year in Antioch University McGregor’s financial aid office in 1997. She worked for another college until 2002, when the Antioch values of community, diversity, and learning through the sharing of differing view points drew her back to the college’s admissions office.

“Antioch students are phenomenal, they are very self-motivated, very independent, and very caring about each other and about the health of the college,” she said. “But the thing I love about our students is that they are not afraid to state their positions and agree to disagree. They give each other a voice, and that’s the cooperative experience.”

While Blackwell-Truitt will busy herself this summer with teaching dance, taking emergency medical training courses, and planning a wedding for her son, she still grieves the loss of the college like the loss of a “dear member of my family,” and she intends to visit the students who return to campus next year to make sure they’re doing alright, she said.

When Harshaw left her job as the -coordinator of the Bonner Scholar program at the Coretta Scott King Center on Friday, she too knew that she cared too much about the center to leave it completely. Though the college had not been a stable place of employment in the three years she was there, she believed that sustaining its connection to the Yellow Springs community she grew up in was vitally important for both the village and the students who attended Antioch.

Antioch College students worked in the village when she was young as naturalists in Glen Helen, Girls Scout leaders, student teachers, at the theater, and other places in town. And as the leader of the Bonner service program, she worked hard to place college students in nearly every service organization in the community, including the schools, Friends Care Community, Home, Inc., the Riding Centre, and the Children’s Center.

Harshaw went through the stages of grief that included anger at the college for its lackluster leadership. But she has come through that stage with clarity of purpose to move forward in her professional life and to help the college and the center to pick up as many pieces as possible and keep going, she said.

Hope for the college’s future
Though they felt the weight of the college’s impending closure, many of the employees the News spoke with were still committed to the college and still carried hope that it would pull through.

Harshaw left the college believing in the alumni’s efforts to keep the college open. Their monumental goal of raising $40 million to put the college back on its feet has a chance of succeeding, and she plans to do all she can to help, she said. And as she isn’t working full-time again yet, she will have even more time to devote to that cause.

“There’s always a chance it won’t happen, but this is the only way it could. I really feel this is where it had to go for people to say, ‘okay, I’ll pick up the gauntlet,’” she said. “It’s going to be this Titanic struggle, but let’s just see if we can do it!”

Perry feels that the few employees who are left to staff each office at the college will be doing the work that a whole office used to do, and she is ready to support them as they usher the last class of students through this year.

Helen Pelzl, whose family is from Yellow Springs, worked in admissions at the college for just a year before she was discharged. As an unemployed single mother, she is going through the steps to getting another job and has support from friends and family. But Pelzl had developed a love for the college and a loyalty to its mission that encourage her to believe that the college may still be resurrected four years from now, as the university has said.

“I’m really optimistic and hopeful for a great undergraduate program that’s supported by the university, and I would love to be involved in creating it,” she said.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com