Antioch College students grieve loss of their "home"

By Virgil Hervey

With the planned closure of Antioch College at the end of the next school year, students are considering their options and reflecting on what the loss of the college would mean to them and their friends. In recent interviews, the words “community” and “home” kept coming up as several of them expressed their regrets over what, if Antioch closes, they would be losing.

“I have met the most important people in my life here,” Tess Lindsay, a fourth-year student, said in an e-mail.

“I have my deepest and most meaningful friendships here,” she said. “I have learned so many real life skills. I have learned to be extremely patient, have self confidence in my abilities, and I’ve gained a deep respect for my peers and teachers. I have also had so much fun. Antioch is a place I feel safe and honored to be myself.”

Fourth-year student Alexandra Kesman from Cincinnati is in town this summer for a co-op at YS Kids Playhouse.

“I am a theater major; specifically a stage manager and director. I came to Antioch over several theater conservatories like College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, and DePaul in Chicago because of the co-op program,” she wrote in a recent e-mail. “At Antioch I was able to use all of my five co-ops traveling and working for amazing professional theaters across the country. At those conservatories I would have been the assistant to graduate students and never would have been able to engage in real stage management. My resume is now miles ahead of any theater conservatory student thanks, to Antioch.”
Kesman was one of a handful of students who were present last month at the meeting during which Antioch College President Steven Lawry announced the college’s closure.

“The room was filled with sobbing staff and faculty,” she said.

In order to assist students like Lindsay and Kesman, an Office of Transition (OT), staffed by representatives from admissions, the registrar’s office, financial aid, faculty and student services, was set up to help students decide what to do about next year. Faculty member Janice Kinghorn, in a recent interview, said she and other staff take calls from students from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week on the OT cell phone.

The OT staff has been reaching out to students via telephone, letters and e-mail. They are working to help them find the best strategy for their remaining education, she said in a recent interview.

According to Kinghorn, an associate professor of economics and associate dean of faculty for the Core Program, the faculty is all coming back next year to serve the students. Virtually all next year’s fourth-year students and the vast majority of third-year students will be returning. Based on the phone calls she had received by the first week in July, Kinghorn was projecting that 50–60 first-year students would enter in the fall and that the total enrollment would be from 175 to 225 students.

Antioch Registrar Donna Evans attributed the relatively high number of first-year students to several factors: the announcement came too late for them to get into another college; their financial aid packages were already in place; and they would be able to transfer their credits when they enrolled in another college. For confidentiality reasons, Evans was not able to provide contact information for incoming first-year students so they could be interviewed for this article.

The OT is advising second-year students and those third-year students who will not have enough credits to graduate next year to enroll elsewhere if possible, she said. However, schools will only accept a limited number of transfer credits.
Most fourth-year and some third-year students still have an opportunity to obtain an Antioch degree if the college closes in 2008, Evans said. Third-year students who don’t have enough credits to graduate next May will be advised to enroll in another college to finish up requirements, then transfer those credits back to Antioch so they can get an Antioch degree, Kinghorn said. This assumes that the students have completed their co-op requirement and can transfer all necessary credits by Dec. 31, 2008. These students will walk with their classmates at graduation next April, but will not receive their degrees until they finish their credits.

For incoming students and students who have fewer than 54 academic credits and two credited co-op terms, the OT promises to work to facilitate their transfer to a suitable institution, Kinghorn said.

One student who has not called the OT, but who plans to come back, is fourth-year student Megan Pergrem. She has been in contact with her academic advisors, with whom she has a strong and trusting personal relationship.

Pergrem, who describes herself as a social activist, was in Washington, D.C., when she first learned of the closing through a flurry of text messages and phone calls from students and alumni. She was working at a co-op job at a reproductive justice organization.

“It was a long time coming, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” she said in a recent interview.

As a woman of color from a working class background, Pergrem feels that Antioch provided the type of community for her that no other school could.
“The community organization was fierce,” she said. “I will miss that.”

Third-year student Michael Durant is co-oping in Yellow Springs for the summer and taking paramedic courses at Clark State. He has been working closely with the OT and feels he has an advantage over the students who are away for the summer in that he can walk into the office anytime he feels like it, he said in a recent interview.

Durant, a native of Barbados, brought six credits with him when he enrolled in Antioch, and has taken extra credits over the past two summers. Even though he is only going into his third year, he will have enough credits to graduate next spring, he said.

He was very surprised when Bonner Program Coordinator Ona Harshaw called to tell him the bad news, and he’s angry.

“As students we are only here for four years. But how can it be legal for the administration to act this way toward faculty and staff?” he said. “I call it tyranny.”
He is, however, grateful for the school’s efforts to assist the students.

“The OT has been very, very helpful,” he said, calling it “the most useful resource on campus right now.”

Of the alumni effort to keep the school from closing he said, “I would be happy if they saved it. I am about to be an alum, too. But what were they doing while they let the college get to this state?”

According to Durant, Antioch was held in very high regard in the high school he attended in New York City. That respect was what drew him to the college. He had very high expectations, he said, and ultimately Antioch met most of them.
Third-year student Brian Utley, who is from Madison, Wis., is working at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston for the summer. He had his cell phone turned off when Lawry announced the college’s closing last month and later discovered that he had 15 text messages about the closing. He was devastated when he learned the news, he said when interviewed recently.

“This is a loss for me and for the country,” he said in a recent interview. “Antioch was the last beacon of hope.”

The school was his “home,” Utley said, and a place where every Antioch student was made to feel special.

Utley, who is heavily reliant on financial aid, will come back in the fall. He thinks it is important for him to graduate. He also holds out hope for the alumni effort.
“I want to save the school for more kids like me — low income, who couldn’t go anywhere else,” he said. “At Antioch, I was taught to challenge the system. If we don’t have a school, we can’t have all the programs I love.”

Utley’s friend, third-year student Will Nichols, lives in Houston. He heard the news from Utley.

“It felt like we’d been dumped in the grease,” he said.

Nichols is up in the air about whether to return next year. He finds the alumni effort both heartening and upsetting. He would just like some finality, he said, when interviewed recently. He has applied to the Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts in New York City, and would like to know for sure what to do if he is accepted.

Kai Qualben, another third-year student, stayed in Yellow Springs to co-op in the Village office this summer. He was at work when someone from the village broke the news.

“I was surprised,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it at all.”

Qualben will try to graduate from Antioch next spring, he said.

According to Qualben, there were problems with Antioch degrees for his class right from the start, when the school surprised them with the new learning communities. They were required to take courses unrelated to their interests, making it hard to get enough credits in their major. However, in time, the college administration adjusted the system to solve the problem, he said.

Fourth-year student Lindsay had a mixed reaction to the news when she receved it in Santa Fe, N.M., in a text message. She knew that she would be able to graduate with her class in April, but worried about her fellow students and friends on the staff and faculty.

“I really thought this would happen way past my time,” she wrote in a recent e-mail. “I was also really mad because I felt defeated. My entire time at Antioch I feel like I have been fighting to save it. For someone to just decide it was over without discussing it with alumni, faculty, or students, or trying out the merger made me very angry.”

The university board of trustees has placed an extra burden on the faculty and staff, she said, in that with the recent cuts and consolidation there will be only one or two people in some of the departments and offices.

Fourth-year student Kesman, who was a reunion host for alumni weekend in June, said she was impressed how, instead of reminiscing, the alumni spent their time discussing how they can save the college.

“Hopefully I’m not a part of the last graduating class at Antioch,” Kesman said.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com