Antioch College Closing?

College president resigns, cites poor governance

By Lauren Heaton

If there is one thing that stood out in Antioch College President Steve Lawry’s announcement last week that he will resign in December, it was his conviction that the current Antioch University system of governance has prevented the college from thriving. A residential college without its own empowered board of trustees will never be able to lead a successful education program and convince donors their investment will yield results, Lawry said during an interview on Friday, July 27.

“The relationship between the college and the university is a zero sum gain because there’s not enough money to go around,” he said. “All the campuses would benefit if they had their own board of trustees that could focus in a very clear way on the particular needs of those colleges. All other questions are secondary to the question of governance.”

In the time before his resignation takes effect on Dec. 30, 2007, Lawry plans to help the college toward a goal of uniting with McGregor under a common board of trustees, distinct from the university board of trustees, which currently oversees the operations of all six of its campuses. By the News press time, Antioch University spokesperson Mary Lou LaPierre had not responded to the question of who will take Lawry’s place.

Lawry knew when he came to Antioch from the Ford Foundation in January 2006 that the college was in financial straights. But the strong interdisciplinary curriculum and dedicated faculty were an indication that the college had a future, he said, and he thought that by focusing on admissions and development, the college could recover.

The college did yield fundraising results, but by June 2007, the college had not raised enough money to guarantee operating expenses for the coming year and therefore risked defaulting on its contractual obligations to the faculty, meaning a one year notice of release, Lawry said.

The decision to close was based on “sound financial analysis,” according to Lawry. Though he said he “could have imagined another scenario in which the board could have asked alumni and the Yellow Springs community to keep it going,” he respects the board’s decision to close because it meant the college could honor its legal obligations.

Lawry did not anticipate the emotional response of devastating loss from the Antioch and Yellow Springs community at the announcement of the closure. And he accepted responsibility for that situation, saying it was a “failure on my part” to prepare the community for the news of the closure that was delivered on June 12.

But he believes the Antioch College and Yellow Springs communities need to accept that the trustees’ decision to close is final.

“People need to accept the closure is happening next year,” Lawry said. “The finances have been further reduced by virtue of the announcement, and there are lots of questions behind the ability of alumni to raise the kind of money needed to keep the college open.”

Demise tied to university
While he accepts that the college was perhaps too poor to save by the time he arrived, Lawry didn’t mince words when assigning blame at the Antioch community meeting last Thursday to a faulty system of university governance. He criticized the university structure, in which the board of trustees is too far removed from Yellow Springs to understand the complexities of the college’s operation or to target the appropriate stakeholders for fundraising.

Lawry said during the interview on Friday that he saw from the beginning that creating a separate board of trustees for the college and McGregor would be essential for the well-being of university operations in Yellow Springs, but he was not able to convince university leaders of the need to reform the current system early enough.

“The college’s problems were seen as endemic to the college and not to a structure that didn’t generate a lot of philanthropy,” he said. “The college has always been seen as the weak link in an otherwise sound structure. But this governance structure wasn’t built to serve the needs of a residential liberal arts college.”

During Thursday’s meeting Lawry also asserted that splitting what is now Antioch University McGregor from the college 19 years ago and then building a McGregor campus separate from the college were two big mistakes.

Though McGregor President Barbara Gellman-Danley has said that McGregor serves a student body from the “professional” world and therefore needed a campus that reflected that business culture, Lawry feels both campuses lose by separating because they won’t share resources and they won’t benefit from the diversity of each other’s company, according to notes taken by Antioch University Associate Professor Dennie Eagleson. If the college culture is disrespectful and intolerant of McGregor’s students, then that is an issue that should be vigorously addressed by the students, the faculty, the college and the university as a whole.

“But using the college culture as a reason for building another campus elsewhere is insufficient,” Lawry said on Friday. “[The new McGregor building] was built to divide the community, by its very nature it was divisive,” he said on Thursday, according to Eagleson’s notes.

Solutions for a stronger Antioch
In order to begin to build the college again from this point in its history, Lawry affirms that the alumni and the local community “need to get actively involved in figuring out how to open the college in 2012 as a financially sound institution...under the authority of a board of trustees of the college.”

According to Lawry, a college board of trustees will only succeed if it is given “clear and final authority” over the college curriculum (led by faculty), the college budget, control over the college’s assets and endowment, and the ability to hire and fire its chief executive officer (the college president). This authority must also be granted in order to convince the right leaders to give their time, leadership and money as members of a new college board that has the power to execute positive change, he said.

Restructuring would also involve a merger of some type between the college and McGregor. Not only would sharing resources between the campuses save money, but intermingling people of diverse backgrounds on both campuses would be a boon to the liberal arts philosophy, where students come to be challenged by perspectives that are unlike their own, Lawry said.

“In due course, it is in the interest of the university’s educational mission and its financial health that the college and McGregor merge,” he said. “Hundreds of colleges and universities around the country offer both residential undergraduate programs and masters and graduate degrees for adult students, and they’re unified.”

The university is currently in the process of analyzing some of Lawry’s advice through a committee of inquiry chaired by Dan Fallon, president of the university board of trustees.

Nancy Crow, president of the Antioch College Alumni Association and a representative to the university board of trustees, is part of the committee, which is scheduled to meet for the first time this month. The alumni association is also forming an independent governance committee to review the university structure and make a recommendation to the board of trustees, Crow said.

The alumni association is still committed to the resolution that was passed during alumni reunion in June to establish its own board and keep the college open beyond the closure date set the by trustees, Crow said, adding that the funds raised to meet that goal had reached $625,000 in cash and pledges in just over a month. The alumni have stated they intend to raise $40 million in the next year.

But Crow maintained that the alumni’s wish to establish a new college board of trustees is not predicated exclusively on the college’s maintaining an uninterrupted schedule of operation. Even if the college closes, alumni will continue to negotiate with the university on the best way of creating a more viable Antioch College, she said. Likewise, she believes the board still has a chance to reconsider the closure and hopes that the university is open to working with alumni if they manage to raise enough money to keep the college open.

“I’m hoping to get beyond the closed, open, suspension hang-up,” Crow said. “If nobody will cross the line, then no one will move forward. There has to be room to cross the line.”

The special Antioch stakeholder meeting in Cincinnati on Saturday, Aug. 25, will be the first formal meeting of the board of trustees since they voted to suspend operations at the college. Both Crow and Lawry hope that meeting, which the larger community is invited to attend, will fuel a cooperative visioning process for a successful, sustainable Antioch College.

As for Lawry’s last six months on campus, he intends to continue raising money to fund operations this fiscal year to ensure the college can fulfill the agreement the university made to cease further layoffs before the closure. He also intends to focus on helping faculty, staff and students to transition beyond the closure by providing career support, helping students who qualify to graduate and helping others transfer to other institutions.

Lawry said his 18 months at Antioch have been “interesting, rewarding and perplexing at times.” He feels that Antioch has shifted away from its original mission, and he has spent his time here trying to get it back on course.

“I think that Antioch drifted into a certain kind of insularity — intellectual and social — that became reactive to what was happening in the world and not creative about finding solutions to what was happening in the world,” he said. “That contributed to a kind of environment of despair and disappointment I found troubling. I’ve been trying to open the place up intellectually and socially and to be inviting of a real world education,” he said.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com