First in a two-part series—
McGregor opens Campus West

Several Antioch University McGregor students took a break on Saturday afternoon from their Weekend College classes in McGregor’s new facility, known as Campus West. The 94,000-square-foot building, located on the corner of Dayton and East Enon roads, has 23 classrooms and the capacity to seat 432 students. It was occupied at the beginning of September and will serve as the anchor for the Yellow Springs Center for Business and Education.

By Diane Chiddister

If the complexity of local feelings about the new Antioch McGregor Campus West could be distilled into one sentence, it might be this: the new building on the western edge of town means different things to different people.

To McGregor President Barbara Gelman-Danley, the building, which opened for classes two weeks ago, finally allows the school to meet the unique needs of its adult students in a way that she believes Antioch College, where McGregor was housed until last month, never could. Campus West also, to Gelman-Danley, reflects the beauty and architecture of the famed intellectual community Chautauqua in upstate New York, a place she has admired since childhood and to which she aspires as a model for McGregor.

To many McGregor faculty and students, the new Campus West is an exciting new beginning that not only meets their needs but also provides expanded opportunities in a much cleaner and newer environment than the often funky college facilities. Other faculty and students see the new building as an overlarge facility that undermines McGregor’s once intimate class settings and its connection to Antioch College.

And while many villagers see the new building as a source of local pride and a successful example of town-gown collaboration, others feel it does not reflect Yellow Springs values of walkability, environmental sustainability and community.

Traditional and high tech
Growing up in upstate New York, Gelman-Danley sometimes visited her aunt and uncle in the famed intellectual gated community of Chautuaqua, which gained prominence as a site for intellectual discourse. When the original design for Campus West fell through several years ago, Gelman-Danley returned to her own original inspiration for the new campus, Chautauqua’s traditional red brick buildings with their stately white pillars. Toward that end, she sent the building’s construction firm to visit Chautauqua, in order to see for themselves the design she sought.

“I wanted the building to visually reflect that McGregor is part of this historical tradition” of intellectual inquiry, Gelman-Danley said in a recent interview.

But while she wanted McGregor’s external look to be traditional, Gelman-Danley sought nothing but the newest technology for the inside, and she gets excited talking about the technological bells and whistles which she believes will make life easier for McGregor’s students and faculty. All classrooms are equipped with easy-to-use Power Point and DVD capabilities, plus mounted projectors, for instance.

Especially, Gelman-Danley said, she is excited about the new building’s reading room, its 247-seat auditorium and its multipurpose room, which can be used for large group meetings. She also likes the building’s bold wall colors, which were designed by the architectural firm of LJB.

The new building also reflects the scope of Gelman-Danley’s ambitions for the McGregor school. The building is big — about 94,000 square feet of space, with 23 classrooms and breakout rooms, two elevators and a total classroom seating capacity of 432. The building also includes 44 computor lab stations and a parking lot with 302 spaces, an exercise room, a student lounge with flat screen television, a video conference room and a “classroom of the future,” teaching technology center.

While the building is large, the McGregor staff is not. Currently, the school employs about 15 faculty members full-time, along with about 30 staff and administrators. Many of the offices are currently empty, and that allows room to grow, according to Gelman-Danley.

The school has about 700 students, about one fourth of those are long distance learners who come to campus infrequently. The two largest on-campus programs, the Weekend College, and education programs, use the building at different times. About 230 Weekend College undergradate and graduate management students use the building on Saturdays, and about 300 education students use Campus West during weeknight evening hours. The 23 classrooms are not used during most weekday hours.

In an interview shortly after the building opened in September, Gelman-Danley emphasized that she hopes the Yellow Springs community considers Campus West avaiilable for use. While McGregor will rent out building space to businesses, she plans to allow local groups to use the space for free the first year, and will probably continue to not charge local non-profit groups after that.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re a Yellow Springs facility,” she said. “We want people here.”

An open house for the community will be held at some point, according to Gelman-Danley.

Response from teachers, students
In interviews on the first day of classes at the Weekend College, students expressed mixed responses to the new building, with the newer students generally more open to the change, and excited about the new building.

“The people I’m around are happy with it,” said second-year student Dawn Sweeney of Fairborn, who said students seemed excited by the technology and the building design.

“Newer is better,” said third-year student Kevin Smith, who also appreciates that he no longer has to walk outside to change classes, which had proved challenging in bad weather.

Those who oppose the new building worry that McGregor will leave behind its connection to Antioch College, according to second-year student Stephanie Elsass, who said she was “trying to look at it with positive eyes,” although her friends don’t like the new building. Many students feel resentful that they weren’t asked if they wanted a new facility, she said.

Fourth-year student Maura Blanford said she was disappointed by the lack of amenities for those who sought community spaces outside the building.

“I can’t find a picnic table or a tree,” she said. “The ambience is gone. There’s not an oak tree to be found.”

You can’t expect ambience in a new building, according to longtime adjunct faculty member Paul Lucas, but the McGregor students and faculty will create their own ambience as time passes.

“You get in and decorate and it takes on a personality,” said Lucas, who added that, overall, “I think it’s a great facility.”

While Campus West definitely has a more corporate look than the Antioch campus, that look fits well with McGregor students, many of whom come from the business world, Lucas said.

Another adjunct faculty, Joe Lawrence, said he had been excited in his first class to experience his classroom’s technological capabilities, and his ability to do things he’d never done before, which he believed enhanced his students’ learning.

But the first day of class didn’t go well for longtime adjuncts Kelly Callahan and Sue Van Allen, both of whom saw the new building as an unwelcome step away from Antioch College traditions. For Callahan, who teaches human development, even the smallest classroom was too big for her classes, and the large room and more formal class setting worked against the intimacy with students which she felt had previously been a strength of McGregor.

Longtime faculty member Jim Malarkey said that faculty members need to work on staying connected to each other, since the building is so large that faculty can go a week without seeing those in other departments, which tend to be spread out from each other. McGregor also needs to address the question of whether it will rent out classrooms during the week, since the rooms are currently consuming energy while not being used during weekdays.

His main concern, Malarkey said, is that the move not reflect a shift away from the Antioch College mission of Horace Mann.

“People need to remember there’s a legacy here, there’s a mission here,” he said. “Will that mission begin to fade?”

Change in design
The new McGregor building is the result of a town/gown collaboration between McGregor, Community Resources and the Yellow Springs Village Council.

Some local leaders became concerned in August 2003, when Gelman-Danley stated that McGregor might move out of Yellow Springs due to its need for bigger and better facilities. The announcement dovetailed with a new effort to open a business park, now called the Center for Business and Education, on the western edge of town. Community Resources purchased for the park 46 acres of land formerly owned by Vernay Laboratories with a $300,000 loan from the Village’s economic development fund and $100,000 from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation. In the summer of 2004, the Antioch University Board of Trustees approved the plan to build a new McGregor building as the anchor of the CBE after an Antioch University trustees meeting in Seattle attended by local leaders who lobbied the trustees to approve the move.

In 2005 Community Resources introduced the design for the McGregor building, which was a state-of-the-art green building which would meet LEED building requirements. However, that design plan fell through when the school did not win a federal grant for about $1 million, according to former Antioch University CFO Glenn Watts, who oversaw the building project.

When the grant fell through, the school moved to a traditional and less expensive design, according to Gelman-Danley. However, according to Watts, the building includes many energy-saving features, including high-efficiency fluorescent lighting, high-efficiency boilers and water heater, and recycled materials in the carpeting and floor tile.

The new building cost about $14 million, with $12 million provided by a performance bond from the Ohio Higher Education Facilities Commission, and $2 million from donations. Gelman-Danley hopes to raise about $1 million more to finish technological upgrades and furnishings, she said, but she plans to wait awhile so as not to compete with the current fund-raising effort by Antioch College alumni.

When the Antioch University Board of Trustees announced the closing of Antioch College next year due to financial exigency, some pointed a finger at the McGregor building as a factor in the university’s inability to borrow more to save the college, since it is already saddled with substantial debt.

However, the McGregor building project was never linked to the college finances and is not funded by the university. Rather, the bond was awarded in December 2005 based on McGregor’s past performance.

The proposal letter to the Ohio Education Facility Commission requesting the bond cited McGregor’s growth as a main factor in the school’s request. “The existing facilities are old and inadequate and will not accommodate McGregor’s growth, which has exceeded 10 percent annually in recent years,” according to former Antioch University Chief Financial Officer Don Tecklenburg.

While McGregor did experience 10 percent growth in 2002, enrollment figures from the years 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 indicate that the school did not experience overall growth during those years, and that enrollment has hovered around 700, wth some years more and some less. The school is doing well now, according to Gelman-Danley, especially in its education program, in which enrollment this fall exceeded expections by about 20 students. A preliminary enrollment count for fall 2007 counts 678 students.

To repay the debt on the bond, McGregor will pay about $600,000 a year for the next two years beginning in February 2008, and then between $800,000 and $850,000 yearly through 2016, according to figures provided by Watts. The debt payments will contine at an increased rate until 2028. The school will repay this debt through expanded enrollment along with building rentals and contracts for special projects, according to Gelman-Danley.

Overall, Gelman-Danley feels optimistic that Campus West is a new and exciting beginning for the McGregor School. The school met its enrollment projections this fall, which was especially gratifying given all the negative and sometimes confusing media coverage regarding the potential closing of Antioch College, she said.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

*The writer is a former adjunct faculty member of McGregor.