Dear Antiochians:

I am a 1983 graduate of Antioch College–the last class to receive a B.F.A. from a dying fine arts program–even then one of the best in its league. I attended the college from 1979-1983 and lived in Yellow Springs until 1992. It is strange, because in the spring of 1979, after I applied and was accepted; the hometown newspaper in Kent, OH reported that Antioch was not able to pay its faculty and may be closing its doors. It was the big joke at our commencement that Antioch actually made it to 1983, for our class to graduate. One of the speakers read letters from the archives in 1850’s about the financial struggles and that they may be forced to close the doors. Financial woes are in the DNA of Antioch’s institutional structure.

I have always seen Antioch as a Phoenix that rises from its own destructive tendencies. However, there has been a collective memory that keeps the place afloat, along with a freshness from all the comings and goings of the students and the stability of a faculty/staff who understood the place and held it together for each generation. I wonder is this base eroding? The historic/global and technical challenges loom larger than they did 20+ years ago when I attended. The baby boomers were dwindling, even then, and enrollment was down.

We are losing a sense of place–a scripted and generic world is replacing what is most unique in us as a country. Antioch has always been a champion of the terminally unique, for better and for worse, but it always managed to survive.

I do not see any great visionary leaders on the horizon. I wonder if Steve Lawry really gets the place? Obviously the doors are closing, so the right leadership has not been taken. How can you have Antioch without the College? It is the heart and soul of the organization. Monumental mistake to close the campus.

Antioch College is about this wonderful merging of ideal and place. There is an experimentation and a certain political banter, but there is a tradition of challenging, even renegade teachers (sometimes even administrators!) and characters that stay with you for the rest of your life. And there is the beauty of Yellow Springs, which has an air of the transcendental in its marrow. It is a tangible presence, connected to the natural world in which the campus and Village are merged. There is no Antioch without the Village of Yellow Springs and visa versa–I would hate to see them go their separate ways, if that were even possible.

Antioch has always been about character and place, not institutional conformity or curriculum or even academic rigor. It has been about exploring character and being challenged by characters to open oneself to character in oneself–for better and worse–and to the character of a place. It’s historical figures have taken on a certain, challenging, “epic” character. I have found it to be true that finding my own character, I can learn anything and reinvent myself over and over. This is the best that an American Liberal Arts training can offer. It is why all of us who have set foot on that campus do not forget it, even if we leave it, it stays with us.

However, to hear people talk about the same problems that we did in 1980’s–”the problem is the University” or the problem is the “never recuperating from the extremism of the late 1960’s and early1970’s”–I do not buy. This sounds like “dejavu, all over again”! We just keep spinning our wheels with the same old rhetoric. It seems there has not been the right combination of leaders to reinvent the place for the next generation. It is stagnating.

At the moment the news does not bode well. There have been other moments of bad news and the place survived. Bad news today. 28 years later, it appears the news has finally come, that the doors are closing. Sad for all of us whose characters have been formed in the crucible of Antioch College, it is our loss; and we know it to be a loss for American culture, as well.

I want to encourage the current students and staff to fight like hell to keep it open. Start your own campaign. Find your character and get it to stand up for its place. It is hard for me to imagine an American educational landscape without the place and character of Antioch.

I hope the board realizes that to cave into the current forces is a huge failure of charcter on its part and a poor excuse for leadership.

Sincerely,
Lesley A. Pownall Bahr, B.F.A. ‘83
Ottertail, Minnesota

Last Modified : March 1st, 2007 Filed under : news Navigate : Previous post / Next post