The story started with a "disclaimer:" that the "correspondant" who was doing the story was himself a graduate of Antioch college.
The story seemed to me a concatenation of these themes: (1) that Antioch has a long association with causes liberals hold dear, (2) that someone (they didn't say who) made some very big mistakes back in the early '70s (one being a strike that closed the campus for five months, the other being a decision to decentralize Antioch in a manner so amorphous that not even the precise number of meta-Antiochs could not be determined by any means known to the brainiacs who are nominally in charge of the place), (3) that a few of the alumnii have made something of their lives, and (4) that 500 of them got together in Yellow Springs Ohio and collectively turned out their pockets, resulting in the raising of $400K, which sounds pretty good until the problematic little factoid that they actually need $40 million to stay in business was dropped at the very end of the story, thereby injecting a big dose of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride into what was sounding like a pretty typical story of how liberals can screw up practically anything.
It became pretty clear that the person reporting the story (whose name is John McChesney) showed up to this impromptu b*tch session and class reunion with a microphone and a tape recorder and pieced together the material thus collected, along with a few of the highlights of Antioch's storied past into what passes for news on NPR Weekend All Things Considered. There was some emoting at the alumnii confab, mainly concerned with the process and method by which the "board of trustees" came to their decision to close the place. Presumably if they had used less rigid, more creative techniques for adding and subtracting they could have made the little $40 mil deficit go away, although whether they could have accomplished this exercise in million-man-math in such a way as to allow the tenured hippies still serving as Antioch's faculty to keep drawing paychecks was not explored.
You had pretty much the same reactions I did. But the bottom line is that this is what happens when you run a college primarily as a political institution, and one that teaches activism as the primary message.
Libs think that activism is the solution to every problem. In other words, get out and rant and rave about what you don’t like, blame it on people other than yourself, and make them “do the right thing.” The other people have got to “do the right thing,” in order to make things better, because you’re philosophy precludes you yourself from doing anything other than complain. Certainly, you aren’t going to do anything on your own to fix the problem other than complain.
They have no ability to comprehend that progress is the result of effort, expertise, and entrepreneurialism. To them, progress is made by pounding other people on the head over and over until those other people “fix things.”