This is the complete account of the Death of Antioch College ( written by Washington Post columnist, George Will ( from the link I cited above ) ):
During the campus convulsions of the late 1960, the film “To Die in Madrid,” a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for its dedication to all things progressive.
When the narrator intoned, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students cheered.
Administrators at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and social improvement they hadn’t found time for teaching them the rebels in Spain were Franco’s fascists.
That’s why it’s heartening that Antioch will close after the 2007-08 academic year.
Members of its Board of Trustees says the decision is to “suspend operations,” and they talk dottily about reviving the institution in 2012.
There is a minuscule market for what Antioch sells for a tuition, room and board of $35,221 - repressive liberalism unleavened by learning.
Founded in 1852, Antioch was, for a while, admirable.
One of the first colleges to enroll women and blacks, it was a destination for escaped slaves.
Its alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Coretta Scott King and Rod Serling, whose “Twilight Zone” never imagined anything weirder than what Antioch became when its liberalism curdled.
In 1972-73, Antioch had 2,470 students. In 1973, a protracted and embittering student and employee strike left the campus physically decrepit and intellectually toxic.
By 1985, enrollment was down 80 percent. This year, there might be 300 students and a faculty of 40.
In 1993, Antioch administrators became international punch lines when they wrote rules to ensure all sexual conduct would be consensual:
“If the level of sexual intimacy increases during an interaction, the people involved need to express their clear verbal consent before moving to that new level.”
Although laughable, Antioch wasn’t funny.
Former public radio correspondent Michael Goldfarb matriculated at what he calls the “sociological petri dish” in 1968.
In his first week, he twice had guns drawn on him, once “in fun” and once by a couple of drunken ex-cons, “whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her.”
A true Antiochian still, Goldfarb says: “I do think I was made stronger for having to deal with these experiences.”
Steven Lawry - Antioch’s fifth president in 13 years - arrived 18 months ago.
He told Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education about a student who left after being assaulted because he wore Nike shoes, symbols of globalization.
Another left because, she told Lawry: “They all think they are so different, but they are just a bunch of conformists.”
Carlson reports Lawry stopped the student newspaper’s practice of printing “announcements containing anonymous, menacing threats against other students for their political views.”
Antioch officials invited Mumia Abu-Jamal to deliver the 2000 commencement speech, which he recorded on death row in a Pennsylvania prison, where he lives because 26 years ago he shot a Philadelphia police officer first in the back, then three times in the face. The invitation was a way of saying what?
In an essay in the Chronicle, Cary Nelson, Antioch Class of 1967 and now a professor of English at the University of Illinois, waxes nostalgic about the fun he had spending much time away from campus, receiving academic credits.
What Nelson calls “my employee resistance to injustice” got him “released from almost every job I had until I became a faculty member.”
“My little expenditure was never noticed” when “I used some of Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty money” to bus anti-Vietnam war protesters from Harlem to Washington.
Given this idea of “work experience” in the “real world,” it’s not surprising the college never produced an alumni cohort capable of enlarging its risible $36 million endowment.
“Ben & Jerry could have named a new flavor for us,” says John Feinberg, Class of 1970 and president of the alumni board.
His lament for a forfeited glory is a suitable epitaph for Antioch.
Unless Congress comes up with some rescue package or takes over this school and others going its way, I think this article is on to something.