The Closing of Antioch College

The decline and fall of Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio has been attributed to many causes. The college was a focal point of a humane belief in social activism. Its students went around the world trying to improve the lives of others. But a rigid adherence to political correctness and left-liberal orthodoxy were certainly contributing factors in its demise. The whole basis of liberal thought is the open mind. It is fundamental to a college environment that there be an atmosphere of free inquiry and open discussion. Antioch appears to have sometimes stifled these goals in the interest of ideology.

When a visiting high school senior was asked if he was going to apply for admission to Antioch, he said: “No way. There is no football and no cool chicks.” I’m sure that some prospective students were turned-off by things like the bizarre rule that a person had to obtain permission for each stage of sexual seduction (e.g. “may I kiss you”). Some parents were probably disturbed by things like the invitation to a cop-killer to speak at commencement. No doubt, the growing identification of the college as a refuge for students with alternate sexual and gender identification led to lower enrollments. But I suspect there may have been other factors leading to the downfall.

Antioch College was a “Liberal Arts” College. It combined different academic disciplines in a method of teaching called the “Connected Curriculum.” To my knowledge, however, it did not have a business school. (Since I wrote this article I have learned that there were some business classes, but I do not know if there was any business major.) In this day and age, the lack of a business school probably accounted more for lowering enrollment than lack of a gridiron powerhouse with delectable cheerleaders.

When I was in college, business courses were considered by liberal arts students to be “gut” courses, something you took if you were not smart enough to master the liberal arts. Today, it is the reverse. The business schools are the hardest to get into. A college education is looked upon as a ticket to success, and a major in classical languages is about as useful as a ticket to Tierra del Fuego.

Paul Neely, publisher of The Chattanooga Times and a trustee of Williams College, recently wrote about today’s higher education, saying: “Students and their families have defined undergraduate education in starkly utilitarian terms. Young people do not go to college to become fuller persons, better citizens, or more lively intellects. In postwar America, college education is justified by the additional lifetime income it will produce.”

Victor E. Ferrall, Jr., former president of Beloit College, said in a recent article in the publication, Inside Higher Education: “The 95 ‘true’ liberal arts colleges, the pure practitioners of liberal education, are in trouble.…. A career-directed education has become the goal of many, if not most, young people eager to get ahead. A purely materialistic motivation for getting an education is now the norm, not the exception. There is economic pressure on liberal arts colleges to add career-directed courses and programs to attract students.”

Why should students study the liberal arts or humanities? Stanley Fish, a college professor, literary critic, and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column on the question of whether the humanities do anything to help humanity. His conclusion was—No, they don’t. He said: “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’ the only honest answer is none whatsoever…. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said ….diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”

The humanities enrich your life, enlarge your mind, and make you more human. When you immerse yourself in literature, philosophy, theology, history, music, art, and other liberal arts subjects, you go through a door into a different world. They not only give a kind of pleasure, they give a kind of life; a life of the mind. They will not earn you any money or confer any power, but they can give you joy and make you a whole person.

Antioch College may open again someday, but as America becomes more and more a marketplace in which the only ideas exchanged are the ideas of commerce, demand for education in the liberal arts will diminish and, perhaps, disappear. The tragedy is that Twenty-First Century America may no longer have any use for Antioch College or for the cultivated, educated people produced by liberal arts colleges.