Tempest in the Fishbowl

Ever since its founding in 1852, Antioch College has been a maverick. It was a pioneer in admitting women and blacks, adopting work-study methods of education and including students on policymaking committees. Now that relative calm has returned to most American schools, Antioch is still out of sync. Its main campus in rural Yellow Springs, Ohio, has been shut down for three weeks, and it is so divided by factional strife that many students and teachers question whether the college can survive. Says one disgruntled faculty member: "In the '50s, Antioch was considered one of the leading colleges in the country; now it is an experiment in anarchy."

Mace. Specifically, Antioch's experiments in educating the poor have led to serious financial and administrative strains that have aroused student militants. They struck the campus for six weeks last winter in support of cafeteria workers who had been laid off. Last week, scholarship students and their sympathizers picketed to extract a promise from trustees not to cut financial aid. College employees refused to cross picket lines to collect trash. As part of their protest, striking students piled it in front of the administration building. Professors could hold classes only in their own homes because militants refused to let them into college buildings. When one teacher tried to get to his office, he was sprayed with Mace. A fire of "suspicious nature" damaged a dean's office.

The 140-member Yellow Springs faculty is so demoralized, some professors say, that perhaps half would quit if teaching jobs were not so scarce. Among their complaints: the administration has been saving money by replacing full professors who retire with low-paid assistant professors; it is also considering abandoning the tenure system. Some professors believe the quality of the 2,300 students at the Yellow Springs campus has declined. The college once accepted only one out of four applicants. Now that applications have dropped, in part because of its troubled reputation, Antioch takes three out of four. It badly needs tuition, which provides 85% of its income. Last year it ran an overall deficit of $600,000.

Antioch also has been unable to hire a dean of the college. Last spring the job was offered to Peter Conn, an associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania. He declined after being held captive in the College Inn for several hours by dissident students who preferred another candidate, Black Marxist Economist Kenneth Mills of Yale.

At the center of all this controversy, and, some say, partly the cause of it, is President James P. Dixon (Antioch, '39; Harvard Medical School, '43), who was serving as Philadelphia's commissioner of health when named to head his alma mater in 1959. Usually chomping on a half-smoked cigar that sprinkles ashes down his rumpled blue polo shirt, Dixon talks in convoluted jargon that has earned him the nickname "Dim Jixon." Students still talk about his speech in 1969 comparing the campus to a well-balanced fishbowl populated with guppies, goldfish and piranhas. "For days," says one senior, "people tried to figure out what he meant."

Dixon's early years were not marred by controversy. Under his leadership, Antioch abolished grades, vigorously recruited black students and experimented with dropping all required freshman courses. He was well liked by both faculty and students. Says Striker Jamie Dahlberg: "He used to be a really great guy. But something happened. I'm not sure what." In 1970 Dixon and the trustees took Antioch even farther, launching a "New Directions" program that upset the balance in the fishbowl.

To better serve impoverished students--both black and white--Antioch brought large numbers of them from urban slums to Yellow Springs, where they required scholarships and loans to meet the college's tuition of $3,050 a year. Despite its altruism, the program has backfired. Many of the needy recruits, who now total about 10% of the student body, were ill prepared for college work, or for life in a rural middle-class community. Their presence has created new tensions--between affluent and poor, black and white.

Under Dixon, Antioch also created an empire of subsidiary campuses --some to try out innovations in teaching, others to bring an Antioch education to even greater numbers of underprivileged youngsters. In addition to the Yellow Springs campus, three satellites based in the Washington, D.C., area award degrees. Antioch also organized some 25 centers in the U.S. and abroad where students can take some of their courses.

The centers were supposed to be selfsupporting, but many required start-up money from Antioch and some are still operating in the red. The program severely strained the college's resources and split Yellow Springs into feuding factions. Complains Humanities Professor George Geiger: "The money is being drained out of here to finance the other campuses."

Such criticism scarcely ruffles Dixon. He operates on a theory of "creative conflict," believing that change comes only through confrontation. "In any given set of circumstances," he says, "there is always the question of how much displacement, distortion and confusion any one institution can tolerate. But the only way you know you've reached the limit is when the institution ceases to exist." Contrary to the opinion of his many detractors, Dixon insists that there is no danger of that happening to Antioch.

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