Antioch on the Brink

It was chaos as usual last week at freewheeling Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Disgruntled trustees were trying to fire the president, who refused to quit. The new chancellor, an apostate Jesuit who says he took the position "so I could get married," was reassuring professors that they would keep their jobs--although the college fired 25% of the faculty last spring and cut the survivors' pay by 13%. At the rear of the admissions office, students were busily stuffing envelopes and making telephone calls in a desperate attempt to recruit more freshmen next year so that the college can survive.

All small liberal arts colleges are in financial trouble, but Antioch is in particularly bad shape. Ever since it opened in 1853, Antioch has been one of the most experimental colleges in the U.S. It pioneered in work-study programs and study abroad; it did away with grades and traditional freshman requirements long ago, and created a "democratic community government," giving students unusual power. One of Antioch's few traditions is that students wear shoes to graduation. Now the college seems to be a victim of its own liberal innovations.

Student Strikes. Antioch's problems started in the mid-1960s when President James P. Dixon, a vigorously self-confident graduate of Antioch ('39) and Harvard Medical School ('43) who had run the college almost singlehanded for a decade, had an inspiration. He decided to form a "network" of 23 other Antioch "campuses" across the country and abroad, not only to serve poor and minority students, but also to provide more places in which to experiment with educational reforms. (For example, at Antioch West in San Francisco, students design most of their highly individualized program themselves; they also hire adjunct professors and even decide how much they will be paid.)

As a symbol that his primary concern was now the entire network, Dixon moved to a country estate four miles from Yellow Springs and took much of the school's endowment and administration with him. That left the main campus without a permanent head for two years, until Francis X. Shea, 48, former president of the Roman Catholic College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, was hired as chancellor last summer. A white-haired scholar of 19th and 20th century literature, Shea was appalled at what he found when he unpacked his bags in Yellow Springs: "The entire administration has levitated out of sight, departed, or become otherwise incapacitated or unavailable."

By this time the network was in serious trouble too. Many of the centers were struggling to stay alive, an experiment to use an inflatable bubble as a campus in Columbia, Md., was a bust, and deficits were mounting. Despite the financial plight of the satellites, they were assessed a special tax of 1% of their budgets last year to keep the campus at Yellow Springs afloat.

The problems on Antioch's main campus were worsened by two student strikes in 1973. For Antioch, which gets 90% of its income from student tuition, the strikes were almost fatal; 170 students dropped out right away, and 150 freshmen who had already paid a deposit did not show up. According to Benjamin Thompson, Antioch's admissions director, the strikes cost the college $1 million in lost tuition. Antioch cut its budget from $5.5 million to $3.5 million last year as enrollment plummeted from about 1,300 to 929. The college even reduced its tuition (from $3,100 to $2,950) to recruit more students.

Many faculty members and trustees have singled out Dixon, 57, as the major villain in Antioch's travail. An ebullient social reformer, Dixon was the commissioner of public health in Philadelphia before coming to Antioch, and he was co-chairman of the New Party in 1968 with Dick Gregory; he frequently thinks aloud in rapid-fire sentences that leave listeners at a total loss. Last spring 75% of the Yellow Springs faculty signed petitions asking him to resign. Said John Sparks, professor of political science: "He managed Antioch as if it were his own private property." Some trustees have urged that he be fired outright, but the Antioch board voted last November to postpone further consideration of Dixon's future and "the present viability of the college" until March.

Dixon is confident that the college will survive--and that its first-rate teaching faculty will continue to offer students a valuable blend of rigorous academic training and job experience. Says he: "Antioch is not going to cash in its chips, although I don't know what its evolution will be." Adds Chancellor Shea: "There's no reason in the world why this campus should roll over and play dead."

Antioch's future now depends on its ability to increase the freshman class 50%--to 450 students--next fall. The college never had to recruit before; now it has bought the names of 92,000 bright high school prospects from the Educational Testing Service, and is embarking on a massive telephone campaign, plus a 200,000-piece mailing. The effort is crucial. Says Jewel Graham, associate professor of social welfare: "Antioch has always been a hand-to-mouth institution, and that's where we're at now. If students come and pay tuition, we'll make it. If they don't, we won't."

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