Tears, fears for Antioch College closing

Here are more responses from Antiochians writing around the web. See the Save Antioch mailing list for more.  (And if you want to write for this blog, just email antiochcollege@gmail.com.)

Christine on Really Bad Cleveland Accent says:

Yellow Springs is one of my most beloved places in the world. It's a unique little village with a fragile civic "ecosystem" - will any of it survive without Antioch? I mean, talk about potential instant ghost town...I'm depressed.

Breena Ronan writes:

No one is mentioning the most important aspect of the Antioch experience, the cooperative education program...Each year at Antioch I spent 3-6 months working full time at a real job. I spent time interning at a major museum in Chicago. I worked as an environmental lobbyist in West Virginia. I tried my hand in a chemistry lab. I even ran the college's community garden, marketing the produce at the Yellow Springs farmers market.
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The commencement speaker at my graduation was Harvard professor and popular science essayist Steven J. Gould, himself an Antioch graduate. At the time I found his speech both amusing and slightly insulting in that it's thesis was that Antioch was like a bacteria or amoeba, small, adaptable, and difficult to eradicate. Now I hope that Gould was correct, that Antioch will reappear 2012.

Jason Rothstein's jblawg says: 

At Antioch...I had amazing experiences through the co-op program, and graduated with a wealth of jobs on my resume including working in a commercial printer, assisting in a neuroimmunology lab, teaching in a small school system, and seeing how the sausage was made in a large one. Like a lot of Antioch students, I left college better prepared for the “real world” than many of my contemporaries who went to higher profile schools.

Buce writes on Underbelly:

The high point of my young life (I was 17) was to join the gang of merry pranksters who stole all the toilet seats out of North Hall, the girl’s dorm at Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio, to string between the twin towers of the main building

We were careful and discreet and we put ‘em all back in the morning, and I think folks had a good laugh, although surely not as good as we had ourselves. Life changes; these days I suppose we’d have to register as sex offenders.
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Many of Antioch’s wounds were self-inflicted, but in a sense, Antioch was a victim of its own success. Antioch liked to think of itself as “experimental.” Indeed it was: in my day, you could do lots of things at Antioch that you couldn’t do elsewhere...By the 60s, everybody was experimental; everybody was a little Antioch—or a big Antioch, ready and able to take advantage of Antioch’s blunders, and to eat Antioch’s lunch.

Laura Markham makes this comment on Politics, Technology, and Language:

Does Antioch College have any chance of reopening in service to its historical mission? A slim one, but only if alumni ask the hard questions. As a former member of the board of trustees, I would start with this one: Can Antioch College take all its property, including the small endowment, and find itself a new Board of Trustees that represents the college?
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Antioch College has risen from the ashes before. Are there enough fearless and committed champions to help it do so again? Now that would be a victory for humanity.