Antiochians keep fighting back

The Washington Post published Megan Rosenfeld's ('69) reply to George Will's blistering attack on Antioch:

We need people who do not accept the status quo. "Antioch taught me to speak up for myself," one graduate said at a recent meeting of shocked alums in Washington. We need people who have learned -- in addition to history and science -- to question authority.

When my husband was at Yale, the unofficial motto was, "We go to school to learn to rule." Maybe that's one reason they have a $20 billion endowment. Our motto is, "Be ashamed to die before you have won some victory for humanity." Maybe that's why we don't.

(The motto of Trinity College, George Will's alma mater, is, "Pro Ecclesia et Patria" -- for church and country. Not quite as inclusive as "humanity," but I'm not criticizing.)

Our small campus in Ohio has always been a target for anyone with an anti-progressive bent. When I was there in the late '60s, the tiny Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan regularly marched down the main street of campus, apparently under the assumption that if Antioch vanished, the Klan's racism could flourish. Some of us set up lemonade stands and watched the marchers from the sidelines.

The sexual-conduct pledge of the early '90s came in for a lot of derision -- but from what I've read and heard, date rape is not a problem at Antioch as it is on other campuses. All colleges today are petri dishes of social issues...

Antioch has produced a suitable number of MacArthur "genius" award winners, doctors and lawyers, if that's how you measure success. The proportion of Antiochians going on to get PhDs is one of the highest in the nation. We are proud to have never had a football team or a fraternity. To the best of my knowledge, "beer pong" was not invented on our campus...


If George Will hates us, we must be doing something right.

And Dan Gediman ('82), producer of NPR's popular "This I Believe,"  had this in the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Speaking of those notorious moments from Antioch's past, I remain unembarrassed and unapologetic about the way the school and its students have addressed the key issues of the past two centuries. They may have sometimes expressed themselves in a messy fashion, but they have been on the right side of history in every major case that I am aware of.

From its very founding in 1852, Antioch admitted both women and people of color, something nearly unheard of in antebellum America. It was the first college in the country to hire a female professor. Antioch was an early and fervent advocate for abolitionism, women's suffrage and civil rights. It supported free-thinkers of every stripe, and when McCarthyism hit this country, Antioch was one of the few schools to support faculty who held politically progressive views.

Agreed, Antioch's students were sometimes overly strident -- even self-destructive -- in their politics, but at least they were deeply engaged in matters of substance, and I for one am glad to have come of age as a citizen surrounded by others who were not a bit cynical about America's ideals of fairness and freedom for all.