In the seventies, flush with counter-culture success, the college expanded and established a series of nationwide campuses. It incorporated as “Antioch University,” and the Yellow Springs campus simply became one of the satellite locations. By the nineties, the “university” was making money as a degree-completion mill, while the original Antioch was hemorrhaging several hundred students and millions of dollars each year. It didn’t take a business degree to figure out something was wrong. One village resident told me that there had not been hot water in the main building for twenty years, the result of deferred maintenance. Finally, Antioch University, the umbrella corporation that owned the college, simply shut it down.
My second morning in Yellow Springs, I picked up the local paper and read a letter from a 1972 graduate. He was glad the doors had finally closed: “Antioch–and its spirit of educational innovation and high academic rigor—died long ago.” He argued that Antioch hadn’t resisted the “fashions of our times, trends that included speech codes, political correctness in academic and campus life….”
After I brought up the death of the college, I found out that others closer to the scene of the crime also believed that Antioch was too progressive for its own good. There was a former student among the staff of the conference I met my first few days in Yellow Springs. He was teaching nonfiction writing. He’d attended the college in its golden years and seemed to have put the institutional failure behind him. When I asked him about the demise, he said Antioch had become “akin to an overspecialized organism that can survive only in a narrow, protected ecological niche.” His alma mater had become “the snail darter of higher education.” I like his natural history analogy, but as I biked through Ohio’s post-glacial landscape, I wondered if the situation of Antioch College in 2008 might have been more akin to an erratic boulder left after the wall of ice had retreated again. The signs of an immense presence are all around us—marooned now in a different context.
My colleague for the week struck me as a good role model to consider, a type of liberal armored against unfriendly times—IBM and General Electric had changed their cultures to survive, why not Antioch and the old hippies associated with it?
There were others in post-Antioch Yellow Springs who wanted to carry on, as Crosby, Stills, and Nash had implored us all to do decades ago. “Non-stop Antioch” had set up shop in the village and instilled its new curriculum with the spirit and educational mission of the old college, to “keep the DNA of Antioch College alive.” In response, Antioch University sued the group for infringement upon its name.
Among people in the village, there were a good dose of old Ohio hippies, but the participants at the writers workshop were mostly men and women in the process of putting their sixties addictions to rest. These were serious writers. The addictions on display were weaknesses for high-prose style, the forms of poetry, and the big score: a positive response in the agent pitch going on every morning in the conference room.
These writers, and those who were teaching them—a successful novelist from Brooklyn, a Oprah Book Club novelist and poet, and five or six dedicated but less acclaimed poets and writers like myself—were intent on finding meaning in words on a contemporary page. I lectured for five straight days on “the art of the personal essay,” a form whose popularity has only emerged in the last several decades. The discussions about the genre were intense. It was not quite a sixties “teach-in,” though the discussions were heated and engaged.