When Antioch College announced that it was going to temporarily close in June, Washington Post Columnist George Will quickly wrote an op-ed piece trashing the school, in a veiled attempt to indict the Liberal Arts on a larger scale. Will, a notorious geek-wad, was just finishing up his Ph.D. while people about five years younger than him were busy experimenting with drugs and sex in the late sixties.
Forty years later Will is finally getting a chance to trash what had formerly been a hot bed of anti-war and radical action, simultaneously continuing to suppress his Dionysian impulses. This is a noble cause on the writer's part, showing a monk-like ability for self-discipline and a commitment to maintaining his pure experiential slate.
My parents and I drove from the tri-state area to Yellow Springs, Ohio to visit Antioch College in the fall of 2000. The campus had the heavy weight of a great civilization after the fall. Only a few students with brightly died hair or brightly colored scarves were seen. The brisk autumn air, naked trees and relative disrepair on campus left a strong impression on me. Since then I have always secretly held a deep admiration for Antioch's beholdence to such a rigid sense of radicalism, even if it meant financial and institutional collapse.
This is why the dense negativity and glee with which George Will discusses the schools scheduled closure is pathetic. Will it seems, is smitten with his hatred for Antioch, suggesting he may have an affinity with the college's steadfast adherence to certain political orthodoxies. When discussing the school's financial instability, Will states that "…it is unsurprising that the college never produced an alumni cohort capable of enlarging the college's risible $36 million endowment."
Will's critique of Antioch as being short on funds reeks of financial elitism, where something's worth is entirely determined by a monetary value. The author even anticipates this interpretation, suggesting that Antioch would consider "raising money beneath its dignity, given its nobility." This is a fitting and shallow analysis, being that Will has been a proponent of a presidential administration that encouraged Americans to go to the mall following one of the nation's most tragic moments.
This said, clearly Antioch presents a polemicist view of the liberal arts and progressive education. Its existence both affirms the Conservative paranoia concerning the infiltration of radical leftists into higher education and nullifies any realistic fear that alternative institutions such as Antioch have a viable chance of influencing society in any substantial way. Antioch is case and point to showing the idiocy of the crusades of paranoid political activists like David Horowitz to expose the leftist bias of higher education in the United States. If Antioch is the worst-case scenario for a private college, what is there to really be worried about?
Will's piece is characterized by likening Antioch to an Orwellian dystopia, where mob rule reigns and dissent is squashed by an irresponsible and ignorant ruling body. The reality is that Antioch is in almost every case the exception and that this warrants being written about by Will shows a penchant for sensationalism. It doesn't take much ingenuity to pick on an institution that was already a punching bag and that has for some time been on the verge of financial collapse. Ironically enough, the alumni association of the college has managed to raise enough money to avert closure, a true challenge to the cynicism of the school's critics.
This is why the Weekly Standard's November twelfth epic entitled “Death by Political Correctness: Who killed Antioch?” comes across more like an act of schadenfreude, than an act of reportage. Author Charlotte Allen painstakingly recounts the last 40 years of mismanagement and turmoil at Antioch, giving the sense of an educational experiment going horrendously wrong. Allen's piece, which is just under 13 printed pages, makes one key argument that isn't entirely unreasonable: that radical politics are difficult to fuse with market viability. In this case, the marketability of Antioch to college applicants is argued to have directly decreased due to an increasingly radicalized student body. Allen discusses a student strike in 1973 as the point when the school took a turn for the worst, giving way to a rapid decrease in enrollment.
While Allen's article is full of relevant information concerning Antioch's potential demise, it might have been easier to take seriously, had it not been published in a highly political magazine that runs a yearly deficit of more than one million dollars and is subsidized by a notorious, politically motivated press baron. It is no secret that progressive institutions are normally run on shoestring budgets and in many ways it is amazing that Antioch has managed to stay in business this long. But apparently it has the same problem with its business model as the Weekly Standard, just less billionaire beneficiaries.
Antioch has been the butt of many jokes, having been parodied on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s, due to the school's incredibly strict guidelines regulating sexual activity. While there is an element of absurdity to such guidelines and many of the other incidents that have occurred on Antioch's campus, it is no less absurd than the jubilation at the school's troubles by dweebs like John Podhoretz (Podhoretz was a five-time champion on Jeopardy in 1986). Ideologues like Podhoretz, who despise the idea of academia, will simply find some other school to beat up on. His brethren, Ann Coulter included my own alma mater, Bard College, on a list of schools that "have become a Safe Streets program for traitors and lunatics," proving a general disdain amongst conservative thinkers for progressive educational institutions.
Antioch holds the special place of being the craziest and most radical institution for higher education in the country. Once that is lost, you can bet your ass that some other school will comfortably slide into that position, garnering the concentrated animosity of anti-intellectual conservatives like Coulter. Now that it looks like Antioch may struggle on and stay open, commentators on the right will have the benefit of its existence to villify. All of this, while the country is at war, and forty million people live without healthcare. Nice priorities.
In June, at the time of the original announcement concerning Antioch's closing, author and alumnus Michael Goldfarb discusses the madness of his days at the college in the late sixties and early seventies. In the New York Times op-ed entitled, "Where the Arts Were Too Liberal," Goldforb provides a measured assessment of the schools woes. He suggests that there were positive experiences amidst the chaos of his days at Antioch. It is only a testament to the narrow mindedness of the school's critics that they are able to see only negatives in what has been a landmark institution for American higher education. Of course, no one should be surprised, given the outlandish policies for which these same critics advocate.
