A week from Saturday, Antioch College will graduate its first class since it reopened following a three-year closure. The 21 seniors will hear Rep. John R. Lewis, the longtime Georgia Democrat, give the commencement address — 50 years after another civil-rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was the liberal-arts college’s graduation speaker. Hundreds of alumni are expected to attend because Antioch’s reunion is scheduled for the same weekend.
The weekend will be an important milestone in the audacious revival of Antioch, which is — as far as anyone here knows — currently the only start-up liberal-arts college in the country. It’s starting up at a time when many other small liberal-arts colleges worry about making ends meet, and when Sweet Briar College’s plan to close has focused attention on the viability of such institutions. Antioch itself had seen enrollment drop to just over 300 before it was shuttered, in 2008, by the trustees of the university the college spawned in the 1970s. In 2009 alumni bought the college from Antioch University for $6 million and began planning to reopen it.
Now the college’s leaders are cautiously optimistic. They have retooled the “co-op"-based curriculum that Antioch adopted in the 1920s — after every two semesters on the campus, students spend a semester working at real jobs — so that it now accommodates global issues that today’s students care about (at least students in the progressive niche Antioch hopes to serve). They’re also working to create an innovative business model in which multiple revenue streams would lessen the college’s dependence on tuition.
Still, reopening has been far from easy. “There were a couple of occasions when we were almost dead in the water,” says Mark Roosevelt, Antioch’s president.
For starters, alumni disagreed vehemently over whether members of the 2008 faculty should be welcomed back with open arms or forbidden to return. Mr. Roosevelt tried to split the difference, allowing former professors to apply for positions. And reopening long-neglected buildings on the campus proved much more costly than was projected. Many remain closed, including Antioch Hall, the iconic main building.
The toughest single shock may have occurred when the college’s initial application to its regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, was rejected. “We had not taken it seriously enough,” says Mr. Roosevelt. Antioch subsequently reapplied and won fast-track candidate status, but the demands of the accreditation process — a whole college’s worth of policies have had to be hammered out in just a couple of years — put an extra burden on a tiny faculty trying to craft a coherent contemporary liberal-arts curriculum.
Trustees pledged to underwrite tuition for the first four classes — a promise that drew a lot of publicity. But even so it’s a challenge attracting good students to an unaccredited 162-year-old start-up whose future is still uncertain and whose past is memorably long-haired, tie-dyed, and strewn with protest posters.
Seeking ‘Next-Phase People’
Now Mr. Roosevelt has announced he’ll leave office at the end of 2015, soon after an accreditation team visits, in November. A former superintendent of Pittsburgh’s public schools, he says he’s had a tough five years here, but has fulfilled the trustees’ expectations and leaves the college “much stronger” and in a position to attract good candidates to succeed him.
This coming fall’s freshmen — the first to enroll at half-price tuition, $16,618, instead of paying only room and board — will bring enrollment to 300, about midway toward the 2021 goal of 575 to 650 students. Mr. Roosevelt says that the current physical plant “gets the maximum use” at that level, and that the college then plans to pause and consider whether to grow larger.
But he has also come to realize, he says, that “it’s unlikely that Antioch can make it home safely without a third stream of revenue,” in addition to tuition and gifts.
The college is now raising $18 million to $20 million a year from loyal alumni and devoted friends, but the pool of contributors is limited and there is “some donor fatigue on the horizon,” says Jennifer Jolls, vice president for external relations. So Antioch is looking seriously at a surprising option: opening a residential community on the spacious campus that would mix families with retirees (“next-phase people” is one of the terms of art) into a “community of lifelong learners” — and also create what Mr. Roosevelt describes as “intergenerational revenue sharing.”
Ideas for the community, which has the working name “Antioch College Village,” were fleshed out in March, during a five-day planning exercise that brought together architects, townspeople, alumni, and others. The college’s primary consultant for the project is Sandy Wiggins, a former chair of the U.S. Green Building Council, but hundreds of people were involved. In addition to lifelong learning, people said they wanted a environmentally sustainable lifestyle and a variety of types of housing and price points — including co-housing, tiny houses, rentals, and condos — that would appeal to a diverse group of residents eager to live at a college.
But the business model for Antioch College Village is still a work in progress, according to Ms. Jolls and Mr. Roosevelt. The expectation is that Antioch’s trustees will be able to see a plan with income projections sometime this summer. “The board would have to invest some money — my strong recommendation is that they do,” says Mr. Roosevelt. “I really believe we’ve identified an undiagnosed need — how to grow older while fully engaged and active.” He adds: “The bigger and bolder we think, the more successful we will be.”
Already Antioch has a similar, if smaller, success on its hands. Last year it completed an $8.5-million renovation of what it’s now calling the Wellness Center, which is open free to students and employees and has sold more than 1,500 memberships to townspeople of all ages (Yellow Springs has no other gym). The complex, which has a swimming pool, a workout room, and several big multipurpose spaces, is already earning enough to pay for itself, says Monica Hasek, the director. The college also shares its two black-box theaters with Yellow Springs, making them another source of income.
A Start-Up With a Legacy
Can such changes both benefit the community and bring in enough revenue to hold down tuition? That’s the hope. Antioch’s curriculum is similarly progressive, offering a liberal-arts take on six contemporary global issues: food, water, energy, health, education, and governing.
“We are a college that works on problems,” says Richard Kraince, dean of cooperative, experiential, and international education. He adds that an oft-repeated quotation from the college’s first president, Horace Mann — “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” — “lays a pretty heavy guilt trip on students right from the beginning.”
That said, it’s the co-ops that set the Antioch experience apart from other liberal-arts colleges. And they do so in a way, Antioch’s leaders hope, that’s well suited to the career-related worries of today’s students and parents. “Our structure allows students to have all these rich experiences,” Mr. Kraince says “They’ve got a leg up on students who’ve been sitting around Ohio U. drinking beer for four years like I did.”
“We get students who are off the charts in social agency,” says Lori Collins-Hall, vice president for academic affairs. “They come in wanting to create social change. At times they’ve really pushed the faculty.”
Not that many of the 34 faculty members need pushing. Both those who taught here before the closing and applied to return and those who have been hired since knew what they were getting into. “Social justice was a big draw for me — working with students to make a difference,” says Kim Landsbergen, an associate professor of biology and environmental science. She recently collaborated with Andrew Thompson, a visiting assistant professor of sculpture, to publish a zine on invasive species. A sheet of paper made by hand from invasive honeysuckle was included with every copy.
“We are a start-up, and also we have this legacy,” says Louise Smith, an associate professor of performance who taught at Antioch for nearly 15 years before the closure and has since returned. “There this delicate dance of honoring the legacy.” At the same time, she says, there has just been a lot of work, especially in the first couple of years, when the faculty was even smaller. Creating an entire institutional infrastructure of handbooks and policies fell on the shoulders of the same small group of people who were also serving on search committees for new teaching slots.
2 Cows, 5 Pigs
Antioch is thinking fairly boldly about its physical plant, too. The first dormitory the college renovated, North Hall, is an 1852 building that has geothermal heating and cooling and a rooftop solar array, all added in a $4.8-million project that made it the second-oldest building to win certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.
“You spend more money on geothermal — about $300,000 over what a conventional system would have cost — but the calculated payback is 10 years,” says Reggie Stratton, director of physical plant. “And the solar panels offset about 13 percent of the electricity the building uses.”
The success of the North Hall renovation led the college to create a $4.4-million central geothermal facility, replacing the old campus steam plant. The new facility can provide heat and cooling for five buildings with the 150 wells in its first phase. It was designed to be doubled in size in a few years, when the college brings more buildings online.
The college’s farm, meanwhile, is doubling in size this summer, and adding two cows and five pigs to the chickens already in residence. The farm has been providing about 10 percent of the food served in Antioch’s two dining halls, with other local sources accounting for 25 percent.
Antioch hopes such efforts will appeal to students eager to attend a college thinking deeply about sustainability.
Still, many high-school seniors aren’t particularly interested in sustainability, or the liberal arts, or a college as small as this one in a town as small as Yellow Springs (where the 2010 census counted 3,487 residents and the only chain retail establishment is a Subway sandwich shop). So finding those who might consider Antioch takes some doing.
“We do a conventional search that’s highly segmental — ZIPs, academic interests,” says Micah Canal, a 2008 graduate who is Antioch’s dean of admission. “We talk about the value of the liberal arts to create thought and action,” in addition to emphasizing sustainability and co-ops.
“Our chief challenge, no question about it, is awareness,” particularly among guidance counselors, he says. “We’re competing with Kenyon, Reed, Wooster — schools that didn’t just close, that have fully renovated campuses.” And now that new students have to pay half of their tuition, “we’re competing on price.” But as the message gets out that Antioch has reopened, and if it does win accreditation, “we’ll be able to discount less,” he says.
Antioch faces “three more really tough years of fund raising” in the $20-million range, says Mr. Roosevelt, who will take over next year as president of the St. John’s College campus in Santa Fe, N.M. And the Antioch College Village plan is still untested. But, he says, Antioch has “re-established its niche — the college for the applied liberal arts — and the vision has got more meat on it. People will come together here to seek better ways of living.”
“The idea is to make this the greenest community in America, with a 600- to 650-student liberal-arts college surrounded by a larger learning community,” he says. “I think it’s a beautiful concept.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.