The Yellow Springs News just published a quietly devastating article on the consultants who provided the legal cushion for the University Leadership Council’s decision to ramrod the plan to close Antioch through the board of trustees.
The article says:
- The board only paid these people $3,000—about half of what I would expect to pay a consultant to help me choose which toilet tissue color gives the best feng shui. That at least helps explain all the grammatical mistakes in the resulting report.
- The consultants visited Yellow Springs for only one day.
- The consultants had never written this kind of report before.
- The consultants are perfectly willing to acknowledge the report was tailored to suit the biases of the ULC.
- The nimnulls in charge of the University didn’t think anybody would care if they just, you know, shut down a prominent 150-year-old college.
I can’t wrap my mind around such monumental idiocy.
Let me be clear: I came out strongly against the Renewal Plan from the moment it was announced. I wrote then and still think that it was derivative and self-evidently too expensive to implement. And I have all kinds of fantasies for what a better Antioch would be like and a deep contempt for virtually every leader the College has had from the second half of the Dixon era on. (Yes, Bob Devine groupies, that includes He Who Must Not Be Criticized. Why you people want to spare him is beyond me.)
But I feel obliged to put all of this aside and to bite my tongue constantly on the discussion lists because my uppermost conviction is that the finance committee of the board of trustees and the ULC have committed a crime against American labor and against American education.
I can’t decide if the crime was more the result of malevolence than slobbering stupidity, but it was a crime.
