I Am Screaming and Screaming and Screaming

The very first thing I wrote about this event–which I stopped myself from posting because I thought I should be polite to the board, give them the benefit of the doubt, etc.–was this:

I see no reason to believe that the dominant trustees are anything other than the kind of drooling zombies whose impaired perceptions of the actual world, colored by a left-of-center conscience, prompt them to nod along with Tom Friedman books and go: “Why, yes, the actual future is the same as futuristic scenarios! Since obviously we can’t shape the future, we have to adapt to the futuristic scenarios! And that will make things better! Better! BETTER!” [CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!]

It turns out I was right. According to this post , Toni “Antioch Cornell” Murdock has said:

I believe Antioch is positioned to be a player in the new world described by Thomas Friedman in his recent book The World Is Flat.

She is so ignorant of the actual workings of the world that she buys a piece of big business puffery like that. She is in charge of the fortunes of a College that should be leading the world in fighting economic colonization but that has instead been kicked to the curb. They gave someone that intellectually naive so much power over a place of “higher education.”

Antioch must be cursed . . .

 

There’s No Word Harsh Enough for These People

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.

 

“Chancellor Toni” Is an Anagram for “Antioch Cornell”

In this smart-as-a-shoulder-pad article, which contains perhaps the most ridiculous attempt at euphemism I’ve ever seen (“Such references have been . . . open to misconception at best”), University chancellor Toni Murdock makes happy about a tenure-free faculty.

The message is the same as the one signaled by the College’s closing–a message so obvious even the various lipids clotting the Antioch faculty bloodstream got it: “No one will get tenure at Antioch Rolling Meadows Estates College.”

There’s nothing surprising about that information, but it is stunning that the chancellor’s first public statement after the reunion and all the resulting press coverage is just a defense of the University and its policy of not granting tenure–rather than, say, an open letter addressing alumni grievances.

Things like that make me doubt it’ll be possible to save the College. These people really don’t give a shit about anyone they don’t have dinner with.