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 . . .

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.

Finally, a post about Antioch that manages to suggest a genuine love of the place while also skewering the leaders of the last few decades–and the students of that time too. She even has the courage to light into the students who are there right now for not taking over the campus and demanding a better place to learn. If only the person had the additional courage to name Bob Devine outright, instead of referring to him twenty different ways to Tuesday.

I don’t buy the “PCism killed Antioch” thesis–unless you’re talking PC circa 1973, supplemented by some PC circa 1965, which inspired Dixon’s murderous plan to start branch campuses all over the planet. But I agree that all kinds of other folks have gotten off pretty easily, particularly on the discussion boards.

The only notes I would add would be a general slam against the somnolent (but hard working! never forget that!) faculty. I’d also include a plan to move forward–one that doesn’t piggyback on one of the Usual Bloviators.

Over at Antiochians.org, a poster says that at reunion “an alumna told me the C.I.A. had engineered the 1973 strike.” The poster doubts this, but many other people have no doubt about it at all.

One thing that keeps this idea out there is the Church Commission report. (A complete copy of it is available here; a searchable text of parts of it is here. )

So far as I can tell, there are only two references to Antioch in the entire text, both of them exactly the same. (In my book that actually makes one reference, but I’m being generous.) They appear in the opening section of Part D of Book II and in Part I.B.2 of Book III in a sentence that reads in part:

New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College (‘vanguard of the New Left’) to the New Mexico Free University and other ‘alternate’ schools.

So Antioch was just a small part of what interested them. What’s important is what COINTELPRO did at Antioch. Here’s an example of the kind of take-no-prisoners directions the FBI gave its agents:

Consider the use of cartoons, photographs, and anonymous letters which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left.

(The memorandum that describes the recommended disruption techniques begins here and goes on for the next five pages.)

The Church Committee also notes that COINTELPRO was “officially terminated ‘for security reasons’ on April 27, 1971″; the report then explains that the Committee’s investigation had found only three instances of COINTELPRO activity continuing beyond that date.

So all the report can be said to claim in relation to Antioch is that COINTELPRO, in the late 1960s, applied some disruptive techniques among groups considered to be in the extremely ill-defined category of the New Left and that these techniques were aimed at suppressing First Amendment rights. A damning enough claim, certainly, but not one that in any way suggests that COINTELPRO was behind the strike–which in any case happened about two years after COINTELPRO closed up shop.

Until I see more concrete information to the contrary, I’m considering this bit about the FBI and the ‘73 strike nothing more than a rumor.

Dear X:

When I was in seventh grade, I began experimenting with stroking my chin. I soon realized that most people can’t tell the difference between a posture of reasonableness and the actual ability to reason.

One day I fed my goldfish to Cookie Monster. He was made of synthetic fabric and didn’t even absorb the liquid.

[Philosophy Professor Guy]
Antioch College

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.

In my first post, I called this “a forum.” That brought to mind this oily comment from Bob “I helped drive the College to its doom” Devine:

Does anyone recall that in the late 80s and through the 90s that the regular Friday Forum brought together a wide diversity of speakers and perspectives in a format of moderated respectful dialogue. Those fora were attended by…

I remember the Friday Forums: a milquetoasty nonevent where a few stragglers sat around watching People Who Had Opinions hold forth on what the Sunday New York Times told us were the most important issues of the day. Luckily, the Times also helped with the guest list by defining what the various “sides” of “the” debate were.

To this day I can’t figure out how people have convinced themselves that bringing together any two yoyos who disagree is the same as the blinking Phaedrus.

Really, the only thing worse than the Friday Forums is watching Bob Devine nod sententiously while pretending the plural of “forum” is “fora”–which it is, if you’re talking about ancient Greek marketplaces.

Places where the Usual Suspects shout down or drown out, through sheer bloviation, people who can write with some degree of concentration. The goal of this blog, then, is to be a forum for concisely worded comments about Antioch’s continued existence and rebirth as a vital institution.

Blogs not being known for their concision, we’re just going to have to see how this works.