The Closing of Antioch College

I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words to you: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
--Horace Mann, 1st president of Antioch College

The closing of Antioch College, announced, well, kind of yesterday I guess, probably didn't surprise anybody, least of all its alumni. After all, a college whose students memorize the quote above probably isn't going to be on the receiving end of a lot of billion dollar bequests.

The hopeful tone on the college's webpage isn't matched by the dismal email we got yesterday, including a forward of an even more dismal email-- the college does not seem to expect to reopen.

The death of Antioch is a minor blow to American liberalism. Its heyday was long past. When I tell people I went there, I know whether they're going to have heard of it or not by whether or not their hair is grey. But Antioch trained Abolitionists, Suffragists, and, yeah, socialists who fought all their lives to save America from itself.

Stephen Jay Gould went there. Coretta Scott King went there. Olympia Brown went there-- you never heard of her, but she was a big suffragist.

Antioch had no grades. You passed or you failed. How much you learned was up to you. There were very few rules, and I remember breaking the one that you had to wear shoes at graduation. You could take all the independent studies you wanted and design your own major. One of my classmates used to show up to dances naked and painted green-- or maybe she only did it once and it seemed like always.

It was a halcyon place. I was happy there, and if I didn't learn to write better there, I learned to become the person who would eventually be a writer. Antioch educated free spirits. In a world that has little room for free spirits, I suppose its death was inevitable.

Godspeed, Antioch.