How Antioch University’s Board Failed Antioch College
The mess at Antioch College got the New York Times treatment last weekend, with the paper’s intellectual life writer, Patricia Cohen, presenting a comprehensive overview of the current atmosphere on campus in the Education Life supplement. Most of Cohen’s piece focused on what students and faculty are going through in the face of the college’s pending closure, and the impression I walked away with is that the school’s highly charged political culture has squelched true debate in favor of — and I absolutely hate to use this term, because it gets thrown around so much in defense of abhorrent views — a politically correct mindset in which voices that run counter to the institution’s norm are shouted down. At a place of higher learning, where dialogue and the presentation of competing views should be prized, this is a terrible legacy.
Stronger actions by senior administrators and trustees would have helped counter that, but it appears that those with a fiduciary responsibility to keep Antioch healthy have abdicated that critical duty:
But one point on which … all agree is that Antioch University — which includes the college and the five adult-education centers — is in the hands of an unworkable system of management. Since 1995, the board and a chancellor have overseen the entire system, with presidents reporting to the chancellor. “By overseeing the entire university, the net result was that it was overseeing nothing,” [trustee Daniel] Fallon said of the board. “No one got proper attention.”
Over time, this arrangement made it difficult to raise money from Antioch College’s alumni (who wanted their money to go solely to the college) and to hire top-notch leaders who would not be put off by a lack of authority. It ended up pitting the interests of the increasingly profitable satellite campuses against the mother ship.
Even with proper management, perhaps Antioch College’s very unorthodox ways would have doomed it in this era of hyper-accountability. But the university’s trustees have done the college no favors. There should be room in the American collegiate enterprise for a place such as Antioch, but its board has ensured that a unique voice is about to be silenced. | 501(c)
Tags: Antioch University, Antioch College
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