By Diane Chiddister

On Friday, Sept. 4, the keys to Antioch College will be transferred from Antioch University to the Antioch College Continuation Corporation, or ACCC. The action marks the college?s revival after having been closed for a year, and its return, after 30 years as part of a university system, to being an independent liberal arts college.

The public is invited to a recognition of the historic event at around 5 p.m. on the horseshoe on the Antioch College campus. The event will follow several hours of paper-signing by ACCC leaders Lee Morgan and Matthew Derr, who have been vested by the ACCC board with the authority to sign the agreements, and Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock and Antioch University Board Chair Art Zucker, who have been vested by the university board with the authority to do so, according to Morgan and Derr in an interview Tuesday evening.

Morgan, Zucker and Great Lakes Colleges Association President Rick Detweiler will speak at the 5 p.m. event, and Antioch professor emeritus Al Denman will give the benediction.

Friday?s closing finalizes an agreement between the university and the ACCC that was made two months ago. While that agreement identified Aug. 31 as the target date for closing the deal for an independent college, the amount of detail involved led to missing that target by a few days, Morgan said. The closing was dependent on the approval of several outside agencies, including the Ohio attorney general, the Greene County probate court and bondholders for Antioch University.

By Eva Erickson and Carole Braun

Ever since the Alumni Board’s official decision to move Alumni Reunion to October 2-4, from its usual time in June, Nonstop has been planning the Summer Alumni Festival, whose purpose is to both celebrate Nonstop’s accomplishments and to connect or reconnect Alumni with Nonstop. Much of the specifics of the Festival are yet to be determined, but the plan is to have work projects – such as painting a mural on the back wall of Millworks that parallels the bike path – dinners, and social events. The Festival is scheduled for the 18th through the 20th of June with hopes that the Alumni Board (AB) members will attend some of the events, since they will be in town for their summer meeting. The Alumni Festival could potentially sync well with the AB meeting, because it may have less time to spare in hosting visiting alumni. “The Alumni Board has already discussed having a very business-oriented meeting in June,” said Aimee Maruyama (‘96), Director of Alumni Relations and Development. AB member Christian Feuerstein ‘94 writes, “I would imagine that parts of our annual meeting are going to be Nonstop events, much as we did with our last AB meeting.”

Having watched Antiochians over the past fifty years, it has been my experience that while Antioch has gotten smaller–as a direct and indirect result of the ‘73 Strike, the 25% cuts in faculty the year after (financial desperation has never worked as a recruiting tool), lingering on the edge of bankruptcy and oblivion, presidents who have not been fond of the institution and have tried to change it into something more marketable and mainstream, shrinking resources and departments (we all know the story)–the students who have come out of Antioch over the years (and those now at NonStop) continue to be, more or less, of the same cloth. Folks, this is remarkable. And the reason for this is the faculty, staff and the smart students who saw through the absence of trappings to something genuine that would engage them.
To be an effective teacher at Antioch demands a dedication and malleability on the part of teachers most institutions don’t require.
I am in the midst of a long essay on Antioch. I have interviewed 20 people, each person for about two hours: from students in the 1930s to current students at NonStop, as well as a number of faculty and two presidents. I think this bit of transcript from my interview with English Professor Jean Gregorek more than makes my point.
JEAN: I was teaching 19th Century British Lit. 20th Century British Lit. Post-Colonial Literature. Literary Theory. Contemporary Drama. African Literature and Caribbean Literature. And Detective Fiction.
ME: Boy, that’s a lot.
JEAN: (Laughs.) In my line of work it’s unheard of. I’m a complete anomaly. No one tries to cover that much…A normal English Department at a small school is, you know, six or seven people.
(Actually, after I interviewed Jean, I checked both Oberlin and Kenyon’s Websites: they both have between 15 and twenty instructors in their English departments. Antioch in its last year had two and a half.)
The point I am trying to make is this: these teachers are not only damn good in their fields, they take on an extraordinary amount of extra work because of their devotion to the ideals of Antioch and because they get a charge out of the students (OK, not all of the students: but even the difficult ones, they are there for them). Teachers for Antioch are as self-selecting as the students. And if outside proof were needed to make this point clear, let me direct you to the 2000 and 2001 National Survey of Student Engagement-sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning.
Antioch College ranked number one among 470 institutions in “Level of Academic Challenge” and “Enriching Educational Experiences” and in the top 10% in “Active and Collaborative Learning,” “Student Interactions with Faculty Members,” and “Supportive Campus Environment.” And, according to the Franklin and Marshall study of Baccalaureate Origins of Doctorate Recipients, Antioch College was among the top twenty undergraduate institutions whose graduates went on to earn Ph.D.s.
Loren Pope, in his 1996 addition of Colleges that Change Lives, says of Antioch College: “Antioch is in a class by itself. There is no college or university in the country that makes a more profound difference in a young person’s life, or that creates more effective adults. None of the Ivies, big or little can match Antioch’s ability to produce outstanding thinkers and doers…For decades this yeast of American higher education…has produced higher percentages of future scientists and scholars than any Ivy League university except Princeton.”
Between 1985 and 1990, according to Ph.D. data supplied by the National Science Foundation, in overall Ph.D. output (in all fields) relative to total undergraduate enrollment, Antioch College outranked M.I.T., Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, U. California-Berkeley…and the list goes on.
It is past time we stopped this self-flagellation. The problems of Antioch are not and were not the quality of its faculty. The NonStop faculty and staff is the DNA of Antioch College. And without that DNA what you have is little more than an instruction manual.
Let us not forget the passion and dedication from which NonStop was born. Let us remember were it not for the threat of a lawsuit by the University, Nonstop would have been called what it has always been in reality: Antioch College in Exile. And let us remember the Alumni Reunion of ‘07 and how for so many of us it was the assault on the faculty that galvanized us into action. Or as Emeritus Dance Professor Dimi Reber articulated our collective concern in her eloquent letter on behalf of the faculty: “I am writing because current faculty are facing possible layoffs and the elimination of tenure and feel unprotected…Our dignity as faculty is at stake, the definition of what Antioch is and has been is hanging in the balance.”
At this crucial time of transition we must support what is the mind, heart and soul of Antioch College–the staff and faculty of The NonStop Stop Liberal Arts Institute. More than support them, we must celebrate them!
Make your donation now to NonStop to guarantee the future of a vibrant and prosperous Antioch College! (secure.imodules.com/s/1050/qs1_index.aspx?sid=1050&gid=1&pgid=310&cid=809)
Carpe diem!

A tiny swarm descended upon Yellow Springs on Nonstop’s Community Day, on March 25th. The bees, as they call themselves, are members of the Beehive Collective, a political media-arts collective based out of Maine. Their mission is to “cross-pollinate the grassroots,” touring their large-scale graphic campaigns that intricately weave together the environmental and social aspects of issues from around the globe. With a focus on horizontal organizing, consensus based decision making, and communal living, they had a lot to share with the Nonstop community.

The giant banner they were currently touring focused on MTR, or mountain top removal, a modern form of coal mining that uses heavy machinery to blast away the entire mountain top. This mechanized process exposes a seam of coal that is then scraped away. In addition, this method requires the rock and debris that once was a mountain to be scraped off and dumped into the surrounding valley, decimating one of the most bio-diverse places in the world. In addition, it negatively affects all communities in its wake, destroying their land and forests, toxifying the water and soil, and continuing to weaken a historically exploited and economically depressed region. The complex graphic was compiled of several large sections depicting different aspects of this involved issue. These included a social and environmental history of Appalachia, the changes in industrial and mining process, the effects of mining and coal consumption locally and globally, and a picture of current resistance and a vision of a healthy Appalachia.

I recently had a conversation with Micah Canal, 2008 graduate of Antioch College, who came back to Yellow Springs in January to join the effort to support Nonstop and for the recreation of the College. He is currently working for the College Revival Fund.

D: So, where are you from?

Micah: I was born on the side of a mountain in southern Oregon, (where we lived) without electricity. My parents went back to the land in the early 70’s. They were hippies, sort of, but I am also part redneck because of growing up in rural southern Oregon. I have always walked that line of someone who embraces my redneck-dom and also someone who was raised by college graduates, and has had a fairly privileged life. I am one of the people who loved high school, rare among the Antioch diaspora.
I was supposed to come to Antioch in 2004, and I deferred until 2005 because I was in love, and I needed to stay on the West Coast. We (my classmates and I) were informed when we got here that something called the Renewal Commission had changed the college that we thought we would be attending. To this day I am still unclear as to why… there was no information that was conveyed to us or our parents that we were going to be a part of a new, untested learning model. That was a real shock.
Fela Pierre-Louis and Olivia Leire, and I organized the first year class in the first two weeks into something called the First Year Liason Committee. It was my first experience with organizing at Antioch, and what an interesting, difficult, troubling, infighting experience it can be. We became Antiochians … for three years, and some of us graduated, and most of us didn’t. There were sixty-seven people who entered with me, and of those less than twenty graduated. I think of us as the lost class, because we were the first under the learning communities, and some of us were the last ones out, and some of us are still here. That is my brief history about Antioch.
My major in one hundred words was Social Entrepreneurship and Economic Development. I studied economics and international relations. My focus was on change-making, trying to do it from the grass roots and also within institutions. All of my professional work has been in the non-profit sector, and I imagine that is where I will stay. That will be my life’s work: social entrepreneurship, building and contributing to organizations that do good works.