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.

By Jeanne-Kay

Research: Brian Springer, Kathryn Leahey, Jeanne Kay

Prelude: The Discourse of Toxicity

“Toxic Culture.” Steve Lawry’s infamous phrase is now part of the vocabulary of virtually all Antiochians. The year before the Antioch University Board of Trustees (UBoT) resolved to close the college, the key political issue on campus and the polemic that reached alumni revolved around the question of Toxic Culture–whether there was one, how it manifested itself, how to fix it or how to debunk its myth.

To alumni whose only contact with the community in years had been filtered through Media and University intermediaries, “toxic culture” meant a steady decline in academic excellence and increased political narrowness from their time at Antioch onwards; to conservative reporters, “toxic culture” came to be the perfect excuse to write diatribes against political correctness at liberal arts colleges; and to many observers “toxic culture” was a perfect shortcut to explaining how Antioch College had found itself in such an incomprehensibly dire situation: Antioch students were narrow-minded, unstable, out of control–they chased away new students, driving down retention and preventing Antioch from achieving financial stability. The toxic culture narrative made sense–and it was useful.

By Alex Borowicz

As the term exhales its final waking breaths into the snow-filled December air, students scramble to finish final papers and senior projects.  Besides the late nights, slippery walkways, and myriad of distractions, Antioch students face one obstacle that has been plaguing the school for months: feeble internet speed that leaves all community members fighting for their own chunk of cyberspace.

Not 10 years ago, before the heydays of file sharing, Antioch was the proud owner of a T1 connection that brought internet to students, staff, faculty, and administrators.  T1 lines are capable of transmitting at speeds of 1.5 megabytes per second for both uploading and downloading.  These days however, speeds have fallen to merely a fraction of their former rates.  Even with the proliferation of the internet and its increased accessibility, Antioch College has been reduced to around half that speed, suggesting that perhaps the college is now being given only a partial T1 line.

By Ben Horlacher
The Co-op program has gotten used to change.  In 1921 Arthur E. Morgan (the then president of Antioch College) began what is know a trademark of Antioch, the Co-op program. During the last few years the Co-op program has seen many changes: the implementation of Co-op communities, the concept of ?list jobs? enter into the vocabulary of Co-op, and the shift in required Co-ops from five to three. These changes were part of the much bemoaned renewal plan, which is often blamed for the College?s current financial straits.

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans

Antioch shakes you to your core; it breaks you and puts you back together with pieces of the people around you becoming part of you. That is what the past four months have felt like for me. If anything diverts me from the disappointment over the resolution that was meant to be the moment of relief and reward, then it is holding on to the unexpected bonds I made since this summer. I do not feel relieved, I do feel rewarded.