Category: Front Page

Articles from the front page.

Suspension Lifted, Suspense Remains

By Eva Erickson & Diana Starkweather

Antioch’s campus was left a ghost town, last Saturday, as students filed in to a historical community meeting in McGregor 113. After impatiently waiting for a week, students, faculty, staff, and other community members anxiously gathered in the one room on campus had signs of life, to hear Antioch’s fate after a week long deliberation between College alumni and University trustees.

After a quiet build up of suspense with small interjections of applause, Andrzej Bloch, the newly-dubbed interim president, announced that the Alumni Board and the Board of Trustees had agreed upon a resolution in principle, and that the BOT “officially rescinds the suspension of operations of Antioch College.” The announcement of decision caused an immediate outburst of cheers, happy-tears, and applause that could be heard from outside the building. It was like popping a zit that had been festering on your forehead for a week.

Continue reading Suspension Lifted, Suspense Remains

And Then We Wait…

Banners, signs, and golden balloons all over Yellow Springs announced the arrival of the Antioch University Board of Trustees last week Wednesday. In addition to the meeting between Trustees and the Alumni Board, around 130 alumni from around the country flocked to campus to await the decision they had been working towards since June: the lifting of the suspension that is scheduled to make the College go dark by July of next year. The weekend, however, ended without a decision.

Resolute and chanting the Antioch community descended upon the Bryan Center last Thursday for the presentation of the alumni business plan to trustees, villagers and Antiochians.

Spirits were high, when alumnus Matthew Derr revealed the $18 million in cash and pledges the alumni have raised to encourage Antioch University to deliver significant autonomy to the college. Continue reading And Then We Wait…

Jury Still Out, Courtroom Left Wondering

“I feel like it’s absolutely wretched,” commented third year student Rachel Sears, “but I hope it means that they’re considering a yes.” With the announcement on Saturday October 27th that the Board of Trustees’ decision in regards to the future of Antioch College would be delayed, the Community has been, once again, left hovering in uncertainty.

Homecoming weekend, with its flood of alumni—some of them coming from as far as Slovenia—its media momentum, and the yellow decorations extravaganza, had a climactic quality that led many to believe that the decision would come “now or never.” On Saturday afternoon, students, alumni, faculty and staff gathered on the Stoop, expecting an imminent announcement. “Have you heard anything?” echoed back and forth while wild rumors and sophisticated interpretations of alumni board members’ facial expressions went around, and test rounds for the Main Building North Tower Bell made everyone jump. The announcement at the John Bryan Center that no decision would be reached at the end of the weekend, and that trustees would be flying back home that same evening broke the illusion that October 27th would be a historic day. Continue reading Jury Still Out, Courtroom Left Wondering

Major Changes in IT

This weekend marks a number of changes in the operations of Antioch University’s IT system. In addition to the move of the college’s server and change in FirstClass login names, new policies have been drawn up that will give IT staff legal access to Email boxes of employees.
According to head of the IT department, William Marshal, there are 30 to 40 servers that support University IT operations, two of them running Email services. The Yellow Springs campuses have their email on a server that was here in Yellow Springs and the other four run their mail off a server in New England. Marshall, who accepted the position of Chief Information Officer 10 months ago, explained on Tuesday, “What we’re doing is putting everyone on the same server because there are problems with people communicating across campuses. That server will be physically located in New England.”

The server migration will take place this weekend, November 3-4, and FirstClass will be offline for the transfer. Coinciding with this move of hardware is a move from current usernames to the NetID system. When the FirstClass email system goes back online all usernames, formerly the user’s first initial and surname, will become Datatel, or NetID numbers. For students, this is the number on caf/key cards and the number used to access my.antioch.edu. Continue reading Major Changes in IT

The Road to Financial Exigency

Research: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans & Brian Springer

“Based on projections of enrollment, if we would have gone beyond the next year, there weren’t going to be more resources to cover expenses.” So says Antioch University CFO Thomas Faecke, in response to the question what his personal reason was to support the suspension of operations at Antioch college in 2008. “There was a fear that the university would become insolvent and that was primarily because of the deficit of the college,” he adds. Presented with this scenario, on June 9th, the vast majority of the members of the University Board of Trustees voted to suspend operations at the 155-year-old college.

“I think in the early 90s, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to close the college and keep the university open,” says Ann Filemyr, a former journalism professor, interim Dean of faculty and serving vice president at the college until 2005. “At that time, the college was clearly considered as the center of Antioch University.”

Continue reading The Road to Financial Exigency