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.
Antioch College, Celebrating 155 Years of Market Tested Toughness
By Billy Joyce
It’s only just begun. Community Meeting was charged with anger and uncertainty this week. With the decision to lift the suspension of operations obliterating the past and only halfway tracing the future, distrust of the university’s minions and its board of trustees runs high.
University Vice Chancellor and Spokesperson Mary Lou LaPierre jockeyed for Community Member of the Week honors this week by putting a heroic spin on this past weekend’s Board of Trustees decision to lift the suspension of operations. Continue reading Dispatches from Community Meeting
By Jeanne Kay
I wish I could celebrate. I wish I could have called Bard College this week thanking them for their patience but telling them that I will never enroll, instead of simply deferring again. I wish I could have sent an email to my friends and family back home that said “The good news is that you’re invited again to my graduation ceremony in 2010. The bad news is, it’s still in Ohio.†I wish I could have let my yellow balloon escape, I wish the bell of main building had rung, I wish I could have gone back to being a normal student. I wish I could have felt relief.
  I am more than a little disappointed that continued financial exigency is a part of the agreement. The original declaration of financial exigency was based on (a) rapidly declining enrollments (in which the
Board played a major role), (b) large deficits (made larger by Board policy with regard to depreciation and COLLEGE endowment growth), (c) projected continuing decline in enrollment and revenue (cast as pessimistically as possible), and (d) cash flow problems. Continue reading Letter from Bob Devine ’67
I think that getting the Trustees to agree to lift the suspension is a great victory, and one that should not be downplayed. True, it’s not over yet. Perhaps the best way to articulate our situation is that we’ve cleared the first hurdle. But it’s also the hurdle we had to clear before we can get to any of the other hurdles.
As for the future of the college? I don’t know. There are a lot of factors—such as recruitment (a word I detest for its military connotation, by the way), curriculum, financial exigency, and where the power will go when the College has it’s own board—that could still cause us serious trouble. As I see it, it all comes down to how the Board of Trustees intends to handle these issues.
“But I’m also an optimist. I think we’ll manage it, with the Trustees and despite them†Continue reading Letter from Lincoln Alpern, 1st Year Student