Antioch College and Yellow Springs

June 6, 2016

We arrived in Yellow Springs Ohio late Sunday afternoon. The main street, Xenia Avenue, was nothing I recognized from my days here almost sixty years past.  Instead of the remembered sleepy village with a market, gas station, donut shop, diner, and barber the street was alive with tourists and residents. It is still the quaint, GMO-free, locally-grown, fair-trade, no-franchises-allowed  communist village it always was but it has grown to become three blocks of very artsy and naturalistic shops and cafes as well.

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It took me awhile to get my bearings but we found our B&B, the Arthur Morgan House just off the north end of the college campus. We found our check-in instructions and key then moved in to our second floor room. No one was in the building.

Arthur Morgan House was Arthur Morgan’s residence. I choose it for its historic significance in Antioch College history.

Arthur Morgan became a member of the Board of Trustees of Antioch College in 1919. The college was not doing very well at the time, but Morgan had a vision of what the school could become. In 1920, he became president of Antioch College, a position that he held until 1936. As president, Morgan stressed the need for students to become well-rounded human beings, focusing on making a contribution to the world rather than just concentrating on a field of study.

Under his leadership, the college gained a national reputation for its quality education. Morgan introduced an innovative concept that he called “work-study” during his time as Antioch’s president. Students attended classes for one term, and then took time off to work as interns in the outside world. Morgan believed that hands-on experience was as valuable as classroom learning.

Work-study, or Co-op as it was called when I was here, means six months on campus alternating with six months at an employer related to our chosen field of study.

There were about twenty five hundred students at Antioch in the years I studied here. Then in the late seventies the college established Antioch University in order to offer courses at centers in various cities around the country. Those are quite successful however they defocused attention on the Yellow Springs original campus to the extent enrollment, income and maintenance declined and the college closed for three years in the mid 2000s.

The campus closing got the attention of the alumni who banded together and convinced the Antioch University BoD to split Antioch College and its property off and give it to the newly re-formed Antioch College. The alumni effort continued and got the campus re-opened and refurbished in 2011. (Those two sentences must suffice as woefully inadequate description of the unimaginably huge effort by generations of powerful alumni, many dating before my time.)

The first year re-opened there were 35 students. They are now up to 250 and expect to add 80 this Fall.

I took the day to explore the campus. Eric Miller of the Alumni Relations Department spent several hours touring me, answering questions and filling me in on the history since I left. He graduated Antioch in 1981 then came back to teach until the close, then joined the challenge to get the college reopened, so he was an excellent resource.

It’s been nearly sixty years since I set foot on the campus. Flashbacks came suddenly and frequently, usually unexpectedly. The library layout was almost unchanged and I walked directly to my favorite study station, almost in a trance.

The familiar card catalog drawers were in the same place, though they have not been used for years; the library is now online and shares resources with other libraries.

With the small student body, several of the buildings are not yet needed and remain shuttered. Others have been repurposed. My old engineering lab is now the home of the geothermal plant that helps moderate temperatures in the active buildings.

Once Eric left me I wandered to the student cafeteria for lunch then visited WYSO, an FM and online (WYSO.org) radio station owned and operated by the college. I had poked around this station, volunteering for odd jobs when I was a student. The layout then was like most radio where I later worked; turntables and reel-to-reel tape machines where the announcer/engineer swapped and cued each program element as it was due up.

Radio is fully computerized today. I knew that and was very curious to see how that all worked in this era. I planned to peek in through the windows. I learned more than I could have hoped; Neenah Ellis, the station General Manager gave me a grand tour. We hung out in the main control room where the announcers demonstrated the modern software that can schedule for hours or days in advance.  No more turntables, no reel-to-reel, no cart machines. Just monitors, keyboards a few cd disc players and a server filled with selectable promos, music and prerecorded programs.

Neenah also toured me through their archives, old equipment and tape reels that go back to the day they first signed on.

Before I left the campus I had a few minutes to talk with Tom Manley, the college’s new President. His big challenge, other than the perpetual budget challenges of any institution, is to attain accreditation for the college. Accreditation remained with Antioch University at the split and must be earned anew. I left with the impression the college is still on precarious ground but has a definite feel it will make it. I will be watching and hoping for its success.

That evening we ate in Yellow Springs at William’s restaurant on their covered patio, the only restaurant in town that served dinner after six PM.

They don’t serve wine or beer. They suggested we bring our own, no corkage charge, so we bought a bottle across the street and enjoyed it along with splitting a delicious plate of salmon, shrimp and lobster over linguine Alfredo.

I know some restaurants that could learn from these gals.

-Geezer