August 22, 08

Hi from Tex (David) Allen, '66 (Email me directly at TexAllen@Hotmail.Com):

The annual and very depressing list of "Best Colleges In America" was just released by the US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, and Antioch College Ohio is not there, sadly.

Here's the link:

http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/105598/Best-Colleges-...

What happened to Antioch? LIFE Magazine ran a big photo article in 1960 when I was in high school dreaming about attending Antioch and going to NYC and Chicago on co-op jobs....the article was titled "America's Top 100 Colleges" and of course, Antioch College, Ohio, was part of the list....LIFE Magazine mentioned the co-op program not at all, stated the "scholarship program is very good," and that "some students are careless about their appearance," but otherwise, Antioch College Ohio was "up there" and without doubt, one of the WORLD'S best schools. And it was.

Why the collapse? A book (many books) should be written about "What happened to and at Antioch College Ohio...the 'Ozymandias' of colleges, once mighty, but disappeared into dust, just like Milton's poem about Ozymandias." (I think it was Milton).

I think the VERY start of Antioch's fall was caused when President Sam Gould (1954-59) doubled the college's student population without doubling the dorm space or other facilities for the students of those and later times. Plain old crowding became a crisis problem never really addressed, and the dominos fell from there.

Antioch College Faculty may or may not have had a retirement/ pension system before the early 1960's, but the Antioch faculty were BOT part of the famous and widespread "TIAA-CREFF" retirement system used by most higher educuation schools which boasted good retirement plans. Then, in the early 1960's, Antioch College "bought into" the TIAA-CREFF Retirement Program at a cost of roughly $6 Million.

This occurred in roughly 1962 under the then new Presidency of Dr. James Payson Dixon (1959-75), who wrote about the subject in his autobiographical history of his time at Antioch College as President titled ANTIOCH: THE DIXON ERA 1959-75 (1991 Bastillle Books).

The move put Antioch College into major debt, and created financial anxieties for Antioch administrators and Trustees never known before.

Buying the Antioch faculty a TIAA-CREFF pension kicked Antioch's tiny financial resources into reverse during the early years of President James Dixon (1959-75), and THAT led to more nervousness and bad decisions aimed at getting "more money in gimmicky ways" (e.g. taking Rockefeller Foundation money refused intelligently by other major colleges to invite inner-city kids to invade and criminalize Antioch in the late 60's/ early 70's, and the whole out of control "network" thing which in time resulted in the current crisis of satellite schools and small time big shots like Toni Murdock....a satellite school leader...raiding and destroying the founding Antioch College Ohio to feed the satellites.....ungrateful children murdering their parents for gain!

And now.....alumni like me get mass email communications about Antioch "surviving via classes held in scattered locations in Yellow Springs, Ohio away from the campus....just like the Strike of 1973 (classes were held off campus during the strike when the strikers closed down the campus for 6 weeks).

How the mighty have fallen...and maybe always do.

Best,
Tex (David) Allen, '66 , SAG Actor