YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO — It was perhaps the last great protest at Antioch College.
The call to arms came last week, when Antioch College's board of trustees announced that the school -- emblematic of the '60s counterculture and the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements -- had run out of money and would close in July 2008.
The news came as a shock to students, local residents and alumni -- who descended upon this village Friday with one goal: to fight "them" and save their alma mater.
The closure of Antioch College is seen as more than the end of a university -- it is another sign of the passing of an era when the search for knowledge brought greater rewards than a degree, a job and a comfortable place in suburban society.
So the Antioch faithful came by the hundreds, from across town and throughout the nation. Some wore anti-Vietnam War T-shirts, others crisp linen suits. But all shared a connection to the liberal arts institution founded in the heat of the abolitionist era, in a place that was one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad.
"It breaks my heart," said Ralph Keyes, 62, a local resident who met his wife here on their first day of school in 1962. "It wasn't just a college. It was a cause."
On Friday morning, trustees and college administrators tried to explain what went wrong to an auditorium packed with more than 600 people, many of whom hissed and jeered as college President Steven Lawry outlined the problems, and how the school had come to rely almost completely on student tuition to cover operating costs.
Ever since a student-driven strike divided the campus in the 1970s, at one point closing the school for six weeks, enrollment has steadily declined from its peak of more than 2,000.
Now, only a few hundred undergraduates are willing to pay $35,400 a year for tuition, room and board to attend this laboratory for American liberal education, where verbal assessment -- not grades -- is a measure of academic performance.
The school's current endowment of $35 million is also lackluster. Denison University in Granville, Ohio, lists its endowment as $545 million; the endowment at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., is $279 million.
While there is a long list of famous alumni, including Coretta Scott King and "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, the school became known for educating artists, activists and nonprofit organizers instead of wealthy business leaders.
