Who killed Antioch? Womyn

ON JUNE 12, the board of trustees of Antioch College, the famously countercultural institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, announced that the campus would shut down next year. The decision is a result of declining enrollment, insufficient alumni support and facilities so neglected that, according to several reports, some buildings don't have hot water. Earlier this year, a number of faculty members were laid off. Meanwhile, student enrollment, which had been about 2,000 in the college's 1960s heyday, has dwindled to about 400.

Like a handful of other unconventional colleges, Antioch offers "areas of concentration" instead of majors, and issues "narrative evaluations" instead of letter grades. But even in an era when the most common question in a high school classroom is "Are we being graded on this?", it's not all that shocking that many prospective students have opted to spend their $35K-a-year tuition and fees at places that have hot water. There's a difference, after all, between getting back to the garden and actually living in one.

And then there's the matter of alumni contributions. Even though it was founded in 1852 and has a number of distinguished alumni, Antioch College, the flagship institution of a larger system called Antioch University (there are campuses in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, among other locations) has an endowment of just $40 million. That's appallingly low -- neighboring Ohio colleges Oberlin and Kenyon have endowments of $700 million and $165 million, respectively.

There's no lack of speculation as to how this happened. Many have suggested that the career choices of typical Antioch alums (think public servant or activist rather than CEO or law partner) do not lend themselves to generous contributions. Others see a more general problem with liberal philanthropy. In a podcast interview for InsideHigherEd.com, Bard College President Leon Botstein (who in the 1970s was president of the seriously far-out and short-lived Franconia College) came down hard on what he sees as a failure of liberals to support their institutions.

"One of the tragedies of the progressive liberal movement," Botstein said, "is that unlike at a conservative institution -- such as Princeton or Dartmouth, where the alumni are deeply loyal and give it support and money -- for liberals, higher education is not a strong enough cause. Their causes are social causes, and higher education is left for the conservatives to fund."