Written on the Occasion of the Antioch College Alumni's Granting of the Annual Arthur Morgan Award to the Antioch College Faculty and Staff
I’ve been asked to accept this award on behalf of the faculty of Antioch College. We’re still here, we’re still going strong, and we are extremely happy to be granted this honor.
This year we have lived with the constant anxiety caused by termination, with the irreparable loss of many friends and colleagues, and most painful, the fear that the historic legacy of Antioch College that we have worked so hard to uphold is coming to a premature end. Yet despite the grimness of our situation, we have never felt alone. It has been our good fortune to have many wonderful partners and allies in this struggle. Indeed, the greatest rewards of this otherwise awful year have come from collaborating with alumni, and with our friends and neighbors in the Yellow Springs community. We have discovered how many lovely people care deeply about this historic institution and its success.
I would like to take a few minutes to recognize and say a heartfelt thanks to some of those who have given time and dedication and in many cases, money, to the cause of Antioch College this past year.
First we would like to thank the University Board of Trustees and the Chancellor of Antioch University for achieving what may never have been previously accomplished in the history of the College: bringing the faculty together, helping us to heal old rifts and long-standing disputes and provide the impetus for us to work together and to really start to appreciate each other.
More seriously,
We want to thank
--The Antioch College Alumni Association and the thousands of fabulous, brilliant, resourceful, infinitely creative alumni of Antioch College
--The wonderful folks at the College Revival Fund and the Alumni Board—thanks so much for your support—you are a godsend
--The brave and resolute Antioch Continuation Corporation (ACCC)
--The indefatigable Antioch College students and the prospective students of NonStop Antioch or The Nonstop Institution for the Liberal Arts (or whatever its name will be)
--Those renegade investigative journalists at The Antioch Papers who put in thousands of hours behind the scenes digging up vital information
--The Yellow Springs News and Inside Higher Ed for their continuous, in-depth, respectful coverage of a story which is not an easy one to condense into journalistic form
--The many talented writers, videomakers, photographers, dancers, and artists of all kinds who have documented and spoken to our struggle. (I really appreciated the piece last night in which the names and positions of all the people who have lost jobs in the closure of the College were projected onto the wall of the Herndon).
--The American Association of University Professors
--The loyal members of U.E. Local 767—true partners in struggle
--The non-union administrative staff who have been a joy to work with on a daily basis and who have done so much to keep up our morale
--The heroic faculty and staff of the Olive Kettering Library whose professionalism and dedication have somehow managed keeping the library open and operating in extremely straitened circumstances
--Antioch College Community Government—the 2007-2008 year (Chelsea, Levi, Rory and Corrie), and now for the 2008-2009 year. (Rowan and Foster).
--Hundreds of concerned citizens of the Village of Yellow Springs who have donated their time to organizing, fundraising, publicizing our cause, letter-writing, sign-painting, demonstrating, dropping everything and driving to Keene New Hampshire to present petitions to the Board of Trustees, and so much more.
--The Village of Yellow Springs for generously offering us a home for Antioch in Exile, also known as NonStop Antioch.
(In the next day and a half you’ll be hearing about more specifics about Nonstop Antioch, and we welcome your feedback and your ideas and contributions)
Well, Mother Jones’s dictum, “Don’t mourn, organize,” is as true as it ever was, and that’s what the Antioch faculty has been busy doing. Since Commencement we’ve been taking matters into our own hands—when the Antioch community governance structure was stalled by administrators, we created our own Administrative Council in Exile. While negotiations dragged on between the ACCC and the University Board of Trustees, we threw ourselves into organizing a new project designed to keep Antioch’s education and educational mission going strong: NonStop. From where I’ve been standing, the faculty has shown amazing resilience, intrepidity, and just plain spunk.
A journalist named Fran Ansley, in a personal account of community action in support of striking coal miners at Pittston’s plant in the bitter coal strike of 1989 made the following observation: “there are moments of transcendence that are capable of teaching us, of making us feel the possibilities that reside in us, in the people around us, and in the groups of which we are or can be part.”
This spring has certainly been one such moment, a moment of crisis that we, the faculty, with the help of the College Revival Fund and the Village of Yellow Springs, have been reshaping into a transcendence of crisis. New knowledges, new habits, new alliances are forged under these dramatic conditions of stress, and that is what has been happening to us. We have been learning, and continue to learn, about the possibilities that reside within us and in the people around us to an extent which would never have happened without the sad events of this turbulent year. NonStop is a still-evolving as I speak, but in its unique forging of partnerships with the Village of Yellow Springs and with alumni it may well prove to be another chapter in the book of Antioch’s numerous contributions to higher education in the United States.
At Commencement this year I presented an analogy between the efforts of environmentalists to conserve vanishing ‘green spaces’ and our efforts to save Antioch College and our vision of education, and I would like to briefly revisit that analogy here partly in order to clarify what we Antiochians are up against.
The Village of Yellow Springs has long sought to preserve green belts and green spaces against suburban sprawl. We know that parks and wild spaces, whether maintained privately or publicly, are absolutely vital ecologically. They are important for aesthetic reasons as well, sources of a variety of pleasures and a necessary sense of stability, continuity, and rootedness. However, parks serve no direct economic function—they often generate no revenue whatsoever and the land on which they sit would usually be worth far more if it were parceled up and ‘developed.’ Such developments serve the financial interests of a few well-placed individuals at the expense of sustaining public or communal space. But the loss of access to the landscape affects the well-being of an entire community. If one lives in a world of strip malls and parking lots one can eventually forget that green spaces were ever there, that they were so beautiful and so important for feeding the body and the soul. Sadly, one can become adapted to an environment of billboards, and not even consciously miss the view of the woods and fields any more. And of course a privileged few can always retire to their own private parks.
Liberal arts colleges, I propose, can be seen as “green spaces for the mind.” In terms of the elusiveness of their value they can be thought of in much the same way as parks and wild places. These educational ‘green spaces’ are equivalent to non-commercial space. Like literal green spaces, they are not profit-producing business enterprises, but they make vital--although hard to quantify--contributions to American life and communities nonetheless. Here are institutions which set aside four years for non-instrumentalized lines of inquiry—for silence, reflection, musings, experiment, practice, the gaining of knowledge, the trying out of ideas and art forms, the bumping up against Otherness and Other points of view, and always, for Questioning.
But, as in the parallel case of literal green spaces, one can all too easily become accustomed to the disappearance of liberal arts colleges. This loss of educational ‘green space’ is being justified by claims of the inherent inefficiency or impracticality of all that time, all those resources given over to disruptive questioning and purposeless meditations on the nature of truth, beauty, justice and self-discovery. We can no longer afford such luxuries, our opponents say. Why support historically elitist institutions, with such outmoded practices as tenure, with its fixed costs, and faculty governance, with its messiness and egos and constant impinging on managerial prerogatives? Why not focus on the non-threatening vocational training that working-class people really want? The charges of elitism and being out of touch with everyday people is in fact a common tactic used both against environmentalists and the liberal arts, as if ‘green space’ was not clearly beneficial to all people and all communities. (In our own case, it’s highly ironic when Antioch University seeks to position itself as the ally of working adults even as it busts unions, ignores tenure, exploits adjunct labor, sneaks out of retirement agreements and adds new administrative positions at the expense of staff and faculty.) Thus educational green spaces are being paved over in the name of the same supposedly inexorable laws of progress, efficiency, and market demand.
Well, why ARE liberal arts colleges so important to save and to nurture? While the ethos we promote at Antioch College and the methods we use to promote it may be ‘inefficient,’ it is far from purposeless. Aside from the (I would argue) considerable value of disinterested inquiry per se, we foster the ideal of stepping up and doing things because they need doing, not because someone will necessarily pay you to do them (although if they do, all the better—I’m certainly not against this!). The ‘green spaces’ of the liberal arts encourage the idea of that each individual should spend his or her brief time on this planet meaningfully and responsibly. The world will almost never think that it needs a new song, a new play, a new theorem, a new analysis, a new philosophy—but that doesn’t mean that this need is not in fact desperate.
This ethos of doing what needs to be done goes by many names: learning, curiosity, discovery, invention, scholarship, scientific findings, art, cultural production, volunteerism, giving back, community service, public spiritedness, citizenship, contributing to the common good, and more. What this array of activities have in common is that their significance cannot be measured in terms of monetary worth. Often their impact is hard to discern in the short term. What is not registered as immediately quantifiable and commodifiable is often not regarded as deserving of monetary compensation. I might suggest that we refer to these various non-instrumentalized activities and enterprises as ‘work,’ as in life-work, mission, calling, or using one’s unique talents or genius to the best of one’s abilities.
As faculty, as academics and artists, teaching is our life-work-and we will pursue it in some form no matter what transpires in the years ahead.
Arthur Morgan famously said, “The chief limitations of humanity are in its vision, not in its powers of achievement.” We take this dictum very seriously. I know I don’t have to convince this audience that the world needs Antioch, and similar places which breed and create space for visionaries. The problem, of course, is that most of the world does not know it needs us. Our true value has perhaps become harder, given the cluttered landscape, for others to see. But it’s clear to us—the faculty of Antioch College--through seeing the amazing people that our Alumni become, that Antioch has been one of the most fruitful and fertile green spaces of American higher education for the past 156 years. A place where flickers of dissent, of questioning, of commitment to democracy and justice, and what this year has abundantly proved, of hope, have endured. Perhaps our greatest accomplishment lies in the fact that hope persists in being kindled and rekindled here, even during the most uncertain of times. Thank you again for this great honor.