The New York Times
By BILL DONAHUE
The long corridors of Antioch Hall are dark. The fluorescent lights, perhaps 50 years old and never updated, do not work. The vinyl floor tiles are loose. There are cobwebs and puddles on the floor, and the whole place smells of mold. You have to squint, almost, to picture this four-story brick building as the birthplace of one of the most vaunted experiments in American higher education.
Antioch College held its first classes in 1853. There were women among the school’s early students, as called for in the charter of the Christian Connexion, the church group that founded Antioch amid the cornfields and forests of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Blacks soon matriculated as well. In the decades that followed, Antioch flourished as a cradle of social activism and freethinking. It was the most liberal of liberal arts colleges. Yet Antioch College has been on shaky financial ground for its entire existence. Four times — in 1863, 1881, 1919 and 2008 — it has had to close.
Next month, it will reopen again. The college has been sending recruiters to college fairs nationwide for a year now, eventually hoping to draw brainy iconoclasts willing to pay $35,000 in annual tuition and room and board. The plan is to have 110 students next year and 1,200 students in a decade or so. But when Antioch kicks off the school year on Oct. 4, it will do so as a sort of nanoschool, having chosen to commence with just 35 freshmen from a pool of 145 applicants. This starter batch of students will enjoy four-year full scholarships, paid for with the interest earned from Antioch’s $25 million endowment. Read More
I'm Ron Denaro and thanks for joining College Campus Chatter today!
Ron Denaro is the president of College Campus Trips, a tour company providing high school students with tours of college campuses, nationwide. For more information, call (954) 567-5751 or e-mail: ron@collegecampustrips.com
No comments:
Post a Comment