When Bill Groves stepped into the role of Interim Chancellor of Antioch University in March of 2016, he knew he would have work to do.
This wasn’t just because he had read up on the institution before accepting the job. He had been representing Antioch as a lawyer since 1979—his first job out of law school was at the firm Martin, Browne, Hall, and Harper, PLL, which had represented Antioch since 1921, and Groves worked on the Antioch legal matters from his first days at the firm, eventually becoming the lead lawyer assigned to the institution. Between 2007 and 2009, Groves had led the University’s legal efforts to close and then sell the long-declining Antioch College campus for $6 million to a small group of alumni who sought to rebuild and reopen the campus as a newly incorporated and independent entity. After that difficult, fraught negotiation consumed a large majority of his professional attention, Groves had decided to leave the law firm to join Antioch as its first-ever, in-house General Counsel, in 2010. And a few years later, in 2013, he had negotiated the sale of WYSO and other assets of the University to the newly-formed Antioch College for an additional $8 million. But soon thereafter, the University posted several years of significant operating deficits that cut deeply into the University’s cash reserves. “There are just so many assets I can sell,” he had told the Board of Governors.
Now, as Chancellor, he pursued swift changes that set the University on its present course. Today’s Antioch has a simplified governance structure featuring centralized administration and support staff, and this has supported massive growth in enrollment and budget, successful weathering of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a promising partnership model with the Coalition for the Common Good that, if it realizes its founders’ biggest aspirations, will set Antioch up to continue as a leader in higher education for decades to come.
Today, Chancellor Groves is preparing to step down from the job he has held for the last nine years. A new Chancellor will take over this summer. This upcoming change is giving Groves a chance to reflect on his work and legacy, something that he has hardly had time to do since taking on this high-stakes job. It’s been an eventful decade to serve at the helm of Antioch University.
“It’s not like I took this job to—what’s the expression?—take a victory lap at the end of my career, or just keep the trains running on schedule,” says Groves. “I had to make sure there were going to be trains, and that there was going to be a schedule going forward. And I had hundreds of people whose livelihood depended upon me making sure I got that right. Or there was going to be no University, and everybody was going to be looking for a job, and we would lose 170 years of a really grand experiment in educating for democracy and social justice.”
The first big challenge faced by Groves was the fact that while the University shared a single budget, it was effectively being run as five separate campuses, each with its own Board of Trustees, IT infrastructure, fundraising and marketing teams, and budget priorities. This came after the period of expansion (1964-75) when Antioch went from having a single campus serving 18- to 24-year-old undergrads in Yellow Springs, Ohio to operating over 40 campuses and centers across the U.S. and even abroad. (Read our cover story from two years ago, “Becoming a National University”), Over the ensuing decades, as each location had significant autonomy but also had to sink or swim on its own, many of these campuses shut down or were spun off. By the mid-2000s only six remained: the current five and Antioch College. Then, in 2007, the Board of Antioch University voted to close the College campus due to existential financial concerns. (Eventually, the campus was sold to a group of alumni, who licensed the name Antioch College and reopened it as a standalone, undergrad-only institution in 2011.) Now Antioch University had only five campuses. These operated on the model of a loose confederation, competing with each other for both resources and students. They were running a giant budget deficit.
Three months after taking the job, Chancellor Groves presented the Board of Governors with a “Realignment Plan” that would take these five fairly independent institutions and turn them into a single, integrated university. “It took us three days to get to consensus,” remembers Groves, “but we got there.”
“I had hundreds people whose livelihood depended upon me making sure I got that right. Or there was going to be no University, and everybody was going to be looking for a job, and we would lose 170 years of a really grand experiment in educating for democracy and social justice.”
The plan caused significant pain at the start. The five campus presidents were each let go, and their staff were reassigned to work under the various Vice Chancellors in the newly centralized administration. For Groves, “probably the most tragic was disbanding the local campus boards of trustees, all good-intentioned people.” Still, he saw unifying the University’s administration and governance structure as a matter of the highest urgency. “I was convinced that the governance structure with five campus boards reporting up to a central fiduciary board was enormously complicated and divisive and was going to destroy the University,” says Groves. He believed “that if we could not start working as a team and stop competing with each other, we had a very short future.” He was equally convinced that the confederated model with administrative power concentrated in campus administrators to the exclusion of a strong central administration was redundant, wasteful, and tremendously ineffective. “We weren’t growing or building,” says Groves. “Instead, we were becoming experts at closing things.”
For months there was uncertainty, concern, and a sense of loss among some stakeholders around Antioch who had enjoyed the years of virtual autonomy from central oversight and accountability. But within a year it was clear that the University was going to survive—and that the new model would actually allow it to deploy its resources in strategic ways that would set it up to grow into new areas and meet the demands of previously unserved students. Many of these students turned out to be aspiring mental health professionals from across the country, who ended up driving the massive growth of the School of Counseling, Psychology, and Therapy. The great demand for these programs—and especially for the MA in Clinical Psychology offered at the Los Angeles campus—has driven much of the enrollment growth of the last nine years. This, in turn, has helped Antioch grow its budget from $54M in 2016 to almost $80M in the last fiscal year. And it has enabled the institution to pursue other strategies including building out continuing education offerings and affiliation.
But as Groves, the Board, and the rest of the faculty, staff, and administration of Antioch worked towards these goals, the world had some more curveballs to throw. Some of these were political, such as navigating the first Trump administration’s policies and responding to the protest movement that sprung up after the murder of George Floyd. Antioch has a long tradition of seeing education as the bedrock of democracy—a tradition that goes back to Antioch’s founding President, Horace Mann—and Groves encouraged faculty and students to see federal policies and popular protest movements as opportunities to reflect on their work and also on the work of the University. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Groves created a new Anti-Racism Task Force. This group, made up of a cross-section of faculty, staff, and students, has tackled the ways Antioch can and must do better.
Another challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic, directly challenged Antioch’s ability to keep its doors open and its budget balanced. Through swift action, the devoted labor of hundreds of staff and faculty, and leaning on the experience and knowledge already built up by Antioch’s long history of offering low-residency programs, the University swiftly transitioned to a fully distance-learning format. They also set up emergency funds to support students facing the worst impacts of the pandemic. Many months later, the campus buildings reopened—with significant safety measures in place. Antioch University had weathered the storm and, unlike most institutions, had actually grown its enrollment.
Through all of these challenges, Groves has worked to develop a culture and practice of greater transparency across Antioch. Before he took over, he explains, “faculty had never gotten a good, clear picture of the University’s finances.” Today, with regular town halls held virtually as well as occasional in-person open meetings on the campuses, interested employees are able to learn about the central works of the University administration, including budget, strategic priorities, and long-term plans. This approach to leadership also means that Groves and the Vice Chancellors are able to hear faculty and staff concerns early in their decision-making processes, ideally leading to better outcomes overall.
As Groves looks back on his long service to Antioch, he sees not just an institution that he has mixed his labor with, but also a place that has helped him step fully into being himself. When he first encountered Antioch as a 25-year-old attorney, he didn’t know anything about the institution. “Everything I learned came after I joined the firm and started doing work for them,” he says. “I got to know so many great people, and I began to really love Antioch because of how they represented, in a way that nobody else in my life had… the social justice issues of the day.” These included issues like women’s bodily autonomy, the long history of white supremacy in American political life, and environmental justice.
“How society treated people like me led to a lot of my social justice leanings. It was about recognizing the marginalization of other people and the cruelty and injustice of that.”
Also: LGBTQIA+ rights. “It was probably the first time I ran into people who in their professional life were out,” says Groves. “I had never experienced that before.” Growing up, he had internalized the unwritten rule that LGBTQIA+ people had to either sublimate their feelings and remain closeted or live life on the margins of society. As a closeted gay man himself, Groves had not believed that another way was possible. “After all, I grew up during the Anita Bryant reign of terror. So it was, for me, an eye-opening experience,” he says, “to see people who were highly regarded, in very responsible positions, who were out and respected by their employer and colleagues.” Years later, when Groves came out to his family, friends, and colleagues at age 42, “Antioch was there,” he says. And when it comes to his career at Antioch, this detail from his personal life hasn’t seemed to hold him back.
To the contrary, the experience of being marginalized is a big part of what led Groves to develop the awareness and passion for social justice that has made him a natural fit with the institution. “Nobody knew that I was gay. Not one person,” says Groves. “Not even my identical twin brother.” He explains that carrying this secret around and seeing “how society treated people like me led to a lot of my social justice leanings. It was about recognizing the marginalization of other people and the cruelty and injustice of that.”
The desire to put Antioch on a firmer footing while preserving what’s best about it and expanding the reach of its mission is what made Groves pursue perhaps the biggest initiative of his time as Chancellor: the creation of the Coalition for the Common Good. Talks about potential mergers or affiliations began all the way back in 2018. It took until August 15, 2023 for the Coalition to be officially announced. (Read the details in an article from last year’s magazine.) This new university system, of which Antioch is one of two founding members—the other being Otterbein University in Ohio—promises to help more people access an Antioch education while expanding Antioch’s offerings and shoring up its financial position.
In the last year, Antioch has begun to see the first fruits of being part of the Coalition for the Common Good. Its new School of Nursing and Health Professions has opened with several programs that had previously been part of Otterbein University’s offerings. Additionally, Otterbein has begun offering numerous Graduate Early Admissions Pathways that allow their undergraduates to transition seamlessly into Antioch graduate programs, saving money along the way. At the same time, having a strong partner in Ohio has enabled Antioch to bring existing, high-demand programs (for instance, the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program) to a new market.
Antioch’s role in the Coalition is to be the university system’s graduate university. This means Antioch will likely take on further graduate programs as it partners with other institutions—and it will leverage future sister institutions to bring its offerings to new populations and geographical areas. In this way, Groves and the other leaders of the Coalition hope to expand Antioch’s academic portfolio and reach.
For Groves, the Coalition is in some ways a return to roots for Antioch. “We have a reputation and a brand that’s national,” he explains. “We had facilities and programs in every corner of the United States. You can’t walk around with an Antioch t-shirt on and not get stopped by people who were part of those programs: Philadelphia and Tucson and Phoenix but also San Francisco and Hawaii and Alaska.” Many of the alumni profiled in this magazine—and receiving it in the mail—studied at one or another of these now-closed campuses. Though the buildings they studied in may no longer belong to the University, Groves is emphatic that they are still Antiochians, and that today’s Antioch still carries the DNA of the past. The Coalition offers chances to make that legacy even more tangible. As he says, “The opportunity to expand into more geographical areas as we build our portfolio of programs, and to reclaim that national presence, is pretty exciting stuff.”
Like anyone who loves the place they work, Groves has some sorrow about stepping down. If he was younger, he might well be staying on the job and looking to guide Antioch through the opportunities as well as the challenges sure to come in the next years and decades. But he’s 71, and, as he says, “The stress of the job wears on you.” All the decision points and long hours have him looking forward to having more free time to spend with his partner, children, grandchildren, and also his siblings—he’s the youngest of four brothers, though he trails his twin by only two minutes.
He’s picked this moment to step down in part because it’s a lull between the big decision points of launching the Coalition for the Common Good and the next step: bringing on more member institutions. “As one of the architects of the Coalition, I’d love to stay and help build it. But growing the affiliation is a relationship-building endeavor,” says Groves, “and I thought it was important that the next leader build that relationship, not the person going out the door.”
“What is clear is that the world today needs Antioch University and its values and mission as much as it ever has.“
Stepping down this way, with a year’s notice, has given the institution the chance to pursue an orderly search for the next Chancellor. Which is good, because the next leader will have some important choices to make. Despite the many huge and transformative ways that Groves and other leaders have changed the University over the past nine years, there is a continued need for change. Groves’s successor will need to find ways to make the University more efficient and effective, and to grow enrollment. And all of this will need to happen under the stress of operating in a political climate that has become decidedly more complex. “The attacks on higher education since January 20 are legion,” says Groves. “They impact all of us, even those not currently under investigation for exercising our First Amendment rights to teach what we know is just and right.”
Antioch’s next leader can take inspiration from the example of Chancellor Groves. It’s no small thing to preserve something as delicate and alive as a university. With his 45 years of service to Antioch, nine of them as the institution’s top leader, Groves leaves a legacy of making bold and at times controversial decisions, but always with the intention of helping Antioch continue to thrive and accomplish its mission in the world. As he puts it, “It’s been a very interesting and rewarding way to end my career.”
There is much that remains to be done—but then, at what point in its 173-year history has Antioch been able to sit back and rest on its laurels? What is clear is that the world today needs Antioch University and its values and mission as much as it ever has. And Antioch is here today, ready to meet that call.
