This essay is part of Antioch Voices, a forum for Antiochians to speak out about issues important to them. Opinions expressed here belong to the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Antioch University. If you’d like to share your own voice, the first step is to send a short description of what you are planning to write about to [email protected].
I retire from Antioch in a few days, after 35 amazing years. As I officially prepare to say good-bye, I’ve been feeling incredibly anxious. On the verge of panic as it feels like everything I believe in (including myself), and every institution I thought would hold (including Antioch), is facing existential crisis.
Perhaps that’s why Horace came to visit me in my dream, maybe one last time. As we have been prone to do over the years, we sat on the Mound in Yellow Springs and talked about hope, specifically my hopes for Antioch.
Difficult times are not new to Antioch. Of course, there have been trials and tribulations, financial crises, unpaid paydays, the Civil War, world wars, the KKK, McCarthyism. And too there has been Freedom Summer and the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement. All of them played out at Antioch.
I look out from the Mound and wonder, how did others over time fight demons much worse, watch their democracies crumble yet calm their panic and fight in whatever way they could? How did those very last fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto find the unbelievable courage to stand tall, even though they knew their end was already written? How did African Americans and their allies find those lunch counters and walk those bridges even as ropes were being hung on trees?
Others had it much worse and made it through. Somehow, I know I will find a way to breathe again. Perhaps this conversation with Horace will help. Connecting time and place and resilience gives me hope for Antioch. Forward. Antioch Strong.
Today, Antioch University faces a very painful, complicated, and still unresolved dispute with the CCG, which could shutter its independence, lose its Board, and see it become an appendage to another institution. I say, we refuse to let Antioch die.
It reminds me a bit of the 2008 Board decision to close Antioch College with great heartbreak. Antiochians refused to let it die. And it survives today.
I stand with Antioch University leadership, faculty and staff, and the Antioch Board, all working so hard to preserve Antioch’s independence. I deeply hope that all the efforts by so many Antiochians near and far will, in fact, take us forward another 175 years.
But I hope for much more than mere survival. I hope Antioch thrives with purpose. I hope it continues to honor its own deep, compelling complexity of diverse people, multiple places, and innovative programs. I hope it does not surrender to traps of efficiency that would diminish our unique role in U.S higher education.
I hope Antioch can build and strengthen communities of care and belonging, externally and within the institution itself. We cannot lose sight that our unity is strengthened by our diversity, and our diversity is strengthened by that unity. That lesson should never be lost. I hope our students grow, our faculty thrive, and our alumni make good trouble in every state of this country and around the world. The planet needs us.
I hope Antioch is a destination to educate and strengthen democracy. I hope that Antioch continues with every leadership appointment, financial decision, and academic choice—to educate for jobs, yes, AND to educate for justice. It is not one or the other.
The authoritarian movements we see here and abroad are betting on an under-educated and angry citizenry to make us believers of lies, to make us haters of those who look different, to make us lovers of fake gold and fake gods, to entice us to fawn over narcissistic inflated egos whose manhood is inches too small. Can it still be about that?
Here on this Mound, as I think of my hopes for Antioch’s future, I realize with great pain that so much of history is the same story told over and over again, of those dreaming and those destroying.
Whether the 1860s or the 2020s, I see disenfranchised and angry mostly white people rage on others. They’re eating your cats and dogs. They’re using your blood in secret rituals. To them, vermin is vermin, be they Jews then or Muslims now. Be they Haitians or Mexicans. Their worry is the same—who will replace them? They are losing their real or perceived privilege.
Higher education—my home, my institution—is under particular assault these days. It is not just one bad administrator or one school’s wrong decision to shut down discourse. It is the destruction of the Department of Education. The defunding of scientific research. The shuttering of the humanities. The undoing of all that equity and inclusion has lifted. The unbearable tuition costs making higher education yet more inaccessible. It is an effort to lock every public library, close every open classroom, rename every pillar of society with adulation for false gods and men.
I am positive Horace would criticize every aspect of this GOP agenda to erase, exclude or marginalize others as contrary to America’s aspirational ideals of inclusivity and opportunity. He would oppose any movement that exacerbates divisions rather than fostering unity. I don’t know if he would have walked the bridge in Selma or marched for No Kings in Minneapolis. I don’t know what the dignified 19th-century patriarch-politician would have done, but I know what this deeply unhappy child-of-the-’60s soon-to-be-retiree must do. My commitment to winning victories for humanity does not end when I walk out the proverbial Antioch door.
Horace believed in an uncommon nation of independent people with the tools to escape poverty and resist exploitation and autocracy. I hope Antioch thrives for decades to come as the uncommon school for the common good.
I have a t-shirt that I bought at the Antioch College bookstore some 30 years back. It reads, “Antioch: Bootcamp of the Revolution.” It is time again. I hope for Antioch to continue to educate in/for/about the principles of justice, equality, human dignity, and civic responsibility.
I hope that Antiochians will continue to fight for all we believe in. Fight for Antioch to Be Strong. Antioch Forward. Those are my hopes.
It has been an honor, a privilege, a responsibility, and a joy to have served Antioch for over three decades.
Thank you.
In peace, with justice, always an Antiochian,
Laurien
