Chris Hill
June 12, 2010
You can also watch a video of Professor Hill delivering these remarks.
I appreciate this opportunity to confirm the findings of the AAUP Investigating Committee's Report, the only independent and in-depth investigation of Antioch College's closing that has occurred to date, and to underscore the importance of exercising sanction in this situation where the unwarranted closing has wrought deep and persistent damage on a liberal arts college that has served as a laboratory for progressive education, on its faculty workforce, and on an extended educational community.
I taught at Antioch College for 11 years where I was a tenured Associate Professor in Media Arts. As you know, without consulting the faculty to consider less drastic measures as called for in our Faculty Personnel Policies, the Antioch University Board of Trustees declared the College in financial exigency and voted to close its flagship institution in June 07. In fact, we now know that the University's administration had been seeking advice during the preceding half year from multiple outside consultants that included weighing the option of closing the College, an option "favored by the University administration," as articulated in one of the consultant's reports and reiterated in an interview with the local newspaper. The AAUP Report cites an AAUP document, The Role of the Faculty in Budgetary and Salary Matters: "At institutions experiencing major threats to their continued financial support, the faculty should be informed as early and as specifically as possible of significant impending financial difficulties... The faculty...should play a fundamental role in any decision that would change the basic character and purpose of the institution, including transformation of the institution."
Over that summer of 2007 following the closure there transpired a series of events that mobilized multiple stakeholders to challenge the University's ill-considered and unlawful decision. These passionately concerned stakeholders, with whom the University administration had not bothered to consult, included College faculty, alumni, staff, students, and residents of Yellow Springs, a village of 3000 where the College has been the major employer.
Subsequent actions included a Reunion that energized alumni and the college community across generations, provocative and informative online discussions, and the establishment of an online archive of found and donated documents providing critical insight into the governance and culture of secrecy fostered by the University administration with some of the trustees. The College faculty also filed a lawsuit that, in addition to challenging the violation of our Faculty Personnel Policies, was designed to function if necessary as an injunctive tool to keep the University from selling off property or knocking down buildings. The legal option to pursue damages, which might have rewarded individual faculty members without addressing the concerns of the collective community, was not considered.
In addition to the faculty being left in the dark about the University administration's plans to close the College, the Alumni Association was not consulted prior to the June 07 announcement. Reacting with shock and then action, within 6 months of the June announcement, almost $18 million had been pledged to the College Revival Fund. Those alumni pledges served as leverage in two separate negotiations over the next year to devise plans that would support and keep the College open with the University system intact, and that would not undermine the College's accreditation.
With the second round of negotiations ongoing in spring 08, the College Revival Fund and a majority of the faculty made plans for ways to keep a core of the academic resources of the College intact post-graduation, a commitment to Nonstop Antioch. Faculty, with students and staff, through elected members and leadership, reconstituted the College’s shared governance body, the Administrative Council, to form an Administrative-Council-in-exile, and prepared to sustain the performance of that practice of shared governance, what we understood to be the core of the College's pedagogical and institutional DNA.
When the second round of negotiations fell apart in May 08, and we were indeed forced off campus in June, the faculty continued building Nonstop. This unaccredited educational project was funded by $1.5 million from the College Revival Fund and eventually $500,000 of in-kind professional services. We offered classes for fall and spring terms, engaging 125 students, ranging in age from traditional undergraduate 18-22 year olds to retired residents of the village. Nonstop would provide jobs for 19 FTE faculty and 8 staff members, additionally supporting the village economy by way of payroll taxes, stabilized real estate values, and wages that would flow through local businesses. Classes were taught in churches, villagers' homes, and coffee shops, and we renovated a former industrial space for offices and meetings. I think it's fair to say that the faculty worked intensively, creatively and strategically that year, embracing both the local community and the College's farflung alumni diaspora. Enlisting an IT and Communications staff of talented young alumni, faculty, villagers, and students we streamed and archived the meetings of the shared governance bodies, hosted a busy program of visiting alumni speakers in the community, and created a highly informative website that could attract prospective students, keep alumni engaged, and inform the public.
All of this activity was accomplished in a state of complete limbo about the future of the College. During this start up of Nonstop in June 08, the third negotiation between alumni and trustees commenced. It would be a full year later, in June 09 when this third negotiating group could announce that the College would become independent of the University.
Also during that year following the closure, despite being advised by preservationists to keep the buildings on campus heated to at least 40 degrees, the University administration declined to do so. During two mid-winter periods of extreme temperature change, attic pipes burst and severely flooded three buildings, including two of the original pre-Civil War buildings. It was a Nonstop staff member who discovered the inches of water on the floor and what appeared to be rain pouring through the ceiling into the wood paneled rooms of the president's office. He called the fire department to attend to the disaster, despite the flock of surveillance cameras that had been installed on the buildings and the regular patrolling that the University claimed would keep the campus safe and intact. It was also villagers together with faculty and Nonstop personnel who came together and filed a petition with the Ohio Attorney General in February 09 to investigate the factors that led to the questionable care of the historic campus and to the closing of the College by Antioch University, a nonprofit organization registered in Ohio to serve a public purpose.
While the College's independence is now provisionally secured as a result of the two year intensive struggle by multiple stakeholders, we should not overlook the University administration's tragic decision to close the college that sadly did produce deep and long term collateral damage. Certainly the College buildings suffered greatly and unnecessarily due to poor stewardship by the University the year after closure. And what of the faculty post-closure and post-Nonstop, a faculty whose vision was, in the words of my colleague Jean Gregorek [see her article in fall 09 Academe], "intended to keep Antioch's professional educators together and pursing the meaningful educational work we all feel called to do."
While the 19 FTE faculty and 8 staff who chose to stay in Yellow Springs and work for Nonstop were salaried with healthcare from Sept 08 through June 09, June of 2010 finds most faculty still contingently employed, underemployed or unemployed. Out of a faculty census of approximately 35 who taught the last year the College was open we know of two tenured faculty who at the time the college closed in spring 08 had secured tenure-track jobs elsewhere, with two more formerly tenured faculty over the following year finding non-tenure track contract jobs that involve some administration and some teaching. Some former faculty retired after the College closed. After alumni funding for Nonstop was re-directed to the new College, five former faculty members were hired as “Arthur Morgan fellows” by the College during this 2009-10 transitional year. Four of the five are working in 3/4 time positions and all are with at will contracts. A number of the remaining former Nonstop faculty, mostly mid- to late-career with families and working partners, are teaching as adjuncts or visiting faculty in the area, grievously underpaid and with no job security. Some, like myself, are collecting unemployment while applying for jobs and contributing professional services to the new non-profit incarnation of Nonstop Institute, a cultural and educational project in Yellow Springs.
The creativity, resilience, and generosity of the faculty, alumni and community in responding to the closure, and persistent efforts over a two-year period to negotiate a mutually workable solution stand in stark contrast to the tragic and ill-considered reneging by the University and the Board of Trustees on their responsibilities, articulated in detail in the AAUP Report. I'd like to point to a vision of faculty participation put forward by Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock in an essay written for the Antioch University Board of Trustees in November 06, six months before the administration led the Board to the decision to close the College. Murdock's essay is titled "The Relationship Among Antioch's Board of Trustees and Its Executives Concerning Expectations in Communication and Responsibilities. In a section titled “Roles and Responsibilities of the Board,” four functions are outlined—delegation of authority, fundraising, relationships with communities, and court of appeals.
It is only in the last section of this 9-page document, the section on court of appeals, that she talks about faculty, and it is focused on how the board might respond to "controversy," such as attacks on the president or the Board accepting responsibility for institutional policies or practices. At no place in this entire document is there any discussion of the principles of shared governance, of the faculty functioning as a loyal opposition, or of the peculiar contradictions within the Antioch University system that has valued tenured faculty actively involved with shared governance in Antioch College for decades along side the untenured core faculty on the adult campuses, or how those two different but co-existing academic cultures might shape faculty, administrator, or board expectations. In fact, the question raised by Murdock is "whether there should be any communication between Trustees and disgruntled faculty." She allows that "certainly in the areas of developing curriculum, designing academic programs, and selecting their peer faculty and program heads, faculty play a strong and pivotal role. Potential controversy surfaces when faculty members attempt to influence Board members through direct contact and participation."
She continues: "In examining this issue further, we can note some received wisdom about the communication and interaction between Boards and faculty from the faculty sector. Faculty members are generally advised of the unlikelihood that their colleagues will become involved in sufficient numbers to ensure a truly democratic 'participatory democracy.' A generally accepted analysis has it that faculties usually comprise spectators (60%), apathetics (30%), and activists (10%). Does the faculty really want 10% of their members to speak for all of them?"
Attention to longstanding contradictions within the governance structures of the multi-campus, federated University and efforts to protect shared governance and academic freedom throughout all of its institutions have been for years and remain a fundamental problem at Antioch University. There is a clear record of accrediting reviewers and Antioch College presidents from the last decade urging the University administration and Board to focus on these interrelated structural problems, only to be ignored, refused, and in one case asked to sign a legal document saying that such issues would never be brought forward.
Michael Fishbein, the new president of Antioch McGregor hired in summer 09, spoke recently to the local Unitarian congregation about trends in higher education. A retired Antioch professor who attended, reported that he outlined concerns about the increasing costs of higher education as it affected undergraduate and graduate students and called for a new educational and fiscal model. Rather than supporting a teaching faculty of PhDs, he recommended increased reliance upon adjuncts, or what a core faculty member at his institution described as an "adjunct fleet." Fishbein went on to explain that PhDs were more suited to do research and administrative work. Their work in not primarily in the classroom which should be allotted to adjuncts with masters degrees. As he had noted earlier in his presentation that he had been attracted to Antioch McGregor's social justice mission when deciding to accept his new position, my former colleague asked him how those values squared with his proposed model of delivering higher ed curricula using underpaid, contingent labor? His response was that adjunct teaching was never meant to create a good living for people, that it attracted people who liked to teach and be in the classroom and were able to afford this situation. Antioch McGregor’s reliance on adjuncts and its current president’s aspiration to extend this institutionalized practice further points to the de-skilling and de-professionalization of the professoriate examined by higher ed researchers like Marc Bousquet and Cary Nelson. Not surprising, core faculty with whom my colleague and I have spoken at McGregor were in strong disagreement with the proposed model.
The evolution of the academy will continue to be marked by strategic adjustments to survive changing economic, political and cultural realities. The erosion of tenure, shared governance, and academic freedom are landmarks of the current academic landscape nationwide. Antioch University's decision to close Antioch College contributed directly to that erosion with both local and national implications. I again quote from my colleague Jean Gregorek's recent Academe article: "Clearly Antioch's plight dramatized these common trends in the corporatization of higher education: a consolidation of power in the upper levels of administration and the expansion of administrative bureaucracy, a reliance on consultants as opposed to available wisdom and experience, a shift away from faculty and community traditions of governance, the abrogation of faculty control over the curriculum, a lack of transparency in governance, a culture of secrecy and closed conversations on the part of the Boards of Trustees and administrators, and no consultation with other stakeholders in making decisions with far-reaching and damaging impacts.” The remainder of her list of national trends pertains less to the College but remains a problem for the adult Antioch University campuses with untenured core faculty: “increased use of contract, part-time and adjunct labor; increased reliance on distance-learning and low -residency courses, and a succumbing to the 'edifice complex'—prioritizing showpiece buildings and facilities over personnel and the rehabilitation of existing usable spaces."
The AAUP has been an invaluable ally for Antioch College and its community. The AAUP’s independent investigation and detailed report clearly spell out violations of the longstanding tradition of the College’s shared governance and the abdication of responsibility on the part of Antioch University. Now the AAUP has the opportunity to underscore the conclusions of its Investigating Committee’s report. By sanctioning Antioch University, you will continue to direct attention to the University’s unprofessional and uncolleagial faculty governance policies, practices detrimental to the maintenance of high standards, fair working conditions for teachers and scholars, and to the academic freedom that is the precondition for all higher learning.
Chris Hill