For the increasingly vocal radical members of the community, change wasn’t going far enough or fast enough. They wanted revolution, but out there in the middle of the cornfields the only “bourgeois” thing to fight was Antioch College itself. The let’s-try-anything, free-thinking society of 1968 evolved into a catastrophic blend of legitimate paranoia (Nixon did keep enemies lists, and the F.B.I. did infiltrate campuses) and postadolescent melodrama. In 1973, a strike trashed the campus and effectively destroyed Antioch’s spirit of community. The next year, student enrollment was down by half.
Most of the talented faculty members began to leave for other institutions, and the few who were dedicated to rebuilding the Yellow Springs campus found themselves increasingly isolated. The college that gave the Antioch University system its name had become just another profit center in a larger enterprise and not even the most important one at that.
Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.
Much of this conformist thinking focused on gender politics, and it culminated in the notorious sexual offense prevention policy. Enacted in 1993, the policy dictated that a person needed express permission for each stage in seduction. (“May I touch your breast?” “May I remove your bra?” And so on.) In two decades students went from being practitioners of free love to prisoners of gender. Antioch became like one of those Essene communities in the Judean desert in the first century after Christ that, convinced of their own purity, died out while waiting for a golden age that never came.
I grieve for the place with all the sadness, anger and self-reproach you feel when a loved one dies unnecessarily. I grieve for Antioch the way I grieve for the hope of 1968 washed away in a tide of self-inflated rhetoric, self-righteousness and self-indulgence.
The ideals of social justice and economic fairness we embraced then are still right and deeply American. The discipline to turn those ideals into realities was what Antioch, its community and the generation it led was lacking. I fear it still is.
It’s not just Antioch, but the weltanschauung of the hard left in general. The left-wing blogosphere is known for its rigidity and willingness, even eagerness, to stifle heterodox views, left-wing faculty are infamous for their demands of conformity and left-wing media are rife with Stalinist enforcers ruthlessly imposing the party line on would-be dissenters.
This is no accident, nor is it something new. It is a return to the roots of the socialist mindset, where those left outside the mandarins’ master plan for society are “treated like cattle.” We saw this in Mao’s China, where millions were subject to brutal psychological and physical abuse in “self-criticism” sessions.
When a single round hole is provided for all to conform, there is little room for square pegs.
This is a perfect example of how Satan first uses his tools, and then breaks them and throws them away. He laughs best when he can get us to do it to ourselves.
In faith, Dave
Viva Texas
I knew Antioch in the sixties. The pluperfect liberal compost heap of fascist repression of conservative thought. I do not mourn its passing. The nation will be better off for it. Now if someone can just do something about the Wisconsin Madison……….