No nostalgia for Antioch

Michael Goldfarb’s piece in today’s NYT, "Where the Arts Were Too Liberal," about the recent demise of Antioch College, had me reminiscing about my time in Yellow Springs. It seems an inevitable end, and the only question I had was, what took so long?

I probably could have gone to college anywhere I wanted. With no preparation I got decent SAT’s (1400), but there was no one around to give me any guidance. I was already a self-avowed iconoclast, an anti-war and environmental activist in a small, very conservative Pennsylvania town. My leisure reading tended toward Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Niel Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, and Charles Reich’s Greening of America. I read a lot of Hermann Hesse. I conducted all of my college research in the town library, reading the college catalogs. The only place that seemed to fit my values was Antioch: freedom of inquiry, a storied liberal past, no grades. It was the only place I applied to.

But it was 1973, the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and at Antioch that ethos was even more extreme than was typical for the time. As a socially awkward small town boy among all these urban sophisticates, it was a huge culture shock. I was terrified of drugs, I had no clue how to negotiate sex (Bill Gate’s line from his Harvard address comes to mind, "This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.") and I hated rock and roll (my tastes ran to Beethoven). I spent many nights sleeping in the Glen Helen nature preserve, sexiled by my roommate’s visitors or driven out by the racket and the clouds of bong smoke.

I found refuges: meditation and yoga, Quaker Meeting, the darkroom, Glen Helen, weekend long bicycle rides in the gorgeous countryside. All alone though, which is not how college is supposed to be. I learned a kind of resilience and self reliance, and with the co-op work structure (every other quarter off campus, on a job that could be anywhere in the country) I learned how to manage my way no matter where I might be dropped down.

The next year, half of the arts faculty was let go, in the cost cutting measures that followed the general strike that occurred just before I got there. I dropped out the next quarter and, after a few years and after living in a half dozen states, I landed at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Here was an alternative educational structure with some academic rigor, if you knew where to look, and with a warm, loving, family-like (in an alternative, hippie-commune sort of way) social scene, which was precisely what I needed the first time around.

It is an interesting irony that my professional life is now so engaged with colleges, what with my checkered past in this arena. My inner 18 year old is having the time of his life, imagining himself having gone to one of these schools, instead of to Antioch. My favorite school I have visited, the one where I should have gone? Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Washington. Great academics, very outdoorsy, and I’ve never seen so much spontaneous hugging in my life.

Comments

[Mike C.]

I enjoyed this post: some parts of the US higher education scene look so exotic viewed from Britain, somewhere between Alice's Restaurant and Doonesbury...

I had what may be the equal and opposite experience -- having grown up in a working class family in a postwar New Town, in 1973 I found myself at Balliol College Oxford. I had no idea what a winning hand I had been dealt, and proceeded to spend my three years following, not fleeing, political turmoil, loud music, and the smell of bong smoke... I think you showed admirable self-knowledge and strength of character for an 18-year old, to go your own way so determinedly...

[Doug Plummer]

I don't know if it was so much strength of character as social isolation, but I did have a strong sense of what I didn't want to be. I tried becoming a pothead for a couple of years, but I didn't like what I was turning into. Pot really messes up your artistic process too. You think you're making works of genius and when you're straight you see you've made incoherant garbage.

Your work, BTW, is brilliant. Check it out everyone: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~mic/index.htm

[Mike C.]

Thanks, Doug, that's very generous. Just as I was about to redesign my webpage, too... Maybe I'll just wait until my Fifteen Minutes have passed.

However, unless you were pointing up the hubris of the title of my "Brilliant Corners" sequence (or unless the word "brilliant" is used in the US as it is here i.e a synonym for "quite good"), I have to politely decline that label. I don't want to seem ungrateful, but "brilliant" work is done by Jem Southam / Richard Misrach / etc. -- I'm sure you agree. I'm just an amateur (in the best sense of the word, of course) working my patch as creatively and honestly as I can. "Quite Good" will do for me!