Revisiting Antioch

I am driving from Chicago to Pennsylvania for my next assignment. Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of my alma mater Antioch College, is at the halfway point, and I'm spending the night.

As you may know, the college board of trustees voted to close the campus earlier this year. So I was surprised to see the campus populated with students. Lightly populated, but present. "It seems that it would have been a contractual violation to close immediately," a freshman student told me. Nonetheless, he's taking classes that will transfer.

I walked through the campus in a thick nostalgia fog. I have not been back since I left, in 1975. My entering class, in 1973, was just after the general strike that nearly closed the campus for good then, so it appears falling apart is an old Antioch tradition. Then there were 2000 students, and it felt vibrant and full. Now there are 250. The place has a near abandoned feel.

I looked for my old dorm,  Normant House, but was not finding it. The memory of my footsteps kept taking me to a vacant lot, until I figured out that my footsteps were right. The campus map still included it. The lot looked like it had been vacant for a long time.

Across the street was the Friends Meeting House, which was a place of refuge and solace for me back then. I attended regularly, and meditated often there when I needed a quiet space to cope.

The art building, my other old haunt, looked abandoned. Vines were creeping up the old garage-door exterior walls. It was a big metal shed, build in the early 70's, and it had not aged well. I was certain it was vacant until I found an unlocked door and a long haired, spacy student in the painting studio. He and I were equally surprised to run into each other. I found the very spot where my easel sat, and my head went light with a deep incoherent swirl of feelings. Nostalgia, the pain of my unhappiness then (I was a deeply depressed kid--I couldn't get laid to save my life, and in 1973 that was quite an accomplishment),  sadness at the current decrepitude, wonder at how important this phase of my life was for everything subsequent, despite everything. Bittersweet is the conventional turn of phrase, but I was neither bitter toward the place nor inclined to elevate my experience at Antioch to the "It made me who I am" myth. Yet it did, in important ways, in how I found myself and found means of expression for the extremes of feeling in my highly sensitive nature. "Kind Mother" (alma mater) works only ironically for me regarding Antioch. but everything makes sense in the end, because we live in sequence and by contingency.

Comments

[Kai]

Hi Doug

Actually Norment hasn't been gone long at all: they used it for a practice burn for the fire department just last year. The chimney didn't burn but someone finally got around to tearing that down a few months ago.

Kai
'01

[Doug Plummer]

Thanks for the factual update. What's your take on the goings on?

[lefty mcfadden]

Sorry for bumping an ancient post. I just found this entry while searching for photos of NPR's "Wait, Wait..."

I'm from the Yellow Springs listening area, and I'm flabbergasted. This is the first I've heard of the campus closing! Of course, this isn't surprising given that I moved to Arizona a year ago, but really, I didn't know universities could shutter their doors. I mean, doesn't the meaning of the word "institution" imply some sort of permanence?

Had I known, I'd have visited the campus last time I was there to poke around.