Stephanie Irwin Gottschlich writes about higher education.Home > Blogs > On Campus > Archives > 2008 > March > 11 > Entry
Antioch faculty won’t go down without a fight
(Antioch College faculty members Anne Bohlen, Peter Townsend and Bob Devine.)
YELLOW SPRINGS — Faculty at Antioch College re-filed a lawsuit Monday against Antioch University, the college’s parent corporation, as part of a larger effort to keep the college open.
Seventeen tenured faculty members filed the suit in Greene County Common Pleas Court, alleging the university broke its contractual obligation with the faculty in its decision back in June to declare financial exigency and close the school at the end of this academic year. The faculty personnel policies and procedures calls for consultation with them before administrators or trustees cut the budget.
The faculty seek a permanent injunction requiring the university follow the faculty policies and prevent it from suspending operations. The lawsuit asks the court to force trustees to pursue “less drastic” means for alleviating the college’s financial crisis: Negotiating a deal with the Antioch College Continuation Corporation, a group of alumni and former trustees with deep pockets (about $9 million) who have hired a turnaround consultant to help it take over operations of the college. You can read more about how that transpired at the bottom of this blog post.
The faculty also ask the court to enjoin the university from liquidating or dispersing its assets, including buildings, land and its endowment. The lawsuit is not about damages or faculty compensation, said Bob Devine, college faculty member and a former president of the institution.
Faculty held a press conference today, March 11, to announce it had re-opened its August lawsuit against the university, which it withdrew in November after it appeared the university was striking a deal with the Antioch Alumni board (and then the ACCC) to keep the college open.
But when university trustees announced Feb. 22 they were going ahead with its original decision to close the school at the end of this academic year for one year, faculty were back to square one.
“One of the great concerns is that in this last period of time that the college is open that the university may start liquidating the assets of the college, because it needs that money,” Devine said. Assets include land, WYSO radio license, Glen Helen Nature Preserve and its endowment. “We think they should pursue those realistic, concrete, less drastic measures” offered by the ACCC, he said.
Faculty are backed by the Alumni Association, which earmarked $1 million from its College Revival Fund for their legal fund. The alumni group — which had previously raised $18 million for keeping the college open until some donors balked — met on campus with faculty and students on March 2 and decided it would commit to a “non-stop Antioch.” The alumni are exploring their own legal avenues for keeping the college open, according to a statement last week.
From Ellen Borgerson, vice president for the alumni association and the fund:
If the ACCC deal succeeds “we’ll be ready to run the College on this campus without interruption. If they don’t, we’ll find someplace else in Yellow Springs to operate, and we’ll to fight to reclaim the campus and the College’s other assets from a University administration that seems bent on destroying everything Antioch has ever stood for.” “But it’s time to stop pretending that the University is negotiating in good faith with the ACCC,” she added. “The University is clearly trying to force people to abandon hope and leave, knowing that it will be impossible to bring the College back once that happens. This is not only bad faith, it is untenable, and Antioch alumni will not stand for this deceptive behavior.”
Antioch University Board Chair Art Zucker posted a statement on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post in the comments section saying members of the board are “shocked and disturbed” by Borgerson’s remarks and that after working “ceaselessly and collaboratively‘“with alumni, it is still in negotiations with the ACCC.
Here’s a rundown of what’s happened in the last month to prompt this, and what’s next for the lawsuit and a potential deal with the ACCC:
After two days of meetings in Los Angeles, the trustees said Feb. 22 they reaffirmed their June 2007 decision to close the college for a year after negotiations failed with the Antioch College Continuation Corporation, or ACCC, which wanted to take over the school and create its own board of trustees.
Trustees had reversed their earlier June decision in November, contingent on whether alumni and the school could meet fundraising deadlines. The reversal came after the college’s alumni board raised millions of dollars in exchange for keeping the school open. Then trustees took that arrangement off the table in January in favor of exploring a deal with AC3, a group of donors, alumni and Yellow Springs residents.
Trustees said they ran out of time to reach a deal on transferring the financially struggling school to the group.
Faculty said Tuesday they are hoping the lawsuit will pressure the board members to strike a deal with the ACCC rather than risk having their depositions about the college’s finances reach the public eye through the public record of the court system.
“The quickest way for them to get the lawsuit off the table is to negotiate a deal with the ACCC,” said Peter Townsend, environmental science and geology professor who has worked at the college for 38 years.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Antioch College
Comments
By Leon Harrison
March 18, 2008 2:46 PM | Link to this
Leon Harrison West Carrollton, Ohio 45449-1608 Tuesday, March 18, 2008 To: The Editor Subject: DDN 3-18-08 Arthur J. Zucker commentary on Antioch “Bottom Line Despite Antioch College Whines…” Despite all of these excuses and whines, the bottom line is: Not enough parents and or students are willing to pay tuition for the knowledge offered by the “liberal arts” curricula, administrators and teachers at Antioch College. Obviously, they are not willing to work and pay for activist classes filled with agenda-driven political and social-engineering activist indoctrination; preferring to pay for useful education for productive employment (in the private sector) instead. Most normal folks will not willingly invest or pay for Yellow Springs things unless they are forced to by the government that takes the taxes they make. Even these educated sophisticated educrat Democrats [school and social spenders] may have finally noticed declining tax bases outside the gates of the bases, the Welfare State, and the colleges; suddenly seeing or sensing the collateral costs and losses of those old blue-collar jobs and dollars, that used to put millions of students and fools through quite a few public and private schools. My former coworkers and these retirees cannot afford to pay for this anymore. Leon Harrison West Carrollton, Ohio