Now it turns out Antioch’s incompetent trustees and chancellor closed the college with zero forethought and planning

The situation at what’s left of beleaguered Antioch College keeps on going – from bad, to worse, to unimaginably horrendous. We’ve commented on the disaster there here, here, and here, but the bad news simply keeps on coming.

Back in May, perhaps some skeptics who thought the trustees and chancellor of Antioch University couldn’t be totally irresponsible might have scoffed at this report in a journal called Inside Higher Ed:

Paula A. Treichler, an Antioch alumna who last week left the Antioch board and who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, blasted trustees for refusing to accept the deal [for turning the Yellow Springs college campus over to the alumni-sponsored Antioch College Continuation Corporation instead of closing down the college.] She said last week’s vote “does violence to the college and its alumni, the Village of Yellow Springs, progressive higher education, and acceptable standards for the governance of academic institutions.” She said that the university’s chancellor, Toni Murdock, and “the uncritical trustees who have applauded her every move are living in a dream world of their own making,” engaged in “bullying, fear-mongering, selective presentation of facts and figures, legal intimidation, self-righteous proclamation, and secrecy.”

While the trustees have “won” the right to shut down the college, Treichler said that they will have done great damage to Antioch. “As the full story of these negotiations, hidden agendas, and 
squandered opportunities emerges over the coming months — and it will — we will have to conclude that the actions and decisions of this university administration and this university Board of Trustees have been among the most unethical, academically and economically irresponsible, incompetent, and politically cowardly in the history of American higher education.

Over the top? On the contrary. In light of new reports from Yellow Springs, Ohio, perhaps Treichler’s bitter denunciation was an understatement.

Proceed blindly, with both left feet

Last week, the Yellow Springs News revealed that the college closing, already in progress, is being conducted with all the forethought and attention to facts, detail, costs and law that the Bush Administration devoted to invading Iraq. Or maybe a little bit less.

• The Yellow Springs News reported that the way the college was going about the shutdown was violating the local fire code and putting buildings at risk. The problem? The buildings contained flammables, yet the fire protection systems had been dismantled.

• Freezing temperatures during winter could cause the sprinkler system pipes to burst, yet heating the more than 20 institutional buildings – a necessary step if the sprinkler system was to be kept on – involved expenses that the parent university and its underlings at the college evidently didn’t plan for.

• The college fired the physical plant employee who had been in communication with fire officials and who might have been able to communicate his concerns to the University’s hellbent-on-closing management.

•
"The problem has been the university has not been forthcoming in their plans for fire protection for the buildings,” according to the local township fire chief, Colin Altman, “No one has contacted us.”
 Not forthcoming? They haven’t even been forthcoming with their own alumni, faculty and the press.

• Having created one of the most enormous fire hazards in educational history, the Trustees, Chancellor and senior staff of the university “vanished.” Reported the Yellow Springs News again:

"We’re not trying to violate any kind of code,” he [Vice President for Student Services Milt Thompson] said. There had not been time to remove all furniture and other combustibles from the buildings because “things happened pretty fast,” he said.

 Decisions regarding the shutdown were made by Antioch University Chief Financial Officer Tom Faecke, according to Faecke in an interview several weeks ago.

 Faecke, University Chancellor Toni Murdock and University Board President Art Zucker were not available for comment last week or this week due to family and travel conflicts around the Fourth of July holiday, according to university spokesperson Lynda Sirk. Faecke and Murdock did not respond to calls seeking comment, and Zucker did not respond to an e-mail request.”

“Tear it down,” says a consultant

Meanwhile, the Trustees, who seem to make a habit of listening to bad advice from consultants (it was an outside consultant who originally advised closing the Yellow Springs college) hired yet another consultant who has advised tearing down half the buildings on campus, including the student union, theater arts building, the college gym, several dormitories, the art building and others. Yeah, that'll certainly help the college reopen in the future, the way Chancellor Tulisse Murdoch says she plans.

If they listen to the consultant, the board will be following not only in the footsteps of the Bush administration, but also of the legendary Vietnam combat officer who declared, without any glimmer of a sense of irony, that “We had to burn the village to save it.”

Panicked trustees change direction

Little wonder the trustees, now suddenly panicked, passed a resolution in June “seeking an independent college and asking the alumni board to present a process and a plan for achieving that goal,” according to the Yellow Springs News. This was the opposite of what they had announced earlier, after having turned down an earnestly drafted alumni plan to preserve the college.

The alumni are crazy if they accept the new offer. They have raised $18 million or so in pledges and cash to “save” the college and perhaps they could raise even more. But the mess that Chancellor Tulisse Murdoch and the trustees have created through their gross incompetence can’t be fixed with $18 million.

A sure thing: To repair the campus physical plant, recruit first rate (and rightfully wary) new faculty in every major department and then keep the college going with an insufficient number of students for about 10 years until Antioch College can finally restore its reputation, demonstrate its quality again, and achieve a critical mass of qualified students will cost many multiples of $18 million.

Our own cranky estimate: try half a billion bucks.

P.S. Antioch’s management, which in the past couldn't take yes for an answer when alumni offered a takeover plan to liberate the college from the University, also can’t seem to take no for an answer. In an organized response to the closing, a number of angry alumni wrote to the PR director of the university telling her to take our names off their e-mail list. We didn’t want to hear from the university, or her, ever again.

In violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the CAN-SPAM law, the university's PR flack and the puppet Yellow Springs campus president not only defied our opt-out message by sending us another e-mail, but said they would do so again. It’s further evidence of the panic that has management desperately trying to get the college off their hands before they can be accused of destroying it physically as well as institutionally – an event that increasingly looks inevitable.

Their "opt-out this, buddy" message, sugarcoated with buzzwords like "stakeholders" and "outreach" said:

I am writing to ask that in light of continued discussions between Antioch University and Antioch College alumni regarding the transfer of the college to alumni, that you consider accepting periodic outreach from Antioch University intended to keep all Antioch stakeholders up to date about the college's future.

I respectfully ask this because it is our goal to make sure that the outcome of any actions pertaining to Antioch College are swiftly and accurately conveyed to everyone with a direct interest in the institution.

If it is still your decision to request removal from periodic communication, you may opt out of the news mailing list by selecting the opt out option at the bottom of the next communication.

Sincerely,
Andrzej Bloch Interim President Antioch College
Lynda Sirk Director of Communications Antioch University

As of July 7th, the college spinmeisters had failed to "swiftly and accurately" convey the chaos over the firetrap they had created, or the consultant's advice to tear down half the college.

P.P.S. Will wonders never cease? The July 10th Yellow Springs News reports that "The water sprinklers had never been turned off," according to the Antioch University vice president for student services, despite his report to the contrary to the local township fire chief, Colin Altman, the previous week. Then, uh, the University VP mentioned that, well, one building is an exception. And he still hasn't said how the University will deal with a pipe-freezing winter now that the heating system has been shut down. Or at least the University's financial vice president is still saying it's shut down. Who knows, given the stumbling by University administrators over what ought to be simple yes-or-no facts.

And still there's more – a move afoot in Yellow Springs to have the village assert its rights of eminent domain and seize the campus. Use the link in the paragraph above for details.  I doubt it will ever happen, but hey, it's Yellow Springs and Antioch. So you never know.

Antioch Univer-SUE-ty. It can’t run a college but it sure can sue-sue-sue. Guess who the trustees are threatening to sue now?

Just when you think you’ve milked the last there is to milk out of the subject of Antioch University’s high-handed trustees and chancellor, who put a great college out of business after letting it slide to the brink of bankruptcy, the trustees come up with yet another whack-a-doodle legal maneuver to demonstrate that their ineptitude and mindless dudgeon have no bottom.

But first take note that:

•The trustees are already involved in a lawsuit with college faculty in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who were fired despite their tenure. And further...

•The trustees have also threatened some alumni and faculty of Antioch College and Yellow Springs with lawsuits for “trademark infringement,” after those groups founded an organization called Antioch Nonstop to continue teaching college courses that once were taught on the defunct campus. The supporters of Antioch College’s survival coined a slogan, “Be ashamed to let it die,” based on founder Horace Mann’s slogan, “Be ashamed to die until you’ve won some victory for humanity.”

There was unintentional irony in this trustees’ threat of a suit, in the name of “trademark protection.” It came from group that had overseen the college’s financial “failure,” deliberately shut down the college, contributed big time to the destruction of the college’s reputation, and refused millions of dollars in pledges from alumni who wanted to save the college.

The trustees’ lawyer had the gall to write, that use of the name Nonstop Antioch “…is likely to deceive the public with respect to Antioch’s trademarks and associated services and dilute the distinctiveness of the well-known Antioch marks and logos. The unauthorized use of Antioch’s valuable trademarks will cause confusion and improperly benefit you to the detriment of Antioch.”

Valuable trademarks? Valuable as what? Thanks to the trustees and their chancellor, the Antioch name these days is as vauable as an odiferous quart of month-old milk, with flies buzzing around the open container. But I’m getting off the topic here.

Here we go again – another
threatened trustee law suit

On Thursday, the Yellow Springs (Ohio) News revealed that the University is now threatening to sue the Village of Yellow Springs over an air conditioner that is reportedly creating an ongoing noise nuisance to its residential neighbors and that the village says was built without the required permits.

According to the website The Antioch Papers, even the air conditioner’s manufacturer says the unit in question is “not suitable for residential areas.” Oh, and by the way, the trustees are also threatening to sue The Antioch Papers.

Twisted reasoning

You wouldn’t believe the University’s twisted reasoning for refusing to turn off an obnoxiously loud and neighborhood-disrupting air conditioner in an empty college. They make the prima facie insane claim that the Village of Yellow Springs is trying to make the college re-open by suing it to turn off its noisy, code-violating air conditioner.

This mad dog legal defense of an obnoxious machine has been going on for four years! The University seems to lack the money to run a once-great college, but evidently has plenty of dough in its war chest to spend on foaming-at-the-mouth legal trivia concerning illegal air conditioners, “protecting” a trademark that its own actions made worthless, and other nonsense.

Quick, somebody call the
men with butterfly nets

Why is this sounding more and more to me like certifiable insanity? Are the trustees and chancellor suffering a collective mental meltdown?

There ought to be a law requiring Antioch University trustees and their chancellor to pass a mental competency exam. And if they flunk it, they ought to be carted off to the looney bin, which more and more is where they are demonstrating they belong.

Perfidy at Antioch: tales of university trustees and senior staff lying, double-dealing, and committing institutional sabotage continue emerging.

If you’ll forgive an old (but apt) cliché, studying the reasons why Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio has in effect ceased to exist is like peeling an onion.

Antioch, as you may recall from an earlier post here, is a 157 years old college controlled by a “university” of the same name – although the university facilities consist of a bunch of second rate college continuation and adult education schools, some offering a few graduate courses.

These satellite “colleges” have no tenured faculty, no residential campuses, and sometimes offer courses of quality one well might question. (See the item on the Seattle campus’ science lab, way down below.)

An ongoing horror story

Each time I receive an e-mail from enraged college alumni – about the university trustees’ rejection of an attempt to save the college by an alumni group called the Antioch College Continuation Corporation (ACCC) – I go digging a bit more. And each time, I find myself peeling off more layers from the onion. It’s an ongoing horror story and at the center of it, if anyone ever gets to the center, you may find a plot as tangled and crooked as the Watergate scandal.

Needed, an ambitious
Ohio attorney general

It’s the kind of case that an ambitious state attorney general – if Ohio has one ambitious enough – might fruitfully explore to see if members of the Trustees and the parent Antioch University chancellor’s staff have been up to shenanigans that might violate state laws involving charitable trusts.

At any rate, here are some shockers I’ve stumbled across this week:

From the Yellow Springs News, the local weekly that finally seems to have its dander up:

Had the negotiating team, led by Chancellor Toni Murdock, wanted an agreement with the ACCC, it would not have started out asking the outrageous price of $54 million for the college, then stalling almost a month before lowering that price while every passing day was critical to the college’s ability to stay open. Had the university negotiators wanted the college to live, they would not have included the demand that the college pay the university $22 million for the college’s own $22 million endowment.

What’s clear is that the university negotiators showed no interest in reaching an agreement that would benefit both the college and the university. Bottom line, they wanted cash. And now it’s reasonable to assume that should the college close, the university leaders will sell off its assets to the highest bidder.

Trustee asset raids worthy
of Wall Street barbarians

Turns out the University wanted to make a grab for assets created at and by the college. The $22 million endowment was only part of it. The University also demanded that it keep WYSO, the college radio station whose license could be sold for a small fortune, and Antioch Education Abroad, another potential money maker. Both WYSO and the education abroad program were begun before there ever was a university.

From Inside Higher Education:

And in an additional complication, university officials said over the weekend that if another buyer for the college emerged — willing to pay for the college with cash immediately and willing to let the university keep Antioch’s NPR stations — a sale was still possible. This prompted a mock ad on Craigslist that said: “Antioch College no longer holds any substantial meaning or value to its Board of Trustees, beyond what it can be sold for on the open market. Offers by alumni groups promising to operate the college in a continuous manner, beholden to its traditional values of openness and academic freedom are particularly loathsome. Real Estate developers with proven military-industrial success are preferred. Contact the Board of Trustees at their Corporate Headquarters in Yellow Springs for more info.”

Also from the same article:

A statement from the university said that negotiations fell apart because the alumni group, which offered to buy the college for $12.2 million, was able to provide only $6 million in cash immediately, and wanted to pay off the remaining sum over the next few years. The lack of security made the deal impossible for the board to accept because the university’s creditors wouldn’t have liked it, said the statement. (At least one trustee, however, reported that there was never a formal vote on the matter and that some trustees might well have accepted the condition.) The statement went on to pledge support for the revival of the college at some point in the future.

Leaders of the Antioch College Continuation Corporation disputed the board’s statement. Eric Bates, co-chair of the group, called the board’s statement “mostly incorrect” and said that he was “shocked” by it. Specifically, he said that his group had offered to use the physical campus of the college to back up its financial pledges, so that in fact the alumni had offered something of far more value than the funds it would have still owed the university.

Borgersen [One of the people trying to keep the college open] said [of the trustees] …“They are trying to build a University of Phoenix clone out of the ashes of Antioch College and we will not let that happen.

From another source comes the news that Tulisse (“Toni”) Murdoch, the Chancellor of Antioch University, received a campus-wide vote of no confidence from the college community last year.

The referendums stated Murdock has “violated long-standing Antioch College values, community standards, and the Civil Liberties Code.” This community-wide vote of no confidence in Chancellor Murdock unifies the two pre-existing votes of no confidence in the Chancellor by Antioch College faculty and union staff. The College’s advisory body to the President, Adcil, was concerned and frustrated with the lack of consultation leading to the departure of President Steve Lawry. The community also endorsed a second referendum that advocates independence from the Antioch University system, including a separate Board of Trustees. This referendum posits that Antioch College can maintain operations beyond the 2007-2008 academic year by attaining autonomy and with the support of the College Alumni Board

And if you think Tulisse Murdoch’s reign is better on other “University” campuses, find the full text of this post to an article about Antioch from an anonymous faculty wife on the University’s Seattle campus. (You'll have to scroll down once you reach the linked article to find it.)

The science laboratory on the Seattle campus is a 3’by 5’ former clothes closet. A shelf has been installed, upon this shelf sets two (2) very, very cheap (toy store) microscopes. Yes, folks that is a science lab in Antioch terms. Any curriculum to accompany this facility? What do you think?

And so I’m waiting, Mr. Ohio Attorney General. Please bring in your charitable trust experts, your forensic accountants, a couple of hard-nosed assistant DAs and lots and lots of subpoena forms. With any luck, we may see some trustees and university administrators performing a classic dance:

The Perp Walk.

Who killed Antioch College? Is it a tale of secrecy, incompetence, and sinister skulduggery?

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Since this was originally posted there have been some major and very positive changes at Antioch. Go here for my latest report on the subject.

Antioch College is scheduled to close in June of this year. This is by now old news. Or is it?

The news has usually been blamed on the decay of the college’s physical plant, the narrowing of political diversity among the students and faculty, and a laughable policy on student sexual relations. The right wing blogs have not-undeservedly been having a vitriolic field day. Example here.

Surprising new twists

But recently, the causes of right-wing glee have begun to seem a bit superficial. It turns out – to my own surprise – that there's much more to the story. And the "much more" isn't very pretty.

It all has to do with a conflict between the 156-years-old college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the parent “university” which, in addition to residential liberal arts Antioch College, contains a bunch of far flung college-ettes — essentially narrowly focused community continuation and adult education schools of no great fame or formidable distinction.

I’m an Antioch College graduate from the days when an Antioch degree commanded a certain amount of respect and I’ve always assumed that the right-wing folks were for once completely correct: the problem was slow decay of the physical plant, a campus culture turned too far and too rigidly left wing to attract lots of students, a downward spiral in applications and an enfeebled endowment. The the situation seemed to be feeding on itself. The worse any one thing got, the worse everything else got.

Not entirely so, according to information leaking out of Antioch College that seems to indicate truly ugly and heretofore hidden skulduggery.

Secret meetings by trustees who
threaten to sue people
who expose their proceedings

I say the information has been “leaking” because that's the only way it can get out. The Antioch University’s Board of Trustees, the very same body that declared it was shutting down the university, is now insisting that its proceedings are subject to “lawyer-client confidentiality.”

That's pretty weird for an institution supported primarily by its alumni and supplemented, as all private college are, by government and tax-exempt foundation funds. In fact, the trustees are threatening to sue a journalist who exposed what ought to be a public record of their activities.
( I'll get you to all the appropriate links a bit further on.)

One of several possible reasons for the secrecy: there appears to be some evidence that the trustees deliberately undermined the college’s finances and growth plan. And that they deliberately rebuffed, on vague technical grounds, the alumni who had raised $20 million in three months to help save the college, as well as an earlier attempt by one individual to make a $10 million dollar donation.

Tangled, creepy and upsetting:
a “moonie” PR man, Abu Gharaib
and land-grabbing entrepreneurs

The story is tangled, creepy, and upsetting – and I don’t need to retell it here in detail. You’ll find the broad outlines here. Notable in this story is an incident in which the trustees rejected a donation that might have kept the college going shortly before they announced the closing.

Then, for a bit of blood-boiling shock-and-awe you might want to go here to read a tale that includes allegations that the parent university, in the course of bringing down the college

•hired a former PR man for Sun Myung Moon to spin what was going on

•invited in a Department of Defense contractor associated with the notorious Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq

•and may be welcoming the possibility of a land grab of Antioch campus property by local entrepreneurs, in connection with changes at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. (Two of the university board members are connected to those interests.)

Did George Bush help plunge
a knife into Antioch’s heart?

Oh and by the way, the last link also leads to a suggestion that the administration of George Bush is playing a part in destroying the institution.

Finally, go here to download some of the documents that seem to authenticate much of what's leaking out of Antioch. On the same web page, if you have about 12 minutes, watch the film that shows the campus and library turning into an exercise ground for a SWAT team doing a Homeland Security exercise.

The team laughs, jokes, and starts waving assault rifles while a library staff, mourning the death of one of their colleagues and in shock from the previous day’s news that the college closing will put them all out of work, try to carry on.

Major national media: please send your investigative reporters digging.