Antioch College is a private liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, United States. It was founded in 1850 by the Christian Connection and began operating in 1852 as a non-sectarian institution; politician and education reformer Horace Mann was its first president. The college is named after the ancient city of Antioch where the disciples of Jesus were first named as Christians.D. A. Long. Sketch of the Legal History of Antioch College. Press of Christian publishing association, 1890. P. 17.
The college has been politically liberal and reformist since its inception. It was the fourth college in the country to admit African-American students on an equal basis with whites. It has had a tumultuous financial and corporative history, closing repeatedly, for years at a time, until new funding was assembled.
Antioch College began opening new campuses in 1964 when it purchased the Putney School of Education in Vermont. Eventually, it opened 38 different campuses, and in 1978 it changed its name to Antioch University. While most of the university's campuses focused on adult education, graduate programs, and degree completion, Antioch College remained a traditional undergraduate institution on the original campus. In 2008, the university closed the college, but it reopened under new management in 2011 after a group of alumni formed the Antioch College Continuation Corporation and bought from the university both the physical campus and the right to use the name.
Antioch has a cooperative education work program mandatory for all students. It is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Global Liberal Arts Alliance, and the Strategic Ohio Council for Higher Education. The college is affiliated with two Nobel Prize winners, José Ramos-Horta and Mario Capecchi.
History
Antioch College is on the site of a short-lived Owenite community, a utopian socialist collective agricultural enterprise that was established in July 1825 and terminated at the end of that year.Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins of the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. Revised 2nd Edition. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970; pp. 210-211.
On October 5, 1850, the General Convention of the Christian Church passed a resolution stating "that our responsibility to the community, and the advancement of our interests as a denomination, demand of us the establishing of a College." The delegates further pledged "the sum of one hundred thousand dollars as the standard by which to measure our zeal and our effort in raising the means for establishing the contemplated College." The Committee on the Plan for a College was formed to undertake the founding of a college and make decisions regarding the name of the school, the endowment, fundraising, faculty, and administration. Most notably, the committee decided that the college "shall afford equal privileges to students of both sexes." The Christian Connection sect wanted the new college to be sectarian, but the planning committee decided otherwise.
Despite its enthusiasm, the Christian Connection's fundraising efforts were insufficient. The money raised before the school opened failed to cover the cost of the three original buildings, much less create an endowment. The Unitarian Church contributed an equal amount of funds and nearly as many students to the new school, causing denominational strife early on.
1850–1899
Horace Mann, Antioch's first president, ran the college from its start in 1853 until his death in 1859. The young college had relatively high academic standards, and "good moral character" was a requirement for graduation. The first curriculum focused on Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, philosophy, and science, and offered electives in art, botany, pedagogy, and modern languages. Tuition was $24 a year, and the first graduating class consisted of 28 students. Although the founders planned for approximately 1,000 students, enrollment exceeded 500 only once in the 19th century, in 1857.
One notable character in Antioch's history is Rebecca Pennell, Mann's niece, who was one of the college's ten original faculty members. She was the first female college professor in the United States to have the same rank and pay as her male colleagues. Her home, now part of the Antioch campus and called Pennell House, served in recent years as community space for several of Antioch's student-led independent groups.
In 1859, Mann gave his final commencement speech, including what became the college's motto: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Mann died in August and was interred on the Antioch College grounds. The next year, he was reinterred in Providence, Rhode Island, next to his first wife. Mann is commemorated by two monuments: an obelisk on campus that bears the college's motto and marks his original grave, and a bronze statue in the Glen Helen.
Noteworthy among historical figures at the college are Austin Craig and Lucretia Crocker. The Reverend Craig became the third president of Antioch College. Crocker taught mathematics and astronomy. As the first woman supervisor of the Boston Public Schools, Crocker pioneered the discovery method of teaching mathematics and the natural sciences during her decade-long tenure, which began with her appointment in 1876. Earlier, in 1873, she was among the first women elected to the Boston School Committee, and a strong advocate for higher education for women.
Racial and gender equity The original founders gave no consideration to the question of whether Antioch should admit students of color, neither forbidding nor explicitly allowing it. The associated preparatory school admitted two African-American girls during the mid-1850s, an action one trustee responded to by resigning and removing his own children from the school. His opinion was apparently the minority one, as the black students were not withdrawn.
Financial difficulties Antioch College was insolvent the day it opened and faced financial difficulties from its first years. From 1857 to 1859, Antioch ran an annual deficit of $5,000 out of a total budget of $13,000. In 1858, Antioch was bankrupt. Mann died in 1859, and the college was reorganized, but deficits continued. Mann's successor, Thomas Hill, took Antioch's presidency on the condition that faculty salaries be paid despite deficits. Despite this stipulation, his salary was often not paid, and he supported his family with loans. Hill and a colleague attempted to raise an endowment, but potential donors were put off by the strong sectarian leanings of some of the college's trustees. Hill resigned in 1862 due to increasing financial troubles, sectarian conflict between Christian Connection and Unitarian trustees, and his election as president of Harvard. In 1862, the college was closed until finances improved and remained closed until after the end of the Civil War.
Unitarian phase In 1865, the college reopened, now administered by the American Unitarian Association. The financial health of the college seemed improved, as the Unitarians had raised a $100,000 endowment in two months. The endowment was originally invested in government bonds and later in real estate and timber. The investment income, while performing well, was still insufficient to maintain the college at the level desired by the trustees. Some of the principal was lost to foreclosures during the Long Depression, which began in 1873. The college closed again from 1881 to 1882 to allow the endowment to recover.
Baseball milestone
In 1869, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings began their inaugural season as the first professional baseball team, they played a preseason game at the site of what is now the Grand Union Terminal in Cincinnati against the Antiochs, who were regarded as one of the finest amateur clubs in Ohio. The game was played on May 15, 1869, and Cincinnati defeated Antioch 41–7. Antioch had been scheduled to host the first game of this professional tour on May 31, 1869, but it was rained out. So, while Antioch was not a part of the first professional baseball game, the college does hold claim to hosting the first ever rainout in professional baseball.Guschov, Stephen D.. The Red Stockings of Cincinnati: Base Ball's First All-Professional Team and its Historic 1869 and 1870 Seasons. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1998. . Page 45. For more information about the rainout, see also two entries from "The Annotated This Day in Baseball History" blog:
1900–1945 The turn of the century saw little improvement in the college's finances. In 1900, faculty were paid between $500 and $700 a year, very low for the time, and the president was paid $1,500 a year. In contrast, Horace Mann's annual salary had been $3,000 more than forty years prior. Enrollment did increase significantly under the presidency of Simeon D. Fess, who served from 1906 to 1917. In 1912 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served three of his five terms while also acting as president of Antioch.
World War I had little effect on the college, and though some people on campus contracted influenza during the Spanish flu epidemic, there were no deaths. In February 1919, YMCA attempted a peaceful takeover of the college, offering to raise an endowment of $500,000 if Antioch would serve as the official national college of YMCA of the USA. YMCA's proposal was received positively by the college's trustees and enacted by a unanimous vote, and Grant Perkins, a YMCA executive, assumed the college's presidency. By May, Perkins had resigned, reporting that he was not prepared to raise the necessary funds.
Morgan era In June 1919, several candidates were submitted to the trustees, including Arthur Morgan. Morgan was elected to the board without any prior notification of his candidacy. An engineer, he had been involved in planning a college in upstate New York that would have included work-study along with a more traditional curriculum. Morgan also received the right to demand the resignations of faculty and trustees. He presented his plan for "practical industrial education" to the trustees, who accepted the new plan. Antioch closed for a third time while the curriculum was reorganized and the co-op program developed. In 1920, Morgan was unanimously elected president and, in 1921, the college reopened with the cooperative education program.
The early co-op program was not required; students could enter as traditional students or cooperative education students. By the 1935 academic year, nearly 80% of the student body had chosen the cooperative program. Students initially studied for eight-week-long terms alternating with eight-week-long work experiences. Male students generally took apprenticeships with craftsmen or jobs in factories; female students often served as nursing or teaching assistants. In 1921, when the program was inaugurated, fewer than 1% of available co-op jobs were outside of Ohio, but that grew to about 75% within 15 years.
Morgan constructed a new board of trustees of prominent businessmen, replacing many of the local ministers and adding a new source of income. Charles Kettering alone contributed more than $500,000 to Antioch. Major donations by board members and their friends totaled more than $2 million for the decade. Kettering and other major patrons hoped to create a model institution that would create potential business administrators with students "trained for proprietorship." The college declined an offer from John Henry Patterson to finance the college completely if Antioch would leave rural Yellow Springs, re-establish itself on NCR grounds in Dayton, and rechristen itself the National Cash Register College.
1946–2000
Center of activism