DaytonDailyNews.com

This piece by Columbus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden appeared in that paper June 24.

The campuswide disaster drill at Antioch College on Friday seemed anti-climactic, coming as it did at the end of a week in which the school announced it would close its doors next year.

With fingers crossed, the college, which has now retired more times than Frank Sinatra, is taking its bows and blowing kisses at the alumni and benefactors it hopes will help restore and reopen the Buckeye State's Berkeley in 2012.

"It has risen from the ashes before," said Pam Hogarty, proprietor of Unfinished Creations, a Xenia Avenue shop that sells art supplies to the school and its students. "If they can get some fresh blood and some fresh ideas, it is not impossible."

Fresh blood? Fresh ideas?

Imagine a snowball. Picture hell.

"Antioch hung itself years ago," Ralph Keyes, an author and Antioch alum, said two days ago from the porch of his home here. "The body has finally slipped the noose and hit the floor. That has caught people's attention.

"It has been a very ineptly managed institution for the last 10 years," Keyes continued. "Interim and acting have become job titles.

"I can't begin to tell you how painful it has been to have a ringside seat to my alma mater in its death throes."

But, he rued, "Antioch couldn't correct its mistakes, because it wouldn't acknowledge it was making them. It couldn't get its house in order because it was so busy blowing smoke."

The one thing that no one was saying in Yellow Springs on June 22 is simply that perhaps it is time for Antioch to close. Period. No more lying back on propped pillows like some 19th-century tubercular diva waiting for a bailout from increasingly disillusioned sugar daddies.

In the 1960s, some of the best and brightest students in the nation went to Antioch to explore and evaluate their core ideologies. The school's reputation for tolerance, social justice and political activism was tested during that decade by the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War and the women's movement. Somehow, along the way, the school also acquired the reputation of harboring a bunch of Birkenstock bohemians and pony-tailed, guitar-plunking pinkos.

Antioch is no longer the nation's only Antioch. Many colleges offer some of the same programs that once made the Yellow Springs school unique, such as pass-fail classes and co-op learning.

Moreover, the ambitions of a great number of students coming out of high schools today are often more baldly practical.

"They're a different breed," Hogarty said. "There is a lot more materialism."

As for the type of students with whom Antioch has been most comfortable, Keyes observed, "There is a smaller and smaller universe of that kind of student."

But a fish rots from the head down. You can't take a Buddhist approach to management and expect to remain solvent long. It is not as though college trustees have not been advised, "Why not recruit the next president from a foundation or government or, God forbid, the corporate world?"

The suggestion is met with an awkward clearing of the throat and a dismissive, "Oh. The pinstripe option."

If Antioch is sunk for good, it will be because its leadership missed the core wisdom of the bumper sticker advising, "Forget world peace. Visualize using your turn signal."