St. Louis CofCC Blog

George Will, in the San Antonio Express-News:

Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the tiresome task of teaching them tedious facts, such as that the rebels in Spain were Franco’s fascists.

That illustrates why it is heartening that Antioch will close after the 2007-08 academic year. Its board of trustees says the decision is to “suspend operations” and it talks dottily about reviving the institution in 2012. There is, however, a minuscule market for what Antioch sells for a tuition, room and board of $35,221 — repressive liberalism unleavened by learning.

Founded in 1852 — its first president was Horace Mann — Antioch was, for a while, admirable. One of the first colleges to enroll women and blacks, it was a destination for escaped slaves. Its alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Coretta Scott King and Rod Serling, whose “Twilight Zone” never imagined anything weirder than what Antioch became when its liberalism curdled.

Stephen Jay Gould is probably the High Priest of the Cult of Racial Equality, and everything that needed to be said about Mrs. King was said here. To this writer, the fact that Dr. Gould and Mrs. King were Antioch alum is indicative of the fact that the College has been a liberal factory for a very long time.

In 1993, Antioch became an international punch line when it wrote rules to insure that all sexual conduct would be consensual, step by minute step: “If the level of sexual intimacy increases during an interaction … the people involved need to express their clear verbal consent before moving to that new level.” Does consent to a touch cover a caress? Is there consent regarding all the buttons?

This story was hot just as I was starting college. As a parody, a conservative law school professor (yes, there is such a thing), whom I will not identify nor where he teaches, drew up legal-looking contracts that would have been necessary to comply with Antioch’s policy, that two or more people would have had to fill in and sign before they had sex with each other or group sex. While reading these model contracts almost reminded one of soft-core verbal porn, it also was demonstrative on how crazy Antioch’s policy was. The irony is that the left is supposedly associated with sexual freedom and liberation, but liberalism at its extreme, as you can see here, is anything but.

Although laughable, Antioch was not funny. Former public radio correspondent Michael Goldfarb matriculated at what he calls the “sociological petri dish” in 1968. In his first week, he twice had guns drawn on him, once “in fun” and once by a couple of drunken ex-cons “whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her.” A true Antiochian still, Goldfarb says: “I do think I was made stronger for having to deal with these experiences.”

Steven Lawry — Antioch’s fifth president in 13 years — came to the college 18 months ago. He told Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education about a student who left after being assaulted because he wore Nike shoes, symbols of globalization. Another left because, she told Lawry, the political climate was suffocating: “They all think they are so different, but they are just a bunch of conformists.”

Carlson reports that Lawry stopped the student newspaper’s practice of printing “announcements containing anonymous, menacing threats against other students for their political views.”

This also casts doubts on the popular canard that liberalism espouses political tolerance.