tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7338267967026201196.post8593778624760172082..comments2023-08-14T06:54:19.360-05:00Comments on The Wise Bard: Present at the Demise: Antioch College, 1852-2008Alan Jay Weisbardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07992336604207867511noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7338267967026201196.post-34028274489983510432008-12-30T17:37:00.000-06:002008-12-30T17:37:00.000-06:00Huh. Well, I attended Antioch from 1999-2003, and ...Huh. Well, I attended Antioch from 1999-2003, and there was still a lot of good in it during most of that period, although the decline was evident in the number of faculty positions, and the departure of some excellent professors. <BR/><BR/>I did, of course, notice a certain amount of left wing dogma at Antioch. I wonder how it got to be that way. My impression at the time was that it wasn't coming from the professors. Most of the professors I had were quite non-dogmatic, and encouraged free thought. (I'm not quite sure what was going on in the women's studies department; certainly some people had some pretty toxic ideas about gender , but I don't know if the professor there was a particular instigator of these.) <BR/><BR/>When I was there, it seemed as though there were certain knots of people who embraced fairly extreme and divisive views, but there were always also people who were more open-minded and intellectually curious. Personally, I think it was okay to give a disproportionately large share of time to leftist thought at Antioch, because in most other contexts it is given a disproportionately small share. I think that most students--if not all--were aware of the alternatives. Or... not. I'll admit that this was kind of a tricky issue. Still, I do believe that many students from my era came out of the experience with appropriately balanced and sophisticated political views. <BR/><BR/>And one thing I did notice for sure, during my time, was that at least many of the students did seem to genuinely care about social issues. I've been teaching discussion sections at UC Santa Barbara for the last few years, and it's very rare to come across students with the same level of intellectual curiosity. <BR/><BR/>So, I don't know. It's pretty complicated, maybe. Definitely there was a sense of menace and decay in Antioch's last decade, but there was still also a sense of intellectual passion, at least among some students. <BR/><BR/>Why exactly did the college fail? An enormous collection of essays could be written on this topic; most likely it was a death of a thousand cuts. I think that everyone has a different theory. I personally feel that the alternating trimester system that formed the basis for the academic and co-op schedules during my era had some major, unappreciated negative consequences. Students had difficulty forming lasting social relationships, academic departments had difficulty creating curricula that built on itself in a logical sequence, and community government had weak institutional memory, all due to the irregular coming and going of all the students. <BR/><BR/>As fatal as that seemed to me, it was clearly just one of the many problems that contributed to the college's decline.<BR/><BR/>James Green-ArmytageHermitage171https://www.blogger.com/profile/03976985912113837794noreply@blogger.com