Antioch College — The College Its Own University Closed, and Its Alumni Bought Back

Antioch College, the historic progressive liberal-arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, founded in 1850 and led at its start by Horace Mann, was closed in 2008 by the very institution it had spawned. Antioch University’s board of trustees declared the college in financial exigency on June 7, 2007, voted days later to suspend its operations, and shut the residential campus on June 30, 2008, after 158 years and with roughly 400 students enrolled. It is the rare case in this registry whose fate word is not “Closed” but “Revived”: three years later, in the autumn of 2011, an alumni-led corporation that had bought the campus, the endowment, and the name reopened Antioch College as an independent institution. It closed; it came back.

The cause was governance as much as money. Antioch College was the founding campus of a sprawling system — Antioch University, with adult-education centers across the country — and over decades the relationship inverted: the small, expensive, low-enrollment residential college in Yellow Springs came to be seen by the university’s leadership as a drain on a system that no longer depended on it. With a small endowment of about $36 million, declining enrollment, and a costly campus, the college had little leverage. When the university board declared exigency and moved to suspend operations, the faculty protested that they had been frozen out of the decision; the American Association of University Professors would later sanction the administration for infringing governance standards. The college did not so much fail as get cut loose.

What followed is what makes Antioch extraordinary. Its alumni, fiercely loyal to a college famous for cooperative education, the honor of its activist history, and the slogan Horace Mann gave it — “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” — refused to let it disappear. They organized, raised money, and in 2009 negotiated an asset purchase agreement with the university: for $6.08 million the Antioch College Continuation Corporation acquired the physical campus, the Glen Helen nature preserve, and the college endowment, and won the right to operate Antioch College as a legally independent institution.

In the autumn of 2011 the reborn college reopened with just 35 students. To attract them it offered free tuition to its first classes, drew thousands of applications, rebuilt a four-year curriculum, and set out on the long road back to accreditation, which the Higher Learning Commission granted in 2016. The revived Antioch is tiny and perennially precarious — it has weathered furloughs and salary cuts since — but it exists, independent of the university that closed it, which is more than almost any closed American college can say.