Friday, March 28, 2008

My Poor College


i am so sad. I don't know the details. I've been avoiding the details. but the gist is that the feckless board of directors have choked poor antioch, founded in 1852, to death so that they can make it a feckless trade school with plastic satellite campuses someplace other than sweet Yellow Springs, Ohio, and these satellites are also doomed. sad sad sad. its been a terrible year of watching its lurching death rattles, but also a time to party, reconnect, and honor its cool-ass power. the remarkable gathering of extraordinary, extraordinary beautiful (I mean jaw-dropping fantastically lovely visionary people) is on the ropes, perhaps down for the count. every antiochian i know has revolutionized a small or large part of their world. add it to the death toll of the Bush years. a college too idealistic, too community dedicated, too turbulent, and too committed to the wild righteous notions of the nineteen year-old to live. i am indebted to my parents for letting me be nineteen there, so i could be wild and righteous without boundaries, get knocked off my feet (or at least severely curtailed) by the real world, and to be inspired to try try try to make my little bit of justice thereafter. if I told you all the amazing things that have been done by my friends since we left there, just in my small little circle of friends there, its just amazing. I am so proud to be part of it and so pissed about its incompetent stewardship. What I was promised when i signed on was to get an education to be an effective activist. That is exactly what i received, with all its triumphs and frustrations. from the people who brought you (in part) co-ed dorms, They Might Be Giants, highlights of the civil rights movement, Stephen Jay Gould, sexual consent, The Gits, cooperative education, Coretta Scott King, Mia Zapata, Mark Strand, div dance, Steve Sady, Anastasia Goodstein, Rod Serling, Sylvia Law, and many other amazing change-makers and change-making ideas (so many more).... aaaaaahhhhggggghhh! last one out, please get the lights.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

great photo from "Passion Prairie" where a many of us I'm sure learned a bit about growing up.
You might add another classmate to your list who brought many smiles across the country.. New Yorker cartoonist Ed Fisher