Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

On the Road from Damascus: The Fall of Antioch College

Charlotte Allen delivers a devastating report on the demise of one of the country’s most venerable liberal arts institutions, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which closed its doors in June 2007. Antioch’s decline took place over many years, and the sad story features, among other things, an administration that fostered “community” and “progressivism” by indulging student demands, no matter how outrageous; students who openly bullied other students for political transgressions, such as using the word “Eskimo” instead of “Inuit”; an affirmative action program that brought “high-risk” students and inner-city belligerence to the campus; the dissolution of Antioch’s rigorous curriculum into student-designed courses of study, and its famed student civic activism into street theatre at the shopping mall; extreme identity politics in which at least one so-called “Community Day” became