The Antioch Papers

Spirit of '73

Strike Interviews.pdf [7.20MB], Documents

The transcribed interviews accompany this video:

The Spirit of ’73 Video Link

From the Introduction

When I was going to Antioch in the early 1990’s, there was a lot of controversy about the College hiring an outside company to manage the physical plant, including the cafeteria and custodial staff. Both staff and students vehemently protested this decision. While legitimate concerns about union busting and external control were voiced, many students began urging protesters to “reclaim the spirit of ‘73”. I had vague notions of what happened during the 1973 student strike, but I had many more questions. Not only did I want to know exactly what happened in 1973, but why. What were both the short and long-term impacts? Furthermore, I wanted my research to encourage critical thinking among protesters in the early ‘90s. Did students know what they were reclaiming? Were the students in ’73 right? Were they wrong? Did the situation in 1973 bear any resemblance to what was happening in the early 1990’s?

So, my senior project was an ambitious one. In the interest of time and lack of resources, I used video only to document the chronology of the events. I chose print interviews with faculty, alumni and administrators to investigate the short and long-term impact of the strike.

Kirsten Ervin, Antioch College Alumn ‘91

The Interview with Nina Myatt ’53, Archivist Emeritus and one of the more than 20 college workers laid off in July 2007

Nina Myatt:

I realized when I was looking over the questions that a lot of my feelings really go back, not to ’73 but to ’79, when we almost went bankrupt and there was this great disruption in terms of people’s lives and such real anxiety that we might not make it. In ’73, my rememberance of that time is more of a deep sadness, because of the effects of it on faculty members, those who were dismissed, including tenured faculty who were let go, and one of these happened to be a very close family friend. And the kind of stunned disbelief that such a thing could happen, especially when the tenured faculty were let go, but some faculty with just two-year contracts were not because of some legal thing. The two-year contracts seemed to have more validity than the tenure. I guess the other remembrances are less personal to me then. I think of it in terms of my husband who was on the faculty and I know how he felt and how his students felt and how he behaved after this. I was working here then, but somehow that part of it all seems less important than the bigger picture of the college or how it affected Don’s work and his relationship with colleagues and friends.

Was he a professor then?

I think by that time, he was called maybe communications and engineering. When he came, Antioch had a straight engineering department and at the time that the college lost its engineering accreditation, they switched, sort of took a step sideways and continued to offer some of the undergraduate courses; and of course co-op has always been important in the engineering program. They also went into a dual-degree completion program, because the college could not really maintain an engineering department. They used to have an electrical, a mechanical and a civil program, and those are fairly expensive to maintain. So he, in some ways was an unusual engineer in that he really had a broader outlook than the narrow field, and enjoyed dealing with students who were in the arts, always had friends among those, the filmmakers and so forth. He shifted his focus to teaching science courses for the non-science people.

Speaking of the larger picture, in the faculty relationships can you talk a little about the effects on the relationship between faculty, or faculty and students and what was wrought because of the strike?

Okay, you know that there were a group of faculty who supported the students in every way and they of course were censored, but were not dismissed. First of all, they were fired, and then they were reinstated.

You mean those seven faculty that were fired and rehired [on May 22, 1973] ?

Yes, right. And I can’t help but believe that those teachers, and Don was one of them, that continued to teach his classes during the strike and a lot of faculty did not. I shouldn’t speak for him, he’s not here to speak for himself, but I can’t help but feel that certainly it must have changed their relationship and how they dealt with one another. [In] the period right after the strike, there was such a decrease in enrollment, which meant a great decrease in money, which meant immediately the beginning of laying off of staff, union people and non-union people, and faculty were non-renewed when they were trying to keep the faculty down to match the new, smaller enrollment. It was a time of, the one word that comes to my mind is really a deep sadness. Nobody really wanted it to end this way, and there were really mixed feelings about the Tightness of the cause of the students.

Over the cause or the tactics?

Yeah, the tactics got so rough that I think they lost a lot of credibility, but there certainly was a realization that Antioch had been very active in seeking government money to bring students here, and in some ways we brought the problem on ourselves by not carefully planning or just blindly assuming that everything was going to work out okay. And [we were] left holding the bag when the federal money dried up. It just seemed like the students really did deserve something, but on the other hand, no one could see how you could guarantee a five-year program with this kind of wanting to do the right thing by the students we brought in, and yet feeling that realistically it was not possible to. I think that had a big part in the sadness, that somehow we’d had a good idea to begin with and it had noble purposes and [we] kind of flubbed it up.

Did the sadness continue for a long time?

Oh, I think so. Because really right after the strike the layoffs began, and [they] just kept cutting back and cutting back. It really wasn’t until Guskin came and said “You can’t just keep cutting back. You have to be bold and say things are going to get better and we have to hire faculty instead of trimming down the faculty and staff to match the smaller and smaller [enrollment].” It was like a catch-22 situation. The financial situation got worse and worse and that was the period when James Dixon fired [Frank] Shea, who was trying to negotiate a way out of the network, and it ended up that Shea was reinstated by the trustees and Dixon was fired. So the period after the strike seemed to be one sort of turmoil after another, and then when Birenbaum came he promptly started pulling in all these fringey little parts of Antioch that had sprouted up all over the country. I think when Birenbaum came there were thirty two bits associated with Antioch. And then everything culminated in ’79, the spring of ’79 when we had the cash-flow crisis and the college couldn’t meet its payroll and so forth.

I was going to ask you about ’79. Do you think ’79 would have happened if there hadn’t been the strike of ’73?

Now, you know we probably would have really had to re-think how much we could afford to do in terms of a New Directions program, or minorities, but it would have happened over a period of time that would not have caused such turmoil. The strike was just very costly to the physical plant and everything else.

I wanted to go to my first question about what the emotional and spiritual climate of the campus was like for the first ten years or so [following the strike], and what it was like to work here.

Well, it’s peculiar that so many of us stayed; I stayed, as my husband had been on the faculty. He didn’t die until ’79, so that was six years after that. But there were lots of staff people who didn’t have any particular connection the way I did, and yet they stayed too. We all had a decrease in our salaries, not that we didn’t get raises, we actually had to take a five percent cut in salary, which didn’t get made up for about three years. People really supported the college immensely by sticking with it. To this very day, which I think is some of the cause for the anger that sometimes erupts among staff, probably more than the faculty. Actually, there are very few people here now who were here then in terms of faculty, and there are a few of the senior faculty. Like here in the library, Joe was here, Ruth was one of the ones who was laid off, or let go. But I’m not sure there’s a community recollection about that period now, because a lot of people were simply not involved in it.

Why do you think people stayed?

I think they really felt that Antioch was worth preserving. The only reason I can think that people would willingly put up with a cut in salary was that we just felt things had to get better, and slowly they are.

What other kinds of things did you have to put up with?

I think it was probably sort of a demoralization that came from extreme poverty, so that the grounds weren’t properly tended, and the buildings were in terrible shape. We’re in much better condition now, and even so we look pretty scrappy around the edges to some people. But those of us who know how bad it was for a while know we’re doing much better. It was just sort of a family embarrassment, especially when students came, or when the alums came and they were just horrified with how things looked.

What about that in relationship to the changing reputation of Antioch? You would probably know better than anyone, seeing all the newsclippings, how the strike affected our national image.

Probably immediately, it affected it very strongly, just because national periodicals had picked up the story, and I’m sure that families could easily decide to have their kids choose a college that didn’t look like it had such shaky underpinnings. Especially when it’s an expensive school to go to; even then it was expensive, although I guess if you look at it we’re not at the top of the heap, I’m not sure we’re even at the top of GLCA schools. I think it takes a long time to dispel some negative something. It may be something that the families or the school counselors couldn’t quite put their fingers on, what it was that made them uneasy about Antioch, but I’m sure that continued for a number of years. During that same time we didn’t have a consistent administrative staff and admissions and I think that probably hurt. That’s one of the things the College had to do to stay within their resources, was to move faculty from teaching positions to administrative positions to take up the slack. That happened in admissions.

What about Antioch’s reputation before ’73?

I think its reputation has been different at different times. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned the first year program to you. Some consider it the first crack in Antioch’s foundation. By ’73 already even some of our faculty certainly thought we were not what we once were and in bringing in students who were just marginally qualified to go to school here, without really having, being able to give them the full support services they needed, that we had to then change our expectations of students. And then, there was a long time [when] we had probably had to minimal admissions work. The applications came in and you chose as many people as you wanted to come. [After the strike] there was a long time where we had to take anyone who looked as though there was any possibility of them coming, and there were a lot of those who probably never should have come because they added to our burden, because they presented either emotional problems or severe academic problems and we just weren’t able to deal with it. I don’t know how other faculty feel, if they feel they had to change their way of teaching because of the students they were dealing with, I’m not sure. I don’t know what Don would have said about that.

That’s another question, how [the strike] affected the academic program and the character of the student body. Could you touch on that a little?

I think compared to the late 50s and early 60s when we had sort of an elitist group of students here, very highly motivated, highly academic types. Like Frank Adler, that’s his vintage. And it’s really different than when I was here. We were serious about our schooling, but I think for the most part we were not as competitive in an academic sense. I think we were stronger in some of the other aspects of the Antioch program, in community. We had a different kind of balance to the student body, during that time, the time that I know. I have a feeling they probably had more people then like I was, in that I would say had an adequate brain and probably overachieved, worked hard enough to maintain good grades or whatever we thought an adequate student was. But I think probably in the late 50s and into the 60s, they probably had students with much greater intellectual ability than our group.

And in the last years since the strike?

I think through all the years we’ve always had a few good students, it’s just that they’re fewer and farther between. I think the faculty wouldn’t have stayed if they always had students who needed remedial reading or whatever that they always had some students who had capacity and who challenged their thinking, or who somehow made them feel it was worthwhile staying here to teach. Why would you stay if you felt like you were dealing with people who really could not appreciate what you were trying to offer in terms of academic programs?

What about community and the cohesion of community across the barriers of different groups, you know, between students, administrators faculty and staff? Did you see that change after the strike?

I feel less comfortable commenting on that. In name, things look the same, you have so many faculty and so many students on Adcil. Adcil itself certainly changed in its power and the kinds of authority it could exert once the University structure came into being. Adcil used to directly select members of the board of trustees, not nominate them, but select them, very powerful.

I was reading about students in the early 70s trying to elect Angela Davis.

Yeah, she was nominated, but some way or other it didn’t happen. It seems, thinking back on it now, it seems there was more political polarization. I think in the old days, there might have been sort of faculty issues and student issues and those were the two groups, faculty and students. And then, in this later period, really before the strike, [with] all the political issues going on, with the integration issues of the whole country and the Vietnam War, the groupings were faculty and students who had the same political agenda, and that probably affected also the way the governance worked. If you paid attention to who you voted for on Adcil, you could get the vote to have certain political happenings come to pass. Because you’d have a certain number of students, or a number of faculty who’d make up a majority.

So faculty and students were in agreement?

Yeah, around a political agenda. And I think that’s different from the way it was in earlier years, where often students had one set of issues they thought were important and faculty had another. Certainly they could come together, but in the late 60s, early 70s, it was either Marxist political thinking or whatever. Which I think was different.

Was it [some] faculty and students belonging in one political camp versus those believing in a different ideology, warring ideologies?

I’m not sure it was that clear, but certainly there were times when Adcil had faculty and students whose agenda was either to get the Marxist study program in, or to push for something that was probably on the left. There was never a strong right wing on this campus.

One of the really key issues I’m interested in is how the strike affected the relationship between administrators and students and administrators and faculty.

I think the administrators who are here now, except maybe for Connie Pelekoudas and Bob Parker… I’m not sure that they make any kind of connection. Have you gotten the feeling that the administrators are nervous about student involvement in goingson at the college?

I’ve gotten the feeling that criticism is not welcome. Not so much that they disagree on certain things but that [the administration] just don’t appreciate critical voices existing. I wonder if the economic downfall following the strike, which snowballed to create a whole bunch of situations, I wonder if it also created a distrust of student dissent of any kind.

Yeah, it’s possible. The one difference I see is there’s so few students around. When there was dissent in the 70s, it was a big bunch of people. Our enrollment on this campus was very high, it was probably 800 on campus, not total enrollment. 800 on campus, which meant a let of bodies and if they were organizing around an issue, it could be an goodly number of people, would be very intimidating. One of the things that’s different is that during Dixon’s time, he was an Antiochian. I think that made a difference in how he looked at what the students were doing. I’m wondering whether the newer administrative structure we have coming from a more traditional way of division of responsibilities, even though they talked about student government and our literature- one would believe there’s still great store put on having student involvement in a lot of things. I have a feeling it makes [the administration] nervous.

It’s very interesting how [the strike keeps coming up. I mean, you’re doing this on it, and practically every fall when freshmen come in, somebody wanders up here and they want to know about this thing they’ve heard about. Some sort of a fascination with the period. I’m not sure I understand how, what triggered that. They don’t seem to be wanting to pick up the issues or anything, but just they’ve heard about the strike in ’73 and they want to know what it’s about. It’s interesting.

Speaking of administrators I wonder if you’ve seen the role of the administration change. You were talking about Dixon and his more Antiochian background.

Well, there was a time, about the time of the strike, when Jim Dixon and his administration literally moved off campus. And that meant that we needed someone to run this campus. It seems to me that the administrative structure’s gotten very complicated, there’s a whole new level. Except for Al Guskin taking over as head of this campus, supposedly as well as the University. But on the other hand he had to have a sidekick vice president, who is what used to be called the provost, or chancellor, the name changes, but essentially, it’s the head of this campus. I think there’s still another level of administration in there, many more administrators than we used to have.

But do you think their role is becoming more managerial, less managerial? For instance, Al Denman talked a lot about how administrators had a role that used to be a lot more educationally-oriented, that they were almost considered administrators and faculty both, an interesting duality.

I get the sense from what I see going on, not really being a part of it, that faculty and students now seem to be antiadministration, it’s not students against the faculty and administration, it’s the faculty and students against the administration; that they often share common ideas. Everybody who comes to Antioch seems to feel they own their part. Every student who walks on campus, everybody who works here. It’s hard to give everyone as much power over what happens as they would really like to have. I can fully understand the people who have to pay the bills and come up with the money getting very nervous about people deciding how things are going to be done. If they have to come up with the money, they want to have more say-so over how the place goes.

What about Antioch’s leadership of that time? How has it changed?

I think Birenbaum when he came, probably had educational ideas that he was never really able to carry through. I know a few projects because Don was on them. I think Bill Birenbaum and Al Guskin, their main concern has been financial, and I think that would be very dissatisfying, to just be plugging up the dike all the time, and never really getting on top of it, and feeling that you can leave some sort of a stamp on a place, that was “When Birenbaum was here this good thing happened, and when Al Guskin was here this good thing happened.” I don’t think either of them were able to do that.

What about the mission? Do you think the strike has affected our idea of the Antioch mission, or not just the idea but the actualization of such?

I think so, I think we have to be very cautious. We used to be very bold in going and looking for high risk students, and people who needed a great deal of financial help and so forth, and I don’t think we can afford to do that without getting ourselves in a bind again. I think we still try in the admissions process, and I’m not sure how that works. I don’t think there are quotas, and yet I think they certainly do send the Antioch missionaries to certain high schools, or to certain parts of the country, or certain alums to have contact with some of the diverse groups they would like to bring here. I don’t think anybody wants a white, middle-class college, I don’t think they do.

But nevertheless, do you think the strike has affected the plurality of the college in terms of economics, ethnicity, economic background?

It probably has. I think there’s actual data that the registrar’s office keeps that you can look at to see the racial mix. I know the registrar’s office does it for a period of years back, maybe not back to ’73, but … we seem to have in recent years more foreign students than I remember. We probably used to have in the early 70s, more Black students percentage-wise than we do now, but I think we now have a great number of Oriental students, American Orientals..I think maybe there’s more diversity of nationalities here, probably percentage wise. I don’t think we ever had 30%, but probably in the teens, but that was high, because in the preceding years at Antioch, as much as we’d talked about wanting to have a diverse population, we didn’t have a very high Black population here. I could count on one hand the number of Black students who were here when I was.

You were saying about how we aren’t able to risk anymore, or be bold financially and I’m wondering if you’ve seen changes in Antioch’s commitment to experimentation, innovation educationally since the strike.

Again, I think its very cautious. The new cross cultural center is very safe. That’s sort of a traditional academic thing that a college ought to be doing, its not like the New Directions program, or the first year program, or something that was really off by itself in not having been done before. Probably because of money, when you can’t bear to make a mistake, you have to be very careful.

What about the effect the strike had on Antioch’s relationship with Yellow Springs?

I’m not sure the effect is long-ranging. Certainly at the time the strike was going on, the village tried very hard to support the college in opening up places for classes to be held, churches and so forth, providing rooms. Probably the bigger effect is just that the number of students now don’t have a tremendous effect on the village the way they once did. At this period when we didn’t have enough housing on campus for all the students we had, the students were living all across campus. I don’t think that there’s any long term negative effects on the community because of the strike, but for the fact that the support of the college is lessened because of the enrollment’s being down. Certainly the strike which led up to ’79, it’s a straight progression that ends up there. The town was very supportive; committees were organized, people volunteered to come in and help in offices or the bookstore, just wherever to shore the place up until it could get on its feet. I guess I don’t see a long-term negative effect on the community because of the strike.

Do you think the strike had any positive effects?

I really can’t imagine what it could have been. Has anybody thought of anything positive?

Yeah, Al Denman said something, Al and Harold Wright said interesting things about that. Al said that it, people saw what taking ideology to its extreme could do, and that people were more wary about their beliefs.

Well, maybe you could phrase it this way, that I think it helped people to realize how much they really cared whether this place survived or not. I’m sure Al is one of those who put a lot of heart and soul and energy into this place.