Word: antioch
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...center of all this controversy, and, some say, partly the cause of it, is President James P. Dixon (Antioch, '39; Harvard Medical School, '43), who was serving as Philadelphia's commissioner of health when named to head his alma mater in 1959. Usually chomping on a half-smoked cigar that sprinkles ashes down his rumpled blue polo shirt, Dixon talks in convoluted jargon that has earned him the nickname "Dim Jixon." Students still talk about his speech in 1969 comparing the campus to a well-balanced fishbowl populated with guppies, goldfish and piranhas. "For days," says...
Dixon's early years were not marred by controversy. Under his leadership, Antioch abolished grades, vigorously recruited black students and experimented with dropping all required freshman courses. He was well liked by both faculty and students. Says Striker Jamie Dahlberg: "He used to be a really great guy. But something happened. I'm not sure what." In 1970 Dixon and the trustees took Antioch even farther, launching a "New Directions" program that upset the balance in the fishbowl...
...better serve impoverished students-both black and white-Antioch brought large numbers of them from urban slums to Yellow Springs, where they required scholarships and loans to meet the college's tuition of $3,050 a year. Despite its altruism, the program has backfired. Many of the needy recruits, who now total about 10% of the student body, were ill prepared for college work, or for life in a rural middle-class community. Their presence has created new tensions-between affluent and poor, black and white...
Under Dixon, Antioch also created an empire of subsidiary campuses -some to try out innovations in teaching, others to bring an Antioch education to even greater numbers of underprivileged youngsters. In addition to the Yellow Springs campus, three satellites based in the Washington, D.C., area award degrees. Antioch also organized some 25 centers in the U.S. and abroad where students can take some of their courses...
...centers were supposed to be selfsupporting, but many required start-up money from Antioch and some are still operating in the red. The program severely strained the college's resources and split Yellow Springs into feuding factions. Complains Humanities Professor George Geiger: "The money is being drained out of here to finance the other campuses...