Antioch against Itself:
Transformation of the Meaning of Antioch College
By
Howard S. Schwartz
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401
(248) 684-5345 (home)
(248) 370-2122 (work)
Draft 1.8
Presented at the Critical Management Studies Workshop, Using psychoanalysis to reconceptualize organization studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, August, 2008; and at the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, Philadelphia, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, June, 2008.
Antioch against Itself:
Transformation of the Meaning of Antioch College
When the closure of my alma mater Antioch College was announced on June 12, 2007, there was plenty of schaedenfreude to go around (e.g. Will, 2007), but there was considerable sadness as well.
Characteristic was Leon Botstein, the distinguished president of Bard College. Speaking from Jerusalem, where he was music director for the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Botstein called the death “a tragedy that should not have happened” (Jaschik, 2007).
Antioch College is one of the historic, great, independent colleges in American history. It was the founding college of the American progressive movement. …It was a strong, important place. And you know it had distinguished alumni, among them Stephen Jay Gould, and it should never have closed.
Yet, for some, it had died a long time ago. Everett K. Wilson (1985), a former member of the Antioch faculty, declared in 1985 that Antioch was already dead.
Of course, he wasn’t speaking literally:
I use the word, death, metaphorically. The organization persists in attenuated form. But it is such a stranger to its past that it might well be seen as a different organization, displacing its predecessor. It persists only tenuously, reduced in size, resources, and program, without a philosophy of education or a distinctive purpose that would confer identity. (p.260)
Still, he didn’t hold out much hope that it would survive in any form and it turned out he was right.
On the other hand, whatever this organization in “attenuated form” was, it was vibrant. Faculty and students at the school, in alliance with a revived and committed group of alumni, put up a fight for salvation that gained considerable national attention (Cohen, 2008). That fight was lost, but it is not possible to deny that something was very much alive.
But what was it? Wilson’s designation of it as “… a stranger to its past .. a different organization, displacing its predecessor .. without a philosophy of education or a distinctive purpose that would confer identity,” tells us what it was not, but conveys no positive information.
We lose nothing if we simply say that Antioch changed; specifically, the meaning of Antioch changed. Insofar as an organization is defined by its meaning, the Antioch that Wilson knew died indeed, but the organization that replaced it had a vitality of its own; and along with that a philosophy of education and a distinct purpose. Ultimately unviable it might have been[1], but as Cohen (2008) put it, it certainly did not go gently.
Wilson did not recognize it, but that was for a reason. Antioch was in the process of redefining itself to be, in fundamental ways, the opposite of what it had been before, and through which Wilson defined what the purpose and philosophy of a college would be. There is a sense in which Antioch redefined itself to be against, and destructive toward, what it previously meant.
My purpose in this essay is to elaborate that sense. I want to consider this transformation in meaning from within a theoretical approach (Schwartz, 2002, 2003; following Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1988) that has focused on the psychodynamics of political correctness. I will briefly introduce this perspective here, develop it for the present purpose, and then show how it can add to our understanding of the transformation and death of Antioch College. Before getting into the theoretical specifics, however, a word should be said about the choice of the psychoanalytic frame.
To begin with, as I have said, the decline of Antioch College may profitably be approached in terms of a transformation of meaning. But the study of meaning requires an interpretive discipline, and for this purpose, in our time, psychoanalytic theory is well suited.
More specifically, psychoanalytic theory offers benefits to the stuffy of this case that other approaches noticeably lack. For example, Wilson (1985; also see Yalman and Wilson, undated) argues that the decline of Antioch was due to a failure of leadership, which could not form a coherent idea of the college in the face of centripetal forces that were pulling it apart. But his analysis leaves us with a number of issues that are unresolved, because they are mysterious to him as well.
Referring to a strike in Spring 1973, which as we shall see marked the starting point of Antioch’s collapse, and whose destructive potential was obvious to anyone, Wilson observed, without explanation, that it engaged the full vigor of the community. As he put it: “Never have I had such a vivid sense of the vitality of an organization, even one in the process of destroying itself.” (277) The members of an organization, deeply committed to the organization, threw themselves with passion into the destruction of the organization they loved. The organizaton drew itself up to its full height, mobilized the full energies at its disposal, and used them to blow itself to bits. The force that destroyed Antioch College was Antioch College; it had become its own self-destruction
The point I want to make is that there was something massively irrational about this organizational suicide. It is difficult to imagine how, working within a framework of rational explanation, as Wilson did, one could make sense of it as a reasonable thing to do. It was deliberate, and intentional; it fully engaged the minds and energies of those engaged in it, but it made no sense in terms of the purposes of which they were consciously aware. Wilson attributed the blame for this to a failure of leadership, which had the responsibility for making sense in this context. But it is one thing to assign blame for senselessness; understanding it is an entirely different matter. To understand that, we need to mobilize a pattern of explanation that allows us to comprehend what does not appear to make sense. For that purpose, the primary paradigm is the psychoanalytic, to which I will now turn.
Theoretical Introduction
For psychoanalytic theory, the process of socialization, of how an individual becomes a member of society, is rooted in the Oedipus complex. In the classic formulation, the child’s tight connection with mother, boundariless fusion, is disrupted by the father, who has a relationship with mother that does not revolve around the child.
In this way, the father represents external reality, which of course does not revolve around the child. This is known to the father, who builds his role out of his association with external reality, endeavoring to keep it at a distance from the family, so that within the family, the intimate manifestations of maternal love can safely operate; and within which he will have earned himself a secure place.
But the child hates him for his intrusion and wants to kill him. Doing so, the phantasy continues, will enable him to resume his fusion with mother. Yet killing father is not in the cards; he is big and powerful and the child is small and weak. What is the child to do? In the paradigmatic case, the alternative chosen is introjection. The child brings the father into himself, which means internalizing the impersonal rules of society and the associated understandings of reality, codified in the common meanings embedded in language. Lacan refers to this as the symbolic order.
The core to this commonality is the “paternal function,” which is the capacity to see oneself from the standpoint of someone who does not have an emotional connection with one. I call this “objective self-consciousness.” I use the word “objectively,” not in the sense of seeing oneself as one actually is, but as an object; that is to say from a perspective that does not belong specifically to any of us, but is available to all of us. It is developed through history, and is constantly under revision through our developing capacity to understand what it means to be a human being.
The objective framework, may be said to exist at a number of levels of abstraction. At the highest level, we have reason, logic, and mathematics, which we may think of as the structure of objectivity. These make possible the development of lower levels of abstraction, including the various laws and norms of society, structures of exchange, and understandings of objective reality that can be collectively comprehended, learned, negotiated, and applied in the service of the individual’s desire.
Specifically from the standpoint of social relations, the objective framework is what makes it possible to codify and comprehend the network of exchange relationships that form the normative structure of society -- a set of widely accepted interlinked hypothetical propositions of the form “If X does this, Y should do that.” In such propositions, we can place ourselves either in the X position or the Y position. This has made it possible for people to be mutually predictable and comprehensible to one another and to understand and coordinate with each other.
Yet the objective framework is not developed for its own sake. It serves subjective purposes. In the Freudian presentation, there is an implicit promise that if one becomes like father, one can have mother. In other words, if you do what you’re supposed to do in the objective world, you can attain your own desideratum. Hence, the objective framework gives us what we need to accomplish things collectively and cooperatively, while at the same time we each pursue the object of our own desire.
In this way, a structure of meaning is formed. We can call this Oedipal meaning.
But notice that while something is surely gained in this resolution of the Oedipal complex, something is also lost. What is lost to objectivity is the sense of one’s cosmic importance, of being the center of a loving world that fusion with mother originally meant, which Freud calls primary narcissism. “The letter kills,” says Lacan. And that is what it kills: the sense that the world is one’s own world. The objective framework, in other words, reveals our narcissism to be narcissism.
It stands to the favor of psychoanalytic theory that it can comprehend that what is lost is never really lost. Primary narcissism remains within every one of us and from that perspective the rage against the father, and hence against the social rules and common understandings that he represents. This makes possible another formulation of meaning, which is in a sense the opposite of Oedipal meaning, and consists in the rejection of the father and his intrusion into our fusion with mother.
Within this formulation, the power of father is illegitimate. He has taken mother by force and the rules and understandings through which he justifies his place are only the details of his domination. There is no objectivity, but only the imposition of his subjective will and desire. Get rid of him and his works and the connection with mother can be restored. Then the infinite power of her love and goodness will make life perfect for us.
Here again a world is structured, but the structure is the mirror image of Oedipal meaning. Expel the father, rather than identify with him, undermine his claims to legitimacy, rather than make sense of them. Do this and the perfect world of mother’s love will be restored.
Since within the maternal sphere it is the emotional connection of identification, rather than the symbolic comprehension of similarities that unites us with others, it can serve as well as the basis for an ethics and even a politics which we can, according to Schwartz (2002, 2003) recognize as “political correctness.”
Political correctness operates on the premise that there is no objective reality and hence that the achievements of the father in making reality amenable have been merely the means through which he has stolen mother’s love. The ethics of PC are based on identification with those from whom her love had been stolen. The father should be hated for his theft and the oppressed, which is to say those from whom he has stolen love, should be loved in compensation. The politics would add to this that there would be the basis of an alliance with the oppressed who would enhance our hatred of the father, which is to say those whose grievances would be most deeply felt and profound.
But underlying politics is something deeper. We are talking here about a permanent state of protest against the imposition of the father’s order, which is to say objective order (Schwartz, 2005). This protest can be the steady-state of a person’s being, and a very different basis of meaning. I will call it anti-oedipal meaning.
Anti-oedipal meaning is essentially nihilistic. Its aim is destruction. Set against the perfect goodness of fusion with mother, nothing can be worthwhile. Indeed, everything that exists stands as a barrier to goodness and is therefore bad; it deserves to be destroyed. This includes the rules of exchange that define organization.
But notice that fusion with mother is the only place that it can make sense to get to. Hence, anti-oedipal meaning can never have the idea of getting anywhere else, and must be an end in itself. The rules and understandings of reality that the father represents, and which have as their Oedipal meaning the objective conditions within which one must fashion one’s route to the ego ideal, can have no significance here. The underlying phantasy is that fusion with mother will be restored if the father is destroyed, but the father cannot be destroyed or the basis of meaning disappears. Hence, the basis of meaning is the continual process of destroying the father.
On the level of politics, this can amount to a very powerful force, and that presents an obvious danger. Such a powerful force, directed against organization, can destroy organization. My hypothesis is that this is what happened to Antioch College. Insofar as it was formulated within Oedipal meaning, Antioch College was destroyed. That is not to say that nothing remained, but it is the reason Wilson did not recognize what Antioch had become. Wilson’s model of education was rooted in Oedipal meaning, and on the idea that the father had something to offer. Yet the meaning of Antioch had become anti-oedipal, rooted in the permanent destruction of the father. What remained, in other words, was the very anti-oedipal politics that destroyed it. It co-opted what was left of Antioch College and, like a hermit crab, took over its structure. Ultimately it was doomed. Whatever its vibrancy, in the end it had declared war on reality, and reality always prevails.
Oedipal Antioch
If one wanted to place Antioch on the political spectrum running from right to left, one would always have located it on the left. This is an important point because it might otherwise be tempting to believe that the left is my object of criticism; it is not. As the statisticians would have it, the dimension that concerns me is orthogonal to the dimension that runs from left to right.
My point is, rather, that the meaning of the left shifted over the history of Antioch. That shift, from social democratic politics to identity politics, corresponds to the shift from Oedipal to anti-oedipal meaning that I would like to elucidate.
The key to Oedipal Antioch is the character of Arthur Morgan, a charismatic figure who was Antioch’s president from 1920 to 1935, and who gave the college its unique institutions, such as the work-study program, in which students spent roughly half their time on full-time coop jobs, and the community governance system, in which students participated fully in college governance. He was an engineer, a political liberal, and a full patriarch.
Morgan had a very definite idea of what education should be about, and he designed Antioch College to realize that idea. That is not to say that the student would be passive matter upon which the College would impose itself. On the contrary, it was inherent in Morgan’s vision that the properly formed graduate would be an active shaper of his or her own ideas. What the College intended to impart was the rigor with which such shaping would be done, the experience that would be brought into it, and the knowledge that would come from the mastery of a curriculum based on the highest accomplishments that had been achieved through the intellectual disciplines.. The student was called upon to bring these understandings into him or herself and make use of them within their own developing personal orientation toward the world
From first to last, the Morgan student was encouraged, indeed required, to think about purpose, about personal philosophy. The person applying for admission wrote about his or her aims in life; and, at exit time, the senior had to write a paper on personal aims and philosophy. In the meantime, in Morgan's day, all Antioch students took a course in philosophy, reinforcing the emphasis on weighing the ends of life and the means of achieving desired ends. Morgan and his faculty stressed a broad exposure to a number of fields of scholarship: required courses in the biological and physical sciences, the social sciences and work in English composition and the humanities. Ability to exploit these fields and, somehow, to integrate them, was tested in a final Comprehensive Examination (Yalman and Wilson, undated, p.575)
A critical part of this was the way political orientation fit into the Antioch program. Morgan had a certain view of the world, which may be called political; he was a liberal. Antioch, as his vision, may be said to have had that liberal orientation as well, but there was nothing in this that contradicted his patriarchy.
Rather, in keeping with the social democratic politics of the time, Antioch’s graduates, at best, would also be liberals and patriarchs. They would transform the objective structure of the world so that it would be more fair and universal, but it would be no less objective. Yalman and Wilson say:
Morgan's Antioch elite would be inventors, not only in the conventional sense (better mouse traps) but also as social designers, modifying social patterns that were inequitable or otherwise inadequate. He celebrated a socially sensitive imagination together with the disciplined skills of the engineer. He had every conviction that the informed intelligence which designed bridges to specified tolerances, could also design social structures that would define a better world.(Yalman and Wilson: pp.566-7)
Yet the expression of that view was implicit, not explicit as it later became. The idea that the student would adopt the vision of the College was perhaps desired, but it was not directly sought, and certainly such a view was not imposed on the student. The social vision of the student would have to come, or not come, through the individual student’s development of his or her own philosophy, in accordance with the demands of rigor and in consideration of the range of experiences, worldly and academic, that were the defining characteristics of an Antioch education. Antioch’s function, in accordance with its embrace of the objective function, was to teach students how to think and weigh evidence, not to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.
Implicit in this, as part of Morgan’s patrimony, was the encouragement of broad ranges of expression and ideological engagement. The assumption was that winnowed through rigorous intellectual conflict, such intellectual diversity could only help the individual develop his or her own views. Thus, the patriarchal legacy here was the frame through which a range of views could be encountered, compared, and objectively considered.
This is from a retrospective article in the Weekly Standard by Charlotte Allen (2007):
Although political views at Antioch might have tilted leftward even back then, the students of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s prided themselves on their willingness to hear out their more conservative classmates in lively all-night dorm discussions on politics and philosophy, inspired by professors who encouraged them to test all their assumptions against the evidence. "We were completely respectful of every point of view," recalled Rick Daily, a Denver lawyer who graduated from Antioch in 1968 and is treasurer of the alumni committee that is struggling to save the college from closure. "We even had a Goldwater Republican in our graduating class," Daily said in a telephone interview.
And this is from a retrospective piece by Ralph Keyes (2007), a 1967 graduate who took a job at Antioch in around 1990.
I remembered Antioch as a lively, demanding institution, full of contentious students and professors. Many, including myself, were ardent left-wingers. Others stood elsewhere on the political spectrum. As we understood it, one's political convictions were beside Antioch's point. Its emphasis was on thinking for one's self and keeping an open mind. "Re-evaluate your basic assumptions in the light of new evidence" was a campus cliché. I felt constantly challenged to justify my points of view. But I didn't assume that reassessing those views would move me left. It might move me to the right, or toward the center, or nowhere at all.
Anti-oedipal Antioch
The political orientation at Antioch in its last years was still toward the left but the contrast of the way it structured meaning was sharp. The agency of the school was presumed to be expressed through fusion, through love, which was massively represented through the term “community.” Difficulties that arose were to be met with, not through objective, rational assessment of causes and consequences, but through imagination and creativity, fostered by the community, here representing the maternal muse. Hence, license was given to fantasy.
But, like it or not, there is an objective reality and it imposes limits on the life of fantasy. These are first encountered in the form of the father. In anti-oedipal psychology, he is subsequently the object upon whom they are projected, in one guise or other, and attacked as oppressive.
We can see this at a number of institutional levels, beginning with the organization’s grand narrative. Consider this from a New York Times article called “The College that would not go gently” (Cohen, 2008):
As any student at Antioch College can tell you, our view of reality is socially constructed. What we consider to be truth is often just a reflection of the power structure, a single narrative propounded by a privileged class that must be countered by alternative narratives.
She follows this by saying:
Put simply, there is more than one side to any story.
But this is more distortion than simplification. There may be many sides of the story, but not all of them are allowed to be told. Without an overarching objective frame of rules for comparing ideas on their merits, subjectivity is all that can be left, and the only way a particular subjectivity can prevail is through power. The paternal “power structure,” or “privileged class” has monopolized this power in the past, but now it is time for the oppressed to stand up against him with their own power.
In this case, their power is mobilized through personal abusiveness.
This abusiveness stood out sharply to most observers. Keyes (2007), for example, writes:
Even in the midst of routine discussion, students interrupted each other with angry outbursts. Presumably this was part of "calling each other out," a popular campus pastime ("I'm calling you out as a product of privilege," "I'm calling you out for wearing Nikes," etc.).
Such attacks on the established social order, including the global capitalism that locates shoe factories in countries where the wage rate is low, are easily seen as attacks on the patriarchal order, but “calling out” has a deeper form. In some cases, people are called out for referring to, and presumably thinking about, others in ways that they do not refer to and think of themselves.
After getting called out for calling Inuits "Eskimos," an exchange student from Poland conducted a survey of language taboos among Antiochians. He and a colleague found that anyone thought to have used inappropriate words was liable to be ostracized. One student described being verbally assaulted after she innocently addressed a gay student as a "guy." Many told the surveyors how fearful they were of saying the wrong thing. "If you say something wrong," explained one Antiochian, "other people will have no mercy."
In general, what is under attack is any view of the self that differs from maternal embrace, including the objective frames represented by college and legal officials
Students were not the only ones being called out. Soon after he arrived on the campus, in early 2006, President Steven W. Lawry received an e-mail message from an Antiochian that said, "Fuck you, asshole." This was not untypical of campus discourse. When the student newspaper asked readers what they would say to a "narc," answers included "Stop snitchin' snitches get stitches," and "Die motherfucker Die."
This verbal and interpersonal dynamic may be considered attacks on the paternal function of the College, directly and through its mission. It certainly did damage to the prospects for recruiting and retaining students. Lawry put the matter this way, in his State of the College address of 2006:
That said, there are aspects of today’s campus culture that are not conducive to the fullest realization of our educational mission. Radical identity politics and identity-centered discourses, while often drawing attention to mistreatment, unfairness and hypocrisy in our society, also take on a stridency and aggressiveness that too often close down conversation, inhibit learning and send off students who really should be here.
But if the damage done by political correctness had been limited to interpersonal interaction, it would have had limited effect. My point is that something was also taking place at the level of the institution. Consider its effect on teaching, which was the main organization process. This is from Cohen (2008):
Flare-ups over race, gender, politics and more happen at every campus, but because of Antioch’s size and focus, they would end up turning into crises, said Eli Nettles, a mathematics professor and the associate dean of faculty. “You say something and it becomes a public incident.”
Ms. Nettles has been at Antioch eight years, and now is interviewing for jobs. She said she was grateful to have taught at Antioch and was a better teacher for it. But before she got tenure in 2005, she said: “I lived in terror that I was going to say something I didn’t even know was offensive. I began to feel uncomfortable with my knowledge of the English language.”
The teaching of statistics suddenly became fraught with political overtones, because research was generally not broken into categories that included “transgendered” or “people of color.” A student was offended by Ms. Nettles’s reference in class to a statistical study on abortion, because “I didn’t discuss how pro-abortion isn’t the same as pro-life,” she said. It’s not that the question isn’t valid, Ms. Nettles emphasized, but that a math lecture was not the appropriate place to discuss it.
Statistics is nothing more than the mathematics of applied probability; it is pure objectivity. To disrupt a class on statistics because one finds oneself offended by the choice of an example shows that one has missed the point; one simply does not understand the nature of statistics. To the extent that concern for such challenges determines the way the course is taught, what is being taught is not statistics.
That something else is being taught came through in a message to an internet list of alumni in which I was participating, though not to great applause, from a former student writing to express her appreciation for Antioch.
And that is what I love about Antioch the most. Every class was an ethics and morals class. Every class challenged and asked questions concerning race, gender, class, sustainability, disability, age, geography and on and on. Even math classes. Despite the fact that I can’t do ANYTHING without asking these questions (every single goddamn one) every second of every day, to perhaps an unhealthy extent, I am so thankful to have learned that as part of my education at Antioch. And wouldn’t trade it for all of the blissful ignorance in the world (and there is a lot...)
But the transformation at Antioch involved more than teaching. Notice the way Nettles, whose attachment to Antioch surely says something about the orientation of her politics, “lived in terror” at the thought that somebody would find something she said objectionable. What this indicates is an assault on objectivity that goes beyond the nature of statistics. It says the institution is being structured, not by reliable, objective rules, but by whim. What is under attack is the paternal order itself.
Yet the attack against social order was not seen as simply an internal matter. It had colored Antioch’s orientation to the external world, as is illustrated by this, from Allen (2007):
Antioch now might be fairly represented by a September 21 article in the student newspaper, the Record, consisting of a gloating account of the invasion by 40 gay and lesbian Antioch students (a full fifth of the current student body) of an evangelical Christian book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble store located in a mall in nearby Beavercreek, Ohio. Record reporter Marysia Walcerz described the hours-long "Gay Takeover," whose participants wore rainbow-tinted bandannas, ostentatiously held hands and kissed, and did their best to shock both authors and customers in this socially conservative sector of Ohio, as a "success … for direct action executed in style."
Nothing illustrates this better than the choice of their 2000 commencement speaker. This is from Allen again:
It was, however, the sort of environment in which a convicted murderer and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, could be invited by students to deliver the commencement speech [by tape recording] in 2000. There had been plenty of evidence supporting Abu-Jamal's conviction in 1982 for shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner five times in the face and back at close range--such as the five spent casings in Abu-Jamal's gun that matched the five bullets lodged in Faulkner's body--and even some leftists have questioned the rush by their fellows to turn Abu-Jamal, currently awaiting the outcome of one of several appeals of his death sentence, into a political prisoner who had been framed by racist cops. When Maureen Faulkner, widow of the slain officer, sent a letter protesting the honor to be conferred on her husband's killer to Robert H. Devine, an Antioch communications professor who had succeeded Crowfoot as the college's president, Devine wrote back, "As educators, it is our responsibility to provide an environment where widely varying points of view can be expressed."
Yet Devine was being disingenuous here. The issue was not whether Abu-Jamal could be heard. He could have been heard in a classroom setting without provoking any furor. The issue was whether he should have been chosen as commencement speaker, and in that way representing the meaning of the institution. Abu-Jamal was a person whose fame was due to the fact that he had been convicted of murdering an agent of the society’s legal order. His defense presented a picture in which virtually the entirety of constituted authority in Philadelphia, and the US generally, was organized as a racist conspiracy (for a relatively understated expression of this, see Amnesty International, 2000). The hypostatization of this vast conspiracy is the only way to discount the evidence against Abu-Jamal. One must conclude that choosing him represented an embrace of this view of American society. In choosing him to represent it, Antioch was doing one or both of two things. First, it was repudiating the importance of evidence in formulating judgment. Second, it was defining itself through an expression of hatred toward the social order of the world in which it lived. In both regards, Antioch was establishing itself as being in a state of war with the father.
There are also indications that, not surprisingly, the attack against the father spilled over into the students’ relations with the College itself. Lawry again:
Over many decades, Antioch students have benefited educationally from the opportunity to participate in AdCil and ComCil and other bodies that give voice to student participation in campus decision-making.
… Community governance is an important aspect of the Antioch experience, and I support it. However, I have concerns with community governance as it is currently understood and practiced.… to my disappointment, there has been a militancy and aggressiveness sometimes directed toward the administration that is really unmerited and not consistent with the educational mission of shared governance structures.
It would be a mistake to believe, though, as Lawry seems to believe, that these anti-oedipal manifestations were simply features and expressions of the student culture. This is from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Mr. Lawry, who came from the Ford Foundation, says that by the time he arrived, the college was in the grip of radically leftist students, intolerant of other views. “It chased off students and had a deleterious effect,” he says. “The adults were looking the other way.” (Carlson, 2007)
In fact, the adults “looking the other way” was also an expression of the organization.
Allen (2007) says something similar, and puts the causality where it belongs:
The adults who could have and should have intervened to put a lid on the excesses of a culture created by 18- to 22-year-olds with little experience of the outside world in fact let that culture run untrammeled and amok, all in the name of Antioch's vaunted ideal of "community
Summing up, from the time of Morgan to the time of its demise, we see a transformation of Antioch from Oedipal to anti-oedipal psychology, a deterioration that proved fatal.
1973, the declension point
There is no question about when the trajectory of Antioch began its downward turn. That was in 1973, a period during which a strike was held that paralyzed the campus for six weeks.
The objective facts of the strike are straightforward. Beginning with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Antioch had been recruiting low income, primarily black students, without regard to standard academic selection criteria. The programs through which this was accomplished changed over time, finally taking the name “New Directions.” The number of such students, starting with zero in 1963, rose monotonically to about twenty percent of the student body by 1973. Virtually all were on full financial assistance.
In 1973, the Nixon administration was cutting back on its funding for college programs that were important in providing financial aid, primarily the National Defense Student Loan and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant programs. Most importantly, the NDSL program, in which colleges themselves administered the loans, which were at three percent interest, was to be replaced by federally insured loans administered by banks, which would be at seven percent interest. There was further concern that many students, especially the black students admitted under the New Directions program, would not be able to obtain these loans, even at the higher rate, due to “their poor credit rating, combined with the racism and class prejudice of most banks.” (Abramson, Casey, and Greenfeld, 1973). The College said that it had, by cutting departmental budgets, set aside $300, 000 to take care of these students, and that the level of aid for 1972-3 would be maintained for 1973-4, but these were not deemed sufficient. The students demanded a contract stating that their aid would be maintained until graduation. The Administrative Council (AdCil) went along with these demands, but the Trustees did not. They refused to agree to such a contract and the strike was on.
The strike, which garnered considerable publicity, caused extensive property damage. It also saw a large number of students withdraw and cut the number of entering students approximately in half. Going into the strike, Antioch enrolled about 2,500 students. Afterwards, although there were ups and downs, down was the overall trajectory. At the end, there were about 200 students. For a school with very little endowment, and which therefore relied heavily on tuition, this falling off of student attendance was crippling.
Our concern, though, is not historical, but psychoanalytic. We are looking not so much to explain Antioch’s changing fortunes, as the changing way it made meaning. Our interest in this period is to see whether we can detect the shift from the Oedipal to the anti-oedipal. Specifically, we want to know what happened to the objective frame.
This takes a very specific form in the study of the strike period. The question is why could the college not defend itself? Why could it not uphold the objective framework that made it possible to respectfully exchange ideas and learn, subject to the demands of rigorous debate? Why could it not uphold the paternal legacy of Morgan, which defined it?
The answer is that Antioch could not defend its paternal legacy because, through the agency of the strike, Antioch was attacking itself. Antioch had redefined itself as being against itself, and specifically the objective form that hitherto constituted its identity. Antioch was committing suicide.
The Strikes of 1973
1. The Winter Strike
Trying to understand the way Antioch was making meaning, I looked at the way the campus saw the strike. I turned to contemporary documents, located in the Antiochiana archive on the Antioch campus in Yellow Springs[2]. One thing that became clear in those accounts is that the Antioch community regarded the strike as being one in a series of strikes going back years. None had been so damaging, but the question of why this strike had proved fatal, and the others had not, seemed critical to the understanding of Antioch’s self-destruction. It was of particular interest to compare the New Directions strike, which took place in Spring quarter 1973, with a strike of university employees that had taken place in the previous Winter quarter. For our purposes, the crucial point is that the College stood fast during the Winter strike and collapsed during the Spring strike. The question is, why was this so?
A major difference was that, while the Spring strike was about race, the Winter strike concerned labor-management relations. The university employees, massively supported by students and some faculty, demanded that they be able to retain jobs in the dining halls[3]. The college said it could not afford to do so, having been subject to annual operating deficits of around $200,000, but wanted to subcontract the dining hall operation to an outside company, ARA.
In getting a fix on the meaning of this strike, I want to consider an image that caught my attention and stayed with me. It turned out that one of the tactics of the strikers was to take garbage and dump it on the floors of the administration building.
Crossing union lines appeared to be the cause of a fracas in main building yesterday which resulted in heaps of trash dumped along a 30-foot stretch of the first floor hall. (Howard, 1973, p.1)
This is a picture of several students picking up garbage cans for that purpose.
I think this image stuck with me because the act of strewing garbage in the administration building was an act of defilement. If there was a sacred location where the father’s spirit resided at the School, the administration building was surely it. To dump garbage on the floor of that building was an act of profanation. A look at the students engaged in this suggests that they are aware of this. They are clearly very serious about what they are doing.
But the defilement of the paternal principle was not taking place in a vacuum. There was also a maternal principle that Antioch had taken on, in the form of the community. One manifestation of this was a manifest concern for the welfare of the strikers and their families, of course. More subtly, there was the role of the muse, through whom the community’s imagination would develop new understandings that were themselves part of education, specifically through what Antioch called “creative conflict.”
Taken together, the concern for the workers and their families, and the creative capacity of the community, were the driving assumptions behind the attack on the rigidity and cold logic represented by the administration. In this sense, we could say they were anti-oedipal forces directed against the Oedipal.
Yet these maternal forces were subordinated during the Winter strike, yielding to the dominance of the paternal principle, garbage-strewn though it was; and this decline of the maternal did not go unnoticed:
This is from an editorial in the January 19 Record, titled “The Hard Edge”:
Antioch’s rhetorical posture as a college with an enlightened approach to crises took a severe blow this past week. That our continuing decline in community behavior dropped a notch further with absurd garbage dumping orgies is hardly surprising. What is disturbing is that the atmosphere created by serious issues in the current strike has lost any shred of our clichéd “educational values” excuse.
Tired as the term is, the familiar sense of a disturbance somehow being a chance for growth had the effect of taking an ugly edge off previous upheavals There was always something educational to be gained, whether it was college action to end connection with the U.S. war machine, correction of a careless neglect of New Directions students, or fairer wages for workers.
That familiar sense is totally absent now, and the ugly edge stands exposed to an extent that can only harden everyone’s cynicism.
We see the edge first in administrative acts, and not just Dean of the College Ewell Reagin’s decision to ignore Administrative Council. It is clearest in the administration’s definite shift from the old hypocritical but somehow soothing liberalism. College officials assumed the role of enemies toward a large pocket of the community. And they have slipped into it with accustomed ease, They not only refuse to listen to the haranguing crowd, but make no bones about ignoring opposing arguments, whereas in past disputes at least the pose of attention was maintained.
The strikers in turn assume a more vicious stance. The adversary of picketing student supporters no longer wears the outward appearance of a ponderous and stubborn father figure. He is very definitely the enemy. As a result battle may continue beyond the usual time limit imposed by fatigue or boredom.
If administrators withstand the siege and sign the fated contract with ARA they can congratulate their own determination. But they shouldn’t turn around and paint a picture of themselves as social change activists and educational radicals. They will simply be management.
If the strikers win, it will mean another score for brute force. This time the college won’t be able to concede as a liberal body, generous if pressured. It will just be beaten.
With the ARA contract practically complete, time will be running out. But there is still the opportunity for the college to make some creative provision for workers slashed from the payroll. With the program ingenuity available here a plan for training the workers in skills marketable in Southwest Ohio should be developed.
Allowing for the expected savings of outside dining hall management, such training in a skill each worker might choose should be realistic, or at least a humane way out.
The precipitating cause referred to here, was a vote by Administrative Council that would have put the question of subsidizing the dining halls to a referendum of the community. This vote, evidently taken under the pressure of a raucous group of 500 students and others who dominated the meeting and would not let others speak, got the administration’s back up. Interim Dean Reagin, in fact, threatened to resign unless AdCil postponed this referendum at its next meeting, which it did.
Interestingly, during the Winter strike, the students who wrote for the Record, when push came to shove, had a sympathy, however grudging, for the reasoning of the patriarch. This is from the January 26 Record editorial, entitled Subsidize Survival:
Community members who believe the college should commit itself to subsidizing the dining halls might glance at a recent memo issued by Admissions Director Frank Logan. The picture he paints of where the college may be headed is clear and well-documented, and sobering.
Overpriced, less attractive and less unique than during the 1960’s, Antioch will draw its full-tuition paying students (who provide the bulk of college income) from an ever shrinking pool of qualified applicants. Already the admissions office reports a serious decline in selectivity, which in turn promises declining educational standards.
The time may come when this campus offers educational achievement and adventure scarcely superior to what is available at numerous state and city colleges. How will the college then persuade students to fork over steep tuitions?
If we are not already on a permanent and deadly spiral, the current drama may provide a crossroads. We can perpetuate our propensity for indulgent and optimistic solutions to financial dilemmas. We can continue to believe, as Tuesday’s Administrative Council motion implied, that money will emerge without pain to meet current pressure. We can continue to avoid looking farther into the future than the next div-change. We can repeatedly face every crisis by creating ugly and depressing splits.
Meanwhile, fewer of us will choose to remain here, and our lifestyle may appear increasingly diseased and unreal to potential students of contributors.
Or we can examine closely what the college has to do to survive. We believe it needs to reinforce the academic offerings and facilities that always made Antioch attractive despite itself. The college should make more strenuous efforts to secure reputable faculty. The physical surroundings – places like the library and science institute labs, must be better stocked and in some cases overhauled. An awareness must somehow evolve among community members that each event affects the college’s perilous existence.
In the end, the referendum was not called. The administration held to its position. The strike lasted four weeks, but teaching and most administrative processes continued. Occasional acts of violence were prosecuted. Finally, the administration threatened an injunction and a contract was reached. In sum, the paternal structure of meaning prevailed.
The Strikes of 1973
2. The Spring Strike
The Spring strike of 1973 was, in a number of ways, the opposite of the Winter strike. In the Winter strike, the administration, acting for the institution and with its legitimacy intact, managed to stand up for itself; in the Spring strike, it did not. What made for the difference?
I believe part of the answer is suggested by something about the garbage action that caught my interest. This is from the Record coverage (Howard, 1973, p.1):
Non-union supervisors spent much of the afternoon cleaning up from the previous days’ garbage melee in main building’s lobby and the office of Interim Dean of the College Ewell Reagin.
Muttering “scab,” Manny Durbin, local UE president, strode down the hall knocking over a trash barrel. A few unidentified students dumped much of the remaining trash into the hall.
One of the supervisors continued methodically loading trash into an incinerator slot in main building, all but ignoring the accusation of “scab” hurled at him. “I’ve grown up a long time ago,” said David Rue, in response to the incident. Helping strew garbage is “the first work Manny’s done for three weeks,” he added in disgust.
According to College Negotiator John Sullivan, Rue does not qualify as a scab because traditionally, in time of emergency, supervisors have done work normally done by union workers. Loose trash is considered a health danger, and therefore an “emergency.”
Why was it important whether David Rue was properly called “scab,” and why was it important for John Sullivan to define the term for those around him and for the Record? I suggest it was because in our society there are highly developed rules for such strikes, and the strike would play out in accordance with them. Individuals who were partisans of the strike were partisans of the strike defined in that way. These rules were themselves part of the paternal order, and they gave the administration a defined role within which to operate, a ground on which they could stand, which the supporters of the strike accepted, whether they liked it or not, because it was within the meaning of being on strike.
By contrast, the Spring strike was about race and had no rules; it was therefore bound to be determined by the underlying emotions. Understanding the Spring strike, then, means understanding those emotional forces. That will be our task in what follows.
In getting a handle on the motivation for the strike it should first be observed that there were real issues here, on both sides. The students, who had been recruited with the full knowledge that they were poor and would have to be fully subsidized, felt that the College had made a commitment to them that it was not prepared to honor. The College, which had counted on outside founding that was being cut back, knew itself to be in desperate financial condition and knew that making such a guarantee would probably result in bankruptcy. As always, though, the immediate issue of the strike cannot be understood without a sense of where it came from, both historically and emotionally. From a psychoanalytic point of view, these cannot help but be intertwined. Some background is therefore necessary.
History of the black student movements at Antioch
From its beginning, Antioch, following directly from its vision of itself, had a tradition of seeking out black students. The project in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation, called APIE for Antioch Program on Interracial Education, however, differed in the type of students who were recruited.
APIE students differed from the blacks who had preceded them. Not all had been well to do; but there was some college or university experience in their backgrounds and above all, one criterion in their selection had been demonstrated achievement in earlier schooling. Names often mentioned as representing the triumphs of this earlier group of black Antioch students are the psychiatrist, Lonnie McDonald, the federal judge, Leon Higginbotham, the New York civic leader and official Eleanor Holmes Norton[4] and a person influential in the civil rights movement, Corrie Scott who became Mrs. Martin Luther King. (Yalman and Wilson, 300)
That changed with the APIE
They [the APIE students] were, first, a bit older: the average of males was 19, of the women, 18 (Data are culled from Graham's third year report, issued in 1967 and covering 44 blacks and six whites, including 2 of Puerto Rican and one of Mexican background.) Nearly three-fourths of them were male. They came from fairly large families half of which were broken by death, divorce or separation; and "several students had separated themselves completely from their families." (Graham, 1967: 10) A third of the fathers were unemployed or deceased (or their whereabouts unknown), another third were laborers, the rest service workers and operatives. Among the mothers, a third were housewives, a tenth deceased, a fifth were laborers and the rest were fairly evenly spread among service, domestic, and clerical work. Family earnings for a fourth of them were under $3,000, a third had earnings between $3 and $5 thousand dollars, (None earned more than $7,000.) No parent contributed more than $400 to the student's support and 30 contributed less than $100…
Not only were the APIE students from poor families. Their parents and siblings were likely to have had little formal schooling. "Most of the fathers and mothers," Graham reports (1967: 10) "had no more than a high school education, and many had less." (ibid.)
From the beginning, there appears to have been a difference in the way the Rockefeller Foundation and Antioch conceived of the program.
For the Rockefeller Foundation people, the aim was to reach Negroes with apparent talent and special promise. In the discussion of the Foundation Board of Trustees on 1 April 1964 the Minutes speak of "the movement of education for those Negroes and other minority group members who are more likely to be--or with encouragement can rapidly become--outstanding leaders among their own groups and in the nation." For this purpose special efforts are required to provide enlarged opportunities and increased encouragement for Negro and other students of high potential to benefit from the best that our system of higher education has to offer." (Rockefeller, BT 4/164:64200-201.
Clearly the Rockefeller people hoped that the most able and promising black students might be identified and thereupon furnished with the best possible undergraduate education. (Yalman and Wilson, 296)
In other words, the Oedipal program was fully in play. For the Antioch administration, however, things were a bit different. This is from a book of transcribed interviews with James P. Dixon, who was president at the time:
. . .one school of thought ...argued for a pretty careful selection of students. ..I don't think Dudley [Dawson, Dean of Students] said we should select for success [sic]. . . But I think he thought we should be careful about our social class boundaries. But there were other people in the college. ..who felt that if one were to address the issue, and open the institution up to its possibilities--why would one be so careful as to select merely those who were likely to succeed? (Dixon, 1991).
Of course, the intention was not to bring in students entirely without selection. These were the qualities considered important:
courage, realism, imagination, skill in communication, past success in any area, stubborness and tenacity, toughness (a sense of self and worth), intellectual and emotional accessibility (openess) freedom of mind, independence of judgment, sense of humor, ability to work hard, a complicated mind,” (Yalman and Wilson 298, citing a 1967 report by the second director of the APIE program, Jill Graham
But these attributes had nothing specific to do with intellectual activity and their relationship to academic success was only fanciful. They were also difficult to assess, especially by those who, in reality, had no relationship with prospective candidates.
Summing up, Yalman and Wilson say:
Thus these students were selected first because of race (or minority status); second because of need; third because of certain inferred qualities such as imagination or realism; but not at all for such predictors of success or promise as might reside in academic achievement or other signs of intellectual accomplishment. They were referred to as high risk students. (299)
Bringing students into an otherwise highly selective and rigorous institution, and one which was as different from these students’ experience and culture as could be imagined, was a prescription for alienation and failure. This is built into the very term “high risk,” which is an expression of probability, and means high probability of failure. These students were known to do badly on the criteria that had been associated with relative success. In choosing to select students because they were high risk, the College was choosing those students who were expected to fail. That is, of course, what happened.
Yalman and Wilson quote from a 1968 study by Professor Lois Sparks of "Separatism at Antioch: A Study of the Antioch Interracial Education Program."
Sparks compares 25 middle and upper-middle class white students randomly drawn from the entering class in the fall of 1965 with all APIE students entering in the summer and fall of 1966 (N=24).
Reading the responses of APIE students to her questionnaire, Sparks says … that
one gets the feeling that most of them arrive at Antioch with only the dimmest comprehension of what a college is all about. Since they never really expected to go to college, they have not, unlike the regular students, acted out the college experience in their imaginations or informed themselves about alternatives. When they enter, therefore, Antioch is little more than a place ( and a fairly exotic one) which may or may not serve their physical and social needs. But at that early stage, they are unequipped even to define the educational program, much less assess their own attitudes toward it. (301-2)
At the same time:
Sparks notes that APIE blacks bring with them an identity, a commitment to a cause, ". ..an already strong sense of social and cultural distance which [they] feel almost from their first hour on the Antioch campus." (Sparks, 1968: 20) The distance is not only a matter of racial experience and stereotypes: it is confounded with--compounded by--class. “..white students in the Interracial Education Program resemble their black colleagues. ..especially [in] academic-vocational expectations and social styles. Similarly, Negro students who enter Antioch through regular channels resemble, in these respects, white students who enter with them. The point is that the APIE students embody disprivilege compounded, a new phenomenon at Antioch, and one with which the total program as currently constituted may be only minimally prepared to cope." (Sparks, 1968: 2, italics added). (301)
In summing a set of observations, Sparks concludes (1968: 17) that:
We have in the APIE group, then, more people who exhibit low self esteem; defensive control of impulse, emotion, and fantasy; rigid conceptions of self; and a cautious, mistrustful view of others. Small wonder that interpersonal empathy and unselfconscious exchange comes hard, when the respective zeitgeists of so many students are so manifestly at odds. (302)
One difficulty in the adjustment of organization to client, and vice versa, was the sheer rapidity of the increase in number of students who differed so dramatically from those hitherto admitted… At the beginning, each of a small number of black students was treated pretty much as an individual case. But with a substantial increase in numbers this was less possible; and there were enough blacks to unite in the face of their common problems--problems largely unanticipated by a white, middle class faculty and administration (whose experience had been with high achieving middle class black students); or problems which, when and if anticipated, were ineptly dealt with.
We do not suggest that the problems were simple. For these students the heritage of racism and poverty meant that they necessarily imported to Antioch special handicaps for learning - a lack of will, suspicion, a preemptive concern with race which was encouraged by national events as well as conditions within the College. Although most had both the ability and the desire to learn, they lacked the will, the determination, the self-discipline to do so. They also brought with them, Graham says, "a kind of wariness of authority and suspiciousness of the white middle class that [precludes] that modicum of trust needed in a learning situation." And, she adds, they have "a preoccupation with [identity] which saps the energy, takes time, and forecloses concentration on matters that lie outside their concern with being poor and/or black. These factors seem to be more acute for the males than for the females." (Graham, 1967: 23) And added to all this is the sense that the Antioch program is irrelevant. "Antioch is, after all, an academic community and. ..academics, narrowly conceived as the transmission of culture. ..will seem least useful for the needs of these young people whose experiences thus far have prepared them for living a different kind of life." (Graham, 1967: 20)
One is not surprised, then, when Graham says (1967: 14) that for APIE students "the transition [to Antioch] was sufficiently unsettling [to be described as culture shock]. . . The students were unprepared for [the differences] they found in language, customs, values, artifacts."…(304-5)
It was a culture shock for the white students as well. This is from Allen:
"There was a lot of tension," said Antioch's archivist, Scott Sanders, in a telephone interview, "and these were inner-city kids, so there was a certain amount of lawlessness. They brought skills to Antioch that they'd learned on the streets: fighting, drawing guns. There were specific instances of violence that were very alien to the other students."
At any rate, returning to Yalman and Wilson:
Under these conditions it was easy for initial respect and anxiety to turn into hostility and contempt. The APIE students come with the knowledge that Antioch students are the cream of the crop--smart, wise, and rich. Their first reaction is awe, to which reaction they cling for a while despite the casual dress and because of the verbal virtuosity of the students. After a while this turns to hostility, the hostility the outs have for the ins, and later to contempt as they begin to learn about the usual Antioch student hangups, problems that seem to quarter as pressures and tensions mounted. At such times, especially, the APIE "students tend to view other students as phony, the Program staff as bumblers, and the College as impossible." (Graham, 1967: 17) (pp. 305-6)
The result could surprise no one:
Among black students, dissatisfaction with the academic program grew--its irrelevance, its fix on Angloamerican culture and white, middle class America. It was not expressed in these terms: it was a product of anxiety and frustration coupled with an ignorance of the connection between these means and desired ends. (p. 311)
Faced with all these problems, and in the absence of any effective response from the organization, students took the solution into their own hands. Finding the host College unacceptable, they raided its resources to create their own. (p. 310)
This took a number of forms, beginning with demands for separate living facilities, then proceeding to a separate curriculum, increased funding, control over that increased funding, a larger black cohort, greater control over organizational decision making, and so on.
Yalman and Wilson put it this way:
In his book, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly tells about a Georgian boyhood, his experiences, commencing at age 11 or 12 at St. Wulfric's, a private school preparing its students for such public schools as Harrow and Eton… through a traditional pattern of age-ranked privilege, faculty and administrators coopted older students to sustain an intricate set of beliefs, values, behavior and authority. Hazings, canings, fear and favors were expected to build character while the classics, literature, mathematics and history were to produce respect for tradition and skills of literacy.
In an inversion of this process, blacks at Antioch coopted the College. Young blacks took over the elders, the weak instilled fear in the strong. They made stipulations affecting admissions, housing, their curriculum and means of assessing progress. Indeed they took over the meaning of the degree. (pp. 310-11)
Yet focusing on the motivations of the black students explains both too little and too much. It brings us to a point at which we can have what Weber called “sympathetic understanding.” The truth is that they had been placed in a situation that was absolutely intolerable, and their reaction to this circumstance made perfectly good sense. Stopping at this point might easily give us a feeling that we have understood the strike and the destruction of the College.
But two obvious questions remain. First, the black students never represented more than a minority on campus: twenty percent at the time of the strike, but for most of the period, far fewer than that. More interestingly, in the strike itself, they represented only a minority. The motivations of the majority of the strikers have not been explained; if it was the black students who were pursuing their advantage through the strike, how could the participation of the whites, who were not only students but faculty, be understood? They were the majority, yet they seem peripheral. Second, we have the fact that the response of the black students was one that anybody could have predicted. When the College undertook to bring so many unprepared students, especially coming from a cultural milieu so hostile to the white middle-class element that Antioch, like it or not, would be taken to represent, they were either being remarkably stupid or they were asking for trouble. Yet they were not stupid people at all, which leads us toward the second explanation. But what was the meaning of this asking? Here, we understand too little
These are both questions for which psychoanalytic theory is well suited to provide answers. The answers I will propose are that, in the first place, the motivations of the white strikers were not peripheral. In reality, it was a white middle-class strike all along. And the reason the College was asking for trouble is precisely because trouble was what they wanted. The strike was their own exercise. That was why they could not uphold the objective frame; they had organized themselves against it. To be sure, the black students were involved in the strike, but they were involved as instrument, rather than as cause. Through them Antioch was killing itself. I will return to this after awhile. First it will be necessary to explore the Spring strike
Psychodynamics of the Spring Strike
Getting a handle on the Spring strike, and understanding how it was different from the Winter strike is made both more difficult and easier by the fact that the personnel at the Record, upon whom we rely for contemporary views, were an entirely different crew than they were during Winter. This was an immediate result of the fact that a division change had taken place between studying and cooperative jobs. More important was that, for reasons I do not know, they defined themselves differently. They called themselves a “collective” and took on an explicitly ideological orientation. They adopted a style, common to the communications organs of radical political groups, such as the Daily Worker, in which there is an obliteration of the boundary between fact and interpretation, and in which the interpretation always assumes the legitimacy and wisdom of the political group. Much of the space in the paper was given over to the coverage of political struggles elsewhere. For example, the issue of April 20 devotes almost half a page to an unsigned story called “Farah: Viva la Huelga,” which begins:
For the past eight months, workers at the many factories of the Farah Manufacturing Co. throughout the Southwest have been on strike. The strikers, close to 3,000 in number, are mostly Mexican-American (Chicana) women, fighting against the sweatshop conditions in which they are forced to work.
The change in voice by the Record poses problems for comparing the strikes of 1973, insofar as the Record’s reporting is concerned. It does, however, give us direct access to the way the strike was seen by those sympathetic to it, and to the construction of meaning within that perspective. Of particular interest in this will be the way the motivation behind the strike was understood.
The Strike Supporters’ Position
As I have said, the bulk of the strikers were not the New Directions students themselves, but their white middle-class supporters, both among students and faculty. Yalman and Wilson discuss the transformation that had been taking place among these groups, largely in terms of an increase in the number of radicals. Considerations of space preclude dealing with that here, and in any case our interest is not so much in who these radicals were, but in what radicalism meant.
What is of interest from our point of view is the way the strike’s supporters interpreted the strike, which we may gather from the position taken by the Record. What is most apparent is the way the issue was moralized, and indeed in absolute terms. The College and the Nixon administration both represented the same bad force. We know who the force is from the general theory of political correctness. It is the father, who has stolen mother’s love and keeps on doing so. He has deprived the oppressed black students in the past, and now he is doing it again. They now demand that what has been stolen should be restored; mother is standing up in their defense. This moral issue is the only issue; everything else is just a paternal smokescreen.
Turning to the specifics of the case, this is how the Record understood the decision to go on strike:
By the beginning of this quarter the patience of the New Directions and financial aid students had begun to wear thin. Facing a national government that valued corporate profits more than the human rights of poor and working people, was difficult at best, but when added to a college administration that was insensitive and indifferent to their needs the situation became impossible. (Abramson, Casey, and Greenfeld, 1973, p1)
The constraints faced by the College were not an issue, and the claim that there were constraints was a lie. The only issue was who should have power. The cause of the strike was the administration’s badness and its hypocrisy. Their legitimacy was not recognized; they were only acting in the interest of the white and rich. The poor and black, because they were poor and black, should rule. This is from an editorial of May 11:
The whole question of economic possibilities – whether money “exists” – is essentially misleading. It is decisions about where money is spent, decisions which are political in nature, which are at the base of the strike. The New Directions program was popular to undertake when there was a lot of foundation and Federal money around, but now those funds are drying up, so is the College’s commitment to the program.
What is at issue is the question of power – can the administration break this strike, as they tried to break the UE-PTEU strike last quarter, and assert total authority over the College in the future? “Creative conflict” used to be Dixon’s theory, but now that the crunch has come, it’s time to clear out the “trouble-making elements,” those people who have taken the lead in opposing the College’s retreat from a progressive posture and its replacement by world-wide expansion, even if it means a return to a white upper-middle class campus.
“Financial considerations” obviously do not represent the real stumbling-block to a strike settlement. Rather, it is Antioch’s unwillingness to commit its own funds to guarantee continued educations for New Directions students, and the administration’s refusal to negotiate a settlement which would infringe on their power to govern at their whim.
A second current, no less interesting from a psychoanalytic point of view, is that the administration has sinned by putting the New Directions students through a hassle. In an unsigned article called Background to Struggle, they say:
It has been a little over a year since the Administration was last forced to deal with the issue. The entire community from faculty and trustees to students and administrators has agreed with the abstract idea of “cultural pluralism.” But every quarter, the New Directions program and poor students have been forced to struggle for the same rights over and over again, rights which should be guaranteed for all students, regardless of nationality or economic background – enough money to live on, travel to co-op jobs, and buy books to study with, as well as remedial programs and the security of their status as students.
A year ago, the administration stated that New Directions was its first priority. Yet New Directions students are still lacking any solid assurances that their presence at Antioch is secure.
The current strike is meant to renew its commitment to New Directions and financial aid students. It is designed so that these problems can be cleared out of the way to allow all students a chance to return to the process of getting an education. (April 20, page 4, emphasis in original),
The idea that education should be hassle free, and indeed anxiety free, is offered again in an op-ed piece called “Perspective on the Strike” by strike-supporting assistant professor of sociology Marge Nelson[5], who contrasts the experience of New Directions students with white middle class ones:
I support the strike because I believe that the demands are legitimate. Most basic to the whole issue is the right to high quality education without constant fear and hassle. I question whether we can talk about quality education at all unless the student has a sense of economic security and adequate leisure for reflection. The many problems of having to approach a bank that is hostile to the poor, to minorities, and to women, of being forced to take on additional interest, of the constant struggle for security on this campus all seem to relate to the basic right of education….
We’ve all known that that these students were feeling anxious over Nixon’s cutback, but we were not very anxious as a community. While it is true that we did come up with funds trimmed out of other programs, the existence of these funds alone was not sufficient. At this point I blame the administration for not sitting down with these students and working over the other equally important problems. Thus anxieties increased – adding to a long history of anxiety on campus. Finally the students felt that they had been forced to act.
I have heard many cries of outrage over the fact that the strike has denied the civil liberties of other students and the faculty. Yet it seems that the fact that the strike grows out of the basic right to education means that this right should be enjoyed freely by all and not just the white and the wealthy. The meaning of civil liberties is that as a citizen one has certain rights. When a large segment of our society is defined as second-class citizens, that means that they have never had the civil liberties that the full-fledged citizens exercise. The poor and the minorities demand that that the right to attend classes is theirs as well. And that means that this right is not to be interfered with by unnecessary trips to the Bursar’s office, changing policies or even constant meetings to deal with the problems. (Apr 27, p3)
But freedom from anxiety resides in the womb, or otherwise in phantasy of the close connection with an omnipotent and loving mother with whom we are fused. Consider here Chasseguet-Smirgel’s (1988) definition of the ego ideal:
In my view, this fantasy corresponds to the wish to rediscover a smooth universe without obstacles, roughness or difference, identified with a mother's insides to which one can have free access, the representation, at the thinking level, of a form of unfettered mental functioning with the free circulation of psychic energy. (30)
Saying that this condition is one to which we are entitled essentially says that the demands of reality, and of the separation that, in reality, marks our existence represent an intolerable imposition. It is not occasioned by any kind of necessity, but is just the result of a malevolent will. In saying this, we cast the father, who represents this reality, in the role of the bad guy. Chasseguet-Smirgel continues:
The father, his penis and reality itself must be destroyed in order for the paradise world of the pleasure principle to be regained. (ibid)
Smiting this bad guy, showing he is a hypocrite who only pretends to act for the common good, destroying his power to determine events but instead leaving the necessities to the fusion of people “negotiating” with each other, whereupon everybody, and not just the white middle-class that the father represents, can live life free from anxiety, is what the strike is intended to bring about. Mother can and should prevail.
This, then, is what the strike is really about. It is a bid for hegemony on the part of the maternal force, seeking to undermine and delegitimize the paternal. A number of other features of the strike support this analysis, which I will be briefly discuss.
First is that the strike itself had become a sacred object. Attempts on the part of the administration to gain the upper hand were viewed, not as moves that are part of the game, but almost as acts of sacrilege. For example, consider a response to an administration threat in a May 16 memo from Dean Reagin, which established cut-off dates for laying off striking workers and gaining access to buildings to retrieve files. Bringing the heat of its prose to a maximum, the Record issued an editorial entitled “A Reprehensible Ploy,” which said, among other things:
This latest administration ploy is the most reprehensible act we have seen in all the years we have been at Antioch. The administration has struck out at those in the college community least able to bear the financial load that Reagin has delivered to them. The workers soon will be without a means of supporting their families because the administration has decided they must carry the brunt of maintaining a strike-breaking college… The strategy of the administration now is to set up an alternative, strike-breaking campus away from campus and in the process try to split the students, faculty and workers in separate, hostile camps…. It was a serious mistake for the administration to make it obvious that negotiations broke down because of politics. The admission that finances were not the question and the continuing emphasis on the strike and how to break it have only strengthened our resolve to continue this strike. We are no longer fighting for just our right to education. We are fighting against every administrative use of arbitrary power against poor and working class students, against women, against the workers, against “troublemaking” faculty. We are fighting for the rights of the union, for women’s studies, for contracts for faculty who serve our needs, for the quality of our education. All of these will be in constant jeopardy if the administration can crush this strike. WE HAVE LONG BEEN ENGAGED IN THIS STRUGGLE AND WE KNOW THE STAKES ARE HIGH – WE WILL WIN
As I have said, the maternal, by itself, cannot establish meaning, in the sense of language that can provide a sense of direction. It can only do so by appropriating such language from elsewhere, which is to say from the father. In this case, it does so by negation. Yet, for that reason, conflict with the father is when it comes most alive. It realizes itself fully in this strike, turning it into a world-historic struggle that establishes its own cosmic importance.
One can see in this that there is going to be a real problem for the administration. The forces supporting the strike, though not necessarily the New Directions students who initiated it, have come to their highest fulfillment in the strike. Their interest is not in settling the strike, but in maintaining it.
One can see this again at the end of the strike, when a small number of students gained an injunction to end the occupation, which brought outside police forces to bring down the barricades. The Record editorialized, on June 1:
Those who walked the mass picket lines yesterday realize that the only effect of this injunction will be a very brief calm. It’s clear that reopening the buildings does not at all mean the end of the strike – the struggle will continue until it is won.
Of course the strike did end, as anyone could see it would, but one can easily understand the strike supporters’ difficulty in acknowledging that would happen. They had never been so much alive.
A related point is that the College, as an organization, does not really exist for the strike supporters’ it only exists as an immoral force, identical with whatever other agencies represent and embody that force. We have seen this already in the way the Record has intermingled the struggle at Antioch with similar struggles around the country and the world. What I point to now is the fact that an organization, as a system of exchange, is at the same time a pattern of constraints that is part of Oedipal meaning. Refuse that meaning and you lose the concept of the organization as well. Maintaining that pattern of exchange, simply does not register as a purpose within their anti-oedipal meaning. The idea that, though they depended on it utterly, they might kill it, as they did, did not enter into their calculations.
The Administration Position
But if the position of the strike supporters is, psychodynamically, rather straightforward, the position of the administration is not. The strikers and their supporters, after all, were just striking. If they failed to comprehend the administration position, that is not all that surprising. They were, after all, on strike. Maintaining the administration’s position was not their job. The question that arises in this case is why the administration failed to maintain its position. That was their job; their failure to do so is what is most interesting about this situation.
When I say that the administration failed to maintain its position I am not simply saying that they failed to use their legal authority to keep the College functioning. They could have immediately gained the injunction that the students finally gained after six weeks. The activity of the strikers, in shutting down the buildings and preventing faculty and staff from functioning, were illegal, not to mention the fires and other destruction that took place. But, in fact, through its history of strikes, Antioch had never called in the police. They would certainly have thought of it as their failure if they had done so.
They would have been right, but the failure would not have been in calling in the police. It would have been in creating the necessity to do so. Antioch’s failure was not that it physically could not defend itself, but that it could not morally do so. Antioch could not make its case.
It is useful to compare the administration’s responses in the Spring and Winter strikes. In the Winter strike, Antioch could maintain its position. There was no doubt about where they stood. They acted with confidence and no one doubted that they would do what they said they would do. As we know, this did not find full favor. The Record, for example, accused them of dropping their liberal veneer; but they understood the administration’s position and accepted its legitimacy. In that event, calling in the police was unnecessary; the administration prevailed through its moral force.
In the Winter strike, by contrast, the administration had no confidence in what it was doing. It could not assert its position and make a case for itself. This was noticed by many observers at the time and in retrospect.
In a general way, a contemporary article in the New York Times, (Kneeland, 1973) put the matter quite nicely when it said
In an old satiric definition, a liberal is a person who cannot take his own side in an argument. That, in a way, is Antioch’s dilemma.
Leonard Botstein, who was not there, but was familiar with the dynamics of the issue, said:
Well I think one of the things that Antioch failed in the late sixties was to be able to engage in a critical dialogue with its own students… the issue was that somehow the faculty and the administration of Antioch was not able to mount a discussion or defense. (Jaschik, 2007)
One could easily personalize this, laying it at the feet of President Dixon. For example, Allen (2007), seeing it as part of his style, said:
The guiding spirit behind all the conflict--if "guiding" could be said to be the appropriate adjective--was Antioch's 15th president, James Payson Dixon, a 1939 graduate of Antioch whose 16-year reign, from 1959 to 1975, spanned both the college's apex in prestige and its nadir… Dixon had been a focused and energetic administrator during his early years, but his philosophy during the late 1960s seemed to be "Whatever."
We will return to Dixon, but I think it is more interesting and revealing to see it as a systemic failure, of which Dixon’s fecklessness was representative. Thus, even those among the students and faculty who wanted to end the strike could not stand against the strikers and in favor of the administration, such as it was. This is from a retrospective in the Yellow Springs News:
At one point a group of 100 faculty and students reopened McGregor Hall, the gym, the library and the science building. Members of the group issued an undated memo saying that they were “concerned with the educational and financial survival of the institution” and that they were acting neither in favor of the administration nor against the strikers. (La Croix , 2003)
Similarly, on May 19, a large and representative meeting of all elements of the community formed an Emergency Committee on the Future of Antioch College,” which was intended to prepare information for an upcoming meeting of the Board of Trustees. They took the step of declaring neutrality on the strike.
Indeed, ambivalence seemed to be a matter of administration policy. At a meeting of faculty on May 1, Interim Dean Reagin said, according to an unsigned article in the Record of May 4, that
the two main guidelines he had to follow in bringing the strike to resolution were the balancing of the Yellow Springs campus budget and a continuing commitment to cultural pluralism.
When asked which of these principles would take precedent if they came into conflict during the resolution, Reagin declined comment.
Bear in mind that “cultural pluralism” is not a phrase occurring in a vacuum. It means, essentially, the New Directions program, as defined by the Steering Committee to Increase Antioch Pluralism (SCIAP) in 1970, and then redefined in action. Within the context of that meaning, Yalman and Wilson said:
[T]he pluralism advocated by SCIAP turned out, in its political manifestations, to be the injured vs the privileged, blacks vs. whites, new program (NDP) vs. old. It became, that is to say, a simple opposition of good against evil. (p. 330)
And who, in this instance, was therefore set off as the evil, if not the College itself?
In this context, a focus on Dixon’s leadership is especially revealing. This is from the article in the Times:
As the strike has dragged on… there are those who say they fear for the survival of its liberal tradition as much as they do for the continuance of the school itself.
One of these is Dr. Dixon, the heavy-set baldish president. He contends that the aid package is no longer the issue, that the two-year offer the college made is as far as it can go, because it does not have cash to make “guarantees” beyond that time.
What is at issue now, he said, is the strike itself…
“Lurking in the background is the question of survival,” he said, sprawling comfortably in a chair in a short-sleeved knit shirt, “but in the foreground is what kind of survival, since Antioch really doesn’t make a fetish of survival or it would never have been behaving the way it’s been behaving for the last decade. I don’t think the campus would want to survive at any cost.
I’m beginning to believe that the level of coercion is destructive of the pluralistic dissent that the campus has been willing to tolerate.” Dixon said.
But since Antioch has always shunned the use of force, Dixon conceded that the situation remains “kind of a standoff.” (Kneeland, 1973)
“Standoff,” was it? This was not a stable situation in which two opposing forces were balanced. The longer the strike went on, the more the reputation and prospects of the College suffered. Beyond some point, the damage would be irreversible.
What was at issue was the existence of the College itself, as Dixon acknowledged. Arrayed against the College were forces that were directed toward its destruction, and whose meaning was best served through the continuation of the strike, not its settlement; and Dixon could not bring himself to choose between them.
The issue, then, was a choice between Oedipal and anti-oedipal meaning. This is a point whose importance cannot be overemphasized. Oedipal and anti-oedipal meaning are not two different forces that can be balanced; they are two fundamentally different orientations toward the world. These were two masters that could not be both served. One could not say that the school was making certain accommodations in order to keep students within Oedipal Antioch; precisely to the extent one made these accommodations, the college became less Oedipal. By refusing to end the strike, Dixon was permitting it to continue this transformation.
By giving the strikers leave to determine events within the College, the College was essentially defining itself against itself; it was committing suicide.
Antioch against Itself
Putting the matter that way, we can see that Antioch was not committing suicide only through the strike. Rather, the strike was the culmination of the whole ten year period that led up to it. The whole period was a prolonged program of suicide, of killing the father.
One particular phase stands out here. This was the period in 1969 and 1970 during which the black students, who had gained the College’s acquiescence in the establishment of separate living facilities, agreed to give that up in exchange for a shift of resources, including greatly accelerated minority recruitment. They first gained the acquiescence of the students, faculty, and administration, and then took the matter to the Board of Trustees.
The Board was not unanimous. Interestingly, it was a number of minority trustees who took a more conservative view:
On the whole there was greater uncertainty about opening admissions to minority students on the Yellow Springs campus than there was about programs in the system. Some minority board members seemed to favor a less radical approach than the one on which the institution was embarked. They were more inclined to press on the importance of scholarship as opposed to the importance of becoming a person in a social and political sense; less tolerant of confusion and violence; more caring about the reputation of the institution; more sensitive to the issues of first and second class education; more sensitive to the possibility that minority students were being exploited[6]. (Dixon, 1991: p. 147)
But, in the end, the Board agreed with the new policy.
A particularly important element of this was the advent of the New Directions program itself. Students would be high risk, and “agents of fundamental social change.” After a three day strike the “Trustees, Adcil, the faculty, and students all agreed that pluralism combined with a fundamentally new direction for the college (not just the New Directions program itself) was to receive priority in planning, and therefore in funding.” (Record, December 12, 1970; cited in unsigned article Background to Struggle, Record April 20)
This is from the minutes of the Trustees meeting:
...the Board of Trustees heard from AASI and APIE leaders and endorsed the overall direction of a series of proposals that would lead to bringing in more high risk students, both black and white. What was being sought was a "critical mass" of differently prepared students so that Antioch would have to move in new educational directions to meet their needs. (cited in Yalman and Wilson, 436)
Yalman and Wilson comment:
What is remarkable in this statement is that new departures in education were to be brought about, not through a discussion by faculty, or Educational Policy Committee; not through discussion of student needs, learning goals and more effective ways of achieving them: a new scheme of education was to be produced through a demographic ploy. A change in the size and character of the student body would necessitate a "move in new educational directions to meet their needs." It is not clear who would define those needs; but the implication is that those doing the defining would not be the existing faculty who had been defining such needs for some time. One must suppose that the definition of need would be offered by students themselves; and that the outcome would be much as it was under the regime of the AASI. Perhaps this difference was foreseen: instead of a segregated curriculum, segregated faculty, a dual system of evaluation, with a sufficiently changed student body, there would be but one system, that appealing to the needs and capacities of the underdog. (pp. 436-7)
Anti-oedipal Antioch
As the College’s identity went through this transformation, necessarily everything within it changed. From Oedipal meaning, in which the purpose was to offer the objective framework for internalization into the self, Antioch’s meaning became anti-oedipal, in which the purpose was to attack the objective framework. For example, as Yalman and Wilson put it with regard to curriculum:
[T]he content of this liberal arts education shifted to race, class and politics. Race and class, as the hinges of inequity, dominated all else and became, additionally, the bases for claims on resources and the axes of antagonism. For the many students centrally involved, these concerns simply superseded a range of interests in the humanities--philosophy, literature, the arts; and the biophysical sciences; and, indeed, the social sciences. (p. 336)
And, generally:
There was a … related change in the culture of this academic community. The change in valued ends (now liberation of the deprived) and in means of achieving ends (aggression) was accompanied by a depreciation of old ends and means. The stress on academic achievement came to be irrelevant, indeed a handicap along the way to political successes. To the extent that this view prevailed, most of the faculty and some interdeterminate part of the student body were without purpose or a valued role.
They add:
Of course the depreciation of the establishment at home (faculty and administrators) had its counterpart in depreciation of the establishment abroad--Nixon and his administration in Washington, together with the venture in Vietnam.(p. 335)
And that goes along nicely with our point. The patrimony of the College was seen as being of a piece with the objective framework of the nation, and all seen as identical with oppression. They were all the father, doing what the father does. Attacking him was what Antioch had undertaken to be.
What remained of Antioch was Antioch in name only; a simulacrum, rather than a fact. Or, one might say it was Antioch, but not Antioch College; Antioch Cult, perhaps.
As for the anti-oedipal forces that destroyed it, they were simply turned into attacks upon politically incorrect individuals, or toward the world, politically incorrect as, of necessity, it is.
But why?
But in all of this, there is an unanswered question: where was the power of the patriarchal forces, and why were they not able to defend themselves? The point I have been trying to make is that the history of Antioch, beginning in the Sixties, represented an attack against these forces, including their representation in the College itself. Hence, it witnessed a transformation of the meaning of the institution, ultimately leading to its demise. Why was it not able to defend itself?
In a sense, this is the question with which we started out, and one which, on the surface at least, we are no closer to resolving. We have seen the anti-oedipal dynamic overcome the Oedipal dynamic, and we have seen that the institution itself used that anti-oedipal dynamic to destroy the paternal framework that, hitherto, had been its identity. In that sense, it committed suicide. But who commits suicide, and why? It seems again that this question is unanswered.
But in fact we are closer to an answer than one might think. In fact, the pieces are here; we just need to put them together to form the answer. And the answer is sex.
Sex and the Politics of Sex
Yalman and Wilson point to a singular fact that has been mentioned but that, so far, has gone unremarked. They say:
We note finally one peculiarity about this sector of the student population. APIE students were disproportionately male. Graham writes (1969:25) that "the students [in APIE] have been consistently and overwhelming male and black. Seventy per cent are male, and almost 90 per cent are black." (p. 445)
This is a peculiar matter. I have been arguing that the recruitment of a large number of unprepared black students represented the importation of a weapon that the College would use against itself. It thus manifested anti-oedipal meaning.
But this must be set off against another possibility, which sees the recruitment as maternal, in the sense that the College was offering love to those who needed it, without recognizing that those loved in this way would have their own agenda, with which the maternal could not cope, and who therefore came to dominate through their aggression. This would not necessarily be anti-oedipal, just a legitimate maternal move that had unfortunate results. I will grant that, on the conscious level, there was an element of this. The question is whether there was also an unconscious desire for this aggression.
If the maternal principle had been operating in pristine fashion, I would think that black females, equally unloved, would have been admitted in equal or greater numbers and encouraged to remain. After all, according to the regnant ideology, victimization operated through sex as well as race. Black females would have been twice oppressed, and therefore entitled to more compensation, in the form of admission. That the vast majority were men strikes me as indicating that their specifically male characteristics were part of their appeal. It adds another dimension to this already complex picture, and an interesting one at that.
Yalman and Wilson continue:
Commenting on the sex ratio, Graham notes in her three-year and five-year reports on the APIE how marked the differences were between ghetto males and regularly admitted white male students. Black ghetto males found the white male students precious--perhaps effete and perhaps effeminate. Other respondents have noted … the sly satisfaction taken by black males in the fear and compliance that could so easily be generated in white students.
This is something commonly observed in studies in clinical psychology, the aggressiveness of the slum child in the father-absent, mother dependent family. Years ago in a study of dramatic, sometimes violent rites of initiating youth to manly roles, Whiting, Kluckhohn and Anthony (1958:359-70) found that such rites were linked with protracted male child-mother association and dependency. Then they ask, where, in U.S. society, does one find similar, virtually ritualized violence among adolescent males? The answer they suggest is that we find such violent conduct in urban slums, and especially in father-absent, mother dominant families--situations in which juveniles, with their gangs and rumbles, their rebellious defiance of authority, their anxious demonstration of virility learn to employ and esteem aggression.
We suggest, then, that the admission in large numbers of very poor ghetto blacks was an unfortunate decision--if, indeed, it was a conscious act. For it added to ghetto-bred aggression the swaggering, muscle-stretching macho of males disproportionately lacking adult male role models. There is no question that providing a fruitful education for black students at Antioch would have had more prospects of success, had the sex ratio been reversed, 70% of the admissions being women. (pp. 445-6)
It only needs to be added that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the decision was much more interesting and significant if it was an unconscious act.
But, of course, imputing unconscious motivation is a risky business, fraught with all kind of difficult and generally irresolvable questions about the nature of argument and proof. To assert propositions about unconscious motivation is to run the risk of being accused of “wild analysis.” I do not want to run that risk, even if only because it would detract from the logic, however incomplete, of what I want to suggest. So I will avoid it by not asserting propositions. I will simply offer a conjecture. I like to think of it as playing a game. The name of the game is
Sex
Freud has been endlessly criticized for saying that everything is about sex.
But let us suppose, for the sake of our game, that everything is about sex.
This is necessarily a psychoanalytic game because psychoanalysis is the only discipline that is configured to make sense of this otherwise outrageous proposition. That is because it uniquely understands that meaning ranges, as I have said, along a dimension of abstraction, without getting lost in the process. When Freud talks about sex he is talking about intercourse, and he is also talking about “immortal Eros,” which Empedocles named as one of the two fundamental principles of the universe. Psychoanalysis understands the unity here.
So it is: a man’s penis stands up in an erection and a man stands up and asserts himself. This similarity is not just an artifact of language. Undermine a man’s confidence in himself to the point where he cannot assert himself, and look at his penis.
The framework of objectification, the paternal function, is man’s representation of himself, and also his claim to have something that the woman will value. On one level of abstraction, this is a matter of the achievement that represents his claim to fusion with a loving world, on another level, it is his penis. But the penis is the biological root of it all, and in some sense we are, at root, animals. It is not a metaphor for anything, but it is that to which metaphors point (Verhaeghe, 1999). Every other self-representation that a man can make can be redefined through self-consciousness. But physical impotence cannot be undone by thought.
Undermine a man’s sexual potency and you undermine him. He has been castrated and he cannot stand up.
What were the black students, beginning with the APIE cohort, brought to Antioch for? They were not brought in to be students, in the usual sense. They were not selected for their proven aptitude as students; on the contrary, as we have seen, they were recruited because they would not fit into the established framework. They were there to change the framework, not be students in it. They were brought there to simply be their own unmediated selves; the college would reconfigure itself around them.
And who were they? Let us go back to the selection criteria:
courage, realism, imagination, skill in communication, past success in any area, stubborness and tenacity, toughness (a sense of self and worth), intellectual and emotional accessibility (openess) freedom of mind, independence of judgment, sense of humor, ability to work hard, a complicated mind (op. cit.)
Most of these are qualities of dominance; they were called in to be dominant. And now let us go back to our favorite psychoanalytic premise, that it’s all about sex. Let’s suppose that these guys were called in to be, with apologies for a certain indelicacy of expression, what are best called “studs.”
So was that what it was? Was it that the Antioch women wanted to have sex with these black guys, who did it so much better than the white guys? Or at least were collectively imagined to do it better?
The answer here must be no and yes, depending on the group of women in question. In the case of the women who were specifically in the van of the strike, and indeed its most violent element, the answer is probably no. Anecdotal evidence in the form of recollections by alumni suggests that these women were generally lesbian. Along these lines, Marge Nelson, the faculty member we have quoted in support of the strike, was quoted in an earlier article to the effect that:
When I came here last summer, I was horrified when women talked about their experiences here. The idea of women as sexual objects is still strong, and women are seen as open and available. (unsigned, 1972)
It is unlikely that she was sexually interested in the black students.
On the other hand, some certainly were. Consider a vignette from Michael Goldfarb, now a significant political writer and formerly a National Public Radio correspondent, who matriculated in 1971.
Within my first week I twice had guns drawn on me, once in fun and once in a state of drunken for real by a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her. (Goldfarb, 2007)
The sexual interest here was clear enough.
But if we simply say that among some women there was sexual desire and among others there was not, we miss an underlying unity here. It is that both lesbianism, as a rejection of male sexuality, and the abandonment of white men as sexual partners in favor of black men, involve the repudiation of the sexual dimension of the white men who these white women would associate with the father. This unity, and here I must repeat that I can offer only a conjecture, is where the psychological action is.
I am suggesting that even when the answer was yes, which is what he importation of the black men was all about, there was something deeper than sex going on. The reality was far less important than the fantasies that were in play. My conjecture is that there was a deeper message being sent to the white guys about their standing as men; sex was serving a symbolic function here. The issue was not so much about sex itself, although sex was the fulcrum; it was about the politics of sex.
My hypothesis is that there was a message here about the meaning of masculinity: “None of this paternal function and objective self-consciousness stuff, no logic and mathematics, no wrought achievement in an impersonal world, no literary work that stands out over time. Let’s cut to the chase: f__k me right. That is what it means to be a man; and on those grounds, you are a failure and you always will be.”
Let’s suppose, to continue our game, that the effect, and my conjecture is that there was an unconscious desire here, was to undermine the men’s confidence in their sexual offering. That would explain, and I know of no other explanation that even comes close, why their confidence in the more refracted aspects of that offering was lost. Masculinity had been redefined in terms of its biological root, and in those terms the white men had been rejected as inadequate.
They had been castrated, and that, in turn, would explain why they could not stand up for the patriarchal function that had hitherto defined the College.
At any rate, if that was the program, the APIE black students certainly went along with it, as could have been expected. Recall:
Graham notes in her three-year and five-year reports on the APIE how marked the differences were between ghetto males and regularly admitted white male students. Black ghetto males found the white male students precious--perhaps effete and perhaps effeminate. Other respondents have noted … the sly satisfaction taken by black males in the fear and compliance that could so easily be generated in white students. (op. cit.)
Of course, we could remove this from its specifically sexual context without changing the underlying dynamic of forces, and we would not be surprised that it would become more extreme:
Graham asserts (1967) that black students used swagger and threat quite consciously to play a cat and mouse game with the very apprehensive white students. But the escalating violence went beyond games. Grant asserts(1972: 53) that "violence erupted when a black shot at a white student." (pp. 333-4)
Whether it had a sexual root or not, this pattern of intimidation represented the force that the College acceded to. It appears there were few that could stand in its way, or understood what was going on.
One of them was Kenneth Clark, the distinguished black psychologist whose work was critical in the Brown versus Board of Education decision. In resigning from Antioch's Board of Trustees, Clark wrote the Chairman of the Board, Theodore Newcomb,
that Antioch, in permitting some of the more hostile Negro students to coerce and intimidate other Negroes and whites by quashing vocal dissent [lacked] the courage necessary to maintain [the] type of academic climate that permits the freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom of dissent which are essential to the life of the intellect. [The College is to be indicted for] permitting a group of students to inflict their dogmatism and ideology on other students and the total college community and [for] being silent while some students intimidate, threaten, and in some cases physically assault the Negro students who disagree with them. (p. 348)
But it was to no avail. According to a 1974 report by Meyers, cited by Yalman and Wilson, Theodore Newcomb, then Chairman of the Board of Trustees responded to Kenneth Clark's allegation of violence and intimidation generated through AASI and Unity House, by saying that "there's no way of knowing that these threats are a consequence of AASI--they could have been much worse without it." (pp. 332-3)
It has been my contention that we cannot end our explanation simply by acknowledging that Antioch gave way to this coercion. Nor can we stop by acknowledging that Antioch brought these coercive forces into itself, because we also know that this was no accident; it was done, if not consciously, then at least deliberately. I have been trying to make sense of why it did that.
My hypothesis is that, ultimately, it was about the politics of sex. In the end, the issue was who would be boss. And in my hypothesis that was resolved. She would be boss.
That this was so, that the matter was about sex and the politics of sex, is reinforced by two facts. In the first place, we may note that after the 1973 revolution, the New Directions program quietly disappeared. What was supposed to be the thrust, so to speak, of the new Antioch, and for which the same arguments could have been made as were made before, was now understood to be inessential. It was not as if the politics of Antioch were changed; they were more radical than before. However, having served the purpose of shifting power, and showing who was boss, the studs were told, by the new boss, that they were no longer necessary.
The second point relates to the fact that, as we saw at the beginning, the mother as boss can offer no direction. She is, after all, the object of desire. How can she maintain her leadership if there is no place for her to lead.
The answer is political correctness, and with it the attack on the father. He could still provide a sense of direction, only in negative form. Attacking him, undermining and destroying his image and significance, would do nicely enough. And here again, this shows up in the politics of sex.
Many who know nothing else about Antioch will know it as the scene of a unique sexual relations policy. In this arrangement, couples engaging in sexual connection needed to specifically ask for and receive permission from their partner at each stage of the progression toward intercourse. Many thought this policy bizarre, and that included me. But in those times, I considered so many things bizarre that I gave the matter little thought. When the decision to close Antioch was announced, I began to pay attention to what the Antioch community, past and present, was thinking about Antioch, as represented by their conversations on the internet.
The sexual policy came up in the context of discussions about the way the general public thought about the college. It appeared that the students supported the policy and felt very much abused by the fact that the outside world thought it weird. According to the students, outsiders did not know what the policy was about, which turned out to be the issue of date rape. The meaning of the policy was that it guarded against the possibility of one student taking advantage of the other and hence, according to the controlling norms, committing rape.
Allen put it this way
The extremists in this case consisted of a group of student feminists who called themselves "Womyn of Antioch" (a title that might have sent up a red flag to administrators elsewhere) and claimed to be reacting to two incidents of date rape on the Yellow Springs campus in 1991, which they said the administration had ignored. No Antioch students were ever charged with those offenses either formally or informally, much less found by a college tribunal to have committed them, much less prosecuted for any crime by outside authorities. Antioch's archivist Sanders said that the alleged rapes might have been more a matter of "perception" than reality. Nonetheless, when the Womyn "stormed" (the word comes from Antioch's website) an Antioch community meeting and insisted on pushing through the policy they had drafted regardless of parliamentary niceties, the administrators and faculty who were supposed to be on at least an equal footing with the students at those meetings, if not their superiors on the basis of maturity and experience, said, oh, okay.
The Womyn-drafted sexual-offense policy read: "Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it. Asking 'Do you want to have sex with me?' is not enough. The request for consent must be specific to each act." The penalty for even being accused of failing to obtain consent for one of the "levels" was immediate expulsion without a hearing or any other rights. Not surprisingly, when word leaked out (it took a while) that Antioch's board of trustees had actually approved the policy and made it official, the reaction of the non-Antioch general public was …. laughter all around. One wag estimated that Antioch required a student seeking a home run in the baseball game of sex to ask for the consent of his beloved a total of 150 times. A few years later, after much media mockery and several threatened legal challenges over the lack of due process, Antioch modified the policy to bring it into line with other colleges' procedures for handling accusations of date rape and related sexual offenses.
But still it remains in force, and what holds it there?
In Stanley Fish’s doctoral dissertation on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1967), he makes the point that a particularly awkward passage was meant to be awkward. Each time we read it, it was intended to remind us that we are fallen.
So it is, I submit, with Antioch’s sexual policy. I have no doubt that, by this time, things have worked their way out to the point that this is a ritual, and one that actually could capitalize nicely on the erotic possibilities of restraint. Still, at some level, the unconscious substratum would remain. Up to 150 times, though no doubt Allen exaggerates a bit, the guy, we may assume, must ask for permission. And the premise behind the request is his acknowledgement that he might be a rapist. Of course she can say yes or no, but whether she says yes or no, the message is “I’m the boss.” And the guy acknowledges, “Okay, you’re the boss.”
And if her being the boss means that he can have sex only by turning against his externalized phallic self – Allen notes that the only Antioch students who do not have their own recognized identity politics group are heterosexual white males – well, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do[7].
End of the Game of Sex: The Nihilistic Impulse
The game of sex is over, but not our investigation quite yet.
As before with blacks, the implication here seems to be that it was women that brought an end to Antioch, and that implication is also off the mark.
My hypothesis is that the active political forces in this process have been women, but, going back to the original premise, I’d say they only represent forces that are deeper than political. At that level, the actors are not women. Truth is, they aren’t even actors. The real issues here are intrapsychic. We externalize them, we even form our ideas of ourselves in that way, and then they can take political form, which is what we have seen here. Then various actors play their roles, thinking that they are the agents in this play. But that they think so is as much a part of the play as their gestures, their words, and their exclamation points.
Ultimately, the energy that underlies the conflict between the Oedipal and the anti-oedipal is the tension between spontaneity and self-constraint, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, to use other words, that is part of every psyche. It ends only in death, and it structures all of life
But every tension is unstable; the pressures within it press toward its end. To the extent that it is the tension that structures life, these pressures push toward the end of life. That is what Freud called the death instinct (Verhaeghe, 1999)
In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud discusses the nihilism of the anarchist Weltanschauung[8]:
The first of these Weltanschauungen is as it were a counterpart to political anarchism, and is perhaps a derivative of it. There have certainly been intellectual nihilists of this kind in the past, but just now the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head. They start out from science, indeed, but they contrive to force it into self-abrogation, into suicide; they set it the task of getting itself out of the way by refuting its own claims. One often has an impression in this connection that this nihilism is only a temporary attitude which is to be retained until this task has been performed. Once science has been disposed of, the space vacated may be filled by some kind of mysticism or, indeed, by the old religious Weltanschauung. According to the anarchist theory there is no such thing as truth, no assured knowledge of the external world. What we give out as being scientific truth is only the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance under changing external conditions: once again, they are illusion. Fundamentally, we find only what we need and see only what we want to see. We have no other possibility. Since the criterion of truth - correspondence with the external world - is absent, it is entirely a matter of indifference what opinions we adopt. All of them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error.
The elements of anti-oedipal meaning, which one could easily call a Weltangschauung, are all here: the elevation of the subjective, the denial of objective reality and the drive to destroy its representations, and even the hint that, if one does so, the fusion of mysticism will be brought about.
There is, of course, no sign of the sexual politics that, by our hypothesis, proved instrumental in the destruction of Antioch. This leads us to two final thoughts. The first is that it reveals the roots of that politics in a much deeper, and darker dynamic, which the ancient Greeks called Chthonian. Second is that it suggests the possibility that the Chthonian dynamic may, in our time, have found a modality of power that it has not previously mobilized in the pursuit of its destructive ends.
References:
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Allen, Charlotte (2007) Death by Political Correctness: Who killed Antioch College? Weekly Standard, November 12.
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Carlson, Scott (2007) A House Divided: After years of ignoring financial realities, Antioch College failed while its more-commercial branches survived Chronicle of Higher Education, June 29
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Cohen, Patricia. (2008) The College that would not go gently. New York Times, April 20.
Dixon, Edla, editor (1991) Antioch: The Dixon Era, 1959-1975: Perspectives of James P. Dixon. Bastille Books
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Unsigned. (1972) Women Hold Open House; Discuss Sexism at Antioch. July 14, page 3.
Verhaeghe, Paul. (1999) Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine. New York: Other Press.
Yalman, Joan and Everett K. Wilson. (undated) Crisis and Change in an Organization: A Case Study of Antioch College. Draft Version. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antiochiana Collection, Olive Kettering Library, Antioch University.
Wilson, Everett K. (1985) What counts in the Death or Transformation of an Organization? Social Forces, 64 (2): 259-280.
Will, George. (2007) Farewell, Antioch. http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/GeorgeWill/2007/07/15/farewell,_antioch