Cincinnati Magazine

Solvency has haunted Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs Ohio with a storied history, which shuttered its doors in 2008. The college reopened last year with 35 students, and is looking for new ways to draw students and maintain financial stability:

“When the first students arrived on campus last fall, they found themselves with an unprecedented amount of influence over what Antioch would be. Administrators had set up a schedule that included intensive study of one subject over a few weeks; what that meant in reality was that students had mid-term exams about two weeks after starting a course. They complained, and in a major change that affected class sequences and faculty, the school dropped the schedule in favor of a more traditional one. Another adjustment: The school had planned to offer Portuguese to help with co-op positions in Brazil, but students persuaded administrators to replace it with Japanese. Students also sit in on faculty interviews and help write visitors’ policies, which is not a common practice at most colleges.

“That kind of influence is possible because Antioch, despite its rich history, is essentially a start-up, with all the opportunities and challenges that go along with a new venture. Money is a constant concern; the school’s endowment, which helps pay for current students’ tuition, is $44.5 million, far smaller than most liberal arts institutions, which means it can’t afford to spend the $75,000 or more per student that high-end liberal-arts colleges do. That’s led Antioch officials to focus on a narrow mission and do it well, acknowledging what they are not and what they cannot do.”

On March 2, 2012, a tornado hit the village of Moscow, Ohio. A look at how the residents fared:

“At approximately 4:47 p.m., it hits the riverfront homes. In the first second, a tornado can break every window in a house. It rips shingles loose and pries the roof free, moving over it like air over a jet wing. With the windows now holes, the houses fill with wind. Roofs lift, exterior walls push outward, interior walls collapse. With nothing left to protect the structure, the tornado takes what’s inside—papers, furniture, tools, photographs, instruments, lamps, antique dressers, refrigerators, chairs, sofas, beds—and adds it to its growing, spinning wall.

“On the riverfront, Linda Niehoff doesn’t hear the tornado the way almost everyone else will. It hits too fast for that. She is on the second floor of her large brick home, trying to get downstairs, when the lights go out. The tornado is here, she knows it; there’s no time to make it to the lower level so she dives into the bathroom, near an interior wall where the chimney comes up from the floor below. She crouches in a fireplace as the tornado demolishes her walls and roof, carrying away everything the floods hadn’t been able to over the last 214 years.”