Presidential Timeline

Mann was born in Franklin, Norfolk County, Massachusetts on May 4, 1796. He graduated from Brown University in 1819, studied law in Litchfield, Conn. and was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts in 1832. He was elected to the State House of Representatives from 1827-1833 and to the State Senate from 1833-1837. He was elected to three terms in Congress from 1847 to 1853 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Quincy Adams. He served in Congress with Abraham Lincoln, and was an ardent abolitionist.

Mann was nominated for governor of Massachusetts, but declined in order to accept the offer as the first president of the newly established Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio. While president, he also taught economics, philosophy, and theology; he was popular with students and with lay audiences across the Midwest who attended his lectures promoting public schools. Antioch is regarded as the first College in America to employ women faculty on the same basis and salary as their male colleagues. The first female faculty member was Mann’s niece, Rebecca Pennell.

Known for his commitment to promoting public education, he led Antioch College from its start in 1853 (when he left Congress) until his death in 1859. Collapsing shortly after commencement, when he charged the class of 1859 to “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” he died at home that August.

In 1862, the Civil War forced the college to shut down, and Hill resigned due to increasing financial troubles as well as sectarian conflict between the Christian Connection and unitarian trustees. He went on to hold the presidency of Harvard University from 1862 to 1868. Ill health caused his retirement from Harvard, and from 1873, he was head of the Unitarian parish in Portland, Maine. Antioch college remained closed until after the end of the Civil War.

Hosmer was also serving as a non-resident professor of divinity in the Unitarian Theological School at Meadville, Pennsylvania. Enrollment at Antioch was low during this period allowing him time to read and study. He enjoyed the company of students, finding his spirits restored by their young and developing minds. After Hosmer resigned as president in 1872, he remained as professor of history and ethics. He was one of the most noted preachers in the Unitarian church of his day.

His studies in geology primarily related to the nature and occurrence of oil and gas. He was widely known as an authority of these natural resources. Orton Hall, the geology building on the The Ohio State University campus, is named after him. He was the uncle to U.S. President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the only person to have ever held both positions.

Derby also served as trustee at Antioch and, wishing to see the board maintain its liberal element, he wrote to Dr. Samuel Eliot, president of the Unitarian Association, asking him for suggestions of potential board members. Dr Eliot mentioned among others Mr. Arthur E. Morgan who was accordingly made a trustee (and would later serve as Antioch’s president).

At Antioch, Long established the Hoagland Chair of Physiology, one of the few endowed faculty positions in the College’s long history. Hoagland, a baking soda magnate, had no direct connection to Antioch but out of a sense of gratitude paid the salary of Dr. Amos Duncan, an Army Surgeon during the Civil War whom Hoagland had credited with saving his life. There was, as a result, only one professor to ever hold that chair.

In 1890 Antioch College began publishing Spirit and Life: A Christian Magazine. Long edited the second volume of the paper, after which its publication was suspended. He also edited the Yellow Springs Review. In 1893 he became president of the reorganized Christian Publishing Association in Dayton, Ohio, where he served for eight years. He was the author of Legal History of Antioch College (1890) and Jefferson Davis: An Address Delivered at Concord, N.C., June 3, 1921 (1923).

Long worked hard to raise necessary funds for Antioch from the Christian church but was unable to put the college back on a strong financial foundation. He resigned in 1899, and the school became the property of the Unitarian church. Until Morgan’s presidency in the 1920’s, Long held the record for the longest serving president at Antioch College.

Weston was professor of economics, social science and psychology at Antioch College from 1902 to 1919 and dean from 1902 to 1906. He was professor of philosophy from 1921 to 1925 and was subsequently named professor emeritus. Dr Weston helped organize the Intercollegiate Peace Association in 1906 and in 1911 was named its executive secretary. In this capacity he edited “Prize Orations” with an historical introduction. At the time of his death he had completed a history of Antioch College.

Morgan was born in Hamilton County, Ohio in 1878 and had a strong interest in progressive education. Following the great Dayton flood of 1913 which breached the city’s levies along the Great Miami River, Morgan moved to Dayton to design and build a system of flood-control dams and reservoirs. He established the Miami Conservancy District and began his work as chief engineer on the project. During this time, he joined a book club with local industrialists such as Charles Kettering, Orville Wright, Edward Deeds, and department store magnate, Fred Rike, where he talked about his dream of a developing a new and better kind of education program. This led to his founding in 1917 of Dayton’s Moraine Park School, an experimental progressive school which allowed students to engage in small business enterprises as a way of integrating their academic learning with the practical world.

Meanwhile, the Antioch College board of trustees, aware of his school and pedagogical model, elected Morgan to the Antioch board in 1919, apparently without him knowing it; he heard about his election from an acquaintance on the street who had read about it in the newspaper. He accepted nonetheless. On the verge of closing in 1920, the trustees unanimously elected Morgan as president of the college. Ernest Morgan, in his book about his father, “Arthur Morgan Remembered,” wrote that “[Arthur Morgan] had been looking for instruments to change the world – to promote the well-being of humanity and of nature,” and so he saw Antioch and Yellow Springs as a kind of double opportunity to test his higher educational ideas and his concepts for community development and progressive education.

As president, he dismissed many of the trustees, including local ministers, and replaced them with prominent businessmen such as Charles Kettering, who had also backed Morgan’s efforts at the Moraine Park School. With a goal to create a model institution that would create potential business administrators with students well educated to become managers and business owners, between 1921 and 1933, board members and their friends donated more than $2 million to Antioch. Kettering alone donated $500,000. Morgan reorganized the educational program to include cooperative education or “co-op”, a structured method of combining classroom-based education with practical and structured work experience for which students received academic credit. While the curriculum was reorganized and the co-op program developed, Antioch was closed and then in 1921 re-opened. Morgan believed that alternating the curriculum this way would keep the learning alive and help students apply and assimilate the classroom learning. While highly emulated throughout higher education today, Antioch was the first College in the U.S. to adopt a co-op model for undergraduate education. The faculty who were involved, most of them personally chosen by Morgan, included not only academics but also architects, engineers, chemists, advertising executives, and government bureaucrats. Although the co-op program was not required, by 1935 nearly 80% of students chose the program. Morgan’s efforts so improved the quality of education at Antioch that it was ranked among the top three colleges of the nation in a study by the Carnegie Corporation.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Morgan to launch and chair the Tennessee Valley Authority, an historically epic economic development effort to bring hydro-electric power, flood control, manufacturing and navigation to the region. While Morgan was away serving as chair of the TVA, an acting president was appointed to lead Antioch College.

In his book, Ernest Morgan writes that his father was probably the first and only college president in the United States not to have a college degree. During his first commencement as president, his father had felt it inappropriate to wear the normal ceremonial regalia donned by academics. Reluctant to upstage their president, the faculty chose to attend the commencement in business suits.

In the late 1940s, Henderson became the associate director of the commission for creating and planning a state university in New York State, which led to the State University of New York, (SUNY). In 1947, Henderson left Antioch to serve as the associate education commissioner of the state of New York until 1950. Upon his resignation from New York, he joined the University of Michigan as a professor and began the first U.S. doctoral program for higher education administration. After retiring from the University of Michigan in 1967, he joined the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Henderson authored 14 books on education.

Dr. Henderson testified for the House Un-American Activities Committee (“HUAC”, created in 1934) regarding whether leftist ideas and Communist groups were a threat to colleges in Ohio.

On July 14, 1952, McGregor testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (“HUAC”). When asked about subversive activities at Antioch, he replied that he believed in a free-thinking and open America, and that it should apply on campuses too. While he admitted to some of his staff being leftists and who might take a position considered quite liberal, and while there were students who participated in groups with Communist ideas, he said “I believe a college campus should contain people with what we call at Antioch a happy diversity of ideas…,” and he did not plan on taking any action to censure the staff’s or students’ thinking. He concluded by testifying that he did not believe Antioch College was communist-ruled or communist-dominated.

In his seminal 1960 book “The Human Side of Enterprise,” McGregor revolutionized human resources thinking by suggesting two ways managers could view employees: Theory X assumes workers are inherently lazy; Theory Y assumes workers are self-motivated. While not clearly on the side of Theory Y, McGregor leaned toward the idea that management should ultimately set the workplace conditions to allow people not only to work well, but to want to work well. His theories remain an indelible part of contemporary management thinking.

In 1994, the School of Adult and Experiential Learning (SAEL) at Antioch University was renamed the McGregor School in his honor and eventually expanded to become Antioch University Midwest in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Gould went on to serve as Chancellor (1959-62) of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in July 1962, he became president of the Educational Broadcasting System in New York with the flagship station, WNDT-TV. In his two years there, he took a leading role in raising the standards of American educational radio and television. He is probably best known for his service as Chancellor of the multi-campus State University of New York, 1964–70, bringing the disparate SUNY campuses into one unified institution.

A Harvard-educated physician, Dixon attended Antioch College from 1934 to 1939. He was one of the first students at Harvard Medical School on academic scholarship and received his medical degree in 1943. A life-long pacifist, Dixon registered as a conscientious objector during WWII and completed his alternative military service with the National Institutes of Health. Drawn to the challenges and opportunities in the emerging field of public health, he went on to earn a Master’s in Public Health Administration degree from Columbia University in 1947.

While serving on the Board of Trustees at Antioch, Dixon was asked to consider and then accepted the role of President of the College. A lifelong champion of civil rights, Dixon was especially pleased to invite Martin Luther King, Jr., to campus as the College’s commencement speaker in 1965.

With a desire to spread Antioch’s educational vision of innovation and student governance, and with the College as the central operating institution, Dixon encouraged the development of approximately forty satellite campuses or programs with faculty, administrators and college alums launching each of these new Antioch learning communities. Known as the Antioch Network, its branches reached post-traditional-age students or “adult learners”. Most were graduate level programs which operated successfully for years with reputations for high quality education. But, some proved to be unsustainable over the years and eventually closed. The remaining campuses are those that comprise the current Antioch University. Dixon’s enduring legacy will be his vision of expanding the mission of Antioch beyond the four corners of Yellow Springs, Ohio and transforming it into a national institution.

However, at the same time, Dixon was faced with the deep unrest on the College campus resulting in the 1973 student strike that closed the campus for seven weeks. The strike was motivated by deep cutbacks in federal student aid under the Nixon administration. Affected students, many of whom were first-generation-college, minority and low-income students, demanded that the Board of Trustees provide institutional aid to replace the federal aid. When the board determined that it could not financially make such a commitment, the students locked down the campus. The strike ended only after a lawsuit for injunctive relief was brought by students opposing the strike which ultimately resulted in the sheriff removing the students and the barricades. The strike is regarded by many as the beginning of the end of Antioch College’s golden age of high enrollment, although the ending of the Vietnam War certainly had an equally significant negative impact on student enrollment, at Antioch and elsewhere.

In a biography published by his wife, Dixon’s years as Antioch’s leader are recounted (see Antioch: The Dixon Era, 1959-1975: Perspectives of James P. Dixon).

Most notably, Keeton moved to Columbia, MD, where he founded a new offshoot of Antioch, the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, CAEL.ORG in 1974. CAEL has become a renowned, national, nonprofit organization that works within higher education and the public and private sectors to close the gap between “traditional” and “adult” learners by providing access to lifelong educational pathways. Keeton served as CAEL’s president until 1989. By resolution, the Antioch Board of Trustees awarded an honorary degree to Keeton in 1989.

In 1978, the Board of Trustees voted to change the name of the institution from “Antioch College” to “Antioch University” to reflect that it was no longer only an undergraduate institution serving only traditional age students. However, Antioch University is the same corporation originally founded in 1852 as “Antioch College”. The tradename “Antioch College” continued thereafter to be used to describe the College campus in Yellow Springs.

Birenbaum received national attention for his efforts to address financial difficulties and employ stringent austerity measures. In 1983 the board authorized Birenbaum and his provost to engage consultants to advise and assist in redesigning the academic program offered at Antioch College. He retired in June 1984. A year later, the Board of Trustees voted to award Birenbaum with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Guskin had previously been Chancellor at University of Wisconsin-Parkside following the merger of the University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin State University in 1974. In 1960, as a student at the University of Michigan, he helped organize a student group that is widely credited with inspiring John F. Kennedy to establish the Peace Corps.

By 1988, Guskin had recommended the closure of three other operating unites of the University including the Antioch School of Law, in Washington, D.C., Antioch Philadelphia and Antioch West in San Francisco. In the meantime, the College campus underwent significant renovations to try to rebuild enrollment. Buildings that had been boarded up were repaired and reopened, including South Hall, one of the college’s three original buildings.

In 1994, citing the challenges of serving as both the College and University president, Guskin presided over the change to a federal model, wherein Antioch College became one of the six campuses or operating units comprising Antioch University. The College acquired its own President, James E. Crowfoot, and Guskin was named Chancellor of the University, which then had its own central administrative operations in support of the campuses. As Chancellor, Guskin was the CEO of Antioch University.

After retiring from Antioch in 1997, he was elected Chancellor Emeritus by the Board of Governors. Guskin returned to Antioch shortly thereafter as faculty to co-found with Laurien Alexander the highly innovative Graduate School of Leadership and Change, and its low-residency PhD program. He retired for the second time in 2018.

At Hall’s urging, in February 1998, the board amended the by-laws to re-designate the position held by the heads of the university’s non-residential campuses from “provost” to “president” of his/her respective campus. Hall has authored texts on education, including In Opposition to Core Curriculum: Alternative Models for Undergraduate Education with Barbara Kevles (1982) and Access Through Innovation: New Colleges for New Students (1991). He was also the editor of Forging the American Character (1971) in Holt Rinehart’s American Problem Series.

Craiglow continued to reside in Keene, NH, spending a week each month on the campus in Yellow Springs to work with the college president on retention and fiscal matters. He also traveled to the west coast campuses regularly to meet with campus presidents. Following his retirement from Antioch in 2005, Jim continued his lifelong commitment to community service in Keene on the boards of Monadnock Developmental Services and Stonewall Farm, also serving as president of each board for a length of time.

Murdock was originally appointed by Antioch in 1997 as president of Antioch University Seattle, where she served for nine years. She was the campus’ first female chief executive and, in 2005 she became the university’s first female Chancellor. After announcing the suspension of operations at the College in June, 2007, Murdock worked over the next two years to negotiate an asset purchase agreement between the University and a group of college alumni allowing them to acquire the college campus and a license to use the name “Antioch College”. The transaction closed in September, 2009 and the College was reopened in 2011 as a separate, independent institution with a shared history and heritage with Antioch University. Murdock retired as Chancellor in June 2012.