A New Academic Recipe

from The Antiochian Winter 2023

Class Notes

by Colin Morris

When Antioch instituted a selfdesigned degree program in 2018, it empowered students with vast academic freedom, building on the college’s reputation for independent inquiry. For four years, this flexible model has accommodated students’ exploration while showcasing their enterprise.

But data from student experiences in that time have shown there’s room for improvement.

Dr. Brian Norman, who joined Antioch as Vice President of Academic Affairs in July 2022, said in a recent interview that

there’s room for guidance even in a pathway designed to give students freedom and independence.

“Freedom without structure can be paralyzing,” he said. “Students come to Antioch not just for discovery but for mentorship along their path.”

This is why advising is a cornerstone of Antioch’s mission, and why it has a significant role to play in shaping the future of the college’s academic vision.

So this Fall, the self-designed major program will evolve into a framework that illuminates

Opportunity and Urgency for Change

Antioch College remains a small place of abundance and opportunity: Engaged alumni, committed faculty, and experienced leadership that includes a visionary new president. As ever, Antioch students are privileged to work alongside faculty in groundbreaking areas of study and apply their work in the real world.

But the real world is pushing back. The generation of incoming freshmen is averse to debt; burnout is pervasive in the workforce; there is public skepticism of liberal arts education and demand for workforce readiness. In short, society is posing pointed questions to colleges and universities.

Higher Ed is adapting to demographic change among incoming freshmen due to declining birthrates. And, while Antioch enjoys a remarkably diverse student population—79

percent of the class of 2026 are eligible for Pell grants, and 82 percent of the class of 2025 identify as LGBTQIA+—it remains incredibly small.

The college needs to increase revenue to survive and grow, and show the world it is open for the long term. Even with a strong culture of independent study, clear degree pathways are essential to recruitment

Of all these, the college’s key existential question is this:

How can Antioch frame its offerings in a way that puts students first while demonstrating the real-world relevance of their knowledge, all while forging a sustainable path for the college?

“This is a consequential moment for Antioch, as it is for all of higher education,” Dr. Norman said when he joined Antioch last summer. “I’ve been blown away by the Antioch community and their commitment to imagining a future and rolling up their sleeves to get it done. I am ready to roll up my sleeves, too, as we win some victories for humanity.”

Dr. Norman has spent the intervening months working with faculty, advisors, and college leadership to identify and hone five focus areas of Antioch’s greatest academic strengths from across the campus.

Interdisciplinary Focus Areas

Incoming freshmen will chart their course of study within one of five interdisciplinary focus areas:

Culture, Power, and Change Cultural

Production and Creative Practice

Global Studies and Engagement

Social Innovation and Social Enterprise

Sustainability and the Environment

These areas are grounded in the college’s values and traditions of learning, but geared toward the future that students will spend in action. Each area connects the specialties of Antioch’s faculty and resources with the careers where graduates are likely to apply them.

Culture, Power, and Change

This area engages with historical foundations and social functions of power in contemporary culture, and provides strong preparation for careers in many areas including advocacy, nonprofit leadership, education,

and law. Coursework focuses on how systems of power are built, reinforced, and operationalized through cultural practices and production.

Cultural Production and Creative Practice

This area is designed to help students develop a strong understanding of the processes and techniques of producing contemporary culture through research and practice. It prepares students to become cultural workers situated in the arts, media, performance, and the expanded field of sociallyengaged inquiry.

The program emphasizes the importance of understanding the theoretical and cultural context in which art is produced and how it is inextricably linked

with our lived experiences, histories, communities and locations.

In studio classes, students build skills and develop collaborative approaches to making within the visual arts, media, performance, and creative writing, while using experimental and interdisciplinary methods informed by philosophy, the social sciences and more.

Global Studies and Engagement

This focus area equips students with an understanding of transnational activities and processes across time and space, and the intellectual and practical skills necessary for reflexive cross-cultural engagement abroad. It prepares students for postgraduate studies and exploring careers in government, nonprofit organizations, education, globally oriented businesses, and other fields.

Social Enterprise and Social Innovation

The Social Enterprise and Social Innovation focus examines the diversity of economic activity taking place within and beyond the business world, while highlighting enterprises and innovations that promote democratic governance,

social equality, and ecological sustainability.

Students explore case studies and histories of social enterprises and worker cooperatives, gain practical skills in business planning and accounting, and envision how our politicaleconomic institutions, policies and technologies might be reconfigured to address emergent and longstanding social and environmental problems.

Students pursuing this focus will be prepared to enter careers in purpose-driven business, as well as graduate programs in fields such as political economy, nonprofit leadership, business history, and critical management studies.

Sustainability and the Environment

This focus area equips students to create and evaluate scientific evidence, environmental ethics and justice; to understand the causes and effects of social and ecological crises; to trace power disparities across social, economic, and environmental lines; to imagine better worlds and to nurture human and nonhuman biological processes and regeneration.

Students graduating with this focus have worked in environmental

science and reporting, land management, and other areas. Other students have entered graduate programs in Ecology, Environmental Science, and more.

Students will still enjoy the freedom and challenge of selfdesigned majors without having to invent them from scratch, all while benefiting from support from advisors and faculty that is more coordinated than ever.

Advising is a distinct strength of Antioch’s unique academic culture that directly improves student retention, persistence, and outcomes. Every student benefits from at least three advisors who are deeply invested in their success: one academic advisor, one language advisor, and another for their off-campus Cooperative Education Program experience.

The new academic vision recommits to this tradition with pre-professional pathways in education, law, medicine, social services, and applied sciences for students who wish to pursue advanced degrees after graduation.

The addition of these optional pathways to the five new interdisciplinary focus areas will multiply the impact of Antioch graduates as free thinking agents of progress as they enter the world and put liberal arts into action.