After a day between Astoria and the Astor St. Station, I went out to dinner with my aunt and uncle, and we discussed the 1973 Antioch College student strike. The Antioch alumni association is now trying to raise money to save the college, which has suffered more and more from low finances and low enrollment since then. (It was almost shut down in 2007.) They told me a number of stories about the actual strike.

From the Yellow Springs News Online:

” During the winter quarter of 1973, cutbacks in education spending by the Nixon administration seemed likely. Antioch allocated $300,000 for student loans, but students in the New Directions program, which was created in 1970 to increase the enrollment of minority and low-income students at the college, felt Antioch wasn’t providing sufficient guarantee that they would be supported until graduation.

On April 18, 1973, the New Directions and financial aid students said that they would strike within 48 hours if the Antioch Board of Trustees didn’t guarantee financial support to keep the students at the college.”

The campus was effectively shut down through the beginning of June, and my aunt was involved both in the strike itself and the actions to reinstate expelled students after it was over. I’m crazy, but I think there’s definitely a play in it – a big, messy, historical play about America, the 60s aftermath, education, financial aid, social class, and everything else you want a play to be about. I’m going to come back in April to interview her, and try to talk to some of the other major participants around the country. I may go to the school, too, assuming it stays open – even if it doesn’t. This feels like one of the most significant ideas I’ve ever come across. I feel the way I did when I first read LYSISTRATA. It means something. What remains to be seen, but it’s something unwieldy, large, exciting. (Adjectives.)

We also talked about governments subsidizing the arts, and they pointed out what I should have thought of before – that nonprofit status is effectively government subsidy within this country, and our tax code. The European countries that have more direct government subsidies of the arts take that tradition from a history of monarchy or theocracy, and patronage systems. Since this country doesn’t have that tradition, it doesn’t have that system.
Boy, does that shake up my brain’s opinions on the arts in the US and Europe. Color me having too many different ideas at once.