FAILING ITS MARKET TEST? Antioch College (yes, that perpetually-trendy Antioch College) will be suspending operations at its Yellow Springs, Ohio campus, where students have to ask their hook-up's permission to hook up, as well as to extend the hook-up with an unhooking, if you get my drift. King Banaian urges readers not to read too much into that development. Peter Wood is encouraged by the closure.

Antioch was, in its time, a worthy experiment and it taught lessons that American higher education eventually absorbed. But today no college can make a niche for itself as a rambunctious outsider by moving to the cultural left. It is standing room only over there, and if you try to push further, there is nothing but abyss. The real room for experiment these days is in rediscovering the traditional curriculum. Colleges that awaken to the attractions of academic rigor, intellectual order, and the abiding principles of free inquiry have a promising future.

Particularly so if the collegiate rankings frenzy, as I maintain, is a revealed preference for something resembling a rigorous higher education.

Henry P. Wickham of The American Thinker suggests Antioch indeed failed its market test.

This is yet another case where the American public has shown more sense than its supposedly intellectual superiors. Antioch College was selling, and the people (as in "Power to the People") were not buying. The packaging shouted "Relevance!", and the people, voting with their feet and pocket books, proclaimed Antioch's titanic irrelevance.

Amen.