Antioch University Seattle

Antioch University’s roots began as Antioch College. It first opened its doors in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch’s first president, Horace Mann, was a lawyer and Congressman from Massachusetts, a well-known abolitionist and social reformer. He is considered the founder of public education in the United States, believing that a well-educated populace was essential to a strong democracy. In his first graduation speech, Horace Mann implored the Antioch graduates to “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Those words remain throughout our history a guiding light of our values and an underlying commitment to an Antioch education. Nonsectarian and co-educational from the outset, Antioch was a leader of progressive thought and innovation. Antioch was the first college in the country to have a woman faculty member as equal to her male counterparts. Antioch’s curriculum was the same for men and women and we admitted black and white students to learn together over a century before civil rights laws would require the same result. In the early 1860s, Antioch adopted a policy that no applicant could be rejected due to his or her race. Sadly, this was quite revolutionary for its time. The modern Antioch began to take shape in the 1920s under the leadership of President Arthur E. Morgan. As an engineer and former Chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority, he was interested in progressive education. He reorganized the Antioch curriculum to include co-op, a structured method of combining classroom-based education and practical work experience. Antioch was the first liberal arts college in the United States to establish a co-op program. This important innovation in experiential learning has been widely reproduced throughout higher education today.