To the CCG Board of Directors:
The Coalition for the Common Good grew from a vision developed by Antioch University leaders and Board members years before Otterbein was selected as its inaugural partner. As the AU Chancellor at the time, I was among those who helped shape that vision and design the Coalition. We sought to create something genuinely new: a partnership in which independent universities would come together as equals—strengthened by collaboration, but never stripped of their identity, governing authority, or voice.
I can speak with confidence about what the Coalition was intended to be because I helped build it.
I also know what authority was preserved for the Antioch University Board of Governors. As an attorney by trade, I worked closely with legal counsel to ensure that the governing documents protected essential powers of the Antioch Board. Those protections were deliberately codified in the Affiliation Agreement, the CCG Bylaws, and Antioch’s Charter.
It is true that the governing documents refer to the Antioch University Board of Governors as the “Advisory Board,” a term that often suggests a limited role in higher education. But in the contractually negotiated CCG structure, the Board’s authority is defined not by its title, but by the governing documents themselves. Those documents vest the Antioch Board with substantive authority over matters fundamental to the University’s governance, leadership, assets, accreditation, and institutional future.
This distinction matters. The word “advisory” cannot be separated from the provisions defining the Board’s actual powers. A label does not nullify contractual rights, erase governing responsibilities, or reduce a body with expressly protected authority to something ceremonial or optional. Nor do the governing documents permit the CCG Board simply to eliminate it by vote.
The name may be confusing. The authority is not.
The Coalition was never conceived as a merger, an acquisition, or a mechanism through which one founding institution could dominate another. Antioch’s governing protections were not technicalities buried in legal documents. They were essential, non-negotiable commitments upon which Antioch agreed to enter the Coalition.
Moreover, while most advisory boards are created by the fiduciary board, Antioch University's Board of Governors created the Coalition, not the other way around. That is why the CCG Board’s action purporting to dissolve the Antioch Board of Governors is so profoundly troubling. The Antioch Board was not incidental to the Coalition. It helped bring the Coalition into existence and was expressly entrusted with safeguarding Antioch’s governing authority within it. The CCG’s purported action does far more than alter an organizational structure. It attempts to eliminate the very body charged with protecting Antioch’s autonomy—and to disregard the commitments that made the affiliation possible.
I entered this partnership with confidence because I took Otterbein’s leaders at their word. I believed they would act in the best interests of Otterbein, Antioch, and the new enterprise we were building together. The integrity of those who make commitments is revealed when keeping the commitments becomes difficult or inconvenient. Principles matter most when they require restraint. Those who invoke the “common good” must be willing to keep their word—especially when doing so protects the independent governing voice of a founding university.
I urge the CCG Board to reverse course, honor the governing documents, and return to the principles of equality, mutual respect, and institutional autonomy that gave the Coalition legitimacy. Without fidelity to those commitments, the Coalition may retain its name, but it will have abandoned the common good it was created to serve. Without that lived commitment, I cannot imagine another institution ever joining such an enterprise.
I stand unequivocally with Antioch’s Board of Governors, administration, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and wider community. They are not resisting collaboration. They are insisting that the commitments made to Antioch be honored—and defending Antioch’s right to remain Antioch.
William R. Groves, JD
Chancellor Emeritus, Antioch University