Inside the rift: Why the Antioch-Otterbein coalition is unraveling

The Coalition for the Common Good was supposed to be the “Justice League” of higher education.

That was how William Plater, a former member of Antioch University’s governing board, framed the idea of creating a novel partnership allowing member universities to flourish rather than merely weather the financial and demographic headwinds buffeting the higher ed sector.

Antioch leaders envisioned a novel coalition that would eventually allow “co-equal, independent universities to work together with shared services, collaborative programming, and enhanced fundraising opportunities for a shared social justice mission,” Plater said in a Sept. 10 statement.

In 2023, they found a willing first partner in nearby Otterbein University, and the two Ohio institutions launched CCG. At the time, American Association of Colleges and Universities President Lynn Pasquerella hailed the coalition as “an exciting, innovative model of excellence.”

But three years later, the coalition is now trying to effectively destroy the very institution that first conceived of it, Antioch stakeholders say.

Since late August, Antioch and CCG have been battling in Ohio state court after the coalition attempted to dissolve the university’s board, fire its leader and seize its bank accounts.

The dispute has become so existential and harrowing for Antioch stakeholders that leaders are ready to leave the coalition that Antioch envisioned and set about building years ago.

Put simply, the coalition is ripping apart at the seams. What happened?

‘Built on cooperation’

Founded in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Antioch’s first president was the abolitionist and education reformer Horace Mann, who is often referred to as the father of American public education.

Mann’s legacy is still a point of pride for the socially progressive institution. Its website quotes his words to the first cohort of Antioch graduates, admonishing them to “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” That imperative is a “beacon of our values,” the university says.

As described by Plater and former Antioch Chancellor Bill Groves in public statements since the litigation began, CCG was an outgrowth of the university’s mission. Plater wrote that he wanted to “bring together other universities with a strong commitment to social justice and find a way to share resources and mission through collaboration" while "doubling down" on Antioch's mission.

The new system was meant to function similarly to the Community Solution Education System, a collaboration that brings together six colleges — including the Chicago School, Saybrook University and the Colleges of Law — to share infrastructure and coordinate resources. The system bills itself as “one community.”

When Lori Varlotta became Antioch’s 23rd president last summer, she echoed this framing of CCG. In an interview with Higher Ed Dive shortly after assuming her role, she described the coalition as being “built on cooperation, and we’re very serious about finding institutions that are very mission-oriented around this notion of democracy and social justice.”

Antioch’s role within the coalition was special by design.

It is supposed to be the graduate system for the coalition and thus, as noted in a report by Antioch administrators prepared for the university’s board of governors meeting this past March, the “revenue engine” for CCG. “Undergraduate institutions retain their governing board, their mission, their brand and their institutional undergraduate offerings,” Varlotta explained in 2025. “But they enter into a revenue-share with Antioch University, which becomes the graduate system of the coalition.”

Antioch came to the two-member partnership as the larger institution. Across its five national campuses and online platform, Antioch enrolled over 3,400 students in fall 2024, according to federal data. Otterbein — based in Westerville, Ohio, and focused primarily on undergraduates — has significantly fewer than that, with roughly 2,300 students in fall 2024.

“It appears to me that the model was built on an assumption that projected growth and never accounted for any downside."

Lori Varlotta

President, Antioch University

In fiscal 2023, which ended the same day as the universities formed the coalition, Antioch brought in $82.2 million in total revenue while Otterbein reported $70.6 million.

When Otterbein became the coalition's co-founder and first partner, it turned over its graduate programs to Antioch and committed $5 million to the bigger university to expand graduate programming. Under the arrangement, Otterbein would receive a 50-50 share of net revenue from the graduate programs after Antioch’s costs beginning in the coalition’s fourth year.

But in a decision that proved fateful when fast-forwarding to today, Antioch agreed to reincorporate as the Coalition for the Common Good “doing business as” Antioch University. This gave the university and coalition the same employer ID and made it a division of CCG, whereas Otterbein is a subsidiary of the coalition.

In interviews this month, Varlotta and Antioch board of governors Chair Steve Crandall said this was supposed to be temporary.

For CCG to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education as the parent entity of both universities, the federal agency required two years of audited financial statements. As the CCG didn’t exist or have its own finances yet, Antioch agreed to put forward its own and become a “division” of the legal corporation to enable a regulatory green light for the overall structure.

As Crandall described it, Antioch lent the coalition its financial history so that the universities wouldn’t have to wait years longer to form it. In time, Antioch leaders expected the university to transition to the same position that Otterbein held under the CCG corporate structure.

John Comerford, who is president of both Otterbein and CCG and spoke for the coalition in an interview with Higher Ed Dive, disputed that Antioch’s position as a corporate division of the coalition was meant as temporary.

“I don't even know where that idea is coming from,” he said. “That was never contemplated. It was never discussed.”

By design, the coalition’s board includes four members chosen by Antioch, four chosen by Otterbein, and a ninth member who is independent of both institutions and elected by a supermajority vote.

Antioch’s four CCG board members form the coalition's “Antioch Standing Committee.” That committee oversees the university's operations “in consultation with” an Antioch advisory board, which was formed from the university’s former governing board, according to the coalition’s original bylaws. The advisory board, called the Antioch University Advisory Board of Governors, nominates members of Antioch’s standing committee.

The bylaws detail a long list of operational topics that must be approved by the Antioch standing committee as well as the full CCG board, including changes to the coalition’s bylaws and charter, removing Antioch’s CCG board members, the hiring and firing of Antioch’s president, accreditation changes and commercial deals exceeding $1 million.

Several other decisions — on issues such as faculty employment, grants and fundraising — are made only by the Antioch standing committee.

Otterbein has a similarly constructed standing committee of CCG board members, though it retains “sole” authority over a much broader swath of Otterbein-related matters — meaning those items are not also subject to CCG board approval.

In the coalition’s bylaws, the presidents of Antioch and Otterbein were each given the dual roles of executive vice president of the coalition and nonvoting board member. That structure would have kept Varlotta and Comerford on equal governance footing within the coalition, and kept the coalition's chief executive role independent of the universities to head off conflicts of interest.

However, Comerford became president of CCG in 2023, the year it launched — a decision made before the coalition had sufficient resources to hire an independent president. That appointment, however, was meant to be temporary, as both Antioch leaders and Comerford noted.

“I think it's very difficult to hold concurrent presidencies, each of which you have fiduciary duties to, and not be conflicted,” Varlotta said.

‘The downside’ to partnership

Shortly after Varlotta assumed the Antioch presidency, the university’s board of governors tasked her with doing a deep dive into the coalition’s finances. “We were already concerned that things weren’t working the way they should have,” Crandall said.

Because the coalition didn’t have a separate operating budget from Antioch's, the analysis meant trying to separate what the university had spent on CCG endeavors. That mainly consists of graduate programs Antioch is operating for Otterbein.

In a report prepared for the Antioch board of governors earlier this year, university leaders found all but one of those programs were in a state of enrollment decline when Antioch took them over. And over the three years since the coalition’s founding, Antioch has spent $5.5 million on those programs for faculty, accreditation and other items against just $1.1 million in tuition revenue, Varlotta said.

While Otterbein’s $5 million was intended to help grow the programs, Antioch has devoted some of that money to stabilizing the pre-existing enrollment declines, Varlotta’s team found in the board report. The program losses raised serious concerns for Varlotta about the sustainability of the coalition model and who among its partners would absorb financial losses on graduate programs going forward.

“It appears to me that the model was built on an assumption that projected growth and never accounted for any downside,” she said.

Varlotta shared the report’s findings with Comerford in February, according to a timeline of events shared by Antioch.

Along with financial concerns, Varlotta raised questions about why the coalition had yet to recruit a single new institutional member beyond its two founding partners. That posed an additional financial problem for Antioch going forward, as Crandall said the coalition’s model was built on the assumption of scale in the long term.

In Varlotta’s telling, when she presented these findings to Antioch’s board of governors, the reaction was one of concern. In contrast, when she brought them to the CCG board earlier this year, Comerford and coalition board Chair Dan Gifford told her “not to be so negative about the model or the assumptions upon which the model was built,” Varlotta said.

In Comerford’s view, however, the Antioch team’s findings were not “a full reflection of where we had been and where we were going and how things were designed,” he said in an interview. “It looks negative because you only presented the downside.”

More broadly, he complained of being siloed off from the Antioch team as it conducted the analysis. What he saw, he said, was Antioch leaders signaling,“‘This is ours, and we're not going to share it, and we're going to write reports that you can't see and develop things that you can't see.’”

In March, Varlotta filed a formal human resources complaint against Comerford following the release of her team’s findings. An independent investigator hired by CCG would later conclude that Comerford had spoken to Varlotta “in an unprofessional and verbally intimidating manner,” according to an Antioch board court filing.

Comerford declined to comment on the HR complaint’s specifics, saying that it hadn't been fully adjudicated yet. “My conduct towards Lori was always professional, will always be professional,” he said.

Just days after she filed her complaint, the CCG board passed resolutions in April that Varlotta said limited her authority and usurped the Antioch standing committee.

The resolutions include an “endorsement” of a governance structure that deemed Antioch as a division of CCG subject to “the ultimate fiduciary authority of the CCG Board,” and with just one executive speaking for Antioch to the CCG board — that executive being CCG’s president, Comerford. Another resolution sought to establish a shared IT services model, with Antioch footing 80% of the bill in the first phase.

Open conflict

In late May, the relationship between Antioch and CCG changed even more dramatically. Ahead of a June meeting, Gifford and CCG board Vice Chair Charlene Moore Hayes asked for “meaningful” governance and reporting recommendations to “solve the myriad of issues that have hindered us since February.” Barring that, the CCG board was prepared to take action — including dissolving the Antioch board of governors.

CCG said later in a court document that it was trying to “address the Advisory Board's refusal to perform its delegated functions in a collaborative and reasonable manner.” It alleged that the Antioch board withheld operating information about the division and “thwarted progress towards shared services.”

Lawyers for Antioch’s board wrote to CCG leaders, arguing that CCG lacked authority to dissolve Antioch’s board. In late June, CCG backed down and agreed to mediation.

But the relationship between Antioch and CCG only deteriorated further over the summer. Shortly after the independent investigator issued findings on Varlotta’s complaint about Comerford, she received a written performance warning from Gifford and Hayes. The two also threatened Varlotta with termination weeks later, which the Antioch board’s lawsuit described as retaliation.

In August, an email back-and-forth broke out between Gifford and Antioch board leaders over payments for CCG communications and legal expenses — costs related to the very dispute between the two entities, Crandall noted.

At the heart of the email debate were big questions: Who was in charge of Antioch’s coffers and spending? And where did the coalition’s finances begin and Antioch’s end?

From the email thread, which Antioch’s board included in a court filing, two very different answers emerged between Antioch and CCG leadership.

Gary Brahm, who chairs the finance committee for Antioch’s board of governors, wrote to Gifford of his “serious concerns” about paying “unbudgeted expenses in a year where we are already budgeting a significant deficit.”

“Had I understood that the CCG Board would later seize upon the word ‘advisory’ to dissolve Antioch’s Board, reclaim its authority, control its assets, and assume its institutional functions, I would never have voted for the agreement."

William Plater

Former member of Antioch University’s governing board

As Antioch board leaders sought details about whether paying the expenses complied with the university’s fiscal policies, a dispute arose over who had authority to make and enforce those policies over Antioch’s spending.

Gifford, who has deep personal ties to Otterbein, at one point wrote, “Let's not lose sight of the fact that the CCG and Antioch are the same entity so much of what you are asking for is inconsequential at the end of the day.” CCG would later say in a court filing that payment delays risked it failing in its contractual obligations to third parties.

On Aug. 28, just days before the Antioch and CCG boards were set to begin mediation, a majority of CCG’s board passed resolutions dissolving the Antioch board and asserting CCG leadership’s control over the university’s financial accounts.

Antioch leaders say the meeting was held in executive session. In an interview, Varlotta said she was not invited to the meeting, though she is executive vice president of CCG and a nonvoting member of its board. She learned of the resolutions from Comerford shortly after the meeting.

She further found out later that of the four Antioch standing committee members, two voted against the resolutions, one wasn't at the meeting and another — Hayes, who had joined Gifford in issuing threats over the summer to dissolve the Antioch board and fire Varlotta — voted to approve them. The AAC&U’s Pasquerella, who is the independent member of the CCG board, also voted to dissolve the board, Varlotta said. Pasquerella turned down an interview request, saying she could not comment on the vote.

Antioch leaders argue that the vote should never have taken place without first going to the full Antioch standing committee for approval, per the CCG bylaws. In Comerford’s view, CCG could make these decisions via a change to the coalition’s bylaws with a supermajority board vote.

That same day, a Friday, the Antioch board sued CCG. Then that evening, Comerford tried to fire Varlotta, and he threatened to do so again over the weekend, according to an Antioch board filing.

Early the next week, an Ohio state court issued a restraining order blocking CCG from enforcing the Aug. 28 resolutions. Later that month, the court extended the order until late September and sent the parties to mediation.

On Sept. 28, Antioch encountered a legal blow when the court determined the Antioch board of governors didn’t have standing to sue. Because it wasn’t party to CCG’s bylaws, the board couldn’t sue over any alleged breaches of them, a magistrate concluded. The court denied the injunction request on those procedural grounds as the restraining order expired, throwing yet more uncertainty over the university.

The CCG board welcomed the decision and said in a statement that the ruling cleared the way to dissolve the Antioch board of governors and carry out the other resolutions from Aug. 28.

But on Tuesday, a member of the CCG’s Antioch standing committee refiled the lawsuit seeking a new restraining order against the coalition. The move came after Antioch called the ruling a “procedural setback” and said “the dispute is not over” in a Monday statement.

A fight over authority and independence

At issue over the course of the dispute is the independence of Antioch, its executives and board of governors.

In court papers and public statements, CCG has described its board as having fiduciary responsibility over Antioch it can delegate and revoke to the board of governors.

“The corporation formerly known as Antioch University became the CCG,” the coalition said in a Sept. 2 statement. “Antioch University continued as an operating division within that corporation, and the CCG Board of Directors became its fiduciary board, responsible for its financial health and institutional well-being. This means, legally, the CCG and Antioch are the same legal entity.”

In a September court filing, the coalition described the dispute by saying that “a legacy group of former Antioch University Board of Governors — now the non-fiduciary Advisory Board — has effectively undermined CCG's efforts to achieve its goals and serve Antioch students.”

Both boards argue that the other is overstepping its authority. Antioch leaders maintain its board of governors has operating and financial oversight when it comes to the university.

"Antioch is the CCG, and the CCG is Antioch. I long for the days that we had before where we were all pulling in the same direction and really believed in this. And so I hope we get to a place where everyone feels good about this again.”

John Comerford

President, Otterbein University and the Coalition for the Common Good

To CCG leaders, the “advisory” in Antioch’s board’s name denotes its lack of decision-making power under the coalition structure. But Antioch and its former leaders argue that this misconstrues the term's intended meaning and the board’s authority in the coalition’s founding documents.

“I worked closely with legal counsel to ensure that the governing documents protected essential powers of the Antioch Board,” Groves, who led Antioch when the coalition was founded, said in a recent open letter to the CCG board. “Those protections were deliberately codified in the Affiliation Agreement, the CCG Bylaws, and Antioch’s Charter.”

Plater, the former Antioch board member, wrote in his statement that CCG's legal structure was never meant to preempt Antioch’s independence as an institution.

Antioch’s faculty have also spoken out to support the board, Varlotta and administrators.

In an Aug. 27 letter, issued just before the CCG vote to dissolve the Antioch board, the university's faculty senate told the CCG board,“We are writing to maintain our identity, restore stability for important decision-making this year, and allow sufficient time to make progress toward the visionary goals our administrative leaders were charged with.”

At this point, Varlotta said the best possible resolution in mediation or litigation would likely entail Antioch negotiating a break from CCG's governing structure while keeping graduate pathways open for Otterbein students, to make good on Antioch’s initial promises.

“It's hard to imagine partnering with an institution that's engaged in a hostile takeover,” she said.

Comerford sees such a split as a contradiction in terms. “Antioch is the CCG, and the CCG is Antioch,” he said. “I long for the days that we had before where we were all pulling in the same direction and really believed in this. And so I hope we get to a place where everyone feels good about this again.”

Despite the coalition’s devolution into rupture and litigation, Varlotta said she is “optimistic” about the potential for institutional partnerships in higher education. “If anything went wrong, it was in the implementation,” she said. “The concept largely was bold, and bright.”

She encourages others in the sector to keep experimenting and to stay true to leadership’s fiduciary duties when entering into such arrangements with other institutions.

And another bit of advice Varlotta offered: “Do everything you can to get to know your partners before you sign on the dotted line, because governance matters most when it's tested.”