Antioch University Sues Over Alleged “Hostile Takeover”

When Antioch and Otterbein Universities joined forces in 2023 to create the Coalition for the Common Good, it was supposed to be the start of a national university system focused on graduate education and adult learners.

The model was designed to allow Otterbein—a small, undergraduate-focused institution in Ohio—to offer its students more pathways to graduate and professional degree programs via the existing programs at Antioch, which has multiple campuses in four states.

Both universities were adamant that the partnership was not a merger, but rather a business alliance. Under the affiliation agreement, the CCG became the parent of the two institutions, though they each maintained autonomous governance structures. At the same time, a shared board made up of four members from each institution and one independent member was created to oversee all decisions that affected the CCG as a whole, such as taking on new debt or launching new programs.

With the agreement in place, the CCG said at the time that it eventually wanted to bring in more partner institutions to further expand its geographic reach and academic offerings.

But three years later, the partnership is the center of a legal battle over who gets to control Antioch, which follows months of mounting tension between Antioch and the coalition.

Last Friday, the CCG—which is led by Otterbein President John Comerford—voted in private to dissolve Antioch’s Board of Governors, take over Antioch’s bank accounts and interfere with its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, Antioch alleged in a legal complaint over the decision. Later that day, Comerford sent a termination letter to Antioch President Lori Varlotta, who is also vice president of the CCG and raised questions last year about CCG’s “long-term strategy and financial viability,” according to court documents.

Antioch immediately went to court to block the CCG’s attempts at a “hostile takeover” of the university, arguing that CCG’s actions broke its own bylaws. Under the bylaws, an Antioch committee must approve any changes to Antioch’s institution, accreditation, budgets, debts and other business decisions. And according to Antioch, CCG hasn’t received consent from the steering committee or the university’s board.

The court granted a temporary restraining order Sept. 1, blocking CCG’s actions. A county judge will hear arguments on whether to issue a preliminary injunction at a Sept. 14 hearing.

CCG objected to Antioch’s claims in a Sept. 1 court filing, saying that some were unverified and inaccurate; the board planned to file a more complete response by Wednesday night. In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, the CCG Board of Directors defended its vote, saying it was part of an effort “to simplify the governance structure to improve decision-making and help Antioch move forward.”

In the meantime, Antioch is carrying on its operations as usual, “refusing to accept these invalid and unlawful actions,” according to a frequently asked questions web page about the ordeal.

Antioch Identified ‘Failures’

Antioch’s leaders told Inside Higher Ed that they never expected the partnership to result in litigation.

“The CCG was one of the many draws to the institution,” said Varlotta, who became president of Antioch in August 2025. “It was a novel idea. It was a bright concept, and it was meant to be the kind of new type of partnership that private tuition-driven institutions could use first and foremost to serve students, and secondly to sustain their own financial health.”

The trouble began after the university’s board asked her to audit the CCG’s finances last fall.

“She came back with this analysis that was not really flattering to the CCG. It recognized their failures. They hadn’t identified a single additional affiliate. There was no pipeline,” said Steve Crandall, chair of Antioch’s board, who estimated that about 30 students have enrolled in the pathway program since it launched. “They hadn’t established any budgets or checking accounts, or any of the normal operations that a system would have done. We shared that with the CCG board, and they did not like that.”

According to the complaint, CCG “directed her to discontinue the analysis and attempted to restrict further discussion of President Varlotta’s findings,” though it “did not quibble with her analysis or conclusions.” But Varlotta and the Antioch board “resisted CCG’s efforts to bury the analysis and continued to push CCG to address the obvious challenges it faced.”

In March, the CCG agreed to form a new committee to analyze how to move forward, and it came up with a list of four options: retain the current structure, pursue a shared-services collaboration, amicably separate or force dissolution.

“We were very surprised that the CCG refused to consider the four recommendations or further engage the committee,” said Varlotta, who is an ex officio member of the CCG board.

The dispute escalated from there.

According to the complaint, Dan Gifford, chair of the CCG board, emailed members of the CCG board and Antioch Standing Committee in May suggesting that the CCG board might vote “to amend the Bylaws to dissolve the AU Board of Governors,” but “made no explanation why such extreme measures were necessary.”

And coalition members have also sought “to pressure President Varlotta out of her role,” the complaint alleged.

A third-party investigation commissioned by the CCG concluded in June that “Comerford treated and spoke to Dr. Varlotta in an unprofessional and verbally intimidating manner, which violated AU’s Employee Code of Conduct and impacted her ability to perform her duties as president of Antioch.” The following month, Gifford and Charlene Hayes, vice chair of the CCG board, threatened Varlotta with “disciplinary action, up to and including termination” if she did not develop her own “corrective” plan in a matter of days.

Although mediation between Antioch and the CCG was scheduled for this week, the CCG board moved forward Friday with the vote to dissolve the university’s board.

“Our intent was to find a way forward, not to end the partnership,” Crandall said. “But now that they’ve taken this action, it makes it difficult for us to see a way out that retains the existing structure of the coalition. The trust has now been broken, and I don’t know that there’s a way to rebuild that trust.”

But, he added, Antioch isn’t abandoning its original vision for the CCG, which focused on widening access to graduate education.

“Even if we were to unwind the coalition itself, that doesn’t mean we’d unwind the relationship with Otterbein,” Crandall said. “The graduate early-admissions pathways are working, even though the program is still small. We can seek out other partners and identify other institutions that can benefit from that. We don’t need the complex structure of a system in order to be able to do that. That’s what we learned from this.”