YELLOW SPRINGS Ohio

Hanging by a chain from the ceiling in the main hallway of Antioch Hall is a black sign: "Office of Transition."

The placard points Antioch College students to the place that can help them transfer away from the private, 155-year-old liberal-arts school nationally known for nontraditional approaches and social activism, now on the brink of shutting its doors.

But the administration's plan to temporarily close the school has rallied its former students to the kind of buck-the-establishment cause they were steeped in here.

In e-mail campaigns and gatherings across the country, Antioch alumni have raised about $15 million in cash and pledges.

At a meeting Friday they are ready to press their plan to keep the school operating, including fundraising, retaining a solid core of faculty members and renovating dorms as finances allow.

"This is the only chance we'll ever have because if we blow this, it's gone," said Rick Daily, executive director and treasurer of the Antioch alumni association.

"It is almost unspeakable," said alumna Catherine Jordan, 58, of Minneapolis. "I haven't cried yet because I don't believe it can happen."

Then she began to cry.

School officials announced in June that because of declining enrollments, heavy dependence on tuition and a small endowment, Antioch will close after spring term in 2008, reorganize, and reopen in 2012.

"Our financial situation hasn't changed since the June meeting," Toni Murdock, chancellor of Antioch University, said Friday. "The financial situation was extremely severe regarding our cash flow to the point that the entire university was in jeopardy."

Murdock believes the alumni must have a plan to sustain Antioch College not just for next year, but for the next three years.

Antioch, which costs $36,000 a year to attend, has an $18 million operating budget and a $2.6 million deficit.

The alma mater of Coretta Scott King, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and two Nobel Prize winners, Antioch doesn't grade classes, encourages students to develop their own study plans, and combines academic learning with experience through a co-op program in which students leave campus to work in various fields.