A group of alumni plan to purchase and reopen Antioch College, a 150-year-old private Ohio college with a radical history.

Antioch, the flagship of the six-campus Antioch University system, closed two years ago, but now the alumni group has struck a deal with AU’s board of trustees to buy the campus, its endowment, and the rights to its name for $6 million.

The deal, which has to be approved by Ohio state officials, would allow the college to reopen as an independent institution. The alumni group plans to start small, with an annual budget of $4.5 million and an enrollment of just seventy students in the first year of operations, and they hope to admit their first new students in the fall of 2011.