Author: YSNews

Antioch hires last of first-year tenure-track faculty

This week Antioch College leaders announced that they had hired the sixth, and last, of the college’s first year tenure-track faculty members. Based on the recommendation of the search committee, Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt hired Anneria Coria-Navis as assistant professor of Spanish.

Coria-Navia comes to the position after a decade of teaching Spanish in both k-12 and college-level classes, and two decades of teaching music education in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, she has taught a beginning Spanish class, Spanish for Health Professionals, at Kettering College, and she also teaches beginner and intermediate-level Spanish at Wright State, where she also serves as a faculty supervisor in the Teacher Education Program.

Coria-Navia has taught Spanish at the Redlands Adventist Academy in Redlands, Cal., and at St. Mary’s Catholis School in Ann Arbor, Mich. She has taught music education at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich., Lake Michigan
College and the Universidad Adventista de Montemorelos.

 

She is the final tenure-track faculty member hired for the revived college’s first year. Previously, faculty have been hired in the fields of cultural anthropology, philosophy, literature, chemistry and art.

 

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College fills key positions

Louise Smith was recently named dean of community life by administrators of the revived Antioch College. (Photo by Diane Chiddister)

Louise Smith was recently named dean of community life by administrators of the revived Antioch College. (Photo by Diane Chiddister)

On June 22 Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt announced that former college theater professor Louise Smith has been hired as the college’s new dean of community life. In her position Smith will report to the president and serve on the college’s senior leadership team.

“This is a critical, central job for the college as we move forward,” Roosevelt said in a press release. “We found the right person with the right set of skills to do this work. I’m so pleased to be welcoming Louise back to Antioch College.”

The new position “is a crucial one,” Smith wrote in an e-mail this week. “Along with really walking the talk of fostering a healthy community life on campus, what it also needs to do is strengthen the bridge between campus and Yellow Springs in ways that are deep and enduring. The name of the poisition reflects the desire on the part of the college to be inclusive, to think about community in its broadest sense.”

Regarding her appointment, “I have been overwhelmed by the expression of support I have received in both the Yellow Springs and the Antioch communities. I am honored and a little bit terrified at the expectations and needs the position carries with it,” Smith wrote in the e-mail. “ I feel extremely grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to the shaping of the new college and its relationship to the village. I am also aware of all of the hard work that has been done by my colleagues in the college and at Nonstop. I want to honor everyone’s efforts: faculty, administrators, staff, alumni, villagers — by moving forward in the best ways possible.”

The position is equivalent to a dean of student affairs position, although “the shift to community life in the title signifies the importance of community building” at Antioch, according to Hassan Rahmanian, the college’s vice president for academic affairs. “This position is broader and deeper than the traditional one.”

“I’m very excited” that Smith was chosen for the job, Rahmanian said, citing her history with Antioch College before it was closed in 2008. A 1977 graduate of the college, she later came back as theater professor, then chair of the theater department, then associate dean of faculty.

“In all of those positions, she proved a successful leader,” Rahmanian said, citing Smith’s tendency to be “very fair and very firm” and to express herself directly regardless of the popularity of her position.

“She speaks the truth and the community appreciates that,” he said.

About 60 candidates applied for the job, Rahmanian said, describing the process as an effective one with a “strong pool of candidates.”

Ultimately, he said, Smith rose to the top due to her deep knowledge of the college and her personal skills and strengths, including her “insights about community, her leadership skills and skills in listening, her ability to form community and her creativity.”

An actor and performance artist, Smith after graduating from Antioch in 1977 worked in New York, touring nationally with Julie Taymor, Ping Chong and Company, Meredith Monk and Illusion Theater, among others. She won an Obie Award in 2003 for her performance in “A Painted Snake in a Painted Chair.”

Smith returned to Antioch as theater professor in 1994, a position she held until the college was closed in 2008. She holds a masters in playwriting from Antioch University and a masters in community counseling, with licensure from the University of Dayton. After the college closed, Smith worked in mental health in the Dayton area.

“It means a great deal to me to do this job well,” Smith wrote this week. “I bring an interest in making things lively and fun.”

Tenure-track professors hired

This week the college also announced that it has filled the fourth and fifth of its six tenure-track positions, with the hiring of Chicago artist Sara Black as the new assistant professor of 3-D art, and Geneva Gano as assistant professor of literature.

For the past five years Black has taught in the performance and sculpture departments at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she taught beginning, intermediate and figure drawing at South Suburban College, led an arts apprenticeship program at the nonprofit Street-Level Youth in Chicago, and taught 3-D visual language and experimental design at the University of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology.

Black’s solo and collaborative exhibits have been featured at a variety of spaces, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Experimental Station, Gallery 400, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Park Avenue Armory.

She holds a masters of fine arts from the University of Chicago, a bachelors in environmental studies and art from Evergreen State College and a bachelors of fine arts in sculpture and painting from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Gano was most recently a visiting assistant professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her teaching and research has focused on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture; Chicana/o literature and film; and GLBTQ and gender studies, among other topics.

Before Indiana University, Gano was a lecturer in the Department of English at UCLA and a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Stanford University.

She earned a bachelors in English, with honors, at Stanford, and a masters and PhD at UCLA. She is currently expanding and revising her dissertation for publication as Un-American Places: Geography, Race and Nationalism in Modern Literature.

The college has previously filled the tenure-track positions in chemistry, philosophy and cultural anthropology, and has one more position, in Spanish, to fill.

 

Glen may become conservancy

The Glen Helen Nature Preserve has been saved from development several times in its 82-year history. In the 1920s, plans to sell the land to an amusement park developer prompted Arthur and Lucy Morgan to find donors to buy the first properties that became the Glen. Later, in the 1960s, the Glen Helen Association fought off efforts to re-route U.S. 68 and the Village sewer line through the preserve.

If efforts now underway are successful, Glen Helen will be permanently protected from development in a few years. That protection effort took a major step forward this month with a renewed commitment from the 1,000-acre nature preserve’s owner, Antioch College, and a new partnership with the Trust for Public Land.

“We’re closer than we’ve ever gotten to permanent protection,” said Nick Boutis, executive director of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute, in an interview last week. “We’re working to establish a modern conservation easement that hardwires in protection, regardless of changes in politics and economics.”

Under the proposed arrangement, the title for the Glen would be held by a newly-created nonprofit — the “Glen Helen Conservancy.” The Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group, would secure private and public funds to purchase the land and the conservation easement. The Tecumseh Land Trust, best known as a farmland preservation organization, would hold and monitor the easement that limits development. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency would provide funding for a strict environmental covenant protecting the most ecologically-sensitive areas of the Glen. And Antioch College would place the funds raised in an endowment to allow for the ongoing operations of the preserve.

After the deal is complete, the Glen would be protected in perpetuity no matter what happens to Antioch College, Boutis said. And the college, which would receive a one-time cash payment for the property, would continue to utilize the Glen as a vital resource for its students and faculty through the Glen Helen Conservancy, whose founding members will include representatives from the Antioch College board.

“The interest of the college is protecting the Glen for future Antiochians,” said Gariot Louima, Antioch’s director of communications. “Antioch College sees [the Glen] as an educational resource, and that won’t change.”

Preserving the Glen has been a goal of the village and college for generations, and some protections are already in place. Those who purchased the land intended for it to be preserved in perpetuity. In Hugh Taylor Birch’s original deed of 850 acres to Antioch, Birch gave the land “to the end that the students and faculty of Antioch College and its successors may forever have available, adequate facilities for the study of varied forms of life, for the exploration of past forms and conditions of life…” In the 1960s, Ken Hunt organized country commons on about 70 acres of Glen in which neighbors took out easements on each other’s property.

More recently, 250 acres around Birch Creek and Yellow Springs Creek were protected as a National Natural Landmark, 2.5 miles of the Little Miami River were designated a National Scenic River, and in 2009 the Ohio EPA approved $1.2 million to the Glen to protect its most ecologically-significant areas. That funding will come through once an environmental covenant is signed by the new Glen Helen Conservancy. But most of the Glen has no such protections and even the protected areas remain vulnerable, according to Boutis.

“None of the [protections] have teeth enough to ward off a vigorous legal challenge and none cover the whole preserve,” Boutis said. The new easement and covenant will assure that the Glen cannot be subdivided, developed, or used for commercial purposes. In more pristine areas, the environmental covenant would require EPA consent to even relocate a trail or build a bridge.

Involving the Trust for Public Land is seen as an important step in the process since the group, founded in 1972, brings substantial experience in preserving natural land that the public can access.

Efforts to prepare an appraisal of the land’s development potential and survey its ecological significance have already begun. While the monetary value has yet to be determined, the land’s ecological value is clear, according to Boutis.

“There are few areas in this part of the country as large as this parcel with as many significant areas that have never been logged and farmed,” Boutis said. Most of the Glen has never had development pressure since it went from a Native-American hunting ground, to a resort, to being part of Antioch College, Boutis added.

Within the Glen are several places of historical and ecological importance, including mounds, earthen enclosures, 450-year old trees, scenic rivers, slope wetlands and uplands and other diverse habitats, Boutis said. The Glen is host to rich wildlife, including at least 90 species of birds that were counted in the Glen this spring.

The Glen additionally filters and purifies the area’s water supply, since the Village wellhead recharge zone is largely within the Glen, said Krista Magaw, executive director of the Tecumseh Land Trust, which holds easements, or is in the process of completing easements, on over 19,000 acres of agricultural and natural land in Greene and Clark counties.

“This is our home and the Glen has always been a part of our sense of place to our board and members,” Magaw said. “This is so we know [the Glen] will remain several generations down the road.”

 

Antioch College alumni reunion— $9 million gift announced

The revived Antioch College needs to articulate a powerful sense of mission, both to attract students and to attract major funding sources, according to President Mark Roosevelt at last Friday’s State of the College address, which took place during the annual college alumni reunion. And for the next several years, he sees developing that mission as his priority.

“What I owe you is to use the next three years to create that compelling story,” Roosevelt said to an overflow crowd of several hundred people at McGregor 113 on campus.

The college is not yet ready to apply for grants from major foundations, Roosevelt said, stating it will take more time for the college to identify and define its unique purpose.

“We have to know who we are deeply,” he said. “It’s the mission that will drive the dollars.”

In the meantime, he said, the alumni need to financially support the college. And he announced that the college’s 14-member board of trustees — formerly called the board pro tempore — has pledged $9 million to Antioch College over the next three years.

“These are people digging very deeply because of how much they love this college,” he said. “It’s a huge, huge step for the college.”

The $9 million is a significant step toward filling the college’s budget gap of $17 million over the next three years, Roosevelt said. Overall, in that time the college projects $27 million in expenses, with revenues of about $4.5 million from endowment income and $5.4 million from the annual fund, for a total of about $10 million in revenues.

Donations must provide the remaining $8 million, Roosevelt said.

“This is a great challenge to the rest of us,” he said of the board’s pledge. “The rest is doable. This task is daunting but doable.”

Sustainability focus

Environmental sustainability will be a focus of the revived college, Roosevelt said, stating that sustainability resonates with the college’s historic emphasis on social justice because the world’s poor are those suffering most from the environmental crisis.

“We older folks have to be sensitive because believe me, young people see a commitment to sustainability as a profound social justice issue,” he said, citing the large percentage of new Antioch College students who have already worked on organic farms or had other relevant experience.

Because the college is located in the Midwestern farmbelt, food will be one area of emphasis, he said, citing statistics that place the United States among third-world countries in terms of life expectancy of the poor, who have less access to healthy food.

“We begin with this premise: The way we live in America today is not sustainable. Antioch College must become a laboratory to discover better ways of living,” Roosevelt said.

The college also “needs to be much tougher on ourselves regarding living sustainably here,” Roosevelt said, stating that the college will be in a position to address this need within four to six months.

Along with a focus on sustainability, the new college will include a required core curriculum, individualized majors, global seminars that focus on issues related to food, water, energy and public policy, and an emphasis on language acquisition and competence in writing. The college’s historic three-pronged educational model of academics, work experience and community governance will be the structure that will hold these components, he said.

Against the grain

Fundamental to defining the college’s mission is answering the questions, “Who are we? Why is this worth doing?” Roosevelt said, stating that, “We’re going against the grain of almost everything in this country today.”

Most liberal arts colleges are struggling, and many have closed in recent decades.

“Nobody is starting a liberal arts college,” he said.

But the world’s problems are huge and complex, and solving them will require the sort of creative and critical thinking that students learn best in liberal arts colleges, he said.

“Liberal arts colleges produce a phenomenal number of leaders,” according to Roosevelt.

These colleges are expensive to maintain because they’re based on a model of intimacy, including small classes with high quality teaching, he said. And in recent years, leading liberal arts colleges have begun offering substantially more financial aid to students, a trend that Roosevelt believes will only increase, so that a tuition-based model of financial stability will become obsolete. Rather, he said, the colleges that will prosper will be those with the largest endowments.

“The rich are getting richer and everyone else is struggling,” he said, comparing the landscape in higher education with other aspects of American life.

Regarding economic stability at Antioch College, which has a small endowment compared to most colleges, “We have to be extremely creative,” he said. “Even if we decided to do business the way we’ve always done it, that’s not an option.”

Thus, he said, it’s critical that the college articulate a vision that both draws students and financial support from donors and large funding sources, such as foundations.

“My commitment to you,” Roosevelt said to the alumni, is when they return to campus in three to five years, “you will be on the campus of one of America’s great liberal arts colleges.”

Alumni questions

Following Roosevelt’s presentation, alumni asked questions regarding the revived college’s relationship to the arts, community governance, and its relationship with former tenured faculty, among other topics.

Regarding the role of the arts in the new college, Roosevelt said, “The arts is a significant part of the equation.” One of the first six tenure-track positions will be in the arts, and while a choice on the recipient of that position has been made, the name of the new faculty member had not yet been made public. This week, the college announced that sculpture and performance artist Sara Black of Chicago will fill the position.

Alum Mark Greenfield of New York City expressed his disappointment that the college has not rehired former faculty, and that several former Nonstop students who applied were not accepted for the college’s first class next fall. Regarding Roosevelt’s statement that the college needs to do a better job retaining students than in the past, “When you talk about retention and don’t retain the faculty that’s already here and the students that are already here, it’s hard to trust,” Greenfield said.

Regarding the situation with former faculty, “One of the most difficult things has been balancing multiple points of view,” Roosevelt said. “There have been some incredibly difficult decisions,” including the decision to conduct national searches for its first tenure-track faculty members. None of the tenure-track faculty members hired have been former Antioch tenured faculty.

But some former faculty, such as new Vice President for Academic Affairs Hassan Rahmanian and Director of Work Susan Ecklund-Leen, have been hired in new positions. Regarding the balance of new hires and former faculty overall, “It’s a balance we’ve tried to do with respect,” Roosevelt said.

Roosevelt announced that Reggie Stratton, formerly facilities director at Creative Memories in Yellow Springs, has been named the college’s new facilities manager. The college will soon announce its remaining two tenure-track faculty members, he said, and searches for a dean of community life and director of admissions are ongoing.

 

College names Louise Smith new director of community life

On June 22, Antioch College announced that Louise Smith, former Antioch professor of theater, will be the college’s new director of community life, a position which is on the revived college’s  senior leadership team.

“This is a critical, central job for the college as we move forward. We found the right person with the right set of skills to do this work. I’m so pleased to be welcoming Louise back to Antioch College,” Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt stated in a press release.

The director of community life, a newly created position, will “lead the coordination of student life initiatives, student orientation, student leadership, outreach, residential life and efforts to see students through to graduation,” and the student life program she directs will “refine the Antioch College tradition of community governance” among other responsibilities, according to the press release.

Smith, an actress and performance artist as well as a licensed clinical therapist, earned a degree in theater from Antioch College in 1977, after which she moved to New York City and worked as a professional actor. In 1994 she joined the Antioch faculty as chair of the theater department, a job she held until the college closed in 2008. Along with her degree from the college, Smith holds a masters in community counseling, with licensure, from the University of Dayton. Since the college closed, she has been working as a mental health therapist.

This week, Antioch College also announced that it has filled the fourth out of six tenure-track faculty positions. Chicago artist Sara Black will assume the position as the college’s assistant professor of 3-D Art.

For the past five years, Black has taught in the performance and sculpture departments at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo and collaborative exhibitions in a variety of places, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, The Park Avenue Armory, The Betty Rymer Gallery and Gallery 400.

She and Smith will both begin their new positions in July.

For a more extended article, see the June 30 issue of the Yellow Springs News.

Roosevelt announces $9 million gift to college

The Antioch College board of trustees has pledged to donate $9 million to the revived college over the next three years, according to President Mark Roosevelt at the college’s annual alumni reunion Friday, June 17. The announcement came during Roosevelt’s State of the College address, which took place in 113 McGregor Hall.

“These are people digging very deeply because of how much they love this college,” Roosevelt said to an overflow crowd of several hundred people. “It’s a huge, huge step for the college.”

There are 14 members on the college’s board of trustees, formerly called the board pro tempore, so that the donation comes out to an average of $750,000 per trustee.

The donation will cover more than a third of the college’s three-year, $27 million operating budget, Roosevelt said. After money received from the college endowment and annual fund campaign, there was still a $17 million funding gap for those three years, and the board’s donation will cover more than half of that gap.

Roosevelt urged the alumni to help cover the rest.

“This is a great challenge to the rest of us,” he said. “That rest is do-able.”

The need for alumni support is critical because the college is not yet charging tuition. But even when tuition kicks in, liberal arts colleges are increasingly providing greater amounts of financial aid to students, and relying more on outside funding, Roosevelt said.

So in the future Antioch College will likely need to attract funding from outside sources such as foundations. However, he said, the college is not yet ready to apply for significant grants, and needs to focus on clarifying its mission in order to be an attractive applicant.

“We have to know who we are deeply,” Roosevelt said. “It’s the mission that will drive the dollars.”

Roosevelt promised the Antioch alumni that he will focus on developing that mission in the college’s first years, with a focus on environmental sustainability. The revived college will also emphasize its historic three-pronged academic model of academic excellence, work experience and community governance, he said.

“My commitment to you is that, when you come back in several years, you will be on the campus of one of America’s great liberal arts colleges,” Roosevelt said.

See the June 24 News for a more detailed story.