Category: news

Antioch faces myriad challenges

The revived Antioch College is moving forward toward its goal of welcoming its first class of new students next fall, according to new President Mark Roosevelt at last Saturday’s meeting of the college’s pro tempore board of trustees. Along with its ongoing work on facilities and search for first-year faculty, the college recently underwent what looks to be a successful first step toward achieving accreditation.

“There’s tons more opportunities and excitement ahead of us than anything else,” Roosevelt said in a Saturday afternoon session open to the public.

However, the challenges facing the new college are huge, and the college’s staff, alumni and Yellow Springs community need to work together to surmount them, he said.

“We’re in a situation where we need to be about collaborative problem-solving,” he said. “We need to have a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude toward our work, and be willing to cross traditional boundaries.”

The issue of how the former Antioch College faculty should be included in the new college loomed large at the meeting. The former faculty issue is “the hottest of hot button” issues for college alumni, according to Alumni Board member Joe Foley, who gave a report on conclusions from a task force on the question. The controversy is “tragic,” Foley said, stating that, “We have to get beyond this to our main agenda.”

In a passionate plea, faculty emeritus Al Denman, who chairs a task force on community governance, called for “fast action and collaboration between the board and the task force,” to address the “injustice” of leaders not adequately including former tenured faculty members in the new college. Denman also asked the pro tem board to define its relationship to the Antioch College community.

“We feel the future of Antioch College is in great danger if you don’t get these problems solved,” Denman said of the task force. In a later statement, Denman said he was speaking for himself only.

However, it’s not the role of the board to take a stand on the former faculty question since the board doesn’t involve itself in personnel issues, according to Board Chair Lee Morgan.

“We’re ducking it,” Morgan said of the faculty issue, stating that Roosevelt is the one to make decisions regarding hiring.

Status of faculty search

The issue of former faculty is timely because the college has already launched its search process for new faculty members. Also, the college will likely soon submit a preliminary information form, or PIF, to the North Central Association, the accrediting agency, according to consultant and former Earlham College Provost Len Clark, who is overseeing the accreditation process. Clark stated that after the PIF is submitted, it will be difficult to make substantive changes.

Currently, the college plans to hire six tenure-track faculty members for next year, along with five positions with one-year contracts and three adjunct positions. Four of the six tenure track positions are currently being advertised and two will be soon, according to consultant and former Earlham College Librarian Tom Kirk, who is overseeing the hiring process. The tenure track positions are in philosophy, literature, 3-D art (sculpture), Spanish, anthropology and chemistry; the one-year positions are in history, psychology, math and biology; and adjunct positions are in performance art, media art and Portugese.

Response to the advertised positions currently ranges from 50 applications for the chemistry position to 200 applications for philosophy, according to Kirk.

The question regarding the appropriate role of former faculty includes the college’s ethical obligations to formerly tenured faculty members, and what college leaders and alumni perceive as the best way forward for the newly independent school. When Antioch University closed Antioch College in 2008, it was able to let go of tenured faculty members due to its declaration of financial exigency for the college. About 30 former faculty lost their jobs, and about 20 remain in the area, 14 of whom have formed the Antioch College Former Faculty Task Force.

The American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, the national advocacy organization for academics, has called on Antioch College leaders to reinstate former tenured faculty in positions for which they are qualified. Other supporters of former faculty state that the college has an ethical obligation to reinstate former faculty, and could be sanctioned by the AAUP if it does not. Supporters also emphasize that the new college would benefit from the experience of former faculty with their unique Antioch College educational model.

Those who support an open hiring process that does not give priority to former faculty say that it is in the college’s best interest to seek as broad a range of applicants for new faculty positions as possible. Some also worry that the new college, if it does not pursue an open nationwide search, could face legal problems by not following affirmative action guidelines. These people argue that former faculty are welcome to apply for the new faculty positions.

The issue became more controversial last fall when the first tenure-track positions were announced, and only two of those positions — philosophy and literature — are in areas of former faculty members’ expertise. One of those qualified for the tenure track positions has stated that she will not apply for the position if the college doesn’t adhere to AAUP recommendations.

In his report on the alumni board task force report, Alumni Board member Foley stated that board members’ research concluded that the college would face neither AAUP sanctions nor legal problems if it hires or does not hire former faculty.

“It does come back to moral and ethical decisions, not things imposed by outside forces,” Foley said.

The alumni board report, which can be found online at www.antiochcollege.org, does not reach a single conclusion regarding the course the new college should take, Foley said. Rather, it offers a series of narratives describing how alumni of different perspectives see the issue. While there is disagreement over what’s best for the college, the alums did agree that the hiring process “should be as close as possible to the standard in higher education,” which utilizes current faculty in hiring new faculty, Foley said. He also stated his own opinion, after a long career as an academic at Ohio State University, that no other decision is more critical than faculty hiring.

“This is the most important thing we do,” he said of hiring. “If we get it right, it doesn’t matter if we get other things wrong. And if we get it wrong, it doesn’t matter what else we get right.”

Creating leaders

The task force on community governance has worked hard to create an orientation program and ongoing support for new Antioch College students that acquaints them with the school’s unique governing structure, according to task force member Jennifer Berman in a report to the board.

“We are very concerned with empowering students so that they know how to become leaders,” Berman said.

Orientation next fall for the incoming class of 25 students will include a five-day “Outward Bound” experience, using the resources of Glen Helen to help students know and trust each other, Berman said. Emphasis on community-building “will be an ongoing process,” she said, with every Wednesday set aside for community-building activities. Some of these may include weekly community meetings and small affinity groups that discuss campus issues.

Students will gradually assume leadership positions as they become comfortable doing so, Berman said.

First step to accreditation

Feedback from a visit to campus last week from an Ohio Board of Regents, or OBR, peer review team seemed positive, according to Len Clark, the consultant who is overseeing the college’s accreditation process.

Within several weeks the college will receive an official report of the visit, which could include the team’s suggestions for changes, which are optional, or recommendations, which would be mandatory changes that could slow down the college’s progress to its opening in the fall.

“We have an informal sense from the enthusiasm of the group that we’re not likely to receive any recommendations that will deter us,” Clark said. “We feel relatively good about the visit.”

However, Clark made clear that the OBR visit is only a first step toward accreditation. Specifically, the OBR team’s task is to determine whether Antioch College should be allowed to grant degrees. If the team gives Antioch a favorable review, the college is then allowed to apply for accreditation from the North Central Association, or NCA, the accrediting agency. The college’s preliminary application form for accreditation will then be sent to two reviewers, who will determine whether the college is ready to be considered for candidacy. If the reviewers give a thumbs up, an NCA team will visit the campus, perhaps next November after classes have begun, Clark said. If the site visit goes well, the college can be admitted for candidacy, a process that will include further site visits.

In a sort of catch-22, a college cannot be granted accreditation until it graduates its first class, so that the college’s first group of students risk going through a four-year program without getting official credit. However, if all goes well and the college achieves accreditation within 12 months of that first graduation, those students will receive retroactive credit. Attaining accreditation status is especially important because the college cannot receive federal financial aid without it, Clark said.

Antioch College presents the Exhibition ‘Sidney Chafetz: A Life in Print’

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – January 27, 2011 – The Morgan Fellows of Antioch College are pleased to present Sidney Chafetz: A Life in Print, a retrospective of the work of the octogenarian, Columbus-based artist and printmaker, from January 29 to April 29 in the Herndon Gallery, South Hall, One Morgan Place.

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, this comprehensive exhibition features fifty of Chafetz's lithographs, woodcuts, and drawings from the 1940s through the twenty-first century, highlighting his witty and deeply humane sensibility and the major areas of his interest: politics, cultural icons, and the academy.

Some of Chafetz's pieces commemorate eminent writers and thinkers (Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud), others satirize the foibles and empty platitudes of politicians and administrators. The chilling but informative Perpetrators series delineates the ordinary Nazi bureaucrats who executed the Third Reich's diabolic program. As energetic as ever, Chafetz's recent series, Legacy, takes aim at egregious abuses of political power in twenty-first century America.

Following his service in World War II, Chafetz earned his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. He went on to study at L'Ecole Americaine des Beaux-Arts in Fountainbleau and L'Academie Julien in Paris, then received further training as a pupil of Ferdinand Leger and, a few years later, of the printmaker Stanley W. Hayter. From 1948 to 1982 Chafetz served on the faculty of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.

Chafetz has exhibited his prints nationally and internationally since 1947, and has held more than one hundred one-man shows in galleries and museums all over the world. His work appears in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, The Florida Holocaust Museum, and the University of Minnesota Center for Genocide Studies, among many others. His innumerable awards and fellowships include two Fulbrights, a Ford Foundation Enrichment Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and the Ohio Arts Council Governor's Award. Artist, master-teacher, social critic, and humanitarian, Sidney Chafetz has been recognized as a national and an Ohio treasure.

For exhibition information, contact Anne Bohlen at abohlen@antiochcollege.org or 937-286-8455.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima ?
Director of Communications
Office: 937-319-6131
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org

Antioch College presents the Exhibition ‘Sidney Chafetz: A Life in Print’

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – January 27, 2011 – The Morgan Fellows of Antioch College are pleased to present Sidney Chafetz: A Life in Print, a retrospective of the work of the octogenarian, Columbus-based artist and printmaker, from January 29 to April 29 in the Herndon Gallery, South Hall, One Morgan Place.

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, this comprehensive exhibition features fifty of Chafetz's lithographs, woodcuts, and drawings from the 1940s through the twenty-first century, highlighting his witty and deeply humane sensibility and the major areas of his interest: politics, cultural icons, and the academy.

Some of Chafetz's pieces commemorate eminent writers and thinkers (Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud), others satirize the foibles and empty platitudes of politicians and administrators. The chilling but informative Perpetrators series delineates the ordinary Nazi bureaucrats who executed the Third Reich's diabolic program. As energetic as ever, Chafetz's recent series, Legacy, takes aim at egregious abuses of political power in twenty-first century America.

Following his service in World War II, Chafetz earned his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. He went on to study at L'Ecole Americaine des Beaux-Arts in Fountainbleau and L'Academie Julien in Paris, then received further training as a pupil of Ferdinand Leger and, a few years later, of the printmaker Stanley W. Hayter. From 1948 to 1982 Chafetz served on the faculty of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.

Chafetz has exhibited his prints nationally and internationally since 1947, and has held more than one hundred one-man shows in galleries and museums all over the world. His work appears in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, The Florida Holocaust Museum, and the University of Minnesota Center for Genocide Studies, among many others. His innumerable awards and fellowships include two Fulbrights, a Ford Foundation Enrichment Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and the Ohio Arts Council Governor's Award. Artist, master-teacher, social critic, and humanitarian, Sidney Chafetz has been recognized as a national and an Ohio treasure.

For exhibition information, contact Anne Bohlen at abohlen@antiochcollege.org or 937-286-8455.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima ?
Director of Communications
Office: 937-319-6131
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org

Daniel Bell, Noted Sociologist and Advisor to the Antioch Review, Dies

Daniel Bell, a noted sociologist, professor, and essayist, has died. Bell was on the Board of Advisors for the Antioch Review, and published some of his most acclaimed essays in the magazine.

“Daniel was not only an important contributor, he was an important advisor for the Antioch Review,” says Robert S. Fogarty, the magazine’s editor. “His advice and support helped sustain us and assured the Antioch Review’s commitment to excellence.”

Bell published five essays in the Antioch Review: “Crime as an American Way of Life” (1953), “Socialism: The Dream and the Reality” (1952), “Japanese Notebook” (1958), "Ethics and Evil: Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Culture" (2005), and most recently “The Reconstruction of Liberal Education: A Foundational Syllabus” (2011).

The New York Times said of him: “Mr. Bell’s output was prodigious and his range enormous. His major lines of inquiry included the failures of socialism in America, the exhaustion of modern culture and the transformation of capitalism from an industrial-based system to one built on consumerism.”

Two of Mr. Bell’s books, The End of Ideology (1960) and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978), were ranked among the 100 most influential books since World War II by The Times Literary Supplement in London.

Bell earned his B.S.S. from C.C.N.Y. in 1939 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1960. From 1948-1958, he served as the labor editor for Fortune magazine, and from 1959-1969, he was a professor of sociology at Columbia. Bell then accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he became the Henry Ford II Professor of Sociology in 1980. He retired in 1990.

Bell’s works include Work and Its Discontent (1956), The Reforming of Education: The Columbia College Experience in Its National Setting (1966), Marxian Socialism in the United States (1967), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), and The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980 (1991). He edited The New American Right (1955, revised edition published in 1963 as The Radical Right), Towards the Year 2000: Work in Progress (1967), and Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities (1969, editor and contributor with Irving Kristol). Bell has also served on the editorial board of American Scholar, edited Daedalus, and co-edited Public Interest.

About the Antioch Review

Founded in 1941, the Antioch Review is one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America. It publishes fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. Authors published in it pages are consistently included in Best American anthologies and Pushcart prizes.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima ?
Director of Communications
Office: 937-319-6131
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org

Daniel Bell, Noted Sociologist and Advisor to the Antioch Review, Dies

Daniel Bell, a noted sociologist, professor, and essayist, has died. Bell was on the Board of Advisors for the Antioch Review, and published some of his most acclaimed essays in the magazine.

“Daniel was not only an important contributor, he was an important advisor for the Antioch Review,” says Robert S. Fogarty, the magazine’s editor. “His advice and support helped sustain us and assured the Antioch Review’s commitment to excellence.”

Bell published five essays in the Antioch Review: “Crime as an American Way of Life” (1953), “Socialism: The Dream and the Reality” (1952), “Japanese Notebook” (1958), "Ethics and Evil: Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Culture" (2005), and most recently “The Reconstruction of Liberal Education: A Foundational Syllabus” (2011).

The New York Times said of him: “Mr. Bell’s output was prodigious and his range enormous. His major lines of inquiry included the failures of socialism in America, the exhaustion of modern culture and the transformation of capitalism from an industrial-based system to one built on consumerism.”

Two of Mr. Bell’s books, The End of Ideology (1960) and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978), were ranked among the 100 most influential books since World War II by The Times Literary Supplement in London.

Bell earned his B.S.S. from C.C.N.Y. in 1939 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1960. From 1948-1958, he served as the labor editor for Fortune magazine, and from 1959-1969, he was a professor of sociology at Columbia. Bell then accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he became the Henry Ford II Professor of Sociology in 1980. He retired in 1990.

Bell’s works include Work and Its Discontent (1956), The Reforming of Education: The Columbia College Experience in Its National Setting (1966), Marxian Socialism in the United States (1967), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), and The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980 (1991). He edited The New American Right (1955, revised edition published in 1963 as The Radical Right), Towards the Year 2000: Work in Progress (1967), and Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities (1969, editor and contributor with Irving Kristol). Bell has also served on the editorial board of American Scholar, edited Daedalus, and co-edited Public Interest.

About the Antioch Review

Founded in 1941, the Antioch Review is one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America. It publishes fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. Authors published in it pages are consistently included in Best American anthologies and Pushcart prizes.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima ?
Director of Communications
Office: 937-319-6131
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org

Antioch adds new leaders

Ron Napal is the new interim director of advancement for Antioch College.

Ron Napal is the new interim director of advancement for Antioch College.

Along with incoming president Mark Roosevelt, who began his tenure January 1, Antioch College recently announced three other new leaders at the revived college.

Ron Napal, a 1966 Antioch College graduate with a long history of fundraising and public relations experience, last week began his position as interim director of advancement. He will continue in this position until June, as the college seeks a permanent leader of the advancement office. In an interview this week, Napal said he is not a candidate for the permanent position.

Retired last year after 20 years with United Cerebral Palsy of New York City, Napal came back to work because “I’m committed to the success of the newly independent Antioch,” he said.

Napal feels commited to his alma mater, he said, because “Antioch transformed my life,” when he was a young man. “It trained me to be an entrepreneur before I knew the word, trained me to be flexible, a problem solver.”

After graduation, Napal went on to found his first business, an arts management firm, at the age of 27. After that, he founded a second company, a niche marketing and public relations firm. Later Napal went on to serve as vice-president and chief development officer for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, where in four years he oversaw growth in revenues from $17.5 million to $34 million annually, followed by his work with the United Cerebral Palsy organization, where he served in a variety of positions, including chief development officer, director for corporate development and special advisor to the CEO and board of directors.

In his new position as interim director of advancement at Antioch College, Napal will oversee a staff of 10 employees who are engaged in fundraising and alumni relations. His specific goal is to assure that the general fundraising campaign, with a goal of $2.2 million, is concluded successfully by the end of the fiscal year in June, along with working on the ongoing capital campaign goal of raising $50 million in five years. So far, the college has raised $22 million, he said.

Born and raised in New York City, Napal will continue his residency there, but plans to be on campus three days a week when not on fundraising trips.

His lifelong work in nonprofits was also informed by his Antioch College experience, Napal said, stating that, “I take Horace Mann’s mandate very seriously.”

Raised in a traditional middle-class home, Napal retained the values he was raised with when he came to Antioch but his experience here “opened up another world to me, gave me a broader social palette.”

New board members

The college also announced last week that David Goodman and Gregory Avis will join the college’s pro tem board. The new members will join other board members at a meeting on campus this weekend, Jan. 21–23. Open sessions of the board will begin at 1:30 on Saturday, Jan. 22, in Herndon Gallery.

“David Goodman and Greg Avis will bring to the work of rebuilding Antioch College their skills, their experience and their wisdom,” according to Board Vice-chair Francis Horowitz in a press statement last week. “We are fortunate to have their commitment to our common purposes.”

Goodman, a 1969 graduate of the college, was a lead negotiator, along with alumnus Eric Bates, of the college alumni’s first attempt to gain independence from Antioch University. During the two years after the university announced in June 2007 that the college would close the following year, alumni mounted several intensive efforts to save the college. Those efforts were successful in September 2009, when the college became independent from Antioch University after more than 20 years in the university system, and became once again a free-standing liberal arts school.

Goodman is a principal of North Arrows LLC, which specializes in power and energy investments. He is also a founding partner and principal of e-Solar Properties LLC. In 1980 he founded United American Energy Corporation, and led it up to its sale in 2003. He is also president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation for Human Dignity and Civil Rights, a nonprofit that honors his brother Andrew, who, with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, was murdered in 1964 while pursuing voter registraton for African Americans in Mississippi.

After graduating from Antioch, Goodman received an MBA from Stanford University. He has written and lectured on civil rights, alternative fuels and green building and general business matters in his areas of expertise.

Avis is the first member of the college’s governing board who is not a graduate of the college. He co-founded Summit Partners in 1984, and has worked as a director of many public and private companies, including Digital Link Corporation, IMPAC Medical Systems, Integrated Systems RightNow Technologies and TGV Software. He holds a bachelors in political economy from Williams College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is currently chair of the Williams College Board of Trustees.