YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – February 25, 2011 – The 29 members of the Antioch College Alumni Association Board of Directors will meet March 4-5 on the College's campus. A number of sessions are open to the public; the full schedule is posted online.
Apart from a series of concurrent committee meetings, all open sessions will be streamed at http://antiochcollege.org/media/audio/.
For information, contact Stacey Wirrig, director of alumni relations, at 937-207-2640 or swirrig@antiochcollege.org.
Antioch College recently accepted its first four students for the entering class of 2011. These students will be Horace Mann Fellows; working with the College administration and faculty, they will be tasked with building the new Antioch and creating its culture. They will shape programs and help construct the experience they envision. In return, Antioch College will award these students with full four-year scholarships.
James Michael Russell, one of the four students accepted so far, said recently to the Yellow Springs News: “I want to go to Antioch…to finally realize my only dream of the past few years, to be an Antiochian. I want to go to Antioch…for what the college represents: not just the vital three C's, that is co-op, classroom and community, but also the kind of person it creates.” Kristen Pett, the Special Assistant to the President for Enrollment, said to the News that these first four students were out of 17 early admissions applications. Pett also said that the initial group is “strong, intellectually inquisitive and from a range of educational backgrounds.” She went on to say that they are also diverse in race, gender, and background.
The deadline for regular admission has been extended to March 1st. Students will be notified by April 1st, and then students will have until May 1st to let the college know if they will be accepting the Fellowship and entering in the fall.
Pett also told the News that applications were coming in at a steady pace. “We continue to attract some of the most talented and community-minded [high school] graduates,” she said.
More information on the Horace Mann Fellowships, including applications and nomination forms, can be found at the Antioch College website.
Antioch College recently admitted four out of the college’s first class of 25 students who will come to campus next fall. The college has been getting ready for its first class since it was revived as a liberal arts college in September, 2009, after an alumni group successfully gained independence for the college from Antioch University.
“We continue to attract some of the most talented and community-minded graduates,” Special Assistant to the President for Enrollment Kristen Pett said in a recent interview.
The first four students — two from Ohio and two from Texas — were admitted during the college’s early admission process. Students can still apply through the regular admission process, which has a March 1 deadline. The college will notify those accepted by April 1, according to Pett, and students then have until May 1 to accept.
Applications are currently coming in from across the country, Pett said, with an especially strong showing from Ohio, New York and California.
All of the entering class of 25 will be awarded Horace Mann Fellowships. Tuition is free for four years, and there is also possible grant money available for room and board fees. The fellowships also include mentoring from Antioch College alumni.
For a more detailed article on the first members of the college’s first class, see the Feb. 24 issue of the Yellow Springs News.
Audio recording of Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt speaking and answering questions at the New York City Antioch College Alumni Chapter meeting Wednesday February 16, 2011. Special thanks the Jeff Wood for recording, editing and uploading this file.
As part of the Antioch College fireside reading series, writer and teacher Rafael Torch will read from his recent creative nonfiction work on Sunday, Feb. 20, at 2 p.m. at the Coretta Scott King Center. His collection of raw personal essays about the realities of cancer treatment is titled Pacific Coast Time: A Recurrence of Days.
Torch, who graduated from Antioch in 2002, is a writer and high school literature teacher in California. His work, part of the rapidly growing body of Latino literature in America, has been published in the Antioch Review, the Indiana Review, the North American Review, and the Crab Apple Review, among other places. His story, “The Naming of Frank Torch,” won the Grand Prize from the online journal Memoir (and). Torch’s MA thesis from the University of Chicago, The Garcia Boy: A Memoir, received numerous awards, including the Catherine Ham Memorial Award for Excellence in graduate work.
Rafael’s Torch’s gripping blog detailing his ongoing experiences with cancer is called “pacific coast time: cancer, las vegas, god, illumination, and a hint of existential dread.” The following is an excerpt from a February entry:
since i began this blog a year ago i’ve had cancer four times and i’ve beat it thus far. how much luck does a person have? is it even a matter of luck? i used to ask if it was fair, but now i know better — fair and luck have nothing to do with it. those are meaningless words…
jonah, i knew, was going to be a good student. i don’t quite remember his exact score, but i know he earned a high B on the test we had the first or second day of school. i never got to read his first essay. after he was diagnosed with cancer and i had gone to his house to see him before he flew to houston for treatment, he said he had his essay for me to grade. i told him that he didn’t need to worry about it, that he had other things much more important than salinger or holden’s dilemma to worry about now. but he was adamant. he had heard that those first essays were dismal, that i had graded hard. he wanted to see where he stood. i told him to email it to me if he wanted. i never got the email.
The fireside readings are sponsored by Antioch College Morgan Fellows Anne Bohlen and Jean Gregorek. The events highlight both established and emerging multi-ethnic writers, poets and memoirists who offer a variety of voices and fresh perspectives on contemporary life in North America. The events all take place at the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom.
About 50 people came to hear Deborah Meier and Shadia Alvarez, both progressive educators and Antioch alumni, speak at the Herndon Gallery on Antioch College campus last weekend. Their talks about how to educate children to build a strong democracy were the second in the Future of Education lecture series sponsored by the village schools and the Antioch Morgan Fellows.
Meier has a long list of awards and honorary degrees from dozens of schools, including Yale, Harvard and Brown Universities, for her leadership in helping to change the public schools. She told many stories about her observations as a teacher in the Chicago public school system and later in public schools in New York City, Philadelphia and Boston. Her points included:
• If a classroom is boring to us, adults, it has to be boring to students.
• An environment that is disrespectful of teachers encourages teachers to disrespect their students.
• Public education is intended to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy, but instead of fostering the critical thinking and active debate necessary for a healthy democracy, the system relies on testing to meet its goals.
• Democracy is complicated and does not come naturally, but we can learn to be democratic if we stop teaching to the test and start teaching kids to love learning.
Alvarez was a student at Central Park East, the New York City school where Meier served as principal and which provided secondary school, or CPESS, a model for alternative public educational institutions across the country. Prior to coming to CPESS, Alvarez had been slow-tracked to the remedial classes in the NYC school system, where she was in danger of languishing for the next 12 years. But at CPESS, instead of labeling her, the school assessed her strengths and weaknesses and worked effectively to address her needs.
To honor that legacy which she benefited from, Alvarez went into education and is now an assistant principal in the New York City school system. She struggles daily to be a “courageous leader” and to overcome the limitations of the system to do what’s right for her students.