Antioch College Commencement
April 26, 2008
Welcome to the Antioch College Alumni Association
By Nancy Crow, Antioch College, class of 1970, President
Antioch College Alumni Association
Welcome, amazing 2008 graduates, to your Alumni Association. Will the other Alumni Board members present please stand? As I speak, they will distribute a small gift from the Alumni Board to you, our newest members.
Every era of alumni, it seems, goes through cataclysmic events on this beloved campus, on this revered mound. We have all weathered controversy and struggles; yours have been unprecedented and epic. I stand before you to let you know that your fellow alumni honor and respect everything that you’ve gone through in your Antioch career. Your brave hearts, activism, and community organizing and participation have been shining examples in these uncertain times. You remind us what it is to be an Antiochian.
Without a doubt the highlight of my nearly eight years of service on the Alumni Board has been meeting remarkable alumni from many decades, including many of you. And what future alumni leaders we have in this class alone! Just to give a few examples: Ruthie Scarpino, will be teaching English in Malaysia on a Fulbright scholarship. Zachary Gallant, currently in the third round in the selection process for a Fulbright award for research in Croatia—we’re pulling for you, Zachary! .Elizabeth Dobson won the Jeannie Pierce Award for excellence in Digital Photography by the National Society of Photographic Education. Ryan Boasi won the Patterson College Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society. Justine Winnie and Jacob Stockwell both won the Abrams Prize; they were selected by the Antioch College Chatterjee Committee. Julie Phillips and Kelly O’Keefe presented their research with social psychology professor Chris Smith at two national conferences. Julie Phillips and Mary Hill co-authored original research that was presented last year at the American Psychological Association annual convention. Also graduating today are community leader Chelsea Martens and community reporter Kim-Jenna Jurriaans.
Again—these are only a few of an exceptional class. We look forward to your shaping the future of Antioch, the future of the alumni association, and the state of the world at large.
You join over 17,000 passionate and spirited people worldwide with the common bond of an Antioch experience. All of us here know the “big names”—Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling, Stephen Jay Gould, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Nobel prize winner Mario Capecci, to name a few. I want to take a couple of moments to point out other Antiochians through the years—your fellow alumni winning victories for humanity.
Marcia Dugan ’53 came to Antioch after graduating from high school in Cuba. Her career has encompassed 25 years of college administration, public relations, and fundraising, most notably for Keuka College and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. When faced with hearing loss, she did what Antiochians throughout the years have done—she reached out to help and organize the community. She published books on living with hearing loss. She has been a leader on numerous boards, including Self Help for Hard of Hearing People, the Keuka College Board of Trustees, the International Federation of Hard of Hearing People, and, most important of all, the Antioch College Alumni Board.
Karen Mulhauser ’65, whom many of you know as the director of the Washington, D.C. area co-op community, was one of my predecessors as president of the Alumni Association. She served as executive director of The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and grew the membership from 8,000 to 135,000. She then directed Citizens Against Nuclear War and the Center for Education on Nuclear War. Like many Antiochians, she is currently winning victories on two fronts: she is simultaneously working on the Obama for President campaign, as well as working closely with the Antioch College Continuation Corporation.
Chester G. Atkins ’70 became the youngest State Representative ever elected in Massachusetts while he was still a student at Antioch College. That’s quite the co-op. He served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1972-1984. In 1984, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he served on the House Appropriations Committee. Since leaving Congress, Atkins has become involved as an election observer for newly elected governments around the globe.
Eric Gupton ’84 was a founding member of the performance art troupe Pomo Afro Homos. Their shows such as “Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life,” and “Dark Fruit” decried both racism and homophobia. He was also an activist in the fight against AIDS, working countless hours with organizations that raised money for research and brought comfort and hope to those with the disease. Gupton passed away in 2003, but true Antiochians don’t pass away—they just move on to another co-op.
Elizabeth Sullivan ’93 and Gabriel Metcalf ’93 founded the non-profit City CarShare in the San Francisco Bay area. The program aims to change Americans’ relationships with the automobile through a web-based car-share system. This program was modeled after successful projects in Europe. City CarShare has won awards from the California State Assembly, the US Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and has also won the prestigious Stockholm Prize.
Antioch alumni honors and successes ring down through the years. Even though decades pass, and every era is convinced theirs is “the golden age of Antioch”—yes, even you will, five or ten years down the road—we share a language that binds us forever together.
As Antioch College alumni, you will be inexplicably drawn to acronyms. Take this sentence: “So after attending Community Meeting with the AB and the ACCC, I decided to go to CG and talk about reviving CSB—maybe putting together a proposal for a FWSP position, if the CM thinks it’s OK.” For Antiochians, this makes perfect sense. For everyone else, we are speaking in tongues.
Antioch College alumni also have shared vocabulary. We all know what you mean when you refer to “that co-op in the sky,” “community shared space,” “Div,” and “starting a stack.”
You will greet triumphs in your lives with the thought: “I’m winning my victory for humanity!”
You will be shocked when you have a permanent address for more than a year. Some of you will feel the urge to move the furniture around every semester in lieu of a co-op.
You will wince whenever you hear the word “toxic.”
Speaking for my fellow alumni, we will rejoice in your triumphs. We will brainstorm with you about solutions, and probably endlessly nitpick your ideas. (Don’t take it personally, we do it to everyone.) We will be shoulder-to-shoulder with you as we rebuild Antioch College We will always share your love of this school, this campus, this education, this faculty, this staff— this community. We are tied to Antioch College by more than just a diploma, we are bound to it by love. Our dreams of the future of America and the world at large are bound to our dreams for this small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, dedicated to shared governance, experiential learning, social justice and community.
No matter when we graduated, no matter what we majored in, no matter where we come from or where we’re going, Antioch College alumni know that it’s up to us to shape the world to come. We also know that we have the tools to do so—because Antioch was here for us. We go out into the beyond, outside of Yellow Springs, to work for a better future for all of us because that’s what’s right. It’s what’s just. It’s what Antiochians do.
In closing, I have one last thing that all Antiochians share. Please stand if you are willing and able. Thank you. At Antioch College graduation in 1858, founder Horace Mann said the words that stand as our motto and our worldview. You know the words. I am going to recite them to you now—feel free to say them with me.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity!”