Antioch College to Host Forum on Community Governance
Update - August 19, 2010: : A letter to alumni and the College community on the Task Force on Community and Community Governance :
YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – August 12, 2010 – A panel that includes Antioch College alumni, a former dean and Yellow Springs residents will discuss “Antioch College Community: What to Keep, What to Add, What to Put Out on the Curb?” at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, August 20, 2010, at the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom at Antioch College, One Morgan Place.
Founded in 1850 as a residential liberal arts college, Antioch College earned an international reputation for its rigorous undergraduate curriculum, trendsetting cooperative work program and pioneering system of community governance that involved students and faculty in the governing of the institution. Interim President Matthew A. Derr established a College Task Force on Community and Community Governance to ensure this key component of the Antioch College education is under development when the new class arrives in the fall of 2011.
Antioch College alumni and the Yellow Springs community are invited to participate in the extensive discussion. “The Task Force seeks a wide range of ideas about what the new Antioch College community should be. We will inform and advise – but not decide for – the students, faculty, staff and administration as they form their own community and ways of making decisions,” said Al Denman, a former Antioch College professor who chairs the Task Force.
The panel includes:
- Paul Graham (Antioch College class of 1952), retired vice president for research at Vernay Laboratories. Graham is a member and president of the Yellow Springs Board Education, a member of the Glen Helen Ecology Institute board and member and president of the Glen Helen Association. He was also a member of the Antioch Alumni Association and recipient of the Arthur Morgan Award for community service.
- Cheryl Keen, dean of community learning at Antioch College from 2003-2005. Keen helped to lead a working group envisioning community learning in the curriculum reforms of that time. She will be speaking about recommendations made in a report completed in 2005 and from the history of community government that the team collected at the time.
- Rose Pelzl, who attended classes at the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, which was established by former Antioch College faculty and alumni after the college closed in 2008. Pelzl sat on Nonstop’s Executive Council (ExCil) and Community Council, and she is a member of the unaffiliated community student union. She plans to apply for admission to Antioch College when it reopens. If accepted, Rose will be the fifth generation of her family to attend Antioch College.
- Raymond Kahu o te Maunga Ruka TeKorako, a Maori elder from New Zealand who lives in Clifton, Ohio, and works in Yellow Springs. A member of the Waitaha Nation, TeKorako is going to share some of his insights on the evolutionary process of change and how his people have tried their best to confront it.
The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Berman, Antioch College class of 1984, secretary to the Task Force on Community and Community Governance and former member of the Alumni Board.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Gariot P. Louima
Chief Communications Officer
Mobile: 937-581-8201
glouima@antiochcollege.org
