Month: September 2007

They too were once young

Chris HillChris Hill- Associate Professor of Film

Where were you at age 20?
When I was 20 I was a psychology major at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

You wanted to be a psychologist?
I did actually do counseling, and I got a degree in psychology.  I did an honors project that had to do with perception. After I graduated, I worked at a free clinic as a counselor and then I worked at a women’s clinic. When I was in Michigan I worked in a womens crisis center.  And at that time abortions were legal in New York but not in Michigan so if people wanted to get an abortion and had to travel to NY state, they called us and we’d talk them through the whole process.

So you were already an activist?
In that sense yeah. That was right about the time when the women’s movement was getting off the ground; I was drawn to the early women’s movement in Ann Arbor.

When were your college years?
Between 1968 and 1973. When I went to MI, like two months after I arrived, the ROTC building was bombed, so there was a lot of activity on campus against the war in Vietnam; it was one of the major centers in the country for anti war activism, so there was a lot happening, which was kind of overwhelming.  But I was more focused on urban issues and class difference; I was against the war, but I focused more on women studies.  I was from a working class family and when I got into college, it took me a while to get oriented to  a world very different from the one I was used to.

What were your dreams when you were 20?
I was really interested in becoming a therapist. I was trying to figure out was what that really meant. I had some idealized version of that. When I was 20 I realized that the culture and society that we find ourselves in has as much  impact on peoples mental health as our individual personalities, so I think that was really important, recognizing that the individual is not isolated in his or her neurosis, but that they’re  in relative position within all the things contributed to the comfort or defensiveness or anxiety. So that was what I was learning when I was 20.  The other thing was that Michigan was being critiqued around race at that time, not only was there a huge antiwar movement, but like Antioch, Michigan had just admitted a lot of students of colour. So I became very involved in theses issues,   Then when I was 20 or 21, I dropped out of school for a time. Because all of these issues were so pressing, I didn’t know if it made sense to be in school.

Do you remember what your favourite book was?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn had a great impact on me. And I was reading a lot of Doris Lessing–the Golden Notebooks.

What music did you listen to?
We listened to a lot of motown.  Because I grew up in Cleveland, the most powerful radiostation was a mowtown station.  So I listened to motown all through high school and then when I was in college, my roommates had grown up in Detroit with people who had involved in motown.  And started listening to jazz, but I think I was more interested in art than than music.

Any movie that particularly moved you?
I worked in a movie theatre actually.  Last Tango in Paris really affected me.  And I saw the Olympiad and was completely blown away by that.  I think I started watching old films then.  I had never really thought about film as a reflection of culture before.

Faculty Profile: Conrad Zagory

As a Japanese exchange student and new addition to the Record Staff I had the pleasure to interview the new adjunct for Japanese, Professor Conrad Zagory. Zagory, or Konrad for Antiochians, lived in Japan for twenty years and hence speaks Japanese fluently, including the dialect of Kochi Prefecture and I can tell you that’s pretty cool.
He was first introduced to the language as a student at Antioch College when he spent his exchange year at Waseda University, one of the most famous universities in Japan, from 1967 to 1968. His stay in Japan sparked an interest in the language and by the time he left he was able to understand basic Japanese. After returning to America he entered Stanford University where he majored in Asian languages and acquired his Ph.D. He later learned more about the Japanese language and literature.
When he went back again in 1972 he took intensive Japanese lectures in Tokyo before moving to Kochi Prefector in the south of Japan to teach English full time at the Koshi Medical school. There he fell in love with the culture of Japanese traditional pottery called Odo-yaki, he said.
Unsurprisingly he fell in love with a Japanese woman and got married in 1980. His first baby girl, Aya was born soon after in 1982 followed by Ninsei in 1985.
As an alumnus living in town he has a soft spot for the college. So when Antioch struggled to find a Japanese professor for 2007, he gladly accepted the offer to teach. “I am heart sick about the possibility of the college closing. If it does suspend operations, I do not think it will re-open. And if it does, I do not think it will be anything like the Antioch we know,” he said sadly.
In my short time here I got to share Zagory’s love for Antioch and I hope my experience here will be as precious as his in Japan. Chatting with Professor Zagory was engaging, and he has a lot of knowledge to share. So I suggest the next time you run into him in the hallway you talk with him, whether you are interested in Japan or not.

Antioch Education Abroad to Revamp EIT Program

Experiential education is the cornerstone of the Antioch College, so it comes as no surprise that Antioch Education Abroad (AEA) has recently revamped its Europe In Transition program in order to meet the challenges and realities of the current political paradigm.
Since Europe In Transition’s (EIT) inception as “Urban Term” in 1972, students from Antioch College and a multitude of other universities have traveled through Europe during designated spring terms in order to explore a comparative approach of post-communism and post-industrialism.
While this may have been considered exceptionally relevant in the 1970s, Leslie King, the program coordinator, thinks that the program has begun to lose its appeal in the last several years, acknowledging, “One of the reasons for change is noticing that this intensive post-communist study has not been appealing to students in this day and age as much anymore.”
This has been attributed to the changing geopolitical landscape. With traditional-age college students primarily identifying with military adventurism in Yugoslavia and Iraq as opposed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, AEA is hopeful that the inclusion of Turkey in the program in place of the Czech Republic and Hungary will “strengthen” the comparative approach.
Kim Sims, AEA’s Associate Director and Program Director for EIT, noted that the program has had a long history of revision, with countries such as Sweden and Yugoslavia included for study and travel in earlier years. Sims thinks that the inclusion of Turkey will prove to be rewardingly challenging, stating, “We’ll be grappling with things that are too politically sensitive to address in a frontal matter, like the role of the military in political life, the Armenian genocide, and the Kurdish situation. These are things we’re all interested in and may have close personal investment in, but if we’re interested in it academically, we need to look at it from a different lens and in a way that won’t endanger our hosts or ourselves.”
Sims also added that the inclusion of Turkey in the program is not simply in response to its prominence in the headlines or its troubled political history. The program has been redeveloped in order to expand the relation of countries and their political and economic systems within the comparative context. The differences between Turkey and Eastern Europe are more striking than the differences that had presented themselves while EIT was concentrated between Eastern European countries of propinquity. Sims hopes to tie in the experiences of Germany and Poland with those of Turkey, by situating students in homestays with families that are representative of the general population and housing them with migrants, primarily in Turkish neighborhoods. This should provide a supportive foundation to study transnational linkages in a way that hasn’t been explored before in the program.
Although Turkey has been added as a location for study and individual research within the program, the majority of the curriculum will remain unchanged. The ability to “study seemingly incongruous environments”, according to Sims, will differ greatly in that, “similar places, for comparative projects, look at how cases relate as opposed to comparing them to control variables.” Sims sees the addition of Turkey in the program as an invaluable means of exacting the differences between these countries while still finding and researching points of relevance.
Both King and Sims maintained that they would consider first-year applicants, but they highly emphasized the research work that would be entailed, strongly suggesting that students with a second-year status or higher apply. The deadline for applications is October 30.

Obama Watcher

“I would say at this point that he still has that magic.” – Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL.)

Magic. Star power. Balls. Whatever one calls it, Barack’s got it. And yes, he is Black enough. But, alas, this champion of ethics reform (ethics? out of Chicago?), recently deemed a “rock star” by the unsurpassable political mind of George Clooney, still trails in the polls.
The latest Rasmussen Report shows Obama garnering 23% of the support for the Democratic nomination to the 39% of a certain “liberal” New York senator. For once, the Democratic Party is actually less divided than the GOP. Yet a question remains as to whether either of the forerunners will survive the primaries. The party as a whole finds both candidates unelectable; an astonishing 54% say that a Caucasian male, most likely John Edwards, being nominated is likely, if not inevitable. Is it possible, that in the year 2008, the country’s mainstream progressive party, faced with presidential hopefuls including a woman, the country’s only Senator of African descent, and a Latino governor (New Mexico’s Bill Richardson is of predominately Mexican heritage) with a résumé longer than H.E. Sheikha Haya Rashed al Khalifa’s monogram, would still choose the WASPy male personal injury attorney?
So, in these times of doom, gloom, and intimidating statistics, what is Barack up to? At the moment, the whole of his campaign workers is keeping busy with the “Countdown to Change”, organizing in the early primary states of Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Maintaining its grassroots philosophy, the campaign relies heavily on the contributions, both organizational and monetary, of individual volunteers around the country. Barack continues to sit down to quiet, official dinners periodically with members of his constituency, generally chosen from those who have made small contributions to the election effort.
Meanwhile, he’s been remaining highly present in the media, recently writing a hard-hitting article for the New York Daily News on his plans for Middle Eastern foreign policy, including the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act he introduced to Congress in May. The near-constant stream of debates has continued, including the AFL-CIO debate in my hometown of Chicago a few weeks past, during which Obama’s opponents continued to attempt to undermine his readiness for the presidency. Most arguments were easily deflected on his part with grace, although even his most die-hard supporters grow a bit weary of Barack reiterating the fact that he voted against the war, unlike his opponents. When the strong corporate and lobbyist ties of a certain “feminist” were mentioned, she attempted to avoid the subject by smiling at the audience and saying, “So if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl.” My girl? Really, Senator Clinton? I was under the impression that you’re 59? Isn’t that a little old to be making public statements befitting a 13 year old running for captain of the junior high cheerleading squad? Go red! Red white blue!

Dispatches from Community Meeting

On Tuesday afternoon Antioch’s most famous weekly rendezvous again gave daytime tv a run for its money. First years: Community Meeting is Antioch 101.  It’s where progressive ideals and the quirks of living in a tiny community grind against each other in the hopes of accomplishing the week’s business. And the whole institution facing annihilation twist just ups the ante as Corri, Chelsea, and Rory moderate the room.
With a guest appearance by Andrzej Bloch, the college’s new Chief Operating Officer (COO), the meeting climaxed and reached its restless denouncement during Pulse.  Bloch, appointed to the COO role in light of former president Steve Lawry’s hasty resignation, danced in front of the room while he fielded questions from an array of community members representing nearly every constituency on campus.
Bloch, in a speech pre-empting Pulse, stated that Lawry’s early resignation came as a surprise and he refused to answer any questions pertaining to the specificity of Lawry’s decision. Bloch made it clear that as COO he is committed “to secure the best conditions for students and  faculty.”
He announced that he was making budget room for new library employees.
He also stated and reiterated throughout the course of the meeting that he must serve a dual role in the capacity of COO. First he must keep the closing date of the college in mind and he must keep an eye on the possibility that the college might stay open.
Many faculty members raised issue with the tenor and significance of the new language of the title “Chief Operations Officer.” Scott Warren asked that, if in a standard corporate structure the COO must report to a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who the CEO of the College is. Bloch  responded that he had not thought of the implications of the new terminology and that he didn’t have an answer to the question at that time.
Susan Eklund-Leen asked that Bloch clarify the reasoning behind Lynda Sirk’s hiring into the new position as assistant to Bloch. The latter responded that with Syrk installed as an assistant that communications would be streamlined.  Eklund-Leen then asked Bloch who she worked for, the University or the College, and to “run tight herd” on her.
Bloch was later grilled by alumni relations officer Aimee Maruyama ‘96 whom on Friday was one of the employees who were asked to go home early. The locks to their offices were subsequently changed, their FirstClass access was restricted, and the IT department constructed out of office reply messages to any incoming email to their account, signing their names at the bottom.  She asked, “I wonder if any of us have given you a reason to show that level of mistrust for our professionalism?”
Bloch answered, “Already the decisions were made. And I’m not going to second-guess why those decisions were made.”
His response garnered dismayed laughter, boos, and hisses from the crowd. He promised to speak to Maruyama about the decisions and asked them to “just accept it for what it is.”
Nicole Bayani asked Bloch if he would want the College to stay open, to close, or to reopen again in four years.  He said, “Suspending operations at the college is not a wise idea,” and that he was “open minded to any possibilities that could keep the college open.”
Emily Mente asked if Bloch would continue Lawry’s commitment to attend each community meeting for the rest of the term to which he agreed.
Earlier in the meeting candidates for AdCil and ComCil announced their intentions for running and listed their credentials.  Some old faces and some new, but each candidate was on board with perrenial ComCil candidate Scott Warren’s charge that “this year, more than ever, we need to build community.”
But looking on the bright side if all this happened second week what could we possibly be afraid of eighth week?