Tag: alumni-board

Alumni Relations and Public Relations Offices Come to Agreement on Authorship of Alumni Newsletter

    “Good Newsletter” or “Damn Good Newsletter”? Two different bulletins have been brought out to the alumni for the past couple of weeks; one drafted by Special Assistant to the COO for Institutional Advancement and Public Relations Lynda Sirk, the other by Director of Alumni relations Aimee Maruyama. “I put together the first newsletter as part of the communications plan (…) and then there was a conflict which arose and needed to be negotiated,” explained Maruyama.

On Wednesday September 26th, Alumni Board Association Treasurer Rick Daily, Head of Governance Committee Ellen Borgersen,  Head of Communications Committee Christian Feuerstein, and College COO Andrzej Bloch met with Sirk and Maruyama in Main Building conference room.  “The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the authorship and origin of the newsletters that are going out to alumns and also the process for getting these email bulletins approved,” said Borgersen.

The issue debated was whether the alumni relations office on behalf of the alumni board would be able to publish its own content and whether the alumni board could review the content that was initiated by the Public Relations Office.

The question remained unresolved at the end of the meeting. It was followed, on the following Friday, by a conference call; “What came out of that phone call was that both the office of public relations office–Lynda Sirk’s office– and the alumni relations office will be putting out a newsletter” recounted Borgersen. “Both of us will review each other’s newsletter, both of us have 24 hours to review each other’s newsletters and we can both write suggestions; these suggestions do not have to be followed,” explained Christian Feuerstein, “If I have huge concerns about Lynda’s newsletter, I can get upstairs to Rick and if Lynda has huge concerns about our newsletter she can get upstairs to Art Zucker (…) and we can get on from there.”

“We will be putting out the newsletter from our own domain, antiochians.org,” explained Feuerstein, who will be coordinating the Alumni Association newsletter from now on. She said that the bulletin would be put out once to twice a week depending on the level of commitment from volunteers and staff.

When asked whether she was concerned that the double-message might undermine the image of a common front shared by the the University and the Alumni Board, she responded in the negative. “We, the Alumni Board, feel it’s very important that we be able to speak to alumns in our own voice and to send out a newsletter that is oriented to our campaign for the revival and survival of the college; and on the other hand, the university feels the need to communicate directly with its constituencies, which includes college alumns and others, and they have news items that they want to put out that we don’t think are appropriate in the context of our campaign”

12 million and counting

“Roughly 12 million dollars” is the number on Alumni Board Treasurer Rick Daily’s abacus this week. It’s the result of the most recent count of cash and pledges donated to the College Revival Fund, that was established less than 12 weeks ago. As the College’s development office prepares to launch a full-fledged fundraising campaign, the Alumni Board has hired a consultant to assist in creating a viable business plan that will encourage the University Board of Trustees to reverse its decision to close the school in June 2008.

Continue reading 12 million and counting

Mending Fences

Rick Daily“We have a hole in this triangle as far as trust is concerned,” Antioch College Professor Hassan Rahmanian fumed to a crowd of alumni and students and villagers last Thursday at the Yellow Springs Senior Center. The three points in the triangle, Antioch College alumni, the University, and the campus community, are engaged in the Alumni Board’s efforts to keep a viable Antioch College open past the announced closing date in 2008. The relationship between the three has recently been tested by direct intervention of the University Chancellor in the operations at the College.

The meeting, organized by the Alumni Board, was meant to facilitate dialogue about the future of the college in an informal, off-campus environment. Attendance was high, with many guests taking position against the wall or on the floor.

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BOT to collaborate with Alumni Board on plan for viable future of Antioch College

Stakeholders’ Meeting“This tree is not ready to die. New twigs are budding; you’ve heard them today,” faculty member Hassan Rachmanian told Antioch Trustees and close to 200 stakeholders assembled at a Kentucky airport hotel on Saturday morning. Whether it was his plea or that of dozens of others last weekend, the Board of Trustees of Antioch College on Monday announced its willingness to collaborate with the college Alumni Association to further develop a business plan for the future of a viable Antioch College. In addition, the trustees in a separate vote expressed their willingness to consider the creation of a separate Board for the college with “significant authority”.

The Board adopted a resolution to that affect on Sunday, following a weekend hearing of stakeholders from the wider College and Yellow Springs Community whose collective efforts over the last two months have brought to the table over eight million dollars in cash and pledges to keep the doors of Antioch College open past the academic year 2007.

From the Editors – Aug. 31, 2007

Kim-Jenna Jurriaans and Jeanne KayDear Community,

Nostalgia, for some a warm and fuzzy word that expresses honor for the wisdom of your predecessors and respect for the past; for others it’s a synonyme for backwardness and lack of adaptability to the new.

It is putting on a pedistole the imperfect because it conveys a feeling. It’s what fuels places like Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, where the the cherished traditions and glorifi ed experiences of the father become the promises of the son and his daughter after that. History and memory in these places are captured in historic buildings that never crumble. I can only assume that on a campus where the choice is between moving into Dickens’ or Byron’s old room, black mold and poorly done grafi ty is not an issue. Nostalgia is allowed, it seems, encouraged even when it is backed up with ever impeccable buildings and supplemented with state of the art new computer labs, as if to proove that one has not stayed behind.

But what if the buildings are crumbling? Recently, the media with willing quotes from those who should defend us, has all to often made a parody of Antioch. Our decaying buildings become indicative of our loss of academic rigour, piercings and tatoos a reason to declare our spiritual demise. What we are left with is nostalgia for better days long out of reach. If attending the meeting in cincinnati has done one thing, it is to counter this. Those attending showed that we are rich in thought and spirit, they were intelligent and compassionate, eloquent and creative and they hold on to what our predecessors have left us with because have made it our own and we value what it entails.

To speak with the words of alumn Larry Rubin “To say that our product is based on nostalgia shows a misunderstanding of what we are about and it shows a misunderstanding of what education is about. It is about collective memory, not condos.”

KJ

_______________________________

Dear Antiochians,

At Saturday’s Cincinnati meeting, many community members expressed their satisfaction at fi nally being able to meet the members of the Board of Trustees. The pleasure to be able to interact face to face with the people behind the institution was genuine and candid. An exterior observer might wonder why, considering the circumstances… But Duffy explained it well at the stakeholders session: “Antioch is an intimate place; our students care about intimacy”. “We want to have a relationship with you”, he declared to the Board in our name.

Antioch is a place that favors intimacy; and the question has already been raised: if the college does stay open, how big should it become? Nostalgics of the late 1960s ‘golden age’ sometimes hold the 1500-2000 students model in reference. Toni Murdock, in her recent PhD Commencement speech, refers to her “dream” of a “virtual commons” as the university of the future. This idea goes in the direction of current patterns of globalization—as described by her principal reference throughout the speech, Thomas Friedman—in which the physical space becomes increasingly disregarded, at great loss for the local.

The Antiochian values of bottom up action, shared governance and community solidarity are contrary to that vision. They call for resistance against any such attempts at uniformization and dehumanization. They call for the recognition of the collective through respect for the individual, and the sacredness of personal interactions.

Whatever a future Antioch College may come to be, I hope that it will always remain an intimate community. The so often undermined power of intimacy sometimes resurfaces despite it all, and authentic interactions might still hold more value than is usually attached to them. We can look for proof in the outcome of Saturday’s meeting.

With Love,

-JK