Tag: faculty

Support Nonstop, by Chad Johnston ’01

Dear alums and supporters,

My name is Chad Johnston and I am an alum of ’01 and a Community Manager of ’01-02. I was a very nontraditional student who always sought out alternatives to conventional education. Antioch was the only college I applied to and I cannot tell you how influential Antioch was to my life and my career.

I was able to go to Nonstop to talk about my current work in media reform, social justice and media policy. I knew from a distance why the committed employees and supporters of Nonstop were so important to the future of the College. However, I did not realize how deep the spirit of these brilliant people ran until I was able to be with them.

I realized in theory how Nonstop was the DNA of the institution, but until I was there to hear and see the students, faculty and staff in action, I did not realize how in practice this was so very true. The people of Nonstop are beyond courageous, and exemplify what an Antioch education means when taking subjects beyond the confines of the academy, and into action. Without this DNA, a new Antioch will be just as those in the University wanted it to be: safe, marketable, and without real value except in respect to the bottom line.

I run a nonprofit and understand on a day to day basis how this economy has effected our ability to do good work. I also understand that when times are tough, it is up to supporters to engage even more. I was speaking with a board member of a foundation the other day. I told them that we were expecting foundations to tighten their belt. He told me, “if there was a time foundations and supporters should be stepping up even more, now is the time and it will happen.”

My nonprofit is small. We have an annual budget of about $170,000 a year. I do not make a ton of money by any stretch of the imagination. However, after seeing Nonstop in person, and after hearing much of the conversations over the last couple of days about them being left in the cold, I have decided that I must do something.

I will contribute $100 a month just to support Nonstop, which is roughly %3 of my salary before taxes. Duffy called me the other day and told me he had given his entire paycheck back to the Revival Fund and Nonstop. If Duffy can make that kind of sacrifice, so can you. If Nonstop employees, who are risking their livelihoods for the sake of saving Antioch College, are giving back part of their paychecks, you can too. By supporting Nonstop, we also send an important message to the “powers that be” that we are in full support of Nonstop being an integral part of the new college, its values and its future. If we can raise millions of dollars for a new College, but not support those who have kept the institution alive and have literally put their ideals and lives on the line, then what have we really done?

I am a change agent and a social justice advocate because of Antioch College, and I need it to survive. We need it to survive. In my opinion, Nonstop is the lifeline to assure that Antioch College, in its new form, carries on the values which have made me who I am, and I’d bet, who you are as well. I am ashamed to die until some victory for humanity is won by my actions. I am committed to living life without dead time. I am a life learner, a risk taker, and an activist who will fight for justice until I have no breath left to give this world. That is because of Antioch College. Those who will come after me as Antioch graduates, will have a history and a new phrase inscribed in their lexicon, and it will be Nonstop.

I call on each one of you to do what you can for those who have stepped up to keep Antioch alive.

Donate by going here: nonstopinstitute.org/support-nonstop/donate/please-donate-today/
When you go to donate, make sure you specify that you want your contribution to go to Nonstop.

—

Chad A. Johnston – Executive Director
The Peoples Channel 300AC South Elliott Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
919.960.0088
www.thepeopleschannel.org

Board Member
The Alliance for Community Media
Washington, DC
www.ourchannels.org

We All Believe We Are Torch Bearers: An Interview with Micah Canal

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I recently had a conversation with Micah Canal, 2008 graduate of Antioch College, who came back to Yellow Springs in January to join the effort to support Nonstop and for the recreation of the College. He is currently working for the College Revival Fund.

D: So, where are you from?

Micah: I was born on the side of a mountain in southern Oregon, (where we lived) without electricity. My parents went back to the land in the early 70’s. They were hippies, sort of, but I am also part redneck because of growing up in rural southern Oregon. I have always walked that line of someone who embraces my redneck-dom and also someone who was raised by college graduates, and has had a fairly privileged life. I am one of the people who loved high school, rare among the Antioch diaspora.
I was supposed to come to Antioch in 2004, and I deferred until 2005 because I was in love, and I needed to stay on the West Coast. We (my classmates and I) were informed when we got here that something called the Renewal Commission had changed the college that we thought we would be attending. To this day I am still unclear as to why… there was no information that was conveyed to us or our parents that we were going to be a part of a new, untested learning model. That was a real shock.
Fela Pierre-Louis and Olivia Leire, and I organized the first year class in the first two weeks into something called the First Year Liason Committee. It was my first experience with organizing at Antioch, and what an interesting, difficult, troubling, infighting experience it can be. We became Antiochians … for three years, and some of us graduated, and most of us didn’t. There were sixty-seven people who entered with me, and of those less than twenty graduated. I think of us as the lost class, because we were the first under the learning communities, and some of us were the last ones out, and some of us are still here. That is my brief history about Antioch.
My major in one hundred words was Social Entrepreneurship and Economic Development. I studied economics and international relations. My focus was on change-making, trying to do it from the grass roots and also within institutions. All of my professional work has been in the non-profit sector, and I imagine that is where I will stay. That will be my life’s work: social entrepreneurship, building and contributing to organizations that do good works.

D: What brought you back?

M: That is a very complex question, especially because things have changed so much here. I came back, fundamentally, because I knew that there was unfinished business in Yellow Springs. I knew that my professors and my student comrades and so many of my Antiochian family were struggling to reach a goal that from afar, from 2500 miles away, seemed a lot more clear than it does here in Yellow Springs. I came back because I believe in a place like Antioch, a place that instills the values and ideas, and a place that is built on the motto that we come back to over and over again, ( “Be Ashamed”).

D: What is your job with the CRF?

M: I do communications work. I work on the web page and help to craft the news and the messaging that goes out to alumni. I work on the e-newsletter and the print newsletter. I try to help chapters organize and publicize their events. Being the youngest person in the office, you get stuck with helping out with people’s computers, and I usually make coffee. My job is largely computer based.

D: What is your analysis of the “Save Antioch” struggle?

There are a lot of different groups here and in the meta-Antiochian community who are working for different things. There is the Board Pro Tem, and the Alumni Board. The Alumni Board created Nonstop – or has been an important agent in the legal and financial creation of Nonstop. And there is the College Revival Fund. Within those organizations, there are different factions. There are people of different ages, different graduating classes, and they have different opinions. One thing about Antiochians is…it is our charming little downfall …that we all believe that we are the torch bearers. We all have the notion that our version is the correct version, and we have to save Antioch from all of the other incorrect understandings of what that word and this land means. I think that it is a huge part of the difficulty we are faced with right now. We have different notions about who carries the torch. Is it the alums? Is it Nonstop? Within Nonstop, is it carried by the students or the faculty? Is the torch carried by the land here? Once the Board Pro Tem gets it back–is that Antioch?
For someone who graduated in the 50’s, they are not going to recognize Nonstop as Antioch. We (the recent generation of Antiochians) believe and have strong connections to professors, a culture, and a staff that remain to some extent over at Millworks. The people who have the money it is going to take to save, to make this thing tenable for the next 155 years, don’t. This – this Olive Kettering Library, the Main Building, this is how they (donors) can relate, at least most of them anyway. And that is not an answer folks want to hear.

D: How do these competing visions impact our efforts?

Are we working on the same effort? I am not convinced we are. I am not convinced we aren’t. We are all communicating with other Antiochians out there, and we pass on our prejudices and our gripes about stuff that is happening here. I think that that process hurts our fund raising effort, it hurts our PR effort with the rest of the world. It hurts our image. It doesn’t build the forward momentum that we will need as an institution and a community to revitalize Antioch. Every one is working hard for their vision. It doesn’t matter what institution you are working for, whether it is Nonstop, or CRF, or BPT or the Alumni Board. In reality, I think our visions have more in common with each other than are different. We are focusing a lot on the differences.
We have an economy that is sinking. The situation in the outside world and here in the Antiochian community is like a perfect storm. We should be seeking whatever breaks we can get. We should be seeking whatever shelter and unity we can find, because it is hard enough, a big enough of a pipe dream to think of starting a college in this economic time.
I am optimistic. Antiochians are not good at faith. I believe that despite all of this, every one that I have talked to has good intentions. I have a lot of faith in Community Government. I have tremendous faith in Chelsea. She carries a lot of respect from all the different groups. With that respect she serves to unify us. The charisma of a capable leader is really important, and she holds a lot of that. The reason that she does is that she is very responsible about the way that she represents the ideas and the will of the community. She is a tremendously capable person.
I am optimistic about the innocence and passion of many of the young people involved. I think we should be listening to them more. Obviously, I am a young person, and take that how you may. I think there are a lot of very good ideas. There are ways to move forward in the hearts and minds of the most recent graduates. We should be reaching out to them. We may not have the deep pockets, but we have the energy, the wherewithal, and the ideas that are going to make any effort to recreate a college successful.

Letter to the Editor: Nonstop is a Laboratory, by Andrew Oswald ’92

Hello All,

It is my understanding that there is a meeting to decide the fate
of Nonstop, and how it fits into the scheme of resurrecting the
college.

One of the powerful aspects of Antioch was that it is a laboratory
for education where learning by experience. All of the times I
have had access to such a program, I have learned much much more
than I would have if I has just “taken a class”, or even “got a
degree”. An Antioch education was never about taking a test,
instead — from the time I was a perspective student, to reunion
two years ago — Antioch is about a ambitious project, a cause, a
mission. This is the essence of learning by doing. I believe that
this is one of the aspects that sets an Antioch education apart and
above any other higher education institution that I have attended.

There are many alumni, faculty, staff, and friends that want to
help. Especially in the current economy, we are not all are in a
position to contribute piles of cash to save the college. But
Antioch has created many creative, ingenious people with many
skills and diverse influences — and many want to help, if they can
figure out how.

Nonstop is a laboratory. Nonstop is another way that we can
contribute. Nonstop can be a prototype platform for ideas for the
future college.

I listened to a web broadcast on the state of Nonstop. I was
floored. The descriptions of what is going on, what has been
accomplished, and what can be done somewhere between nothing and so
little amazed me. Like it or not, restarting the college will be
an expensive endeavor, and the ability to do much with little will
be a valuable intellectual capital to augment the funds that we do
have to start the college. Let’s remember that in addition to the
millions of dollars we need, there will be millions of tasks that
are required to start-up a college.

Additionally, I think that the program that Nonstop provides is an
innovative aspect of the caliber that can set Antioch apart. It is unlike anything I have seen in higher education. I am impressed that the Nonstop program can
have so many students–many that have traveled far– for classes
that they love. They attend with a lack of campus, accreditation,
places to live, and with lots of other uncertainty.

It is these people that can be the strongest ambassabors of what the
Antioch experience can be. In changing the perception of Antioch
to southwest Ohio, and public at large it can be a compelling
story. For people checking out the college–future students,
faculty, etc, the story of these people can also be very persuasive.

Antioch has always been an extra-ordinary institution. No college
has ever extracted itself from a university. No college has had a
group of alumni that would mobilize on such a scale to try to save
a closed college. And I can only think of one institution that
has dedicated students, faculty and staff to start an institution
to keep the institution alive until the institution comes back to
life. That is Nonstop.

We will need a place to prototype ideas for future programs. We
will need people who have experience with those ideas. We will
need the support of the community. It will be valuable to have the
community outreach that Nonstop represents. We need people on the
ground in Yellow Springs to reboot the College.

For these reasons I feel that it is essential to keep Nonstop
alive, and integrate it back into the College when the college is
capable of standing independent of the University.

Sincerely,
Andrew “Ozz” Oswald
’92

Board Pro Tempore Member of the Week: Pavel Curtis

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To read the full transcript download PDF: pavel_curtis_interview_transcript

Interview by Rose Pelzl

Why did you agree to be a Pro Tem board member?

[…] this opportunity to recreate what Antioch should always have been. […] An institution that encourages young people to think for themselves, to backup their ideas with actual rigor and, and to appreciate the conflicting ideas of others. […] We have this great combination of an institution with a great legacy and at the same time has a pause in which we can really catch our breath and do what’s right without having to keep it running day to day.
[…] I didn’t want to disappoint anybody with my being on the board. I didn’t want people to assume that I had great buckets of money that I could give the college. I didn’t want anybody to assume that I had great huge amounts of time that I could give on a day to day basis to the college. So I think those were the two biggest concerns. […] And they insisted. […] they basically reassured me that I wasn’t going to be disappointing anybody. […] So I agreed because I am very excited about the whole possibility of what we’re doing. And I resisted because I didn’t want to let anybody down.

What is your vision for the new Antioch?

An Antioch that has strong academics, full of people serious about learning. And intellectual rigor, I think the word rigor is very important to me. That I want people who don’t just believe things, but they can back up their belief in something with strong argument and strong evidence. And that while their passion may be driven from their emotions, their action is backed up by their knowledge. […] Antioch has always, Antiochians in general have always had an enormous amount of passion, have not always been very self-critical, they have not always been required to back up their ideas with intellectual rigor, and an explanation and evidence. […]
And so for me the vision of Antioch has to include a campus that’s full of conflicting ideas. People have to be getting practice in defending their point of view. Not from attack, not from ad homonym, or emotional hurtful statements, but from honest legitimate inquiry. […]
[A new Antioch will] strongly encourages people to be agents of change in the world. […] that makes the world a better place than what they’ve found.[…] I want us to turn out people with agendas.
[…] I’d like us to create an Antioch in which all of those time-lines of helping somebody right this moment, helping somebody over the course of the next few years, and helping the whole civilization over the next ten or fifteen years, all of those time-lines are valued. […]
And so I’m looking for diversity that will, in some sense, force everybody to reexamine their own ideas […] And I think that’s the great thing that the cauldron of the college campus can offer, is that opportunity to be in a relatively safe place, and yet really getting practice at defending your ideas, living your ideals, and being challenged.

How do you think Nonstop will be integrated into the new Antioch College?

I mean, mostly there isn’t much I can say, we don’t know, is what it really come down to. And there’s really not very much that’s known, um, I think one of the most important things that we need to do is to think about, … we need to figure out what the right thing for Antioch is, what should it be, what do we want it to be? And when we know what it is we are trying to create, then we’re in a much better position to look around at the resources available and try to make the best use of them to achieve that goal.
And we’re just beginning a process, that will take lots of people, not just the board, but lots of people a long time, to figure out what is it we’re trying to create here. Because I think that’s very important to kee-, the verb I like the use is ‘create’, not ‘restore’. We’re not trying to go back to some earlier state, we’re trying to create a new thing. And when we know what it is what we’re trying to create, we’ll know what resources we need and how best to bring them to bare.

What was your major?

[in ’77] I was a Drama major in New York City. […] And that was just not me, I mean, I loved all the studies, but everything seemed to be pointing at […] Broadway […] and I wasn’t at all interested in that. […] and so I ended up leaving the drama program […] and becoming a double major in Music and Computer Science and looking for another college to go to and ended up choosing Antioch, and thought I was going to continue my double major in Music and Computer Science, but Computer Science Department had disappeared between the summer when I had visited and the fall when I arrived, and so I ended up being a Music major, […] majoring in my avocation, […] and teaching and TAing computing on the side. And did all my co-op jobs in computing, sometimes in finding a job in computing [laughs]. And ended up getting a BA in Music, […]

What was your favorite co-op?

… This is 1980, I believe, it’s spring/summer co-op … So it’s a sixth month co-op and that means you can get a sort of longer job, and Al Denman, who I believe was a faculty member, and I think is still around, I don’t know, had a son, Don Denman, who was working as a programmer, I believe, at a then much, much smaller company called Apple. […]
So […] Apple was in like two different buildings, and Steve Jobs is walking around and it’s all very exciting, and Don informs me that they have a hiring freeze, and they won’t be able to hire me. […] trying to find jobs in computing, which was a lot harder than, then say, a few years ago. And uh, I remember one of the jobs that looked really good was being a Unix system administrator for the US Geological Survey […] and so I met with those guys, […] And this was gonna be great. And it turned out the position was actually outsourced to a company called EDF, […] we went into the office of this woman who was the representative of EDF, […] and we’re filling out all the paperwork and I remember, she said, […] “And of course you’ll need to shave your beard and cut your hair.” […] And this was just a complete shock to me and to the other two guys.
And they were just like “What’s going on here? Why is that the case?” […] and it turns out that because I would be working for EDF and not working for the government, I have to follow the EDF dress code, […] And Mr. Perot doesn’t approve of long hair or beards, […] and the USGS guys could tell that I was thinking it over, […], and they said “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare, we’re really sorry not to get you, but you can’t do this to yourself. Don’t give in to this.” And so I didn’t. And I’m glad they, they did that. And uh, and I didn’t get that job, it wasn’t available to someone who looked like me.
[…] and so that’s my most memorable coop, I’m sure. I had a second co-op, um, before I left. I was only at Antioch for two years. […] but I don’t remember what the other co-op was. […]

What is your position on open-source software in the context of higher education?

[…] My position is that there’s a lot of great software that’s open source, there’s a lot of great software that’s commercial, I’m not a zealot in either direction. I think that there are a lot of sources of cost of software, one of them is the purchase price, but much more of it is what happens after that, support and deployment and maintenance and growth. And that you need many situations to think about what you’re requirements are, and uh, and then look at the various options that are available, and count the complete costs, […] And in some cases it will be open source and in some cases it will not be. And that’s the right way to choose software and not based on ideology.
And I think the key thing I think we need to do is to share the cost of software with other colleges, the obvious group would be the Great Lakes College Association, […] And so that we might be able to run personnel management and payroll through one system that one member of the associates pays for and maintains and we might be able to run, you know, content management for academics in a different way, and again, share these resources across various institutions […].We aren’t going to find a single piece of software that’s going to meet all of our needs across that huge breadth, and so I just think we just need to take a very clear-eyed non-ideological point of view about it and make the best decisions for each case, really considering what the requirements are.

What are you doing now?

[…] There’s a huge revolution in computers coming, very shortly, it’s nearly upon us, most of the general public is unaware of it. […] what it really comes down to is we can’t afford to make computers faster, we know how to make them faster, but we cant afford it. And the thing we cant afford is heat. […] And it turns out there’s really only one solution, and that’s to run slower, […] the nice thing is slower computers can be very, very small, we’re still good at making things smaller and smaller and smaller, we don’t seem to be close to the edge of that. So the only thing that we can do is instead of having faster computers, we can have lots more smaller slower computers, […]
[…] we’re moving towards a world where that little desktop computer that you’ve got, […] Your computer is going to get a lot more processors, […] And the crisis is that we don’t know how to use that many. […] We have to take, you know, the applications that you’re using and they have to be written in a different way, so they can take advantage of multiple processors. […]
[So I’m working] under a senior vice president at Microsoft, […] he reports directly to Steve Ballmer, the chairman or CEO of the company. And we’re this little group of about 75 people. […] basically trying to figure out how should we build computers that are vastly more secure, vastly more reliable, vastly more connected to the network. And able to deal with vast numbers of processors, because it’s not the way that any of the existing operating systems, whether it’s Windows or Linux or Mac OS, […] and they’re all based on ideas that were maybe right 30 years ago, maybe, but they’re certainly wrong now. … it’s an opportunity to do things right. […]
[…] really great jump from that to the Antioch experience, which is that we really aren’t trying to figure out not how to restore the Antioch of two years ago, or five years ago, or 50 years ago, we’re trying to figure out for today, the right Antioch and build that. And that’s what’s so incredibly exciting about this opportunity.
[…] I mean, the board’s job is to guide the overall process and in particular for these parts were you just can’t have a whole mob of people involved, getting these legal agreements and getting separated from the university. […] in order to really begin the process of figuring out what is the right Antioch for the 21st century. And that’s a process where we expect to get a lot more people involved and try to figure out what the right thing is and once we know what we’re trying to build, then we can look around at the resources that are available, and figure out how to best bring them to bare to achieve that.

Before the school closed down in April of ‘07, […] I was part of something called the Antioch Science Advisory Board, […] and we all came to campus in April, […] talked about how best we […] could help the sciences at Antioch, by bringing to bare all of these incredibly accomplished science alumni of the college […] help science education at Antioch and it was so exciting, […] the great things that we could do, starting seminar series and […] and like a month and a half later comes this stunning announcement, that the school is shutting down. […]
[…] that was the first time I’d been back to yellow spring in 25 years, which is a very, very trippy experience. Oh my god, I just had to get away from people and walk on campus. Its like all these ghosts are talking to me. […] things that I’d just completely forgotten. […] it was just an incredible experience for me to just sit there and regain all these memories, […] And then a month and a half later “No, no, no, we’re going to shut it all down.” […] So that’s one of the things we talked about a lot on the board, and you know, exactly what are the conditions of these buildings, exactly what can we afford to save, what can we not afford to save.