Tag: faculty

IT Continuing Problem for College Community

By Alex Borowicz

As the term exhales its final waking breaths into the snow-filled December air, students scramble to finish final papers and senior projects.  Besides the late nights, slippery walkways, and myriad of distractions, Antioch students face one obstacle that has been plaguing the school for months: feeble internet speed that leaves all community members fighting for their own chunk of cyberspace.

Not 10 years ago, before the heydays of file sharing, Antioch was the proud owner of a T1 connection that brought internet to students, staff, faculty, and administrators.  T1 lines are capable of transmitting at speeds of 1.5 megabytes per second for both uploading and downloading.  These days however, speeds have fallen to merely a fraction of their former rates.  Even with the proliferation of the internet and its increased accessibility, Antioch College has been reduced to around half that speed, suggesting that perhaps the college is now being given only a partial T1 line. Continue reading IT Continuing Problem for College Community

Editorial by Kim-Jenna Jurriaans

“It’s a wild place,” I remember my English teacher in University, an Antioch College alumna from the late 70s, saying when talking about the College back home in the Netherlands. In hindsight she could not have predicted just how right she was.

Sixteen months ago I embarked on a transcontinental journey to a small town in Ohio, hoping to reinvigorate a joy for learning I once had. Little did I know that less than a year later, I would find myself amidst one of the biggest stories in US higher education of the last decade. I had taken a leap of faith and it had changed my path forever.

At times, it is still unreal how this national uprising of alumni and campus community –the Antioch Revival, as it has come to be known — came about and just how massive it is. Online listservs are buzzing at all hours of the day and deep into the night, when alumni, having come home from a long day at work and having put their kids to bed, give up on a good night’s sleep to share their expertise in areas like law, fundraising and communications in one of dozens of online planning discussions (some running 80-posts deep in your Gmail inbox), while a volunteer IT team, made up of alumni professionals from around the country, work graveyard shifts to live-stream audio of campus meetings and build websites, including that of the new College Revival Fund, which in the last 125 days has raised close to $18 million in gifts and pledges to keep Antioch College open. Things are simply going too quickly to pause and realize the magnitude of experiences we’ve undergone in such a short period of time. Yet it somehow feels organic; as so often at Antioch, madness soon became a state of normality.
Continue reading Editorial by Kim-Jenna Jurriaans

They too were once young – Jill Becker – Associate Professor of Dance

Jill Becker – Associate Professor of Dance

Where were you when you and what were you doing at 20?
It was 1969 and I was at State University of New York at Brockport studying as a dance major. I had been inspired to dance since I was about 15 when I saw an Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance, and I was just blown away.

What kind of student were you in college?
I was a great student when I was dancing, and I was dancing a lot. So my dancing grades were great, but when it came to academics I was like a B student.
Continue reading They too were once young – Jill Becker – Associate Professor of Dance

Beloved Former Faculty Member, Elaine Comegys, Passes Away

By Ben Horlacher

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio, Dec. 5 — Elaine Comegys, former Co-op faculty and Associate Dean of Students, passed away in her sleep on the night of Thursday, Nov. 22.
Comegys’ time at Antioch began in the mid 1970s as a member of the Co-op faculty, she then later became the Associate Dean of Faculty. During her tenure at Antioch Comegys’ touched many hearts, in the words of Steven Duffy, “she was a good friend and a great human, you could talk to her about the worst of things and she still could get you to laugh and see the ridiculous things even in the worst moments.”

Continue reading Beloved Former Faculty Member, Elaine Comegys, Passes Away

Time to Move On

While drinking my routine cup of coffee in Emporium yesterday, my eyes lingered for a minute on the bright red flag near the window that reads “Antioch alive!” I remember thinking “Yeah… It is for now. But for how long?”

In spirit, the campus appears pretty dead right now; students and faculty are trying to secure a future at other institutions and alumni throughout the country are once again left without agency. Continue reading Time to Move On