The original e-mail was an interesting read and thought others should read it. The formatting may be missing some paragraphs and I'm to blame since I copied and pasted everything. The original is from the Alumni-chat.

I want to start by thanking my colleagues for selecting me for this honor, although a mere thank you feels so inadequate. When I was here four years ago for my campus interview, and it was just about to the day, I parted from Marianne Whelchel as she headed off to hear Jill Yeager deliver that year’s faculty lecture. I was excited to be considered for a job at the college, knowing that it celebrated its faculty each year with this kind of wonderful recognition. On my very first day of work at the faculty retreat, Anne Filemyr and Hassan Rachmanian each gave a presentation on curriculum, and without having consulted with each other, they both did so using fruit metaphors. I had frankly given curriculum design little thought up to that point, and could never have put the issues in terms of grapes or cherry pie or anything else. In fact, I still don’t think I could do much better than a boring old flow chart model. In any case, I went home that night and told Jane that I was working with the most creative and amazing group of people I had ever met. I immediately realized I had so much to learn – I hoped I was up to the challenge.

Every single day since then has provided me with stimulating and new ways to think about ideas and issues. It is an unbelievably dynamic environment to work in and I am indebted to my colleagues for that. There is a second set of faculty – I would call them the super faculty – who have been role models and support systems for me in countless ways. I am referring to the emeriti faculty. Irwin, Marianne, Victor, Harold, Al, Connie, Bob, Barbara, Elaine, and Jewel in particular have given me vital assistance and walked me through some challenging times inside and outside the classroom. They are the gems of the college and we are so very fortunate to have their wise counsel to tap into. I know I have been deeply marked by their generosity and wisdom. To the extent that I am a better teacher, scholar, or community member more generally, I can thank them in large part.

I also want to express my very deep gratitude to the Dean of Faculty’s office and the executive office staff for their ongoing support. For the many challenges Antioch faces, I have always walked into that office and found someone ready and able to help me – I particularly want to thank Kathy Carr and Andrzej Bloch. I know that this evening’s event came together because of Kathy Carr. Kathy, Anna, Nancy, and Sharon are the glue that holds this institution together, and their unwavering generosity of time, and their consistent professionalism remind me of the ways I want to be as a colleague.

Finally, I want to thank the students at Antioch. No matter what is happening on campus or beyond, when I walk in the classroom, I have the best part of my day. I am continuously inspired and challenged. There is a wonderful energy that comes from our classroom dynamics. The rigor and commitment our students pursue their studies with is often fantastic. My reading of texts, my writing, my analysis of the world is better and deeper because of the classroom conversations that take place on a daily basis. And so, I thank the students from the bottom of my heart. When I was first elected to give this lecture back in early September, I was daunted by the idea of having something meaningful to say to this community. I am still early in my life education, especially as a professor. I thought to myself, what in the world do you say to the most interesting, committed, creative and intelligent people you have ever met? And when I thought about it that way, the answer was easy – I tell them the ways not only that I have continuously learned from them, but even more, how much they have to say about the problems the world faces. And so in this lecture tonight, I will reflect on a few of the ways that the Antioch College community has informed my own thinking and how it does or could contribute to the public discourse regarding some of the grave challenges of our time. Unfortunately the challenges I will talk about don’t begin to exhaust the list, but I feel they are significant nonetheless. They are 1) the tremendous inequality in wealth distribution, 2) the entrenchment of and enchantment with militarism in the United States, and 3) the fundamental interconnectedness of environmental issues and social justice. The Herndon Gallery and this exhibit on human rights is a perfect reminder of how Antioch keeps these issues in front of our eyes constantly. For those of you who haven’t had an opportunity to look at Tom Block’s portraits of courageous people who have been tortured or killed for their commitments to social justice, I urge you to do so.

Economic Inequality

I want to first discuss the persistent and pervasive problem of economic inequality and how the education one receives at Antioch positions us to not only critically analyze the roots and mechanisms of its proliferation, but also equips us to weigh in as public intellectuals and activists. We can help shift the debates globally and domestically in ways that can illuminate the true nature of the maldistribution of wealth and point to alternative paths forward.

For the past 30 years, we have existed in a world dominated by a conservative discourse regarding global capitalism. Not only has the discourse supported this growth, the U.S. political system actively facilitated the dramatic resurgence and expansion of unregulated corporate dominance. Neo-liberalism promised to reduce poverty not just within the United States, but across the world. To that end, large corporations were given free reign, and international institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank compelled countries in the global south to adopt their oppressive structural adjustment agendas. The minimal regulatory state was largely dismantled, and capital was encouraged to flow in all directions. In large sections of society, that message was greeted with enthusiasm. Americans were encouraged to buy with literally reckless abandon as access to credit became irresponsibly easy.

While conservatives pushed neo-liberalism, Antioch faculty, students and alumni have continued to critically analyze and challenge it. One very simple example was an enlightening discussion we had in class one day recently about a corporate message found in newspaper fliers and on the trucks shipping merchandise for Target, a national big box chain. The company’s simple slogan “Expect More, Pay Less,” encapsulates this new global order. Americans are told that they deserve more than anyone else and they should get it for less money. The presumption of American dominance is effectively reinforced at the same time that the wheels of consumer capitalism are greased.

Over the past few decades, while much of America embraced these opportunities to buy more and pay less for it, Antioch has remained a place where uncomplicated messages of capitalist celebration have not taken hold. Humanities, Social Science and Arts faculty and students regularly discuss the failure of neo-liberalism to produce the poverty alleviation it promised. Collectively we help illuminate the injustices in the capitalist system that it denies exist. In the Humanities, namely literature, philosophy, and history courses, we expose the origins and manifestations of power and we also study struggles to resist it. Jean Gregorek’s courses on the British Empire and post-colonial literature introduce students to ways that people have responded and are still responding to problems of injustice that they face. Third world theorists have effectively used film and literature to spread messages about global oppression and resistance to it. Our students are frequently exposed to these ideas, are urged to not only read them, but also to think about ways to apply them in their daily lives. Isabella Winkler’s philosophy and women’s studies courses give students the tools to deconstruct master narratives to see how identities are created and recreated to both positive and negative effect. The tools she provides students with in the classroom are employed in community here and in work experiences when students do co-op jobs. In my history courses, we study contradictions in the system. For example African Americans are particularly positioned to see the inequalities in capitalism. They have in the past and continue to experience the realities of racism even though the free market system insists that it is fair. Historically, U.S. wealth was built by people both in forced bondage and later in dangerous and exploitative factories on land violently seized from its indigenous inhabitants. The U.S. has achieved economic greatness, but our students know the real costs of that wealth, and they begin to understand who has paid the greatest price. In political science and economics courses taught by Hassan Nejad and Janice Kinghorn, students are made aware that when Americans pay less, it is because someone else somewhere in the world has not been paid a fair wage. Our students are urged to understand the interconnectedness of global poverty and American wealth, as well as the hierarchies of wealth and poverty within the United States. No one circulated that message more prominently and effectively than our own professor of media studies, Anne Bohlen in her award winning documentaries “The Global Assembly Line” and “With Babies and Banners.” Anne and others on the faculty including management professors Hassan Rachmanian, Cathy LaPalombara, and the director of the Antioch Education Abroad, Women’s Studies in Europe Program, Iveta Jusová, encourage students to critically analyze economic inequalities and politics globally, but they demand that we also attend to the ways that gender, race, and ethnicity intersect with class issues. Chris Smith’s, Kim Barton’s, and Beverly Rodgers courses in psychology, sociology and anthropology provide students with critical tools to evaluate individuals and their relationships to social systems, especially in the U.S. They teach our students to see how power operates on multiple vectors simultaneously within and outside of the United States. These aren’t tools that lay fallow here at Antioch. Our students utilize them continuously in their conversations with each other and in their reflections on the world. They are developing habits of mind and dispositions of engagement that leave with them every time they head off campus, and especially when they graduate. Our very active and impressive alumni are evidence of what I am saying.

There are huge cultural obstacles and there is intentional obfuscation that makes the workings of economic power nearly invisible to the untutored eye. A number of people on this faculty regularly monitor and call attention to the myth-making machinery. Chris Hill, Scott Warren and Bob Devine offer courses that not only expose the complicity of the state in creating economic inequalities, but they model for students how to deconstruct the discourses in the media that support the myths. I would note that Chris Hill’s and Jean Gregorek’s work on prisons and the growth of the prison industrial complex is an excellent case in point. I don’t know how many of you had an opportunity to see the prison art exhibit that the Herndon sponsored a few years ago. Chris and Jean gave presentations as part of that program that significantly changed the way I think about race, gender, capitalism, crime and punishment. Our unemployment numbers look much better to the public when we warehouse the “unemployables” we as a society have failed to provide decent educations and decent opportunities for. Louise Smith through theater, Dennie Eagleson through photography, and David LaPalombara through painting encourage students to study and create art that urges a counter narrative, that forces us beneath the smooth and seductive surfaces that capitalism needs in order to function easily. Art at Antioch is a public discourse of social criticism and activism.

The same critical perspective is encouraged when our students go on co-ops in Chicago, in rural West Virginia, in western Kenya, and in northern Brazil. Lessons that are taught in the classroom have immediate application in the work place. While students are learning valuable skills and new ideas in the work place, they also reflect on power dynamics, on who has which opportunities to advance and who does not, on how decisions get made and resources get allocated. Our co-operative education faculty like Tom Haugsby and Susan Eklund-Leen seek out opportunities for our students to employ the critical frameworks of analysis they are developing about economics, gender, race and national identity. Not only do students apply the ideas they learn in the classroom at their jobs, but also when they return to campus, their work place education informs their classroom studies. As a result, our students are well equipped to resist the tantalizing messages and cheap goods that corporate suppliers lure the mass of consumers with. But even more than that, they are positioned to become effective advocates for a more just world in whatever workplace or community groups they are a part of.

In the post Cold War period since the early 1990s, we have been encouraged to believe that there are no alternatives to free market, global capitalism. However, there is growing evidence that people around the world ARE trying to find alternatives. Two ways they have sought to challenge U.S. economic hegemony are through a resurgence of leftist structural arguments and governments to go with them, and through fundamentalism, especially religious fundamentalism.

In nation after nation in South America, people are turning away from neo-liberalism and are looking for a political and economic system of distribution that more adequately meets their needs and that more fairly distributes wealth. A number of countries have elected leaders that have explicitly challenged neo-liberal globalization and American dominance. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, hailed from the Workers Party. He has taken a cautious stance regarding free trade agreements and endeavored to reduce huge inequalities domestically. Evo Morales is the President of Bolivia. He is the first indigenous head of state and the leader of the Movement for Socialism Party. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet, the first female president in that country, was also a survivor of Pinochet’s Villa Grimaldi secret detention center. She is a left-of-center politician trying to bring greater economic justice to her people. And finally, we are all familiar with Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who has aggressively, and I might add controversially, targeted the U.S. for its position as the global economic and cultural hegemon.

People across Latin America are trying to resist capitalism’s global dominance and they are looking for new solutions. There are few people in the United States with a platform to engage the debates that are emanating from South America. But because of Antioch’s history and its commitment to critical analyses, especially of the economy, our students and our faculty are positioned to move forward, to illuminate the ways that neo-liberalism has failed to bring equality and greater justice globally. We can and must help broaden the boundaries of the public discourse on capitalism.

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In pockets of the United States and across the world, people are also challenging messages about economic inequalities with ideological arguments grounded in religious fundamentalism. These are vital critiques that we have to find better ways to engage. While some of our courses and programs do this, especially Hassan Nejad’s, Jim Keen’s and Pat Mische’s, and our AEA Buddhist studies programs in Japan and India led by Brian Victoria and Robert Pryor, we need to have more substantive conversations about religions and further critical study of the roots of fundamentalisms and their current manifestations. Religious organizations have historically followed quickly with the bible after the sword has done its work. When I did refugee work during the Balkans conflict in Kosovo in 1999, I saw this first hand. Missionaries are everywhere offering “help” for the promise of a soul. Antioch has a different mission. From time to time, our faculty and alumni have been involved in conflict situations. But we do not just “help” and presume we have the answers. We understand the importance of listening to people – to letting them define their needs for themselves. We have an unusual kind of exchange to offer. It is imperative that as religious conservatives, who have a lot of money and well-oiled machines, offer pathways to challenge economic injustices, that alternatives such as those our education can provide are also part of the conversation. Antioch can point the way forward in discussions about economic inequalities. While it may sometimes feel impossible that things can change, history has taught us that it doesn’t have to be. For one thing, Antioch is still here despite the relative minority perspectives it supports. The faculty are role models; they haven’t given up. Moreover, we have designed courses and a stimulating curriculum that resists the atomization of specific disciplines. We have not only a strong commitment to illuminating the interconnections of politics, economics, history, art and culture, of theory and practice, but we have intentionally designed our education to continuously reinforce those relationships for our students. In addition, we have a new center for cultural and intellectual freedom, the Coretta Scott King Center, which we are proud to have directed by Dana Patterson. As we were reminded just last week during the inauguration, Coretta Scott King was a tireless activist in her own right for political freedom and for human rights. Workers, racially oppressed people, women, gays and lesbians, and peace activists found a vocal advocate in Mrs. King. We have not just the opportunity, but also the obligation to carry her work forward. What I want to tell you tonight is that we also have the talent and commitment. Finally, when the struggles against economic injustices seem overwhelming, I would also remind you of the wealth of knowledge, experience, and commitment we have in our alumni. They haven’t given up. Instead, they have found myriad ways to live their commitments to economic justice.

Militarism

I turn now to a brief discussion of the entrenchment of and enchantment with militarism in the United States. Since October 2001, almost six years now, the United States has been engaged in war, first in Afghanistan and then also in Iraq. I would remind you too that our guns had not been silent long because in 1999 we led a NATO mission in Kosovo, and before that in Bosnia. In addition, the nation has been saber rattling with Iran, gave material and moral support to Israel’s war with Lebanon, established new military bases in Central Asia, and sold allies countless billions of dollars worth of military equipment. The United States has also undermined the effectiveness of the United Nations, one of the only spaces where nations can come together to engage in dialogue before they pick up guns and roll tanks, or fly drones and drop bombs. While peace activists and politicians appropriately condemn any movement by other states to acquire nuclear weapons, the United States remains the only country in the world to have used them, and we dropped those bombs on civilians. A full accounting of that decision has never been taken in this country, and the lessons too many people take from it are very disconcerting. With the onset of World War II, the United States economy became overly dependent on the expansion and maintenance of our military and the militaries of our allies. Although former U.S. President General Eisenhower warned the nation about the centrality of the military industrial complex to our society, little has changed in over sixty years. National conversations and debates about U.S. military actions and the nation’s dependence on militarism more generally have been terrifyingly narrow, especially given the lives and infrastructure that are at risk of destruction, and the high opportunity costs of pursuing war instead of peace. From January through March 2003, a million plus Americans took to the streets protesting the march to war. But nearly 300 million more gave ascent through their silence and through their articulations of support. We are just now at a moment where the mainstream of American society and the U.S. Congress itself are urging a departure from Iraq. According to the national discourse, we are “losing” in Iraq because too many U.S. soldiers are being killed and so the solution is to leave.

Yet in conversations at Antioch, in Pat Mische’s and Jim Keen’s peace studies classes, or in Hassan Nejad’s political science and international law classes for example, students are taught to analyze why the situation requires a much more complex response. This war is currently being discussed in terms of winning and losing. It is often compared to the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, the mainstream argument went, it was right to engage because the nation feared the spread of communism, but ultimately it was not a “good” war because the U.S. “lost” – the cost in U.S. lives became too high to bear. Today, most people don’t talk about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have had their lives and livelihoods destroyed or have been killed. They say nothing about the nearly half a million that died during the embargos of the 1990s, when U.S. military planes patrolled Iraqi skies and routinely dropped bombs. In addition, journalists, pundits and politicians are silent about the infrastructure that has been destroyed, as well as the sea of oil that lies underneath the ground.

Faculty at Antioch and Yellow Springs community members give us tools to evaluate not just the current manifestations of the conflict, but the history and packaging of the war as well. We are indebted to the Interfaith Council and the Unitarians of Yellow Springs for hosting urgent dialogues about war. Gordon Chapman has generously shared his experiences with us, as a speaker in my classes, and in the panel on torture that Jean Gregorek and Jim Malarkey organized in October. He discussed the broad contours of his early work in the CIA and his determined effort to pursue a different life course. In Scott Warren’s philosophy courses, in my history courses, and Bob Devine’s media studies courses students are encouraged to analyze how and why military conflicts came to pass and how they have been effectively maintained. When the war is framed in terms of simplistic beginnings and endings, winning and losing like this, the central causes and potential alternative paths forward remain obscured. Discussions about nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism, the CIA’s covert activities, proxy wars and unholy alliances, and support of authoritarian regimes, are vital elements to scrutinize in order to comprehend the big picture. Beverly Rodgers’ and Jean’s courses regularly challenge students to dig deeper, to illuminate the workings of power and oppression.

There are a few points of light in the national and international debates, yet Antioch and the Yellow Springs community more generally have been consistent in their condemnation of the war and the causes of war more broadly. Jill Becker’s dance interpretations of the conflict in which she explored the gendered affects of the war on Iraqi women, David LaPalombara’s encouragement of students to create broadsides that challenge complacency about war, and music professor James Johnston’s coordination of Apple Hill’s music program for peace on campus, are just a couple of the insightful and necessary responses that Antioch generates. Iveta and Isabella, Hassan Rachmanian, and Chris Hill, all demand that any analysis of social, economic or cultural practices, of contestations over power, include an exposition of the interconnections of race and gender as well. We have been living in a period of heightened, and I might suggest, hyper masculinity. No moment demonstrated that more than when the president of the United States landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit to announce, “mission accomplished.” Rhetoric like “we want ‘em dead or alive” and “you’re either with us or against us” intentionally created narrow boundaries within which to debate U.S. responses to the horrifying attacks of September 11. They became, by sleight of hand, the first of many rationales for war in Iraq. They remain the generally accepted justification for human rights abuses and violations of international law in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons and Bagram Air Force Base. I would remind us as well that the U.S. is a signatory to the international laws that our current government has violated. To the extent that public conversations grapple with the implications of the conflation of U.S. military might with masculinity or with economic predominance, we have succeeded in bringing a important elements to the debates. When there is silence on these dynamics, we know that we have more work to do. Antioch students who travel to points around the globe on co-ops set up by Eric Miller, who study languages with Ivan Dihoff, Jocelyn Hardman, and Haruna Tomaru and who pursue the AEA programs Europe in Transition, Mali, and the Buddhist Studies programs, encounter people and cultures affected by U.S. militarism and who often hold different values than mainstream Americans promulgate. Through ongoing dialogues and experiences in these different places, our students gain perspectives that benefit themselves and those of us on campus with whom they share their new knowledge. Praxis in action.

We understand that the vital elements in the debates about the war in Iraq are not about whether to remain, or remain for a year, or two years, or leave now. We dig deeper. Historical contexts, thorough political and cultural analyses, comprehensive exposés of economic motivations are what the Antioch and Yellow Springs community have to offer to the national discussions. Colette Palamar and the Herndon Gallery committee wanted to remind us about what is immoral, what is a violation of international law, what is terribly wrong about losing site of human rights in our national debates. Again, I encourage you to spend time contemplating the artwork and biographies that line these walls. The way forward requires that we discuss the war and U.S. militarism in terms beyond that of U.S. body counts and U.S. losses. There is a broader conversation that urgently needs to happen. U.S. culpability should be weighed. This nation engaged in a pre-emptive war of aggression and destroyed the infrastructure and livelihood of millions of people. It may have committed war crimes. Yes, Congress just voted last week to bring the troops home. Americans are increasingly saying that the war in Iraq is a mistake. And I would agree, the war was and is a mistake but not because we are “losing.” What we don’t hear being discussed, but I and many of us here would argue absolutely should be, is that war and militarism are a deeply troubling way to live in the world, especially when one lives in the midst of a global giant.

Again we can find hope and role models in our alumni like Steve Schwerner and Eleanor Holmes Norton, or the thousands of Antiochians who have taken up the challenge to bring about a different and more just world. Here on campus our conversations go on in our classrooms all the time. Now we can sponsor much more comprehensive debates in the Coretta Scott King Center. We have the forums, we have the talent, and we have the commitment. We must get busy. I don’t pretend to have the answers. I don’t know what “winning” was supposed to look like, but I do know that the entire debate needs to be changed.

Environmental Issues and Social Justice

The third area I want to briefly reflect on is the fundamental interconnectedness of environmental issues and social justice. For years debates have waged as to whether or not global warming exists or is a problem. Those who denied its existence or saw efforts to address it as too burdensome on the economy, succeeded in blocking the United State’s support of the Kyoto Treaty. Even this internationally supported incomplete solution could not curry national favor.

At long last, however, those who argue in the affirmative, that in fact there have been dramatic and frightening fluctuations in the earth’s climate have finally convinced the majority of Americans that we need to put our moral authority and economic weight behind this problem. We owe Al Gore and his film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” no small measure of appreciation for helping advance the discussion about environmental degradation. Politicians and business leaders are talking seriously about “doing something” to help save the environment. It has become the new political vogue. But we know that the shift is not just about polar bears drowning. Businesses are finally finding ways to make environmental management profitable. To the extent that the world may stay whole a little longer, we can be thankful.

But as with the public discussions about economic inequalities and U.S. militarism, the national discourse around environmental concerns has remained troublingly limited. The discussion needs to be framed in terms not just of the environment but of social justice as well, both within the United States and internationally. And Antioch is already doing that. Not only do students develop the knowledge and skill sets to evaluate and measure environmental change in our science and math classes led by Kab Butimina, C.T. Chen, Eli Nettles, Chuck Taylor, and Brenda Moore. But nature is their classroom as Tom Ayersman so eloquently noted the other day. He, Peter Townsend, Colette and David Kammler demonstrate knowledge in action in our regions natural settings like our very own Glen and on nearby prairies. Our students learn both a respect for and sense of wonder about the world around them and beyond from Bill Whitsell, a physics and astronomy professor here. Bill I hope you and your wife will take this in the spirit it was meant with – but I’d love to spend the night lying on the grass looking at the stars with you. You have a fantastic curiosity about the world and everything in it. Jill Yager, a biologist, has been a great model of living a life committed to integrating theory and practice, as she teaches students and her colleagues to integrate the natural world into our everyday lives. Co-op professor Kathy Sheltens helps students find co-ops that facilitate their potential to apply their science and math classroom-based learning in work places. And AEA professor Suzanne Kolb, who heads our environmental studies program in Brazil, creates opportunities for students to see the global impacts of environmental change and further apply classroom learning in new situations. Praxis in action.

Our students’ classroom skills find immediate and numerous opportunities for application. At the same time, they bring a different lens to the problems they encounter because at Antioch we are schooled to look at the interconnectedness of the environment and social justice – to think about not just what is happening to nature, but who is experiencing the changes most acutely and why. One cannot study climate change without thinking about how racism, gender bias and class discrimination are interwoven into the fabric of these problems, which Chris Smith reminds students in her classroom regularly. In addition, under Bonner Program leader Ona Harshaw, our students have worked in economically disadvantaged communities that are suffering from problems particularly connected to environmental degradation and social injustices. After their trip to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our students presented a comprehensive reflection on the ways racism, class discrimination and environmental problems played out. The destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina foreshadows the impacts of global warming and who pays the price, and who gets left behind.

Moreover, our arts faculty has been innovative in their collaborations with our science professors, and they have found powerful ways to make manifest the very critical connections of human rights and environmental issues. Photography professor Dennie Eagleson and poetry professor Ben Grossberg have worked together to teach students to document these problems with a sensitive but well trained eye. Louise Smith, Chris Garcia, Nevin Mercede, and David LaPolombara are art makers and simultaneously thoughtful social critics. Anne Bohlen, Chris Hill, and Pat Mische in their most recent work have each been looking at the natural world and been critically illuminating the ways that its transformations have affected not just the other millions of species that we co-habit the earth with, but the ways that these changes are affecting people in Dayton, Ohio, in Central Europe, and in East Timor. These are urgent environmental problems, but they are also human rights problems. To the extent that we don’t talk about this, the world will increasingly face devastating conflicts and human generated tragedies.

Our faculty and our alumni have been keeping this part of the debates alive in the worlds in which we work. I suggest that we need to find even more ways to insert our perspectives into national and international debates.

I want to say a few closing words about community. Antioch is a very special place. The generosity of spirit and the passion with which people live their lives here is distinct among the many places, the progressive communities, I have lived in. We are inspired to live fully and live healthfully. I never close an email from Judy Kintner that I don’t say, yes, Judy’s right, “If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live.” Judy, in her many roles on campus and in the community, is so giving of spirit and I thank her for the many ways she supports us all. We have also faced some daunting personal challenges together. We’ve lost fathers and mothers, sisters, brothers, daughters and friends in only the few years I have been here. We have supported each other and mourned together. When someone is in need, people move with lightening speed to lend a hand.

I am continuously moved by the caring and love that people here so often share with each other. At the same time, there’s a singularly special place on this campus that I want to mention for just one minute and that is the library. It is the physical and emotional embodiment of community. We lost a fine man and a true institution when we lost Joe Cali in February. We have all been marked by his life in so many ways. But despite his loss, the library and its wonderful staff, especially Nina, Scott, Duffy, Ritch, Sandy, Debra, and Sue have carried forward the mission and the vision of the college as a dynamic and welcoming place to come and learn, share, and reflect on life’s little and big challenges. We are lucky to have them all. Together we live fully and we feel deeply. Tonight I wanted to take a few minutes to remind us that perhaps we should find more ways to celebrate each other and what we have to give to the world. Thank you.

Julie Gallagher
Assistant Professor of History
Antioch College
April 4, 2007