Excerpt from the Peoria Journal Star:
Knox College wrestler Jaran Rutledge is the top-ranked heavyweight in NCAA Division III in the National Wrestling Coaches Association preseason poll.
Rutledge last season became Knox’s first wrestling all-American when he placed third in the Division III national tournament. He posted a 36-5 record.
A senior from Carmel High School in Mundelein, Rutledge’s national tournament appearance was the first by a Knox wrestler in 27 years. In 1980, Tom MacMillan reached nationals for the second year in a row.
The Knox College choir and Nova Singers team up for their first joint concert.
Excerpt from the Register-Mail:
The Nova Singers concert this weekend is one of firsts.
It’s the first concert of the 20-member professional ensemble’s 22nd season.
It will be the first time the professional singing group has performed a full concert with another choir, in this case with the 62-member Knox College choir.
It also will be the first time Laura Lane, award-winning conductor of Nova Singers and the Knox College choir, has attempted to put on a program of complex, double-choir, eight-part music…..
According to Lane, double-choir music is rarely composed and rarely performed, due to technical demands.
But she’s had her eye on some double-choir compositions for several years and decided her Knox choir was up for the challenge this year.
Recent Knox grad is taking the ROWVA High School band to new heights during his first year on the job.
Excerpt from the Register Mail story:
The 45-member group, now under the direction of Justin Haynes, took extra steps early this fall to ensure better performances and more dedication from its members.
The band talked about goals at the beginning of the season. They didn’t want another fiasco like the “Amazing Collapse of 2006,” they said, where the entire band “fell apart” at a competition in Washington. The goals include: to have fun, win at least one award at competition, memorize music by the first football game, have two-thirds of the field show learned by the first football game, show continued improvement and show discipline and hard work at all times.
Haynes said the group met all of its goals while performing a Monkees-themed field show this year.
The students attribute a lot of their success to their new director, the seventh band instructor at ROWVA in 15 years.
“Last year, there was no pride in what we did,” said Doug Rylander, a senior trumpet player. “At the end of last year I wasn’t excited about band.”
Band members knew right away that Haynes was going to push them much harder this year. The band practiced six hours a day for the two weeks of band camp, then twice a week for three hours for the two weeks before school started. After school began the band practiced from 7 to 8:15 a.m. and again during its 90-minute class period.
“It’s a huge time commitment,” Haynes said. “They work really hard, but every day we had a blast.”
Matthew Andersson is one of 15 semi-finalists in the nation-wide competition of first novelists.
Excerpt from the Register-Mail:
Knox College student Matthew Andersson has been selected as a semi-finalist for the 2007 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.
Andersson submitted the first 50 pages of his novel, “Troy Goes Greek,” to the nation-wide competition, administered by the Master’s Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University of Pennsylvania.
“For the final round of the competition, I was asked to submit a second section of the novel, pages 51 through 100,” Andersson said.
Andersson is one of 15 semi-finalists in the contest, which typically draws more than 600 entries. Results are expected to be announced in late fall.
Lincoln Scholar Rod Davis describes the Lincoln-Douglas Debates to students at Iowa Wesleyan College.
Excerpt from the Mount Pleasant News:
When Abraham Lincoln set out to challenge then-Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-Ill.) in the election of 1858, he had his work cut out for him. Douglas was the most prominent Democratic politician in the country, and Lincoln had trouble simply getting the public’s attention.
He first tried following Douglas across Illinois, making campaign stops in towns the Senator had just visited in order to rebut his speeches. This approach didn’t earn Lincoln much respect, however, and drew ridicule from state Democrats.
“They said if he really wanted an audience, he ought to follow one of the several circuses that were traveling through Illinois at the time,” Dr. Rodney Davis recounted.
For about an hour Wednesday night, Davis told a group of about 30 at Iowa Wesleyan College the story of a very different kind of campaign, which culminated in a series of seven debates that changed American history.
Knox is listed among schools with gender-neutral restrooms on campus.
Excerpt from the Chicago Tribune:
This fall, the single-stall bathrooms on American University’s campus are getting a name change. In the next month and a half, signs that once designated the toilet for men or women will be replaced with the more general term “restroom.”
The change is more than cosmetic. It’s part of a movement on university campuses that recognizes that not everyone fits neatly under the labels of male and female, and that some students or staff may feel uncomfortable using a men’s or women’s restroom. To accommodate them, an increasing number of colleges and universities are designating bathrooms as gender-neutral……
More schools switching
According to a GenderPAC survey conducted in 2007, 141 schools have established gender-neutral restrooms. Illinois schools that have such facilities include the University of Chicago, which has had them since at least 2004, Knox College and the University of Illinois, according to GenderPAC.
