Excerpt from Jaunted.com:
President Bush is doing double duty this weekend at the US Air Force Academy and Furman University in Georgia, and tiny Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois continued its tradition of getting high-wattage speakers by snagging Madeline Albright. (Both Bill Clinton and Stephen Colbert have spoken there in recent years.)
In the May 19, 2008 edition of Forbes magazine, the editors rank colleges and universities based on student evaluations, graduation rates, the percent of students winning prestigious awards, and vocational success after college.
Excerpt from Forbes:
The biggest surprises come in our list of liberal arts colleges. Wabash doesn’t make the top 50 on U.S. News’ list but ranks tenth with CCAP because of the awards its students won and its showing in Who’s Who. Several other schools not high on the U.S. News list, including Whitman, Washington & Lee, Barnard and the U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point), are in our top 10. A number of excellent smaller liberal arts colleges do poorly on the U.S. News list but fare very well on the CCAP list, including Reed (twelfth) and Knox (sixteenth). Like other consumers, students want satisfaction and results, which is what CCAP measures.
Sable Sanders, a Gates Millennium Scholar, plans to attend Knox this fall.
Excerpt from the Chicago Defender:
The Gates Millennium Scholars program, established in 1999, was initially funded by a $1 billion grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Carlos Adrian, research analyst for the Gates Millenium Scholarship program, more than 13,000 students applied this year, and only 1,000 were accepted.
“It’s an honor and it’s a blessing. To know that we don’t have to go to college worrying about how we’re going to pay for the next semester or how we’re going to pay for books is an honor and a privilege,” said Peterson, who is headed to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall. Sanders will go to Knox College, in downstate Galesburg. As the two look to their futures, they also speak fondly of how they got to where they are now.
“Me and her, we have a big history, we call ourselves twins. Freshman year we came in and we were ranked No. 10 in our class, then we both moved up to No. 6, and then went to No. 3,” Peterson remembered. “Yeah, we stayed together,” Sanders laughed. “Well, she left me one year for a minute. She went up to No. 2, and then she came back to No. 3,” Peterson said with a chuckle.
The two–both National Honor Society members–went from academic competitors to friends, volunteering after school at the Museum of Science and Industry, and swapping life stories and advice. And the two have something else in common: they are the first in their immediate families to attend college.
Excerpt from the Adirondack Daily Enterprise:
Painted sky blue and white, a spacious room on the second floor of the Pendragon Theatre, tucked up under a sloping ceiling, overflows with piles of multi-colored fabrics and scattered assortments of hats, shoes, feather boas, scarves, cloaks, dresses, pants and shirts.
This place is to Kent Streed what a palette is to a painter. For, from this extraordinary collection of many-hued odds and ends, Kent, a skillful artist, designs and produces his elaborate creations.
These fabrications take the form of period costumes mostly made for the Pendragon’s performers, though sometimes created for other area theatrical productions as well.
Kent’s cheerful space, lit by two south-facing windows and four dropped ceiling lights, is equipped with a large 5-by7- foot cutting table, four sewing machines, multiple tissue paper patterns in boxes on the floor, on the counters and pinned to the walls, four mannequins, ironing boards, racks, counters and shelves.
The floor, covered with brightly colored scraps of fabric, cast off by Kent as he continually moves from one task to another, resembles a sunny wildflower garden in full bloom.
In this behind-the-scenes workshop, Kent puts in 12-hour days, using his knowledge and imagination to create costumes that lend credibility to the stage characters. Hired as Pendragon’s fulltime designer, he, along with everyone except the volunteer ushers, receives a paycheck. It is a professional theatre, and putting on quality performances is costly. Kent is not sure people always understand this.
Excerpt from the Register-Mail:
It is almost always entertaining to watch dancers move together in the same space on a stage, but the choreographers featured in “Journeys” have added another level of emotional depth to their pieces.
The main stage dance production at Knox College this spring, “Journeys” incorporates the work of Knox faculty, students and a professional dance company into the show, which will be performed at 7:30 p.m. tonight through Saturday in Harbach Theatre in Ford Center for the Fine Arts at the college.
“I feel like this show in particular is very emotional,” said Megan Hall, a Knox senior and a choreographer for the show. “The dances have real solid ideas behind them.”
Hall’s choreography was inspired by several different relationships she has had over the past few years, including those with her best friends and her mother. Each of the four dancers has her own character: one who is always dependent on others, an angst-ridden teenager, a manipulator and a nurturer. A version of the dance was performed earlier this year, and Hall said some audience members were brought to tears.
Excerpt from Harper’s Magazine, May, 2008 (from an essay by Marilynne Robinson)
One of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was held on the lawn of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, one of the oldest and most important of the abolitionist schools. Thousands of people stood in the open air to hear a very lengthy, unamplified debate. Lincoln’s own few months of education might not have been unusual in that crowd. But no one now would dare speak to any crowd as substantively and respectfully as he spoke to them, and no one now would expect the patient attention they gave to Douglas and to him. Lincoln was well prepared by his own history to know that intelligence, eloquence, intuition, and sensitivity could emerge despite obstacles, and that they could be quietly present where no one might expect them.
We have not learned what we should have learned from the best experiments in democracy that have taken place among us. If I had not gone from Western Massachusetts to Iowa, and if I had not been struck by the anomalous presence of what might be New England schools surrounded by what might be New England villages, and if I had not wondered why these colleges should be the oldest things on the landscape and why there should be so many of them, I would never have learned that aspirations for American democracy had once been so generous and at the same time so high. I would not have known because it is not a story we tell ourselves. We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believed it must depress the level of culture and of public life.
