Knox in the News

By Allen Guelzo in the National Review:

On the day in 1858 that Abraham Lincoln squared off against Stephen A. Douglas in the fifth of their great debates across Illinois, the candidates spoke from behind platforms that had been hastily cobbled together and moved to the east side of Knox College’s “Old Main,” in Galesburg. Because of a quirk in the height of the platforms, the candidates were helped onto them through a seven-foot-high window in “Old Main,” leading Lincoln (who’d never had more than a year’s worth of formal schooling) to wisecrack, “At last I’ve gone through college.”

The joke concealed the real mortification Lincoln felt as a 49-year-old lawyer facing the influx of a new generation of college-educated competitors from back east. “Ah, that is what I have always regretted,” Lincoln told New York Herald reporter Stephen Fiske in 1861, “the want of a college education.”

From the Beta Theta Pi Magazine, Luke Karner describes his summer work with Wediko, a camp for young people struggling with serious behavioral and emotional problems.

From WGIL radio:

Knox College presented Carol Craig Friday with one of four alumni achievement awards as part of its week-long Founders Day celebration. Craig owns a technology firm based in Florida that has gone from just one employee less than ten years ago, to 170 now. And that’s to say nothing of the fact she was the first woman aviator in her naval squadron, and has won engineering accolades.

Craig admits she wasn’t sure what kind of an impact her going to Knox College would have on her at first. “I’m not sure when I realized how broad of an education I was receiving at Knox,” Craig. “Although, pretty soon, I started to get an idea of how my education might be a little different, when I got comments from people saying ‘You’re not like most engineers.’ You try to figure out if that’s a compliment or not. But I think it turned out to be a compliment. My experience in how I view the world was much broader.”

From WGIL radio:

Many Knox College graduates like to come back to Galesburg and to campus often — in fact, it’s pretty much encouraged. But one hadn’t been back on campus at all for 37 years — before Friday.

You may not be able to blame Charles Kartman, though. He spent 26 years with the State Department as a special envoy, deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and other titles, dealing in large part with East Asian issues, including North Korea.

Kartman received an Alumni Achievement Award at Knox College Friday — and says several Knox professors caused him to work in a part of the world for 30 years that he otherwise wouldn’t have given much thought to. “I was just a kid from the South Side of Chicago, with no known skills, but possessing some small store of intellectual fuel, waiting to be ignited…by the late Howie Wilson…along with Steve Bailey, Harlan Goudy, and their colleagues.”

From WGIL radio:

A Knox College alum who has taught business leaders around the world and is now dean of a business school says he couldn’t do any of that had he gone somewhere other than Knox College for school.

P. Christopher Earley was one of four to receive an Alumni Achievement Award Friday as part of Founders Day activities at Knox College. Earley has taught business in California, Arizona, Singapore, Hong Kong, and others — but is currently the Dean of the University of Connecticut School of Business.

But Earley, like the three others who also received Alumni Achievement Awards Friday, says without Knox, none of that would be possible. “I think if there’s anything I got from my education here, it wasn’t just a desire and a passion for global issues — and I’ve spent most of my life as an ex-pat outside the U.S.,” Earley said. “I’ve lived in a dozen different countries, three different continents. That passion began because of what I was exposed to here at Knox.”

From the Chicago Tribune:

Douglas Wilson, co-director of the renowned Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, said the museum “isn’t for scholars.” But he accepts its shortcomings because it comes with an astonishing research library that is “a fantastic resource for studying Lincoln.”

“As long as they built a new, big, state-of-the-art library for us to work with,” Burlingame said, chuckling, “they can do anything they want to the museum.”

In December, Lincoln fans lamented the state’s closing of the Vandalia Statehouse and Lincoln Log Cabin near Charleston, two important sites. The same month, the presidential library and museum lost the chance to acquire a collection of Lincoln documents and artifacts valued at $20 million.

David Blanchette, spokesman for the $150 million presidential library and museum, acknowledged the loss to an Indianapolis consortium. But he noted that the library already has more than 12 million Lincoln items, and that almost 2 million people have visited the library and museum since their April 2005 opening.