Knox in the News

From the Register-Mail:

He’s a 6-foot something Knox College sophomore with a goofy grin who plays soccer, is in a fraternity and is 20 years old. If there’s one thing you wouldn’t expect Oliver Horton to do, it’s probably tap dance. But tap dance he does.

“I got started because I saw Billy Elliot,” Horton said. “I bugged my mom for like three years about getting lessons.”

He started tapping at age 12, and was taught by a former Broadway star. From there, his love for tapping bloomed.

“I saw every performance I could involving tap dancing after that,” he said. These days, Horton practices on his own and performs with a Knox College band, sometimes providing the band’s percussion by playing off a drummer’s beats.

“Starting the tap band was sweet,” he said. “I’d never tapped with instruments before.”

Knox has a big dance scene — the Terpsichore Dance Collective, or TERP for short, draws huge crowds to its show every term — but there are few other tap dancers on campus. In Galesburg, however, there is a lot of interest in tap.

From Miller-McCune:

As the United States gears up for midyear elections, getting involved in a campaign might not only be a great opportunity to participate in democracy — it might make you feel better.

Two psychologists — Malte Klar, a practicing psychologist in Germany, and Tim Kasser, professor at Knox College — have found a clear link between political activism and a person’s sense of well-being, and have shown that even a very small engagement with political activism can boost one’s sense of vitality.

“Activists live a happier and more fulfilling life than the average person,” said Klar, who studied with Kasser for a year.

From the Wall Street Journal:

1. Honor’s Voice. By Douglas L. Wilson, Knopf, 1998

2. The Young Eagle. By Kenneth J. Winkle, Taylor, 2001

3. Lincoln’s Melancholy. By Joshua Wolf Shenk, Houghton Mifflin, 2005

4. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly. By Jennifer Fleischner, Broadway, 2003

5. Herndon’s Lincoln. By William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, University of Illinois, 2006

From the New York Times:

Do you like to share awe-inspiring articles with your friends, like the many Times readers whose habits are analyzed in a new study? Or do you have other motives?

In my Findings column, I describe a new analysis of The Times list of most-e-mailed articles by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. Dr. Berger, who has previously studied trends in naming children and the the spread of information on the Web, told me that the Times’ most e-mailed list provided a rare opportunity to observe the “virality” of different types of information.

Previous researchers have analyzed which nodes on social networks seem especially important in spreading, and there have been small-scale studies (like this 2002 study by researchers at Knox College) asking people what kinds of gossip they would pass. But The Times’ list offered a real-time look at which stories on the Web home page were being shared by thousands of people with their friends. The researchers controlled for factors like how long the article was promoted on the home page and exactly where on the page it appeared.

From the Register-Mail:

A group led by Galesburg High School graduates Chanda Wade and Shanell Lightfoot met with school officials Thursday to discuss proposals to improve the graduation rate of black students.

Spurred on by The Register-Mail’s late-December series “Graduation in Black & White,” Lightfoot and Wade prepared an 18-page report detailing suggestions to help reverse the trend of declining graduation rates among black students. The two-part series documented a nearly 30 percentage point drop in the graduation rate for black students over the past seven years, putting the district’s rate below comparable schools and the state average. The series looked at causes and sought solutions for reversing the trend.

“Our overall purpose was, I guess, to try and rally the community to realize high school dropouts are everyone’s problem,” Lightfoot said. “We know from statistics that the vast majority of high school dropouts nationwide end up staying in the community where they dropped out of school.

“And we know from statistics that a significant number of dropouts (students who don’t graduate) are more likely to be a burden on taxpayers — in terms of health care, employment and incarceration rates. What we want to say to the Galesburg community is that the dropout rate really is a shared problem. It effects all of us and we should try to work together toward some kind of solution.”

Wade is a 2006 GHS graduate who is a senior at Knox College. She was profiled in The Register-Mail’s series. Lightfoot graduated from Galesburg in 2001 and recently started her own business, DormStyled, in St. Louis. They were joined by Knox College students Jordan Lanfair, Christina Aquino and Maurice McDavid, as well as community member Addi Williams. They met with GHS Principal Tom Chiles, Assistant Principal Brett Wolfe, teacher Jean Ann Glasnovich and Knox County Regional Office of Education Truancy Director Lorenzo Pugh.

In their report, Wade and Lightfoot suggested a dropout prevention and graduation improvement team comprised of community members dedicated to “rallying the community to end the dropout crisis, understanding the dimensions of the dropout challenge in your region, develop an effective plan to combat high dropout rates and prepare youth for advanced learning in and after high school and building strong partnerships to make lasting change happen.”

From WGIL radio:

An Illinois Congressman says he hopes students at Knox College will heed his call to take another look at public service when they graduate.

Sixth District Republican Peter Roskam came to Galesburg Friday, where he spoke to an introductory Political Science course at Knox along with a class on politics and religion. Both Roskam’s parents graduated from the school.

Roskam tells WGIL he encouraged the students to consider public service, despite what they otherwise see and hear about public service and political life, and draws a parallel to two certain famous former visitors of the school.

“Don’t be deceived by cynicism about public life,” Roskam said. “Ultimately, you look at the sort of declarations that Abraham Lincoln was making, even though he lost that election of 1958. Stephen Douglas made a mistake in some ways by agreeing to those debates from a political perspective. But ultimately, that was a great service to our country, wasn’t it?”