Friday, July 21, 2006

Welcome to our new visitors!

If you’re visiting this site after receiving our letter, thank you for stopping by! In the coming months, we’ll post updates and new information of note here about this fall’s reunion on Oct. 7, the formation of an alumni association for former Collegian staffers and the paper in general.

If you’d like to take the online version of our survey on your interests and vision for this group, please click here or at the link at right. After the survey, you can click to return to this site.

We also have an online version of the letter you received here.

At right, you can find our mission statement, contact information and board of directors. If you would like to get in touch with us, please feel free to leave a comment on this site, e-mail us at collegian.alumni.association@gmail.com or write us at Collegian Alumni; P.O. Box 707; Gambier, OH 43022.

Feel free to look around the site, and we hope you have a good day and stay in touch!

-- Collegian Alumni Interim Board of Directors

A retrospective

The spring issue of the Kenyon Alumni Bulletin has several nice pieces about the Collegian’s anniversary, journalism and our upcoming reunion.

A large article recognizes the paper’s sesquicentennial, featuring comments and memories from several alumni. At the bottom of that story are links to several sidebars, including one on the reunion.

In the issue’s editorial, Dan Laskin looks back at his time as a copy editor and reporter. (A personal aside from this post's writer: This is a fine read but, as a copy editor, I must take exception to a certain reference therein. Specifically: "Eventually, I escaped to reporting." As nearly any rimmer could say, one does not escape to reporting. One escapes to the copy desk. And yes, responses are welcome. We're a group welcoming to all, even reporters...)

And in the closing column, Columbus Dispatch writer Molly Willow shows how a Collegian columnist’s background led to work as a small-paper reporter -- and taught lessons such as one many former Collegian reporters might have learned during a Gambier Vilage Council meeting: "Issues that seem trivial can stoke the hottest passions."

Many thanks to the Alumni Bulletin staff for all the hard work!

Monday, July 17, 2006

Some changes

The letter and survey that were previously linked from this site have been changed, and we feel we should explain the reasoning behind this:

After extensive discussions among the members of our board and with Kenyon College, we've decided to change our vision for the structure of the alumni association. Initially, we had intended to organize ourselves as an independent non-profit organization, dedicated to supporting the Collegian and its work. Our main interest in doing this was to provide a source of support autonomous from Kenyon, in order to ensure that the Collegian, while remaining a student organization affiliated with Kenyon, could always continue to report on the College aggressively and impartially.

We also always sought to be friends with the College. And, from talking with Kenyon ahead of this fall's reunion, we learned that it could make the job of the College's alumni coordinators a bit harder if we were to organize independently. For instance, it would be harder for the College to keep in touch with alumni if leaders there didn't know about the timing of our communications.

Therefore, we have decided to instead organize as an affiliated alumni association with Kenyon College, operating under its oversight but still maintaining our own board. The guidelines for being an affiliated alumni association can be found here.

Again, we made this change only after careful and extensive consideration. In reviewing the aforementioned guidelines, we didn't feel that any of those bylaws required us to sacrifice our mission of fostering fellowship among alumni, connecting with current student journalists and supporting the ongoing work of the newspaper. We received assurances from the College that it has no intention of seeking to control or limit the aggressive reporting or independent editorial judgment of the paper. And, to ensure the importance of this in our own mission, we have amended the last part of our mission statement to state our desire "to support the ongoing work and impartial journalism of the newspaper." Most importantly, we feel that this relationship between the College and our group can be beneficial to all parties, especially in our early years.

Accordingly, a new letter announcing our organization is now here. A new survey is now here and at the link at right.