News

The third annual Albion College Film Festival will be held Sunday, February 17, at the Bohm Theatre and student organizers are convinced it will be the biggest, best and most expansive one yet.

Albion College will host “RiverTalk Albion: Connecting the Kalamazoo River Community,” one of two community conversations centered on linking resources, lives and livelihoods to the river, which remains a valuable and vital part of Michigan. It will be held February 13 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Ludington Center.

The February 11 opening of a new primary and express health clinic is the realization of a longtime plan that will benefit both Albion College students and the Albion community at large. Oaklawn Express Care – Albion is the result of a partnership, first announced in summer 2018, between the College and Marshall-based Oaklawn Hospital. Says President Mauri Ditzler: “The new clinic comes at just the right time.”

Dayton, Ohio, native Craig Kirby became interested in public service at Albion College, and that interest has taken him to Washington, D.C., where he has worked for a president, a vice president and senators, as well as rubbed elbows with international figures. Now he has brought his love of helping to the golf course. “I bet on myself and on an idea that I believe in,” he said.

It was a busy media week for Albion College economics and management professor Vicki Baker, who was featured in two online publications that focused on two topics she has studied extensively: the value of a liberal arts education, and the obstacles and opportunities facing mid-career academic professionals.

After postponement due to extremely cold weather January 30, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Convocation and Community Celebration, featuring Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley as guest speaker, has been rescheduled for Tuesday, February 26, at the Bohm Theatre, 201 S. Superior St. The event will begin at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Chemistry professor Lisa Lewis is using a yearlong grant from the National Sciene Foundation to work on an initiative that will create new policy, resources and infrastructure to help U.S. institutions discover, manufacture and deploy advanced materials twice as fast. “It’s going to change how we do science,” she said.

In deciding to attend Albion College, Sarah Kilbreath, ’20, assumed she would give up her dream of working in media production. But thanks to The Philadelphia Center, Kilbreath spent the fall semester on shoot sets, in editing rooms and drinking a lot of 5 a.m. coffee, getting valuable experience in a field she hopes will become a career.

Evan Rieth, ’19, grew up on a 60-acre farm in Three Oaks, Mich., and has been transfixed by the idea of farming as a career ever since. Now he’s using the liberal arts skills he’s learned at Albion to become a farmer that can succeed in 21st-century America.

Albion College psychology professor emeritus John Philip Hostetler passed away December 15 in Albion, at the age of 86. An Indiana native who received his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees from Purdue University, Hostetler moved north in 1964 to spend his 35-year teaching career at Albion College.