CO-OP Q&A:

Bob Devine ’67 College Professor, Communications

interviewed by Samantha (Williams) Eckenrode ’83

• I co-oped in New York selling sheets and pillowcases at B. Altmans. I became an expert on thread-counts.
• I was a youth leader at the Rogers Park Jewish Community Center; although the cross-cultural experience requirement wasn’t yet in place in those days, that co-op probably would have been mine. I lived in an Italian neighborhood of Chicago, worked at the Jewish Community Center, and, in the evenings, moonlighted with Delmark records, recording music on location in the clubs on the south side, working shoulder to shoulder with some of the great Chicago Blues artists of the day.
• I co-oped as a normal voluntary control and a youth recreation leader at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I learned how to cope emotionally with working with kids who were dying of cancer and leukemia.
• I returned to NIH for a term to serve as a control for a friend in a study. The study involved eating a metabolic diet that was 80% fat.
• In those days, we had to do a lot more co-ops. I co-oped as Director of a summer day camp in New Jersey where I learned to make programming out of nothing, and I spent a term as an orderly at Metropolitan State in Boston, working with disturbed adolescent boys. I spent two co-op terms with Antioch's Office of Institutional Research and Development (under Sam Baskin), and the Communications Project that first brought video to the College.
• Working with video, and making films with Jewel Graham on the Antioch Program on Interracial Education changed my entire career direction. I became a "videot", a documentarian, a process oriented cybernaut with a deep commitment to social justice.
• My co-ops and community experience at Antioch gave me the skills, the confidence (chutzpah?), and the sense of agency necessary to take on even the most difficult of situations—even when I wasn't entirely sure of what I was doing. I also discovered that the values of community and social justice that I had developed at Antioch ran very deep. To my great surprise, the national Alliance for Community Media presented me with the George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication in 1994 for my work on behalf of urban communities across the country in building citizen-responsive access systems.