Antioch names new VP for Advancement

Antioch College President Mark Roosevelt today announced that Brian Williams has been hired as the vice president for advancement, effective August 1.

Williams will be responsible for organizing, leading, and aligning the fundraising efforts of the College to best utilize the strengths of the institution’s donors, leaders, and staff in furthering its long-term sustainable fundraising operation. He replaces Reid. W. Crawford, who was appointed interim vice president for advancement in January.

“Brian is the right-fit candidate for this position and we were pleased to find him,” Roosevelt said. “He brings both a strong fundraising and administrative background to Antioch, a vital aspect to this institution. He is a skilled professional with eleven years of executive-level experience in higher education and non-profit administration, six years of teaching experience, and three years of experience in the legal world. He will be an asset to our senior leadership team.”

Williams will be joining the Antioch College staff from The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he has been the vice president of development since May 2006. During his tenure, he managed the museum’s resource development program and helped to generate an annual average of $8.5 million in contributed revenue.

As vice president for advancement at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, a position he held from 2001 to 2006, Williams served as a member of the president’s senior staff, advising the college’s president, other vice presidents, and deans on strategic initiatives, including the strategies through which the college navigated a difficult financial period marked by a small endowment, a high discount rate, and low faculty salaries.

“I bring both a passion for liberal arts education and all that Antioch is working to achieve, as well as a long tenure of successful fundraising and capital campaign management at two nationally significant institutions,” said Williams. “I was attracted to Antioch for a number of reasons. There is no other place in the country that one can go and work on the project that is underway at Antioch—building a new brand of liberal arts college for the 21st century. I have enjoyed meeting the faculty and staff who are doing that work during my visits to campus and am enthusiastic about working with those individuals.”

Early in his career, Williams worked as an attorney at Vedder, Price, Kaufman and Kammholz in Chicago where his focus was labor and employment law. Following that position, he became a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law, until 1997, when he moved on to Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, where he was named director of the Legal Methods Program.

Williams earned an MA in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1994 and graduated cum laude in 1989 with his JD from the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his undergraduate degree in American studies from Knox College in 1986.

“Liberal education is in my DNA,” Williams said, having grown up on the GLCA campus of Wabash College, where his father was professor of religion and then chair of the religion department for nearly 45 years.