Dean Antczak grew up on the west side of Grand Rapids, and graduated from West Catholic in the class of 1970.  He took his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 1974, and his M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1979) from the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Methods at the University of Chicago, working with Wayne Booth and Robert Streeter.  He taught in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California-Berkeley, the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Virginia, and for seventeen years in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Iowa.  In his first year at Grand Valley, he begins his second quarter-century as a teacher-scholar.

Dean Antczak's first book, Thought and Character: the Rhetoric of Democratic Education, won a Phi Beta Kappa Book Award.  He edited Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth, and with Cinda Coggins and Geoffrey Klinger co-edited Professing Rhetoric: Proceedings of the 2000 RSA Conference.   He is the author of a variety of articles and reviews.  At the University of Iowa he served for six years as a department chair, and six years as associate dean for academic programs; he has served the discipline in a variety of ways including as President of the Rhetoric Society of America in 2000 and 2001.

During his time at the University of Virginia, Dean Antczak won the University's Thomas Jefferson teaching award "for best embodying the educational ideals of Thomas Jefferson."  At the University of Iowa, he won the UI's Collegiate Teaching Award, and was the 2002 recipient of the Iowa Communication Association "Citation" award for lifetime contributions to the teaching of communication in the state of Iowa.  In 1998-99 he was chosen by the University of Iowa as a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow.  And in 2004, he was named as one of the first five Fellows of the Rhetoric Society of America, for outstanding accomplishments in teaching, research and service.

Dean Antczak has served as an expert commentator on political rhetoric for MS-NBC, the Washington Post, FOX News, the Atlanta Constitution, Reuters International, Newsday, PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Boston Herald, and NPR's All Things Considered.

In his off hours, Fred is an ardent student of baseball, and golfers at the Meadows and contiguous roads and properties already know him to be remarkably long and even more remarkably inaccurate with pretty much every club, including the putter (he claims an 18 handicap, which seems to us characteristically optimistic).  His wife Deborah Hughes is an attorney, and they live with gentle, sociable, and astonishingly well-behaved Australian Shepherd, Max.