Title: Professor Antczak is the former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Office: 249 Lake Huron Hall 

Phone: (616) 331-3244

Fax:

Email:  [email protected]

Faculty member in the English Department

Fred Antczak grew up on the west side of Grand Rapids, and graduated from West Catholic high school in the class of 1970. He took his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 1974, and his MA (1976) and PhD (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 in 2004, he began his second quarter-century as a teacher-scholar.

During his time at the University of Virginia, Fred 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 Outstanding Teaching Award in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1997, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Citation for Outstanding Classroom Practice in 1998. He was the 2002 recipient of the Iowa Communication Association Citation for Lifetime Contributions to the secondary and postsecondary teaching of communication in Iowa.

Fred 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.   In 1998-99 he was chosen by the University of Iowa as a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow. 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. 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 and as its Executive Director 2012-2014. He was named National Endowment of the Humanities Professor in the NEH seminar for college teachers on the American Lyceum in spring 2007.

Fred 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.

Fred was the Founding Dean of the GVSU College of Liberal Arts and Science from 2004-June 30, 2020.  He is now a professor in the English Department.

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.