Eric Utne, social entrepreneur, publisher, teacher and founder of the Utne Reader, will speak at the commencement for Antioch University New England (AUNE) students on Saturday, May 14.
Utne, a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing, where he is co-writing a curriculum called Whole Systems Healing, about the social and environmental aspects of personal and community health and well-being.
Utne continues to write a column for the Utne Reader, which he founded in 1984 and chaired for fifteen years. It was bought by Ogden Communications, publisher of Mother Earth News, in 2006. He also founded the New Age Journal, of which he was publisher from 1974 to 1978.
From 2000 to 2002, Utne was a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at City of Lakes Waldorf School in Minneapolis, which he helped found and develop. He published Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac: Celebrating Nature & Her Rhythms in the City, described by Utne as a “twenty-first-century version of Poor Richard’s Almanac,” in 2005 and 2006.
Utne is a member of the executive committee of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum and co-founder of the Headwaters Fund and the Social Venture Network. He is a member of the boards of advisors for the World Future Council and for Ecotrust. He recently retired from the board of trustees of Sunbridge College, a Waldorf teacher-training college, based in Spring Valley, New York. He has a BED (Environmental Design) from the University of Minnesota.
Utne is widely published and is a frequent speaker on social entrepreneurship, holistic journalism, community-building, and other topics.
AUNE will confer master’s degrees in applied psychology, education, environmental studies and management, and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology and environmental studies at commencement.
