Education: Kenyon Kickoff

The Ohio landscape is dotted with colleges, big & small (only bigger New York and Pennsylvania have more). Of Ohio’s 44, little Kenyon, in tiny Gambier, is one of the oldest, best-known, and best-looking. Kenyon (chartered in 1824) came into the world when Philander Chase, the horse-riding Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, stood on top of an oak-wooded hill in 1825 and announced to the wilderness: “This will do.”

Last week, in its pleasantly isolated, bucolic little community, Kenyon staged a conference on “The Heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples and Their Responsibility.” Long and lovingly planned by Kenyon’s President Gordon Keith Chalmers, the conference attracted such varied bigwigs as Senator Robert A. Taft, British Socialist Harold Laski, Cambridge University’s Denis Brogan, Poet Robert Frost.

The meeting served as a kickoff for an endowment drive. Goal: $2,160,000—more than Kenyon’s present total endowment—for a new library, new athletic field house, increased faculty salaries (Kenyon has one faculty member for every nine students).

There was more than a British angle to Kenyon’s first money raising effort. Founder Chase’s original $30,000 for Kenyon was, in fact, the gift of a British group including Lords Kenyon and Gambier (Henry Clay, having met and liked Lord Gambier at the Treaty of Ghent negotiations, gave Chase a letter of introduction to him). Because of this backing, and because Kenyon’s first building had walls four feet thick, surrounding frontier settlers suspected the college of being a British fort. Kenyon’s ultimate response was the turning out of such stanch U.S. citizens as Lincoln’s Secretary of War

Edwin M. Stanton and President Rutherford B. Hayes.

Like many another U.S. college, Kenyon was founded as a school for the training of clergymen. Later becoming a liberal arts college, it still maintains relations with the Episcopal Church, but accepts students of all faiths, has a separate theological seminary (Bexley Hall). Until recently the undergraduate body has been limited to 300 (about half of them Ohioans, on the average). This year’s G.I.-swollen enrollment is a record 500, and the college plans to settle down to a postwar 400-odd.

Last week’s 500 conference guests—including the present Baron Kenyon, 28, and his lady—temporarily doubled the town’s population. They found a green and wooded campus with architecture ranging from the massive, crenelated Gothic of Old Kenyon, through degrees of Victorian adornment, to Gothic of the Age of Cram. But Kenyon is careful to keep its 19th Century ivy rustling. It is particularly proud of its young (42) president, who was only 33 when he got the job; of its flying field and its curricular course in practical aeronautics, soon to be resumed after a wartime lapse; of its seven-year-old, widely respected literary quarterly, The Kenyon Review, edited by Poet-Critic John Crowe Ransom, a member of the college faculty.

Unlike Philander Chase’s money-raising drive, President Chalmers’ is not a matter of life or death to the college. Kenyon, like all accredited small colleges, has its immediate future guaranteed by the G.I. Bill of Rights.