Yet again and again during the campaign, donors stepped up. Thousands combined to give $110 million to endowed scholarship funds. Invested with the College’s endowment, their payout will provide between $4 and $5 million for scholarships annually, forever. This has helped the College nearly double the amount of budgeted financial aid since the campaign began, with nearly $66 million for 2024-25 representing a full third of the operating budget. Including gifts to the Kenyon Fund and other annual funds, this academic year Kenyon was able to provide some form of scholarship or financial aid to 85 percent of all students.

These are students like Bader-Gregory, who thinks of Kenyon as a second home. The kind of students we want at Kenyon.

Learning beyond the classroom

Kenyon was also the top choice for L.J. Dusthimer ’19, who grew up in nearby Danville, Ohio. “I was lucky to receive a large amount of financial aid, which made the decision for me to come to Kenyon possible,” she said.

Once on campus, although she thought she might pursue political science, the classes she selected naturally pointed her toward international studies. “I grew up in a small town, so for me, learning about global political systems, economic and cultural — it was all new. It was appealing to learn about different perspectives. International studies is so interdisciplinary: history, political science, sociology, economics. It felt like a holistic take on the world,” she said.

“I also was lucky to have a number of friendships with international students and in some ways, it felt like I was always in the classroom, because I could always talk to them about what I was studying.”

The summer before her senior year she had the opportunity to study intensive Arabic at Qalam wa Lawh Institute in Rabat, Morocco, thanks to funding from the Andrew Driscoll Pochter ’15 Memorial International Studies Fund, created by Pochter’s parents. “The opportunity I got to study abroad definitely helped me decide on the career path I was interested in. Without the financial help, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Morocco or improve my Arabic,” she said.

After graduation, she won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Malaysia, although that was interrupted by the pandemic. She went on to receive the Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of State, and administered by Howard University. In January, she’ll begin her career with the Foreign Service.

Like Dusthimer, today’s Kenyon students are encouraged to put words to ideas and put those ideas into practice. Funding for such high-impact experiences, or experiential learning, was a campaign priority; donors combined to give nearly $30 million to make them attainable for more students.

This past summer, students received campaign-funded support for internships with regional theaters and a Hollywood-based management and production firm (Harlene Marley Endowed Fund for Internships); graphic design sales and a journal of religion and public life (P. F. Kluge Collegian Fund for student journalists); a medical school doing data analysis (DKE Fraternity Internships Fund); a youth development center (Goode Internship Fund for the Career Development Office) and more.

The opportunity to study abroad definitely helped me decide on the career path I was interested in. Without the financial help, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Morocco or improve my Arabic.

L.J. Dusthimer ’19, who is entering the Foreign Service

Many students also took advantage of professional opportunities on campus this summer. Nearly 150 Kenyon students — including more than 100 Summer Scholars — conducted research or pursued other work with faculty and staff. Last summer, Jeremy Roberts ’26, from Richmond, Indiana, was one of those students. He also receives the Decatur Scholarship and is a STEM Scholar, which comes with a four-year financial aid package as well as a book and supply allowance, both of which made attending Kenyon possible for the son of a retired small business owner and public school teacher. “There were some really scary financial constraints,” he said. “I was really so grateful and I wouldn’t have gone to Kenyon if it wasn’t for that (aid).”

As a Summer Scholar, Roberts worked with Ruth Heindel of the environmental studies
faculty and two other students to study glacial dust samples Heindel brought back from the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica’s Victoria Land. (Pause one second on how cool that is.) The group traveled to The Ohio State University twice a week to use a scanning electron microscope, giving the students invaluable research lab experience.

Heindel is the inaugural Dorothy and Thomas Jegla Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, one of 10 positions endowed by donors during the campaign: two with The Gund, two with the Kenyon Review, one head coach and five faculty (see list below). In creating these endowments, donors ensure the position will be funded in perpetuity, which in turn relieves pressure on the operating budget.

Last January, Roberts and his roommate entered the housing lottery and scored a coveted double room in newly renovated Bexley Hall — a project made possible in part by donor funding. “It was the greatest thing ever. No words can describe how amazing it was,” Roberts said. “We moved in on a snowy night and it felt magical.”

Enhancing the campus

In September 2017, President Decatur and then-Board of Trustees Chair Brackett B. Denniston III ’69 announced that Kenyon had received the largest gift in its history: $75 million from an anonymous donor. The gift largely funded the West Quad and inspired other donors to join in that capital investment and set the pace for forward progress. The quad replaced confused, conjoined Olin and Chalmers Libraries, created a new home for admissions in Lowell House and grouped faculty in the social sciences together in Oden Hall. It also allowed for a campus first: an underground parking garage that alleviates car clutter above ground and makes for a cozier commute around the quad in winter.

The new Chalmers Library, which opened in 2021, also made possible the relocation and centralization of student resources including academic advising, student accessibility and support services, career development, the writing center and registrar. In addition to sporting dozens of reservable study rooms and quiet nooks throughout, its lower levels house Kenyon’s collection with room to grow.

The West Quad was designed by renowned architect Graham Gund ’63 H’81, whom architecture critic Paul Goldberger P’04 H’05 calls “in effect, Kenyon’s official architect” as the designer of Storer Hall, the 1999 addition to Rosse Hall, and every major addition since. With the new library, Gund had a chance to correct crowding along Middle Path caused by the close placement of Olin, which Goldberger called “one of the most dysfunctional and ill-suited buildings Kenyon has ever built.”

Chalmers, he wrote, is “like most of Gund’s work at Kenyon, an attempt to straddle both modern and traditional styles … the library’s design both relates to the older stone academic buildings along Middle Path and, with a large, glass-enclosed central atrium, brings a crisp, bright energy to the center of campus.”

“I like working in a context — having buildings that are new but also relate to the historic buildings,” Gund told Matt Winkler ’77 H’00 P’13 in “Place and Purpose: Kenyon at 200.”

In September, it was announced that one of the new South Campus residence halls would be named for Winkler, a longtime former trustee and one of the College’s most generous donors, along with Emeritus Trustee Richard L. Thomas ’53 H’72 P’81. Thomas Hall opens to students in January; Winkler Hall will open in fall 2025.

Such care for context is a central reason that Kenyon’s campus has been able to evolve with the times while preserving the past. The revitalization of the village core — including the Bookstore in Farr Hall, the addition of new retail spaces and apartments and the relocation of the Village Market to the corner of Chase Avenue and Brooklyn Street — was a substantial overhaul, but it still feels the same.

Likewise, Chalmers Library and Thomas and Winkler residence halls, whose stone comes from the same local geologic formation of sandstone that has been used recently on the Peirce Hall addition and Gund Gallery.

Additional care was paid to Bexley Hall’s masonry to faithfully restore the building with period-correct stone and architectural details, preserving its Gothic exterior while updating the interior to contemporary standards for residential spaces.

All of these new or renovated buildings were included in the College’s 2014 master plan or reflected in the priorities identified in a student housing study in the fall of 2020. Their construction could not have happened without significant donor investment. So while air conditioning in every building and replacement of the New Apartments are important, those and many other updates will need to wait until funding is available — and that funding will most likely require significant philanthropic investment.

The Kenyon campus, the place that is Kenyon, exists as a living demonstration of the lesson that the College itself exists to teach: we learn from the past not to be caught within it, not to be limited by it, but to be inspired by it to help us make a richer, more meaningful present. At Kenyon, not only does East meet the Midwest. The past meets present, and they are the better for it.

Paul Goldberger P’04 H’05, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and Kenyon
emeritus trustee, in “Place and Purpose: Kenyon at 200”

Annual funds gifts make a daily difference

Ethan Parks ’24, from Fort Worth, Texas, was to a rural high school and was a National Merit Finalist who majored in French while taking classes in environmental studies, computer science, Russian and English. After graduating in May, he started a program through the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, while also teaching French at a small private school in Massachusetts.

“The scholarships I received were the number one reason I attended Kenyon,” he said, recalling that he was overjoyed at the news. “It really felt like I was plucked, very luckily, almost like a lottery of students from my high school who got to leave the state.”

Parks came to Kenyon before his first year as a Kenyon Educational Enrichment Program
(KEEP) Scholar, helping him acclimate to college life and meet a cohort of first-gen and underrepresented students like him. He went on to serve as president of the affinity group FiGLi (First-Generation Low-Income Student Organization). “Kenyon is just doing an amazing job supporting these students.” he said.

I’m really, really proud that I went to an institution that puts that care into making sure their students come from literally everywhere.

Ethan Parks ’24, KEEP Scholar

Parks’ significant scholarship support came not from endowed funds but from the College’s operating budget. Such financial aid is directly supported by giving to the College’s annual funds, including the Kenyon Fund and Kenyon Parents Fund — those emails, letters and postcards that come from the College several times a year. Gifts to the annual funds were another campaign priority, supported by senior class gifts, reunion giving and giving challenges (Kenyon Together, 43022 Day, Bicentennial Spirit Week, etc.), combining to inspire donors to give a cumulative $46,768,722 to annual operating budgets. Many alumni — and students — made their first gifts to Kenyon during the campaign, beginning a philanthropic relationship with the College that will be necessary for a third century of academic excellence.

. . . To the Bicentennial 

At the campaign’s end, every region of Kenyon’s campus has been transformed or rejuvenated through philanthropy, which also will grow the endowment by $138,761,361.

This is incredible.

It is also, by necessity, only the beginning.

For Kenyon to enroll the most talented students regardless of finances in an increasingly competitive higher education landscape, it must be able to offer more aid — both need- and merit-based.

President Julie Kornfeld, who began as Kenyon’s 20th president in October 2023, is a vocal advocate for the liberal arts with aspirations to continue the powerful progress of the campaign. “A Kenyon education teaches students how to gather and synthesize information and consider it critically; it also trains them to examine all sides of a question, seek out different views and understand context. We need more of these thinkers tackling the world’s greatest challenges, particularly at this moment in the world,” she said.

“I am profoundly grateful to the more than 22,000 people who responded to the priorities of the campaign and see clearly this value of a Kenyon education. I am further gratified that the Kenyon community understands that diverse voices and experiences enrich us all and that to truly live our values we must continue to ensure that access to a Kenyon education is a priority. Kenyon and our community are better for it.”

And so, as the College wraps up celebrating 200 years throughout 2024, we marvel at what was made possible by the combined generosity of so many: 22,886 people giving $532 million to build momentum for Kenyon’s third century. The path, still, leads forward.