Chemistry grant awarded by Booth Ferris Foundation

Kenyon has received a grant of $150,000 in support of its chemistry program from the Booth Ferris Foundation of New York City. The grant was awarded as part of the College's $100-million fundraising effort, "Claiming Our Place: The Campaign for Kenyon."

The College is currently constructing a new $28-million science complex, with buildings for chemistry, mathematics, and physics. The buildings are expected to be completed in the fall of 2000. In addition, the project includes the renovation of two existing facilities, Higley Hall and Samuel Mather Hall, for the departments of biology and psychology as well as the programs in biochemistry, molecular biology, and neuroscience.

The Booth Ferris Foundation, operated by the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, was founded in 1957 under the wills of wife and husband Chancie Ferris Booth and Willis H. Booth. Since that time, the foundation has contributed more than $100 million to organizations for a variety of charitable purposes, including several other grants to Kenyon. The foundation's primary interest is in the field of education, including smaller private colleges, public education initiatives in New York City, theological schools, and independent secondary schools. The College's grant is one of only four awarded to Midwestern institutions of higher education this year.

Contributions and pledges to Kenyon's campaign currently total $76 million. "The support of the Booth Ferris Foundation will help produce future scientists and a scientifically literate population," says President Robert A. Oden Jr. "The completion of the new chemistry building will represent the culmination of a fourteen-year period of change in science education that is unprecedented in Kenyon's one-hundred-seventy-five-year history."

While the College has long been known for its strength in the humanities, Kenyon's science programs have gained increasing recognition and success in the past twenty years. The new facilities are designed to help integrate research with teaching throughout the science curriculum.

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