Kenyon in the News

Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions and financial aid, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on December 23 in a story offering advice on how to submit a successful application. The story noted that applications have become all too slick, smacking of parental interference. "We keep looking for authenticity and genuineness, for kids who are their true selves," Delahunty said.

Writer-in-Residence P.F. Kluge drew media attention thanks to the success of his novel Gone Tomorrow.

The book was included on a list of "best books of the year" by the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, on December 14. "Anyone who has set foot in Gambier will instantly recognize ‘a small college on a hill in central Ohio' as Kenyon College, where the author teaches creative writing and sets his beguiling story." A review in the Plain Dealer was published on December 27 and said Kluge "vibrates like a tuning fork to the foibles of academe."

Gone Tomorrow was included on a "best books" list announced by National Public Radio on December 11. Kluge, NPR said, "alternates between humor and poetic examinations of the academic pursuit, along the way touching on the basic elements of love, commitment to career, and friendship." An excerpt from the novel was posted on www.npr.org.

A review published on December 3 in the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Kluge has dozens of gorgeous, wrenching passages, details, throw-away observations. He can really write, like a man who means it."

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, on November 22, published an interview with Kluge. "I have a long engagement with this place," Kluge said of Kenyon. "I have written of it fondly, and critically. There have been some highly charged moments along the way. Hard things have been said. But I have always believed ... that this hilltop in Knox County, Ohio, is a good place for a writer to be."

Interim Provost Howard Sacks has been central to the national discussion on the importance of local foods to liberal arts colleges.

A December 20 story published by the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, focused on local foods served by colleges and mentioned the Food for Thought program and its sustainability initiatives. Sacks said student interest in food has helped fuel interest. "It's sort of a perfect storm for promoting local foods," he said.

Sacks was quoted on the subject in a story published November 21 in the Daily Record of Wooster, Ohio. "What we're doing here at Kenyon is unlike anything that anybody in the nation is doing," he said.

A column by Sacks on the role local foods play at a liberal arts college was published on November 21 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sacks wrote, in part, "Liberal-arts colleges, dedicated as they are to holistic education, appreciate the inextricable link between healthy agriculture and healthy communities-and the necessity of putting ‘culture' back in ‘agriculture.'"

A sold-out public lecture by Ben Schumacher, professor of physics, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, drew coverage by the Record of Kitchener, Ontario, on December 8. The story focused on the influence of science fiction on science. "Plenty of really interesting research has been motivated by science fictiony ideas," said Schumacher, who was described as "an American theoretical physicist who has dabbled in science fiction writing." He added, "Physicists think about the impossible in order to help understand the real world."

An account of an interview with novelist E.L. Doctorow '52 was published on November 14 in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times. Doctorow did a reading at the Clearwater Main Library. He was asked about being at Kenyon while Paul Newman '49

was here. Doctorow said Newman "was a great comic actor at Kenyon and after he left I began to get some decent parts. He was quite the rogue at school." Doctorow, the story said, "radiates old-school formality." Asked why he sometimes revisits characters in subsequent novels, he said, "You do things to keep yourself amused."

Lewis Hyde, Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing and the author of The Gift, was featured in the November 16 edition of the New York Times Magazine. The story examined Hyde's iconic status as a creative thinker who has grappled with the concept of "the public life of the imagination." Some of the finest fiction writers "routinely use words like ‘transformative' and ‘life-altering' to describe his books, which they've been known to pass hand to hand like spiritual texts or samizdat manifestoes," the story said. Hyde told the magazine, "One thing I've always liked to read is the kind of literature you find in Jung and Freud, which combines personal anecdote, philosophy, mythology, dreams. I like the way it jumps from one discursive realm to another."

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