That's TMI: Time, Memory, and Interpretation

When I entered the Special Collections room, I had no idea where to start or what to do. We were given large files of several notable Kenyon alumni, and it was overwhelming. Without a clear understanding of the responsibilities we were tasked with, we each selected a different file without giving reason or pause as to who we selected. For one reason or another, Junzo Shono’s name caught my eye. I had never heard of the man, but after taking a class on Japanese Literature last fall, I was curious as to who he was and his involvement with the College. Junzo Shono, an acclaimed Japanese writer, first came to Gambier in 1957, where he spent a year in the College capturing and describing the mundane moments of everyday life (Creel, 2022). He would eventually publish these memories in the form of a novel titled “Gambia Taizaiki” (Sojourn in Gambier. He was born in Osaka, Japan on February 9th, 1921, and studied at Osaka University of Foreign Languages for four years, and later studied at Kyu...

  Attached above is a screenshot of “The Kenyon College Campus Guide”, which is a near-comprehensive list of buildings that have belonged to the College and Village of Gambier since 1824. Although my group is curating something about the future of the Hill, our first meeting mainly involved discussions of its past. To this end, we tried to develop a picture of what the Hill physically looked like in the past 100 years by reviewing photographs of buildings, construction plans, and the Campus Guide, which you can see above. If you were to review the entire guide, you’d see that under the name of every building is a description of when it was built, what it was used (or being used) for, and when (if) it was destroyed. In the context of this week’s reading, these descriptions call the terms “communities of memory” and “communities of hope” to mind. According to Bellah et al. (1985, 2011), a “community of memory…tell[s]...stories of shared suffering” and orients us towards “future co...

  This week's focus was on the pre-merger period of Coordinate College and the period leading up to the integration with Kenyon College in 1969. A vast effort was made to reconstruct the college to best prepare for a new era of education and a new student population. This included multiple projects including the construction of Gund Commons, Mather, and McBride dorms, which cost over 2.3 million dollars at the time. These spaces were built to create new spaces for the female student body that would be “more feminine” and more welcoming, while also intentionally keeping the residences of the female and male students separate and not coeducational. What was most striking to me looking through the Kenyon Reveille editions from the seventies was the shift in social structure that also took place. For example, the editorial from the 1974 Reveille discusses the decrease of social traditions of respect and an increase of unrest and public struggle occurring during the merger of the s...

  When my groupmates and I met up for our appointment at the Special Collections and Archives reading room, I had no idea what to expect really. I knew that we would be spending time digging through old documents, letters, lists, etc, but I didn't expect for my perception of Kenyon to change so drastically. I found my discussion with my groupmates about the things we found from old Collegian articles to be fascinating, as we are tasked with curating what is "important" with "Kenyon in the World" in these past 100 years. We spent most of our time looking at old lists and articles about how wars impacted Kenyon. Even though I do not know any of these people from 20th-century Kenyon, the articles and letters that I did read resonated strongly because they were perspectives from Kenyon students. One of the most impactful materials I came across was the edition of the Kenyon Collegian from May 19, 1970, which talked about Kenyon's response to the Kent State shoot...

The artifact I spent most of the group’s time diving into pertained to the Old Kenyon Fire on February 27th, 1949. The artifacts included police investigation notes as well as a scrapbook/yearbook detailing the fire with pictures and newspaper clippings. The pictures were of the fire in all stages, it included photos collected from students, of all sides of the building, showing the height of the fire. As well as pictures of the extinguished building, and demolition for safety reasons. Newspaper articles ranged from days after the fire to months after the fire. As time went on throughout the article the casualties grew. The first article stated one person died and just over two dozen were wounded, but as the articles went on, it highlighted two missing students and two additional dead. The police investigations of the students were each brief, many students reported rushing fellow students out of the building, as well as jumping from the building, unable to reach the fire ladders. Stor...

  During our time with archives and special collections this week, my group examined the boxes that were selected for us, documenting Keyon’s response to WW2, Vietnam, The Kent State Shooting, and other significant tragic historical events. We sorted through, articles, letters, photographs, and other artifacts, allowing us to gain new insights on how Kenyon has been viewed by the greater world. It was interesting to grapple with the fact that although I view Kenyon as a particularly small community, one that is unique to me and my life, it also has a lot of historical significance to the greater world. I was amazed to find articles from significant outside news sources, delighted by the fact that Kenyon was deemed important enough to be cited. All this being said, I think I can speak for my entire group when I say that far more interesting to us were the archive articles from the Kenyon Collegian. We were charmed by the personal accounts of events insignificant enough as a new di...

     Kenyon takes clear pride in its "Writer's College" status, using it as a status symbol and a tool for collectivity. All the students who go here, and all who've gone here, share this collective identity of the institution. It's an intense and (kinda) forced grouping; even non-writers engage with this reputation. Digging into the archives shows this on full display. Our group's exhibit focuses on notable people, and our hour spent in the archives was very writer-centric. I focused on Carl Djerassi, whom a document from the archives described as an "Orator, chemist, professor, editor, world traveler." Most strikingly, the archives contained many of Djerassi's college essays. I read works about prostitution, chemical bonds, religion, and more. His miscellaneous essay topics are a reflection of the college's liberal arts status, and Djerassi went on to write multiple plays, staging two of them at Kenyon. It floored me to be able to read his ...

This past week my group spent most of our time in the archives looking over old Collegian articles. Our group is working on the exhibit box titled "Kenyon in the World," so we focused a lot on Kenyon's reaction to major world events and Kenyon's public persona. One of my favorite things that we found was a Collegian article about the intro that was written by a professor for Kenyon's time on the General Electric College Bowl. Since it was written in 1963, this article really stuck out to me because it seems to fully represent Kenyon 60 years ago. It's important to understand because this short introduction includes everything that Kenyon hoped to show to the world while on this competition show, which gave us insight into how Kenyon was advertising itself to people. One of my favorite parts of the intro was all of the thing mentioned that still exist at Kenyon today. It discussed all of our collegiate sports and intramural sports and also brought up the Ke...

My group is working on the "The Hill and the Next 200 years".  At first it seems to be an ambigious realm of archives, but very interesting nontheless. Before we transition into future plans of kenyon, we are looking at the past 100 years as a baseline of what got us to the present. There are two articfacts that my group and I focused on this week. Both of them coming from the Kenyon Collegian. The first was the article from when Old Kenyon burned down. It was a scary artifact, and one that still saddens the college. On Febuary 27th, 1949, an irate fire advanced through the halls of Old Kenyon. It left 9 students dead and many terrified. This event is a scary one, but it is a part of our history. Old K is one of the most iconic buildings on campus and it had to be rebuilt. The other artifact that sparked my groups interest was the article from 2005, on the Peirce "Master plan". This article described talks of a Peirce renovation, which had not occured in the previou...

During my time with Liv and Julián with the Archives and Special Collections this past Tuesday, we individually and quietly sorted through each of the boxes holding archives of different notable Kenyon alumni and professors. Most of the artifacts we had come across were old documents, letters, photos and photo negatives, books, and other forms of writing. Though we all kept to ourselves as we leafed through the objects, every couple of minutes or so we would present something we found to our other group mates that sparked particular interest. For example, Julián was fascinated by an old Kenyon Alumni magazine discussing Josh Radnor’s involvement on campus, and this led us down a rabbit hole discussing the movie Liberal Arts that he directed on campus. A woman working in the archives even began to chime in filling us in on secrets about the movie and filming process. I personally spent a lot of my time sifting through Robert Lowell’s archives, and many of the artifacts I found made me ...

  When my group walked into the archives and special collections room, we whispered to each other about how we were unsure about what to expect. I imagined we would be looking through a few grainy images and newspapers, but upon first glance at the boxes of artifacts, I was pleasantly surprised that we would have so much material to work with. The first box that I looked at was full of information on the addition of the women's coordinate college to Kenyon in 1967. The news releases, building plans, images, and financial statements provided an inside look into how Kenyon developed to account for a new population of students on campus; however, the most striking things that I looked at were the opinion pieces in the Collegian and the Reveille that showcased how members of the Kenyon community felt about the introduction of women on campus. While the official statements released by the college were all positive and optimistic about the community welcoming new female students, it seem...

    February 25th, 2024      Our group has started researching the archive collections about Kenyon student life one hundred years ago. I found various documents and photographs in the file boxes at the archive collection that documented the activities and clubs that happened during that period. The set of film photograph collections recorded the student parties and scenes and collected various documents and photographs for different activities and clubs, which I believe is a valuable source for reviewing the old student life. We also delved into the file boxes within the archives and searched through the documents including WKCO’s history events and posters, The Chasers’ past members, and Greek students’ lives reported by Kenyon Collegian. I gained a unique feeling from viewing those documents as I sensed a familiarity and connection with them even though we are from different generations. The feeling became stronger as I went through the Kenyon Collegian repor...

This week, my group began our process of sifting through Kenyon’s archival collection of student life over the past one hundred years. Immediately, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artifacts, stuffed into multiple large boxes, all of which were practically overflowing. Each box had a label, and among them were “Dances,” “Greek Life,” and “The Chasers,” to name a few, but the box that caught my attention was simply labeled, “Student Life.” Upon opening the box, I discovered countless laminated sleeves in which negatives (undeveloped photographs) were enclosed. The images were hard to discern, but luckily, the photos had been digitized, and I was eager to look at them. Later that afternoon, when I was spending time with a close friend, she and I decided to scroll through the series of pictures. Although we were not alive or at Kenyon in the 1980s– the decade during which we estimated the photos were taken based on the fashion and hairstyles– we found ourselves feeling nostalgic f...