Constructing New Traditions: Gund, Mather, McBride and Beyond

By Anonymous

 

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 schools. “Fortunately this tradition of maturity has fostered at Kenyon a tradition of freedom and a relative feeling of trust and security among the Kenyon Student Body. Unfortunately, recent events seem to ominously signal the death of this tradition at Kenyon.” 

Hobsbawm discusses the importance of “invented tradition” and the way power is upheld by recreating rituals or symbols and establishing continuity with the past. These systems of power legitimize collective behaviors and actions and are essential for maintaining the structures upon which that power relies.

The story told throughout these records of the pre-merger Kenyon campus illustrates the intentional restructuring of physical space that was used to generate a shift in social tradition. This effort for change was met with understandable resistance, and while the landscape of the campus changed, the student body was resistant to relinquishing the social normative order.



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