If Kenyon doesn’t Tell You, Student Organizations Will: A Full History

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This past week in the archives, we were able to hone in our group's topic: Identity and inclusion. Progressing from files to boxes of materials from different organizations, we leafed through posters, documents, photos, etc. from groups like Adelante, AAPI, Hilel, BSU, and more. On Monday we found paperwork from 1989 recording the officiation of Adelante. The group thought it important to save this orange piece of paper and they were right. The document had signatures of potential members of the group as well as context to what the group would be. The document had ot yet been signed by the dean of students, but we know now that this would become the case. On wednesday we graduated to archival boxes where Andreas and I looked through the Black Student Union box. Upon flipping over 3 or 4 papers we found a document that chronologically listed important dates regarding kenyon history in relation to black history and students of color on campus. It became apparent that these groups are so important because they act as archives for a true kenyon history, a history that kenyon does not like to advertise. We knew these two things would be good points of reference in understanding the importance of documenting and historicizing campus affairs (especially in relation to identity and inclusion on campus).

In Michael Shudsons essay on “The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past,” he talks about the importance for individuals, groups, and people in power to immortalize their pasts. I say “their pasts” because the essay suggests that these groups act in response to an invented/re-invented history. I believe that an invented history is more applicable to a colonial present used to justify a colonial past, while re-inventing history activates the history of minorities who often did not have a say in the national understandings of their histories. “The full freedom to reconstruct the past according to one's own present interests is limited by three factors: the structure of available pasts, the structure of individual choices, and the conflicts about the past among a multitude of mutually aware individuals or groups”(287). 

This freedom chooses events that directly affect them, events in which they move towards or away from, events that guide them through future actions. Just like what the Chalmers library archives is doing, documenting the past immediately makes an event important and a moment of history. The article discusses monuments stating: “Certainly the statues can be destroyed, the museum exhibits redone, the plaques removed—but this is not easy to do and may well create public controversy that revives rather than erases memory”(288). We are in a time that prioritizes all history (excluding the recent election), because it contextualizes other major events happening at the time.
 
“People and organizations and nations do make their own pasts, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing,”(287). Looking back on the chronological time-line BSU created surrounding dates that were necessary in understanding their history. Like Shudsons essay states, they did not choose the condition of the majority white liberal arts school, but acted in response to it. I was not surprised to find extensive archival material from these groups considering America prioritizes written history over almost everything else, it acts as a receipt to hold the college accountable. These groups working towards inclusion must work to document their history in relation to the colleges, or else the overall Kenyon history will be inaccurate.





Shudson, Michael. “‘The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past.’” The Collective

Memory Reader , Oxford University Press, New York City, New York, 2011, pp.

287–290.

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