Kenyon's Demographic Origins: A Tradition or Custom?

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  1. The artifact I focused on during our visit to Special Collections and Archives was the 1942-1943 edition of The Kenyon Reveille, or Kenyon College's yearbook for that academic year. It provided a glimpse into what Kenyon was like during that time: in which organizations students participated, which areas of study students pursued, and where all of these events and occurrences took place. It was interesting to see how the school has changed while simultaneously acknowledging what has stayed the same despite 200 years of history. My group and I discussed how the college has deviated from its all-male, all-white origins, along with its loss of emphasis on religious study.


  3. With our in-class discussion of traditions versus customs according to Eric Hobsbawm, Kenyon's deviations from its origins allows one to consider the ability for a tradition to shift into a custom once it becomes variable. Hobsbawn (2011:272) explains how customs "dominate ... traditional societies," meaning that through traditions and respect to a society's past, customs are developed into a habit of sorts but not necessarily limited to its original state. While there is room for change, there are still references to the past because "'custom' in traditional societies has the double function of motor and fly-wheel. It does not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though evidently the requirement that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substantial limitations on it. What it does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history"(Hobsbawm 2011:273).


  5. I relate that concept to the notion that while Kenyon College was once a white-only, male-only institution and their former students who attended before 1969 (when women were allowed to attend the college) may think of that practice (of only admitting white males) as a tradition, because of its ability to evolve and change (since Kenyon now has no admission barriers on basis of sex, race, and other factors), it is truly an outdated custom that has now been replaced. However, as a current Black female student at Kenyon College, I have witnessed several of my classmates being oblivious to Kenyon's restricted history (which also reflects other higher education institutions in the United States) and not truly realizing its origins and how they have impacted the college's history. It is interesting to think about the perspectives of different groups of students across the years. While I, and my classmates, may not view the college as "diverse," students from the 1942-43 time period would say it is.

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