Palliative Polarization: The Modern Sanitizing of Kenyon’s Political Activism

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    Before the archival work on Wednesday, I picked up my copy of the Collegian from Pierce to do my routine quarter of the crossword and then recycle, but as I flipped through it an article in the opinion section caught my attention. “Kenyon community should honor legacy of civil discourse” is an opinion that’s immediately agreeable, especially considering the history Kenyon has of spirited political activism—upon further reading, though, the message is contradictory to the actions and motivations of Kenyon students.   

   “I want to encourage our community to make sure we are practicing our activism in the right way,” Lifson, Collegian staff writer, says, referring to our tendency to sit around talking politics at one another. It’s by no means a bad sentiment, but it conflates Kenyon with a right and wrong way to engage in political dialogue—in keeping with Schwartz (2000), it identifies a societal model, templating “civil discourse” as the Kenyon norm and dictating all else as “declining political civility.” This interpretation is palliative of what actions of activism are seen as typical of our community and, as evidenced by Kenyon’s own archive, erasing our known penchant for the dramatics in political displays.

One of the most striking (and therefore “most Kenyon”) examples of political activism my group discovered was a Collegian piece about the Kenyon Peace Coalition’s die-in at Pierce Hall in 1985. The purpose was to demonstrate the ruin nuclear weapons can cause and bring awareness to the danger nuclear proliferation poses to humanity. While there was a discussion after the demonstration, the action itself was not the purported “right way” of civil discourse, but rather an impassioned spectacle of intentionally polarizing visualization. Furthermore, in the Collegian issue that talks about Lifson’s provided example of poor political discourse (a student being booed during a Rose Hall assembly for expressing right-leaning political views), there is another major display that is intentionally provocative in the political zeitgeist. In April 2018, an orchestra of Kenyon students protesting against gun violence performed Ticheli’s An American Elegy 27 times at the Ohio statehouse, “one for every mass shooting since Columbine.”


In having these events contradictory to the recent opinion piece’s point, this history cannot be rewritten due to a lack of non-contradiction and potential identity erasure (Schudson 1989). Social cohesion requires a sufficiently uncontested and unifying narrative of history, but this cannot be simply created. As Lifson argues, there is an “emphasized… value of conversation” in Kenyon’s political discourse history and there always has been, taking a rather traditionalist approach. There are many student organizations, both current and former, that were built on and dedicated to meaningful discussion and attention-grabbing action that would disagree with Lifson, establishing countermemory that prevents his point from becoming the dominant collective memory. The hegemonic theory of the “Kenyon way” being placid discussion is only partially accurate—Kenyon’s dedication to political activism in the form of spectacle cannot be ignored in favor of a more palatable interpretation lest it erase the identity and significance of student organizations like the Kenyon Peace Coalition, Students for a Free Tibet, the Kenyon Vietnam Committee, and many others like them.





References:

Blaker, Bailey. 2018. “Students protest gun violence at statehouse with performance.” The Kenyon Collegian 145(22). Retrieved February 23, 2025 (https://digital.kenyon.edu/collegian/2456).

Lifson, Robbie. 2025. “Kenyon community should honor legacy of civil discourse.” The Kenyon Collegian 152(20) 10.

Schudson, Michael. 1989. “The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past.” Communication II 105-13 (https://www.informaworld.com).

Schwartz, Barry. 2000. “Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of American Memory.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


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