The oldest private institution of higher education in Ohio, Kenyon College was founded in 1824 by a tenacious clergyman and educator named Philander Chase. With funds from both American and British benefactors -- among them a Lord Kenyon and a Lord Gambier -- Chase created a small college and a neighboring village (Gambier) on a hilltop deep in the interior of the new nation. It was a remarkable venture: gothic spires, Greek drama, and scriptural exegesis in a rough-hewn territory little removed from its frontier days.
Kenyon soon developed a reputation as one of the finest places in the country to acquire a classical education. Among its early graduates were such national leaders as Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war, Supreme Court justices David Davis and Stanley Matthews, and President Rutherford B. Hayes.
The College rose to prominence as a center of literary scholarship during the 1940s and 1950s, when poet and critic John Crowe Ransom made the Kenyon Review the nation's foremost magazine of letters. The chief literary figures of the day flocked to Gambier. Graduates of the College during this period included poets Robert Lowell and James Wright and novelists E. L. Doctorow and William Gass. The other arts and sciences flourished as well: actor Paul Newman graduated from Kenyon, as did birth-control-pill developer Carl Djerassi and the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.
And women graduates—among them actress Allison Janney, art historian Victoria Wyatt, artist Meg Cranston, journalist Vicki Barker, publisher Kristina Peterson, scientific researchers Jayna Danska and Flora Katz, and award-winning writers Laura Hillenbrand and Nancy Zafris—began to distinguish themselves in virtually every field of endeavor, just as their male counterparts had for a century and a half.
In the late 1990s, and into the first years of the twenty-first century, Kenyon consolidated its position by increasing the diversity of the faculty and the student body, strengthening the curriculum, and, through the generosity of alumni, parents, and friends of the College, tripling the endowment. Storer Hall, a new home for the music department, opened in 1999, and new buildings for chemistry (Tomsich Hall), mathematics and physics (Hayes Hall), and molecular biology (the Fischman Wing of Higley Hall) opened in 2000 and 2001. The new Kenyon Athletic Center was opened in January, 2006
The modern Kenyon began to emerge after 1969, when the College first admitted women students. Within a decade, enrollment grew from six hundred to more than fourteen hundred, with women constituting half of the student population. New facilities were built, the faculty expanded, the curriculum branched out to embrace interdisciplinary studies, and computer terminals sprouted throughout the campus.
This growth, rooted as it is in traditions of excellence, has enabled Kenyon to remain a distinctive college offering exceptional educational opportunities. Today, the College ranks as one of the finest liberal-arts institutions in the country, attracting superior students and a superb faculty and providing them with first-rate academic, residential, and recreational facilities.