Kenyon College Top Questions

The majority of students at Kenyon are very nerdy. The closest you get to a popular kid in high school is most often found on a sports team. The campus is also very liberal, and most students are very active in current political conflicts.

TOTALLY FALSE. Well, not completely. Let me just preface this by saying that I'm an Ohio native, so I get defensive about this one. But in all honesty, you forget about the isolation. There's very little cabin fever. When academics aren't keeping you busy, all you want to do is relax and take a break from the stresses of school. As long as you've got great people with whom to hang out and blow off steam, you don't really need to go places or do things in order to have fun. That's what we call the Kenyon bubble. It's both your best friend and your worst enemy. I'll come home for break and realize that I've never heard of any of the movies that are out or the songs that are on the radio. That can be startling.

The hippie stereotype might still be there, but the hippies aren't.

While there certainly are students from privileged backgrounds, saying the student body is entirely composed of this demographic couldn't be farther from the truth.

All stereo-types are based on a degree of truth; that said, only the latter seems true of almost all Kenyon students. The thing I love about Kenyon is that for such a small school, it actually has a good mix of students - we have an active Republican and Democratic and (slight active :) ) Liberterian society; we have religious groups from Western and Eastern faiths; there is an active sporting and fine arts scene. You get your rich kids who don't know what it is to not be able to afford everything, but you've got kids like me who couldn't go to Kenyon if not for government funding. And somehow we all co-habitate and find our common ground.

I've encountered a huge quantity of selfishness and and thoughtlessness beneath the accurate exterior.

I'd say all these statements are accurate, and by and large the current student body hopes to maintain that stereotype as part of Kenyon's charm. We're all hard working and there are many amazingly smart and talented people, but we also goof around, have geeky, funky, or weird interests, and are basically fun people.

As with all stereotypes, the ones about Kenyon are based on a grain of truth; but, for the most part, these cursory glimpses barely manage to skim the surface of what's actually there. While its location is very rural, Kenyon's atmosphere is more reminiscent of a liberal-thinking utopia than a backwards small town. Professors, students, staff, and townsfolk all intermingle on a daily basis, forming a solid sense of community that I haven't found anywhere outside of Gambier. As for the students, intelligence reins and you find that even the most unlikely looking person is well-informed and able to engage you in a debate ranging from politics to classical literature to sports. Everyone at Kenyon is there because they chose to be there, because it drew them in, so it's rare to find someone that doesn't appreciate what they have at Kenyon.

To some degree, yes. But Kenyon is what you make of it and so many people do not fit any of these stereotypes.

Few students would match the aforementioned persona, but nearly every student would overlap in several major ways.