Word: kenyon
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...Criticism. In 1937 Ransom went to tiny, oak-sheltered Kenyon College (enrollment: 500) in Gambier, Ohio. Next month, a few weeks after his 70th birthday, he will retire from teaching. In the 21-year interval Kenyon has become a focus of literary ferment rivaled by few campuses...
...Ransom founded the Kenyon Review, one of the nation's best and healthiest literary quarterlies, used it to develop a new idea for literary criticism. Main tenet of the New Criticism, of which Ransom has been a principal architect: hard analysis of text and texture. When the hard analysis has threatened to degenerate into the myopic picking of microscopic nits. Ransom has kept his perspective, helped the pedants to regain theirs. Among the students and faculty members who have studied and taught at Kenyon: Poet Robert Lovell (Lord Weary's Castle), Poet Randall Jarrell, Novelist Robie Macaulay...
...surface. No campus is without its atrocity story of intellectual deadness. At the University of Michigan, Vice President for Student Affairs James Lewis asked a group of 100 students what they thought of Aldous Huxley. "Only one or two of them," he reported, "had ever heard of him." At Kenyon, Poet-Critic John Crowe Ransom sadly detects "a sort of idleness of the creative imagination." At the University of Illinois, English Professor Charles Shattuck complains : "A secondhand bookstore wouldn't be supported in this town." Says Joseph Baker, professor of English at the State University of Iowa: "Even...
Religion is less in the air at Kenyon (Episcopalian), although the college has its own divinity school, and its 500 students are required to attend chapel. A faculty member has defined the place of religion as "a part of education, like English, biology and math, but certainly a more important part than the others." Despite these points, one official of Kenyon frankly admits: "The Episcopalians and the other major denominations have fellowship groups which are sneered at by about half the campus...
...campuses differ about as widely on extracurricular activities, although all six de-emphasize intercollegiate athletics. Kenyon, the only men's college of the six, invites girls by the busload for its dances, but half the student body at Baptist Denison (1,300) and Ohio Wesleyan (2,000) is female. Wooster has no national fraternities, but Kenyon has eight, and 90% of the student body at Denison belong to fraternities or sororities. At Wooster the Presbyterian Church controls the administration; at Oberlin (no church affiliation) the faculty is the big wheel on campus, even sets salaries (top for a full...