Dear members of the Kenyon community,
I wanted to extend a warm welcome back to a very chilly Gambier and to a spring semester that feels decidedly unlike spring.
On Monday, Kenyon had the honor of hosting dozens of community leaders for a celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This annual breakfast is a long-standing partnership with Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and each campus hosts every other year. It has become something of a touchstone for our communities, kicking off a new year and our spring semesters with food and fellowship, reflection and hope.
So many of King’s words resonate with me, and this year I am thinking especially about an assertion he made in one of his sermons: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
As an educational institution, we care a lot about knowing things — as researchers and scientists, as experts in our fields, as citizens and as a society. But I would argue that this is so that we can do things, and do them to greater effect. In many ways, this comes out of my training as a public health scientist. In addressing complex public health challenges we often ask questions like, “How can we act effectively and who can we partner with to improve the situations of those around us?” — because the consequences of not acting and not doing for others are often too dire.
I have said many times and will say again that I believe a residential liberal arts college is the perfect setting to build the muscles that will allow you to act effectively. Here, we teach you to think about more than one thing in more than one way with others who may see the same things quite differently. And then we ask you to put what you know (or think you know) into practice. The value of this approach cannot be underestimated. The challenges we face as a society are simply too complex to be solved by any one discipline or by narrow research alone.
The pace at which the world moves is confounding. When I think about all that has happened even in the short time since we broke for winter break: there is no shortage of tragedies or setbacks to overcome, just as there are countless opportunities to make gains.
I am so proud of the ways that Kenyon alumni are living King’s words — building lives of purpose and consequence, as we would put it. I’ll give you two recent examples. Many of us have watched in horror as wildfires devastated and continue to devastate whole communities in California, sadly taking the lives and homes of people of all ages and backgrounds, including people in the Kenyon community. I have been moved by their stories and by the stories of the people helping them. Many Californians have cited the coverage of local broadcasters and a wildfire-tracking app as critical resources and lifelines in the crisis. Chace Beech ’14 has been covering the fires live for Spectrum News, while Gabe Schine ’05 was one of the software engineers who built Watch Duty, a nonprofit app dedicated to tracking fires and other natural disasters in real-time for the public.
Gabe and Chace are just two of countless Kenyon alumni who have brought their skills and knowledge to bear at critical moments, in communities all across the globe. Everywhere I turn, I encounter Kenyon people who know how to work toward solutions — people who know how to find collaborators and resources and how to tap their own imagination and will to do good for humanity.
As the spring semester gets into full swing, I invite you to see the collaborators around you, people who can bring fresh perspectives to shared challenges. I invite you to be inspired by the possibilities and, even in times of uncertainty, to step forward with hope and confidence. As Dr. King reminds us, we must think not just of ourselves but how we may be of service to others. There is work to do to support one another at Kenyon, in Knox County and around the world. I look forward to partnering with you in that work.
Warmly,
Julie Kornfeld
President