Kenyon College

Our Mission

Over the 185 years of its life, Kenyon College has developed a distinctive identity and has sought a special purpose among institutions of higher learning. Kenyon is an academic institution. The virtue of the academic mode is that it deals not with private and particular truths, but with the general and the universal. It enables one to escape the limits of private experience and the tyranny of the present moment. But to assert the primacy of the academic is not to deny the value of experience or of other ways of knowing. Kenyon's academic purpose will permeate all that the College does, but the definition of the academic will be open to recurrent questioning.