Monday, February 5, 2024

Life and Death at a Liberal Arts College

by P.F. Kluge  

When I came to college — there’s a room-emptying sentence fragment if I’ve ever heard one — when I showed up as a clueless, immigrant stock first in the family to enter college, kid out of northern New Jersey, we were asked — make that required — to go to dinner in a place called Peirce Hall, the college commons, and there, sitting at long tables, framed by stained glass windows portraying great works of literature, surrounded by oil portraits of dead Episcopalians who were the college’s founders and benefactors, there we confronted one of those men who — risking colleagues’ sniping irony and contending with his own inner anger — incarnated the spirit of that time, that place: Kenyon College, September 1960. . . .

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