Mission

The Rural Life Center (RLC) at Kenyon College promotes education, scholarship, and public projects about rural life. Through collaboration with the central Ohio community, RLC seeks to enhance the quality of local rural life.

Education. RLC encourages Kenyon students, faculty, and staff to learn about rural life. RLC supports coursework and sponsors extracurricular activities that extend the broad educational goals of the College through study of the local community.

Scholarship. RLC initiates and supports scholarly and creative work in the arts, sciences, and humanities to document and interpret local rural life. RLC archives the results of these efforts for use by the Kenyon and Knox County communities.

Public Projects. RLC produces exhibitions, programs, and publications about rural life to enhance appreciation, understanding, and reflection among residents and visitors to the area. RLC designs these projects to respond to the needs and interests of the surrounding community and to address rural issues with relevance nationwide.

Background of the Rural Life Center

Located in rural Knox County, Kenyon College offers a valuable opportunity for students and faculty to actively engage rural life. Directed immersion in the surrounding community provides a rich cultural experience for our students, particularly those unfamiliar with rural life. The surrounding local affords students and faculty a wide variety of opportunities for original scholarship and artistic work. Through their involvement in projects that share this work publicly, students develop and demonstrate their substantive knowledge as well as a variety of technical and interpersonal skills. By facilitating connections between classroom learning and the life of an ongoing community, RLC enables students to directly encounter the values of social responsibility and citizenship that are so central to the liberal arts.

Kenyon's character as a liberal arts institution uniquely suits it for the creative study of rural life. Unlike university programs that typically study rural life as a specialization separate from the general curriculum, Kenyon's holistic approach brings together the arts, humanities, and sciences toward a more integrative understanding of the human experience. For example, a liberal arts approach to current issues in agriculture explores the interplay among social, economic, cultural and biological forces, rather than emphasizing one factor in isolation. By harnessing this more synthetic approach within the local community, RLC offers a powerful opportunity ot address issues in our nations' rural communities and to develop innovative educational strategies for the next century.

As an active participant in the life of our community, Kenyon offers important resources at a critical moment in Knox County's history. The rapid expansion of metropolitan Columbus poses significant challenges to the county's rural character. Those communities closer to downtown Columbus that failed to recognize the profound impact of urban growth must now contend with problems including water shortages, traffic congestion, and the loss of a way of life whose significance they appreciated too late. Knox Countians have begun significant long-term planning to manage and direct the course of this change in keeping with community priorities. RLC contributes to this effort through systematic data collection, educational programs, and projects that implement the community's plans for the future. Because the issues facing this region are confronted throughout much of America, the Rural Life Center 's efforts have practical benefits that extend nationwide.

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Funding

Funding for the RLC comes from Kenyon College and a variety of federal, state, and local sources. Kenyon College provides for general operating expenses and supports various projects. Grants and outside agency funds support additional initiatives:

Grants

McGregor Foundation, Food for Thought

Ohio Humanities Council, Documenting Local Culture, Life Along the Kokosing, Oral History Institute, The Mayos

Knox County Community Trust, Documenting Local Culture, Life Along the Kokosing

Rural Sociological Society/Kellogg Foundation, Life Along the Kokosing

Ohio Department of Agriculture, HomeGrown

Agencies

American Folklife Center, Documenting Local Culture

Knox County Planning Commission, Land Use Survey

United States Information Agency, Jiaoliu

Knox County Fair Board, Knox County Fair

First Knox National Bank, Life Along the Kokosing

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Professional Collaboration

In addition to its many projects, RLC works closely with a variety of organizations that view RLC as a model program of rural study, experiential learning, and college-community collaboration. This interest attests to RLC's value in drawing attention to Kenyon as an innovative liberal arts institution.

To date, RLC has worked with the Bailey Scholars Program at Michigan State University, the Community Food Security Coalition, Farm Aid, Green Mountain College in Vermont, the folklore departments at Indiana University and Ohio State University, Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association, Ohio State University's rural sociological program, The Ohio Historical Society, and Malabar Farm State Park.

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Director

Howard L. Sacks is National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor at Kenyon College, where he has taught American studies and sociology since 1975. His publications have appeared in American Quarterly, American Music, the Journal of American Folklore, Contemporary Sociology, Social Forces, Symbolic Interaction, the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly, as well as numerous magazines and newspapers. His recent book, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem (University of Illinois Press, 2003 [1993]), was hailed in the Nation as "the fullest, most finely detailed account of the musical life of a nineteenth-century African American family anywhere in the United States," and received a 1994 Ohioana Book Award.

Dr. Sacks has served on panels of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as on the board of directors of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. As Director of the Rural Life Center, Dr. Sacks is a regular consultant to organizations and communities nationwide on cultural activities and serves on the diversity subcommittee of the Rural Sociological Society. He is the recipient of over thirty grants and fellowships for scholarly research and public programs, including four award-winning projects on regional life: Seems Like Romance to Me: Traditional Fiddle Tunes from Ohio; The Community Within: Black Experience in Knox County, Ohio; Rural Delivery: Family Farming in Knox County Ohio; and Life Along the Kokosing.

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Kenyon College

RLC resides as a program at Kenyon College, the oldest private institution of higher education in Ohio, founded in 1824. Throughout the nineteenth century, Kenyon developed a reputation as one of the country’s finest liberal arts colleges, graduating such national leaders as Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, and President Rutherford B. Hayes. In the twentieth century, the College’s name became synonymous with literary and scholarly excellence, with graduates such as poet Robert Lowell, short-story writers Peter Taylor and Nancy Sydor Zafris, birth-control-pill developer Carl Djerassi, novelists E.L. Doctorow and William Gass, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, actor Paul Newman, and cartoonists Jim Borgman, a Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning, and Bill Watterson, creator of “Calvin and Hobbes.” The alumni body also contains such business leaders as Richard Thomas, the recently retired chair of First Chicago NBD Corporation, and John Snow, currently US Secretary of the Treasury.

After nearly a century and a half as a men’s college, Kenyon first welcomed women students in the fall of 1969 with the arrival of the Class of 1973. The College is now fully coeducational, with women holding a 54-percent majority in the current 1536-student enrollment. Kenyon’s campus now boasts more than fifty buildings on about eight hundred acres. Many structures are historically notable, particularly Old Kenyon, first used in 1839, and Ascension Hall, an 1859 edifice by Victorian Gothic architect William Tinsley. These and other venerable buildings sit beside those of modern design in a landscape of sweeping lawns and towering oaks that has led observers to call the campus one of the nation’s most beautiful.

Today Kenyon moves forward confidently under the leadership of President S. Georgia Nugent, who sets high aspirations for the college. In recent years the number and quality of student applicants has increased markedly, and enrolled classes exhibit the best academic credentials and greatest National Merit Program recognition in the college’s history. National rankings are moving upward, and special grants and awards attest to quality of academic and extracurricular programs.

Ranked among the top 30 liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report, Kenyon generally ranks among the top two in Ohio. The College is probably best known for its strong humanities programs. The renowned Kenyon Review is the hallmark of an exceptional tradition of literary excellence, a strength that permeates the Humanities and the Arts at the college. The drama department is particularly strong, and social sciences are popular disciplines with students, and the music department is moving forward rapidly. The science programs are known for a research oriented curriculum and in 1996 were awarded a $1.5 million grant from Howard Hughes Medical Institute for undergraduate science education.

In the past decade, Kenyon has increased the number of minority students and has invested heavily in technology, becoming a leader in educational applications. The College led the effort to form the Ohio Five consortium of colleges that implement cost efficiencies and improve academic resources by coordinating efforts. Kenyon College’s most recent 10-year accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools was in 1990.

For more information, visit the Kenyon College web site.

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