Remembering Colin

GAMBIER, Ohio (April 7, 2005) Kenyon continues to grieve for Colin Boyarski, the student who lost his life this past weekend. While his classmates and professors reach out to comfort one another, sharing memories of Colin and planning activities to memorialize him, the College is arranging to provide transportation for members of the campus community who wish to attend a memorial service being planned by his family in Pittsburgh.

The service will be held on Sunday, April 17, at 2:00 p.m. in the great hall of the Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts Building. Colin's parents, Daniel and Libby Boyarski, and his sister, Luisa, will welcome visitors from Kenyon. The College will announce transportation arrangements as soon as plans are completed.

Colin Boyarski

The Board of Campus Ministries is planning a campus memorial service, with details to be announced soon. Students, meanwhile, have prepared remembrance books, which will be available in dining halls and other public areas in the next few days. All are invited to share memories, thoughts, prayers, and messages in the books, which will be given to Colin's family. In addition, the First-Year Council is selling purple wrist bands, with proceeds helping to fund a campus memorial for Colin.

"Colin was thoughtful, in all senses of the word," says Kristen Van Ausdall, an assistant professor of art history, who had Colin this semester in High Renaissance Art. "He was 'full of thought,' as one my other students put it, and also kind, a very kind person. So many of us noticed his smile, how genuine it was. He had a luminous smile."

Colin was a quiet but insightful student who surprised Van Ausdall by his ability, as a first-year student, to handle the sophistication of an intermediate-level course. "He was not just an 'A' student, but a student who really knew how to think," she says. "He wrote extremely well. And he had a grasp of the multidisciplinary nature of art history, how it's not just about the artistic forms but about the culture and history, too. He had an incisive mind, and a mind that also understood visual poetry, beauty."

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Yang Xiao, who had Colin in two courses, remembers both his sense of social justice and his strong feeling for family. In a midterm exam that Colin wrote for Xiao in Early Chinese Philosophy, he discussed different kinds of love. "He wrote a really convincing argument," Xiao recalls, "about how family love was the basis for all other kinds of love. It was in the family where one learned how to love, so that one could eventually expand it to other people."

Professors and students alike remember Colin as a soft-spoken, easy-going person who had begun to feel very much at home at Kenyon. "Colin lived life to the fullest," says Jessica Gersh '08, a friend. "He was very social and enjoyed sharing things with his friends. He loved his family very much and was proud of his older sister, Luisa. We [his Kenyon friends] all felt like we personally knew his friends from home and his family."

"I was so much looking forward to getting to know him better," says Van Ausdall. "He was going to turn into a really great human being. I always had this sense about him. It was going to be fun to see him emerge, as who he was, to grow and change."

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