Success Stories

GAMBIER, Ohio (September 21, 2006) Thanks to a grant from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, faculty and students will benefit from a new lecture series featuring successful entrepreneurs, many of them Kenyon alumni. The initiative is designed to stimulate discussion about the connection between a liberal-arts education and entrepreneurship.

This semester, the Burton Morgan Lectureships will present four speakers. Each is an innovator or inventor within his field, who has started his own business or professional practice, often in a high-risk arena.

The inaugural lecture on September 27 will feature Jon Chun, former president and chief executive officer of SafeWeb, a leading provider of Web-based security and privacy technologies. Following SafeWeb's acquisition by Symantec Corporation in 2003, Chun now serves as Symantec's director of development for the clientless virtual network adapted from a SafeWeb-designed product. He is also executive-in-residence at Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Chun also endowed the Dr. Newton Chun Award, in honor of his father, to support faculty research and artistic projects of exceptional merit and promise at Kenyon.

Stephen Hays, Class of 1983, will be the second speaker in the series, on October 4. He is an executive producer and managing member of 120dB Films, a finance company specializing in gap loans to the independent film industry. From 1996 until 2003, Hays was cofounder and general partner of Seneca Capital, a $3 billion, New York-based hedge fund. In addition to his involvement with numerous charitable and nonprofit organizations, Hays is an extreme sports enthusiast, a fan of dub and electronic music, and co-writer of a screenplay titled "Rocksteady,"scheduled for 2007 production.

Chun and Hays will be followed by David Gury, Class of 1960, founding chairman of the Florida Research Consortium and former CEO of NABI Biopharmaceuticals, on October 12; and Matthew Winkler, Class of 1977, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, who worked at The Wall Street Journal for ten years, on October 26. Jeffrey Bell, Class of 1984, corporate VP of global marketing for Microsoft Corporation's interactive entertainment business, will visit campus during the spring semester.