When Leopoldo López was held in solitary confinement in a Venezuelan military prison, his captors realized how much strength and focus he drew from his books. So, they confiscated his library and placed it in a neighboring cell where he could see his books, but not reach them. He kept writing. In 1989 he arrived in Gambier and graduated from Kenyon in 1993 with honors in sociology, receiving both the George Herbert Mead Award in sociology and the Richard F. Hettlinger Award for excellence in the IPHS.
Three decades later, Raul Romero ’22 discovered Kenyon while searching for López’s biography during an internship at a Caracas-area city council office. At Kenyon, he went on to win the Leopoldo López Student Award.
Fifty years into Kenyon’s humane studies program, López and Romero sit down together to ask what an education like Kenyon’s is for, and why the humane study of ideas and human experience matters even more when the state itself turns inhumane.
Please join us in the Archon Auditorium, located in Oden Hall, on Saturday, September 26, at 4:00 p.m.
Sponsored by the Integrated Program in Humane Studies and the Kenyon Campus Community Development Fund.