Fifty years ago, Kenyon students were presented with a chance to join a new and exciting educational enterprise — more than 3,500 miles away from Gambier.
In a unique study-abroad partnership with the University of Exeter, the College launched a program in southwest England that gave English majors access to the resources of a top-ranked British university while maintaining the intimacy and familiarity of their Kenyon liberal arts experience.
Since 1975, the Kenyon-Exeter Program has offered hundreds of students the once-in-a-lifetime chance to study abroad with friends from home. The special arrangement allows an annual cohort to take classes over the course of a full academic year with British students and faculty while also participating in a seminar under the guidance of an on-site member of the Kenyon English Department.
This relationship — which combines intellectual exploration, intercultural learning and cocurricular travel — will be celebrated this week as President Julie Kornfeld and Provost Jeff Bowman visit Exeter and meet with members of the Kenyon program and the university. A new agreement with Exeter will allow Kenyon students who qualify for admission to its Master of Arts programs to do so in an expedited manner and with discounted tuition.
It’s the latest evolution of a relationship that Professor of English Sarah Heidt ’97, the current department chair who has attended the Exeter program both as a student and as a resident director, said has changed many lives — including her own.
“On the program, I learned how to travel, how to interact critically and emotionally with a landscape, and how to understand historical and cultural contexts and literary works in more multidimensional ways than I ever had before,” she said. “I came back to Gambier from Exeter a changed person — and I’m grateful to have gotten to accompany so many groups of students as they’ve experienced the intellectual and personal transformations the program can work.”
