Sure enough, Emily spent two years at Kenyon before transferring.
Now she has a memoir out, And the Heart Says Whatever, which focuses on her post-college experiences as an Internet gossip for gawker, but also spends time on her Kenyon days.
From the text itself (via google books), we have the following description of Kenyon:
When I say I went to Kenyon, people usually assume I went to Oberlin, that breeding ground of cool bands and UItimate Frisbee championships and general Williamsburg, Brooklyn training camp some miles to Kenyon's north, and even after I say I went to Kenyon I think people are still sometimes imagining Oberlin. Aside from the fact that it was in Ohio, Kenyon was nothing like Oberlin. Kenyon may be the anti-Oberlin. Its dress code was preppy and its intellectual climate was second-rate conservatism. It was a place for people who'd flunked out of several East-Coast boarding schools, who'd been denied admission at Yale despite being double legacies. It was a summer camp for the loser younger brothers of the ruling class, and its social life was entirely dependent, you learned immediately - like on your first night there, hours after your parents finished helping you move in - on frat parties."
Also, packed into just a couple of pages about Kenyon, she mentions a lot of violence, sexual violence, and general it-sucks-to-be-female-at-Kenyon: She says "Kenyon was a strange place to be a girl," "the girl I stayed with on my visit told me that she had been raped by another student," "Status came from being a frat boy's girlfriend," as well as recounting two negative experiences with men she was involved with, one of which is clearly abusive (he attempts to slam her head into the sidewalk).
this is the school we went to :(
ReplyDeleteIt kind of is, and kind of not. Unless you flunked out of an East Coast boarding school and never told anybody about it?
ReplyDeleteMy roommate read this aloud to me at the end of the year. It's good for a laugh, but fortunately the people who find this an accurate description are a small part of the population.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't my Kenyon experience, and if I were doing a by-the-numbers sort of picture of Kenyon, it wouldn't look like that at all (Kenyon has a lot more high-performing kids from the midwest than it does mediocre East Coast prep school kids, and I don't know if it's taking much of anyone with below a B average these days). But I recognize Kenyon in her description, and I do think that the students she describes have a disproportionate effect on the social scene at Kenyon, as well as the prevailing values.
ReplyDelete