Sean Decatur, an emerging national leader in higher education, became the nineteenth president of Kenyon College on July 1, 2013. A champion of the liberal arts, President Decatur earned a bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College and a doctorate in biophysical chemistry at Stanford University.
Years of a liberal arts education have added many layers and dimensions to my life experiences, and this has been a source of renewal and strength as I take on a new challenge of caring for an elderly parent.
You won’t find a seminar at Kenyon on leading a life of grace, or a syllabus outlining steps to improve the lives of those around you. And, as the examples of Aretha Franklin and Dr. James Cox ’60 H’97 illustrate, there is no single model for achieving this. But we can extract some principles from their lives.
We are at a cultural moment when the value of liberal arts education is being questioned; where access and opportunity for education is being denied to talented young people; when the value of both evidence-based scientific thinking and the beauty of poetry are being questioned. We have an obligation to create opportunity for talented, deserving students, and advocate for the greater value of liberal education.
