Kenyon students are rallying behind the Denison Homestead: its community dinners, liberal arts essence and occasional keg stand. On Friday, over 30 Kenyon students carpooled to Granville for the Denison Homestead’s community dinner to show their support following the announcement from Denison University’s administration that the Homestead would cease to be a residential option for students after next year. 

Denison’s Homestead currently functions as “a living learning community at Denison focused on sustainability,” as described in a November Denisonian article on the residential program’s shuttering. It was founded in 1977 and can house 12 students who are responsible for the Homestead’s upkeep. 

Members of the Denison community immediately voiced their opposition to the Denison administration’s decision. Some of the reasons that the administration cited for ending the residential program were lack of engagement, liability concerns and building more community on Denison’s hill rather than at the Homestead, which is a 20-minute walk away. While there are no specific plans for the Homestead’s future, Denison President Adam S. Weinberg wants the space to be more accessible to a greater number of students than the 12 who are able to live there, according to the Denisonian. 

Noa Holland, one of the Denison students currently living on the Homestead, spends their Fridays preparing the food for weekly community dinners. During Friday’s visit, the 60-person crew of Kenyon and Denison students ate homemade chickpea stew, naan, salads, fruit and more. Holland has experience feeding large groups, having cooked for 60 when the whole Denison women’s rugby team attended and for 100 last semester when the Homestead hosted a number of bands for an outdoor concert. Students and alumni who lived, worked at or frequented the Homestead maintain that it is crucial to Denison’s community, explaining that the students who work to call this place home are vital to the Homestead. “The Homestead provides a very unique living learning experience where students are able to take care of themselves, learn more independence, learn to be accountable to each other and have other people be accountable to them. And it also just allows them to reassess their place at the university and in the world as a whole,” Holland described. “I’ve talked to dozens of alumni who lived at the Homestead, saying it was one of the most important experiences of their lives. Many of them went off to start their own communes and start their own sustainable farms. So it’s definitely an incredibly important institution at Denison.”

Ellie Westfall ’27, Jen Novick ’26 and David Bonnen ’27 spearheaded the “mass exodus” (as Westfall called it) to Granville last week. The carpools met at the Kenyon Bookstore, and the Collegian spoke with organizers and other participants both before and after the dinner. Overwhelmingly, these students reflected the lasting impact of the failed “Save the Farm” campaign at Kenyon. Novick and Westfall have both overlapped with students who used to be resident-farmers, and came to Kenyon because of the residential farm program. The two do not want the school to forget what it once had. 

For Westfall and others, the closing of the Homestead as a residence reopened wounds from when Kenyon eliminated the residential program at the Farm in 2022. Westfall sat down with the Collegian several weeks before the community dinner and laid out her intentions for the visit. “We’re kind of giving them the Kenyon Farm as a case study for how the Denison administration should not wreck the student community with this decision. We want to offer them as much insight about how the loss of the Farm still affects students today,” Westfall said.

Westfall described the Homestead as what people had imagined college would be, complete with its fire pit, beer keg and not a phone in sight. She added that at the Homestead, “it really felt like there was a collective identity and memory … that we don’t really have in any space at Kenyon.” Denison’s administration acknowledged the importance of preserving the Homestead’s history while figuring out what its future could look like. 

The Kenyon Farm’s residential program was established in 2012 and spent 10 years as the only collegiate residential farm program in the country until it was shut down in 2022. The Office of the Provost and the Office of the President were criticized at the time for failing to consult farm residents or provide sufficient notice. The response from the community was immediate. Student farmers were concerned about cuts to their working hours and the Farm not being able to survive the lack of around-the-clock attention. Kenyon’s farmers, alongside members of the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee (K-SWOC), held a protest that amassed over 50 students on the Saturday after the announcement. The Farm became central in larger conversations about the rights of student workers, and the farmers voted unanimously to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice strike. Kenyon farmers hosted open forums and asked to meet with administration to try to save the Farm. Even the Horn Gallery hosted a mutual aid concert that raised $1,200 for the K-SWOC strike fund and a circulating petition to save the farm garnered over 1,300 signatures. 

Denison is in the early stages of what became a long and layered affair for Kenyon. Everyone who spoke to the Collegian appreciated the melding of Kenyon and Denison’s respective bubbles, especially in pursuit of a larger cause. “I am a huge advocate for solidarity, especially among students like ourselves,” Holland said. “Going across campus lines, I think that that’s hugely important. Sometimes it feels like you’re a David fighting Goliath when you’re dealing with administration, so knowing that you’re not alone and that other institutions are dealing with similar setbacks and pressures from their administrations makes it feel a lot less lonely.”

Holland acknowledged that the Homestead has its issues, but recommended the school invest in its historical institutions rather than abandon them. “We need more resources. We need more faculty contacts. We need a better support system, as the Homestead currently stands,” Holland continued. “Or they need to allow us more freedom to do what we want, because right now, we’re caught in the middle of regulation without guidance, and that’s just not sustainable for a place like the Homestead.”