Campus Senate put its proposed constitutional amendments on President Julie Kornfeld’s desk in the waning weeks of spring 2026. Her response isn’t due until mid-September, but in late July Kornfeld officially notified Campus Senate that she had signed off on nearly every amendment. 

The only suggested revision Kornfeld did not approve was to reduce the time the community has to respond to proposed amendments. Instead of the current two weeks, the rejected amendment would have required the Senate to publicize amendment proposals one week before the meeting at which they are discussed or adopted. 

Students may remember the debate within the Senate that continued for the better part of the past year. The debate resulted in former Campus Senate co-Chair Aidan Cullen ’26 compromising on her plans for larger-scale legislative reforms in favor of the current amendments focused on transparency and communication. 

Current student Campus Senate co-Chair Eleanor Retish ’28 has shifted her stance on reforms regarding legislative autonomy since last semester. Retish discussed exactly this in a recent interview with the Collegian. While she would not concede her belief that further reform is good and necessary, she is no longer confident that these changes are the best use of Campus Senate’s limited time. “That is something that would take a lot of talks. … Maybe another year, maybe two years. And that’s my whole time at Kenyon,” Retish said.

One change that has been approved is an amendment requiring the administrative coordinator to share Campus Senate meeting minutes with the all-student and all-employee email groups.  Another amendment now requires Campus Senate to publicly announce their meetings and to make a broadcast option available. In addition, Campus Senate is now required to send relevant documents to Special Collections and Archives on a monthly basis. In summary, Campus Senate will become a significantly more public institution than it has been. 

Alongside Kornfeld’s early announcement of the constitutional amendments over the summer, she gave the Senate a charge for the year. “The new charge is to start addressing campus communications, which seems like quite an expansive task,” Associate Professor of Psychology Leah Dickens, the faculty Campus Senate co-chair, said in an interview with the Collegian. 

Dickens described her interpretation of the charge, “[There is] the concern that maybe some of the really essential information is getting lost in the flood of other information. That there might be some anxiety about how many emails people are getting … and then some concern about some of the unmoderated campus communications.” 

Retish, Dickens and Kornfeld all agree that campus communication, as it exists, is not ideal. How to improve it remains unclear. “It’s hard, right? Everybody wants to communicate their message. … So you know, if we had an answer, we would have done it, but we don’t,” Kornfeld told the Collegian. “I think the best thing to do in this kind of environment is go to the people who live and work here and ask them, ‘What are some recommendations for how to do this better?’”

This is not the first attempt at reforming campus communications. In the spring of 2024, the Office of Student Engagement (OSE) released a new campus communication policy. It limited the location and number of posters on campus and banned event promotion emails from the employee-info, student-info and faculty-info email groups. Since then, the OSE has encouraged using their daily event digest email and Kenyon Connect to promote events. These daily emails have not continued this semester.

Kornfeld succinctly characterized the reception to the OSE daily digest when she told the Collegian, “Nobody liked that, so that didn’t work.”