At the time of publication, the College has not listed courses in the Department of Physical Education and Health Studies for next semester. You may write this department off for only offering half-credit courses like 5K running and yoga, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, I am particularly upset by this decision because I have previously been unable to complete Wilderness First Aid & Outdoor Skills (HSPS 184) due to high demand and persistent scheduling conflicts. As someone already pursuing a career in the outdoor industry, this certification would have greatly improved my skill set, not to mention my resume. As Kenyon tries to adjust its course offerings to best prepare us for the world we live in, more consideration should be given to vocational skills.

My time at Kenyon has also seen the elimination of the woodworking classes at the Craft Center. The locks were changed with no notice given to the instructor. On multiple occasions, friends and I used that space to assemble set pieces for student plays, and now we no longer can. The whole community suffers when it’s deprived of the ability to make things. There is tremendous joy in using and seeing objects you or your loved ones have created. 

I have personally filled the cavity left by the loss of the woodshop with my work as one of the Bike Barn’s managers. While I can’t take all the credit, I will always look back upon the improvements at the Bike Barn as some of my greatest accomplishments. It has also been a personal transformation. I could barely change a tire when I began almost three years ago, and I’m now a mostly-proficient mechanic. Still, the positive changes we have been able to implement at the Bike Barn have come with the cost of tremendous begging, circumvention, uncertainty, collaboration and deception. We have carved our way upstream through a river of red tape without a paddle, and I often wonder what the Bike Barn would be right now had the College adopted a more proactive approach and reversed the current.

Privileging core academics at the expense of electives and extracurriculars comes with the political, economic, technological and demographic crises that academia finds itself in. There is less grant money to go around, fewer students and a new technology — artificial intelligence — that threatens everything higher education stands for. To put it bluntly, the value of a liberal arts education has become much lower than its cost. You can’t fault the College for cutting seemingly inconsequential classes and programs in favor of those more central to its mission.

And yet, the College’s liberal arts mission has been quite adaptable in the past. Both the Department of Environmental Studies and the Kenyon Farm tend toward the vocational rather than the liberal side of education. Despite this seeming shortcoming, both dovetail nicely with other educational opportunities offered on campus. 

From personal experience, it is my firm conviction that more care should be given to the development of vocational skills on campus. Technical competence of any kind can expand students’ perspectives on the world as much as any introductory English or philosophy course. We lose a lot when we draw arbitrary lines between the head, the heart and the hands. We struggle to understand how things are made or how they work. We sacrifice reality for plans, and fail to realize them. We lose the ability to turn our values into actions, and instead become satisfied with words. 

David Bonnen ’27 is an anthropology and history major from Houston. He can be reached at bonnen1@kenyon.edu.