In 2000, the College received a gift of $1.5 million from an anonymous donor, an alumnus and long-time friend of Kenyon, to establish the new professorship. With this gift, Robert A. Oden Jr., seventeenth president of Kenyon, became one of only three leaders of the College to be honored with a faculty chair bearing his name. The others are Kenyon’s second president, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, and Oden’s predecessor, Philip H. Jordan Jr.
The gift of this professorship, by which I am most humbled, will allow us to signal our especially high regard for those teachers and scholars whose work in and out of the classroom openly takes the kinds of risks upon which groundbreaking achievements are based, said Oden, who, during his tenure, sought to make more named professorships available to honor teaching excellence at the College. Knowledge is anything but static: it grows, and it changes, and our newest chair will honor those responsible for such growth in knowledge. Most personally, though, I am deeply grateful to the donor for the name the professorship will bear, Oden added. It is an act of grace, where grace means the bestowing of a gift beyond anything that might be earned.
A graduate of Harvard College, Oden was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University in England, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in religious studies and Oriental languages before returning to the United States to complete his doctorate in Near Eastern languages and literatures at Harvard University. Oden came to Kenyon in 1995 from the Hotchkiss School where he had served as headmaster, and was president of Kenyon until he departed in 2002 to lead Carleton College.