Brackett’s Path: Our Union’s Report on the State of Life at Kenyon

Brackett Badger Denniston III has been Chair of Kenyon’s Board of Trustees since 2015. In that time, he has driven up costs, disinvested from student support services, overworked and underpaid, staff, faculty, and student workers - all while approving highly expensive new construction projects to shape our community in his image.

Brackett Has Made His Choice. What Will Ours Be?

This report is designed to show the ramifications of Brackett’s choices. As a result of his policies, full-time student support services staff, faculty, office and administrative staff, maintenance workers, and student workers are underpaid and increasingly overworked. Our cheap labor, tireless work and ingenuity keeps Kenyon afloat and saves the school the money it needs to sustain itself.

But Mr. Denniston has not reinvested our savings back into our services. Instead, he has pursued a reckless strategy that prioritizes massive over-enrollment and debt-incurring construction projects over the well-being of the people (and buildings) that are already here. To realize this costly and undemocratic vision for our community, Mr. Denniston has consistently increased the cost of attendance for our most financially insecure students, saddled understaffed student support services and maintenance offices with unsustainable amounts of work, and overseen a system of student employment that exists to plug the gaps at the expense of both student and full-time employee wellbeing. 

The conclusion we draw from the data available to us is that Kenyon’s future is being driven by a building boom, the rationale for which has never been made clear, but the debts from which have put us all in a precarious and untenable position. It is also clear that Mr. Denniston is willing to spend significant college resources to prevent any members of the Kenyon community from charting a different course. Since October of 2021, his administration has been spending potentially thousands of dollars per hour on anti-union labor lawyers from Jones Day in an attempt to reverse the right of student employees to form unions under the National Labor Relations Act. Mr. Denniston’s willingness to hire these lawyers, sink our college into debt, and devalue our institution’s credit rating leads us to believe that Mr. Denniston fears a student workers’ union not for financial reasons, but because such a union could challenge his unchecked power to shape Kenyon in his image. 

Brackett, and his fellow trustees who have reelected him to a 6-year term, have made their choice. Now it is time for us to make ours. Do we think that the road Mr. Denniston is leading us down is wise, fair, or democratic? Are we satisfied with more debt, more over-enrollment, and poor investment in our community’s overall health to show for it? Or should we begin a dialogue on whether it is time to take a different path? We welcome all members of the Kenyon community to engage with this report critically, even skeptically. We hope to be proven wrong about the direction in which our community is being steered, and hope that any discussion sparked by this report will shed much-needed light on Kenyon's future and the goals we seek to achieve together.