Eden Kenney
As a transfer student coming from a large public university where it felt easy to fall through the cracks, I was drawn to the intimate class sizes and more personal connections with faculty that L&C has to offer.
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What three words would you use to describe L&C?
What made you want to come to Lewis & Clark?
As a transfer student coming from a large public university where it felt easy to fall through the cracks, I was drawn to the intimate class sizes and more personal connections with faculty that L&C has to offer. L&C is also the best place to go in the Pacific Northwest if you want Speech and Debate to be a major part of your college experience, which was an important factor to me. Plus, the gorgeous campus certainly didn’t hurt.
What have you been doing since graduation?
Since graduating in 2023, I’ve coached speech and debate, waited tables at an upscale seafood restaurant, studied for the LSAT, applied to law school, and started my own LSAT tutoring business. I’m very excited to start law school at Stanford next month.
How did Lewis & Clark prepare you for law school?
The critical thinking, research, and communication skills I developed at L&C proved invaluable at every stage in the process of applying to law school. I aspire to work as a litigator, so I anticipate that the argumentation and public speaking skills I honed through Speech and Debate will continue to benefit me greatly for many years to come.
What would you say is the most important thing you learned at Lewis & Clark?
I consider the most important lesson I learned at L&C to be the importance of critical self-reflexivity in the process of conducting social research, from both a methodological and an ethical perspective. In most academic contexts prior to studying sociology and anthropology at L&C, I was encouraged to write in ways that minimized my own subjectivity by assuming a universal, objective voice. In the context of producing knowledge about people with whom we are directly interacting, this veneer of objectivity can obscure the power differentials and implicit biases that are always present in the relationship of researcher to research subject, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. Historically, the discipline of anthropology served a key ideological purpose within the broader colonial projects of the era: producing the exoticizing and stigmatizing beliefs about cultures in the Global South that lent academic legitimacy to their subjugation. The sociology and anthropology faculty at L&C do an incredible job of not only engaging critically with the discipline’s history in the material they teach, but also equipping their students with the knowledge and theoretical frameworks necessary to conduct our own research in ways that respect and highlight the humanity of our subjects.
How do you stay connected to Lewis & Clark as an alum?
I stay connected to L&C through the lasting relationships I created with professors, classmates, coaches, and teammates. As I progress through my career, I am excited to stay connected with other L&C alums and find new ways of giving back to the community.
Where did you find your community on campus?
As a new transfer student in the height of the pandemic, finding community on campus was initially really hard. Because opportunities to connect in person were so limited, the Speech and Debate team became my main source of community. I became close with many of my teammates and coaches, and being part of the team ended up being a big part of my life at L&C. My former teammates and coaches remain some of my dearest friends.
Who was your mentor on campus? Why do you consider this person your mentor?
It would be impossible for me to pick just one person. I chose to take more than one class with almost all of the professors I had at L&C, which speaks to the incredible quality of mentorship the school has to offer. The professors at Lewis & Clark are there because they love to teach, so they are deeply invested in your intellectual growth. Early on, my mentors were Sarah Warren and my faculty advisor Jennifer Hubbert, both of whom introduced me to sociology and anthropology and made me feel incredibly welcome and valued as a transfer student within the department. Getting to take their classes in person while L&C was still on a hybrid-remote model was a major privilege.
Further along, my mentors were my thesis advisor Oren Kosansky, who pushed me to take the analytical rigor of my writing to the next level, and Mitch Reyes, whose class on the politics of public memory inspired me to pursue my minor in rhetoric and media studies. I’m also incredibly grateful to L&C’s Director of Forensics, Joe Gantt, whose dedication to running the team and supporting each individual competitor is truly unparalleled.
