Event – Detail Past

In After the Ivory Tower Falls, award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. That journey begins in Gambier, Ohio, home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,” there is no better entry point than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students amidst a sea of economic despair.

Reception and book signing to follow.

Will Bunch is the national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including sharing a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for New York Newsday on a deadly subway crash at Union Square in Manhattan. Bunch has written several books on politics, including “Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy” and “The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama.” Featured at the 2022 National Book Festival, his new book, “After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics―and How to Fix It,” asks and answers questions about the nature of the university in the U.S. today and how it can move forward.