Leverett Senior Tutor Accepts Post at Kenyon

Elizabeth B. Keeney, Leverett House's Allston Burr senior tutor, will be leaving Harvard at the end of the academic year to accept an administrative post at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Keeney, who is currently director of advanced standing and head tutor in special concentrations at Harvard, will begin serving as Kenyon's dean of academic advising on July 1.

"This is a wonderful opportunity," said Keeny. "The hard part is leaving."

After spending her school years in Providence, R.I. and Washington, D.C., Keeney attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and went on to pursue her graduate work in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1985, Keeney came to Harvard to become lecturer on the history of science, and was appointed Leverett's senior tutor two years later.

"I became senior tutor because my favorite part of academic life is one-on-one contact with students," she said.

At Kenyon, Keeney said, she will be responsible to designing an advising system loosely resembling that of Harvard.

"I will help them figure out how to bring residential and academic advising back into one track," she said.

The move to a liberal arts college with only about 1500 students poses a another kind of challenge for Keeney.

"It's a different sort of atmosphere," she said.

In addition to her academic interests, Keeney enjoys bicycling, reading, and volunteering with Partners for Disabled Youth, a mentoring program that pairs disabled youth and adults. Her most recent work is a book on amateur botanists in the nineteenth century, which is due to be published in the fall.