Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college founded in Gambier, Ohio in 1824, by Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase. It is considered to be among the most prestigious and selective in the nation and is Ohio's oldest private institute of higher learning. Originally an all-male institution, Kenyon became co-educational in 1969. Kenyon remains loosely affliated with the Episcopal Church. The 2004 Princeton Review and Fiske Guide to Colleges 2004 both ranked Kenyon's admissions as "most selective" and the college received top academic ratings.

The campus is noted for its Gothic architecture and beautiful rustic setting. Although suffering two serious fires (after which it was rebuilt), Old Kenyon Hall (1827) is believed to be the first Gothic revival building in North America.

Among its famous alumni are: former U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, Secretary of War under Lincoln Edwin Stanton, Supreme Court Justice David Davis, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, composer Alfred Humphreys Pease, artist Coles Phillips, actor Paul Newman, Calvin & Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, political cartoonist Jim Borgman, actress Allison Janney, architects Alfred Granger and Graham Gund, typhus-vaccine developer and NIH director Rolla Dyer, MTV president Mark Rosenthal, CNN anchor Kris Osborn, actor and comedian Jonathan Winters, legendary journalist and newspaper editor Jim Bellows, art historian Victoria Wyatt, and the creator of the birth control pill, Carl Djerassi.

Kenyon's English department is probably the best known among the college's academic departments. The English department first gained international recognition with the arrival of the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom in 1937 as Professor of Poetry and first editor of The Kenyon Review, a renowned literary journal. Perhaps the department's greatest influence on American literature derives from the central role that it played in the development of a theory of literary study known as "the New Criticism." At a time when many scholars and teachers focused on the historical backgrounds of a literary text or probed authors' biographies for psychological clues, Ransom and his contemporaries argued for a method of literary analysis which took literature to be the most significant way humanity has ever devised for exploring reality, and which took texts themselves with corresponding seriousness, reading them closely and interpreting them intensively. Besides John Crowe Ransom, notable English faculty have included Jacques Barzun, Elizabeth Bishop, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, and more recently, John Kinsella and James Wood. Former English students at Kenyon include poets Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Robert Mezey and Anthony Hecht, biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein, playwright Wendy MacLeod, and authors Peter Taylor, Fred Waitzkin, P. F. Kluge, James Wright, William Gass, Laura Hillenbrand, and E. L. Doctorow.

Kenyon's sports teams are referred to as the Lords and Ladies, and their colors are purple and white, with gold often added as an accent. The college's men's and women's swimming teams are generally considered the best in NCAA Division III, with the men's team winning 25 consecutive national championships and the women's 20 (not consecutively). Swim Coach Jim Steen is the winningest coach in any sport in NCAA history. Kenyon's football team, however, is considered the worst in NCAA Division III.

Kenyon College is a member of the Five Colleges of Ohio, Great Lakes Colleges Association, and the Association of Episcopal Colleges.