What is Love at Kenyon?

Kenyon Dating: Hildy Joseph ’13 and Jackson Cabo ’13

Hildy Joseph ’13 and Jackson Cabo ’13 struggle with their not-so-long-distance-but-distant relationship: she lives South and he lives North.

“It’s always a hike. I try to steal my roommate’s car,” Cabo said.

After getting to know one another on the cross-country team when Joseph joined her sophomore year, the couple gradually grew together, though they had first met prior to coming to Kenyon.

Both come from the Boston area, which allows them to train together and see one another away from Kenyon.

“Jackson’s really fast, so it’s kind of a struggle,” Joseph said, “[but] he has had a positive influence on my training.”

She even received the “I run more miles than my boyfriend” paper plate award for cross country, but “the facts are misconstrued,” Cabo said. (See photo 1).

Professor Marriage: Professor Laycock and Professor Carson

It all started in a Canadian classroom with a Marxist professor and a group project in the ’70s. Professors of English Deborah Laycock and James Carson both grew up in Edmonton, Canada, but they did not meet until they enrolled in a comparative literature course at the University of Alberta.

“Strangely enough, even though we worked on the project together, we didn’t get to know each other through that,” Laycock said.

“[We] actually started going out when she went to the same movie with a girlfriend that I went to with a guy,” Carson said. Little did they know that 37 years later, they would be celebrating 25 years of marriage and teaching together at Kenyon. The path to this Hill was a long and sometimes lonely journey, however.

For graduate school, the couple chose two colleges in the San Francisco Bay area. Laycock attended Stanford University while living in Berkley, and Carson attended the University of California at Berkley. “[T]hey looked closer on the map,” said Laycock, who had a three-and-a-half-hour commute by bus to Stanford. That commute soon became even longer. Laycock took a job at the University of Iowa while Carson returned to Canada to do a post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University.

In 1988, Carson came to Kenyon. “[We] were actually commuting then for about five years before we got jobs together,” said Laycock, who at last took her position at Kenyon in 1991. What made those years bearable was their “repository of shared memories,” Laycock said.

“The more you share with a person, the better,” Carson said.

Perhaps the best part of working with one’s spouse, especially in the English Department, is that “we don’t have a huge duplicate book collection,” Laycock said.

They also have the opportunity to critique each other’s work and relax by reading aloud. Their love for literature follows them wherever they go, especially on road trips. “In the car, he’s my books on tape,” Laycock said.  

“Our major source of dispute here [is] music,” Carson said.

“I like it really loud, so I crank it up ... [and he] runs and turns it down,” said Laycock, who especially likes Canadian music since it relates to one of her subjects of interest, Canadian literature.

They have a shared interest and specialization in 18th-century literature. “Since there are so few jobs in one’s area of specialization, couples don’t have geographical choice in the choice of the kind of job they are going to go to,” Carson said. “[A]fter putting in that five years, things worked out so we both have jobs in the same small college. Wow, isn’t that lucky?” (See photo 2).

Professor Marriage: Professors Lisa and David Leibowitz

Some may know them as She-bowitz and He-bowitz, but Professors of Political Science Lisa and David Leibowitz have more to their story than sharing a common last name.

“I seduced her with Plato,” David Leibowitz said. “I was her teacher at [the] University of Toronto.” Lisa Leibowitz  became increasingly enamored with his course, and, after he left the University, she changed her major to political philosophy. In the year that he was there, she often visited his office for philosophical discussions. As Lisa Leibowitz was an undergrad, the couple could not date until she entered graduate school at Michigan State University.