A DIPLOMAT’S VIEW OF RIPON COLLEGE IN 1965:
‘Good-natured louts,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ women George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat, ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, political scientist and writer. He advocated a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely, wrote about foreign policy and analyzed international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study for nearly half a century. In February 1965, when I was a student at Ripon College, the distinguished American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, whose father (Kossuth Kent Kennan, Class of 1875) had attended the school, visited the campus to deliver a lecture and speak with students. His views of the student body, I later learned, were mixed. Our faces were
3 4 | R I P O N College
“open, pleasant ones,” he wrote. But to my chagrin, he rendered a particularly harsh judgement on me and my fellow male students, calling us “good-natured louts” who were decidedly inferior to the more “cosmopolitan” women on campus. Kennan — perhaps best known as the author of the “Long Telegram,” written in 1946, which outlined a new “containment” policy for dealing with the Soviet Union — was met at the train station in Columbus, Wisconsin, by members of the Ripon College history department. From there, he was driven to Ripon, he wrote, “over wide straight roads, past frozen, snow-covered fields and prosperous dairy farms with beautiful red barns and less beautiful houses done in the dirty yellow brick of the region …” He was a week shy of his 61st birthday.
He wrote that the “girls” at Ripon, in his view, were more mature than the “men” and superior to them, too, “socially and in style: more cosmopolitan, less provincial, more part of the age, in general more like modern women in Vienna or Milan or wherever else you like than the men of similar age in those places.” Kennan said that Ripon’s female students clearly took a larger view than the men did of the competitive sphere in which they considered their lives to evolve — the reflection of an awareness, perhaps, of the relative uniformity in women’s problems everywhere. The Ripon men, however, were “goodnatured louts” who were “immersed in their world of records and athletics and