I’m sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room in Texas, where I’ve unexpectedly been quarantining since this second wave of COVID-19, when I speak with Chad Berry over Zoom. He has offered to tell me more about Berea College, for which he is Vice President for Alumni and College Relations. After I sort out the inevitable technical difficulties, I share that I didn’t attend an American university myself, instead studied and then continued to live in Paris until recently. He jokes about wishing this interview could be conducted at a terrace café somewhere rive gauche. Seems we are both a little nostalgic for a not so distant past, when travel and in-person interviews were still a thing.

 

However, on the other side of my screen, Berry finds himself in Kentucky, at the heart of Appalachia. Which makes it all the more astounding to learn of Berea’s founding story, being the first interracial and coeducational school established in 1855, by Reverend John Gregg Fee, in what was still the slave-holding South. The reverend and his wife began classes in a one room church built on land gifted to them by the renowned abolitionist Cassius Clay. “Rare is a vision as distinctive and relevant 150 years later”, Berry notes, as he assures me that the audacity and courage of Fee’s initial vision continue to guide Berea’s progressive philosophy in 2020. Berea College is still committed to “radical inclusion” and “educational opportunity” (this is plainly stated in the school’s Great Commitments). This by ensuring ethnic and gender diversity of course, but also perhaps something even more renegade by 21st century American standards: offering a tuition free education.