Biography | Michael Eisner — The Chapel on The Hill Where He Took an English Degree

People treat a Disney chief as a Hollywood product who skipped the liberal-arts hill town.

Michael Dammann Eisner finished Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in English.

Swasey Chapel has stood at the center of that campus since 1924.

The limestone and brick steeple sits on the highest point of the academic hill. Commencement, lectures, and the Vail concerts still use the nave.

Eisner arrived intending medicine and left with literature and theatre. The campus later named a performing-arts center for him, opened in 2019, a short walk from this chapel.

In 2008 the Eisner Foundation gave Denison 1.75 million dollars to endow a chair in honor of English professor Dominick Consolo.

The degree is the documented turn. A page job at NBC came after this hill, not instead of it.

Stand on Chapel Walk and the chapel is the building you see first. That is the frame that belongs to the undergraduate years, not the later gift.

The village of Granville sits below the ridge. The school is still a private liberal-arts college of about 2,400 students.

Photo: Swasey Chapel and observatory, Denison University, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Michael Eisner, 1977, public domain.