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The University of the South

Diocesan Press Service. October 7, 1966 [47-6]

Among the eight colleges represented by the Association of Episcopal Colleges, the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn., has the most direct ties with the church. It is owned and operated by 21 southern dioceses, each of which appoints one clergyman and two laymen to the university's board of trustees, in addition to its bishops, who are members ex officio.

Each year these dioceses contribute in support of their educational center an amount equivalent to the income on $6.5 million, almost entirely in unrestricted funds.

The church, or course, does more for Sewanee than help support it financially. Because its trustees are the policy makers, Christian education is held as a living ideal and intellectual freedom encouraged.

"Unique" is a word perhaps too often used in academic circles, but there is much about Sewanee that only can be described so. Arnold Toynbee has said, "One of the strong points of American higher education is its immense variety, and in this variety the University of the South stands out, like the plateau on which it has been planted."

The plateau to which the British historian referred is in a spur of the Cumberland mountains, 2,000 feet above sea level, covered with old oaks and new pines. The University's forestry department, charged with its 10,000 acres, had led the way for area tree farmers in pine reforesting. On the campus you will see only the trees and the sandstone buildings hewn out of the area's own rock. Go a short distance and you will catch your breath at one of a number of views, all different, where the plateau sheers away to the farm-checked valley a thousand feet below, framed in rock juttings or bending tree branches.

As the 1966 valedictorian phrased it, "Sewanee is infolded by the land, land that takes your breath away, land that exhausts the adjectives of the most descriptive writer, land that makes you a little embarrassed to be an inhabitant."

Sewanee is also unique in its history and in its product.

Founded in 1857 by the church's bishops and given its resounding name as an exact description of what its founders planned it to be, the University of the South was lost, in all but idea, in the Civil War. Its cornerstone, laid amid fanfare and oratory before 5,000 people who made the trip up the mountain in the wilderness by foot and horse and cart, was blown up by idle Union troops encamped there. A legend has it that the northern captain, ashamed of his men's action, had a Bible carved from a shard of the pink Tennessee marble and carried it to his death in battle.

The Rt. Rev. Charles Todd Quintard, Bishop of Tennessee, a native of Connecticut, the first vice-chancellor, sought funds in England and set going what was, physically, a poor fragile remnant of the dream of a great university. Priests and scholars and generals joined in teaching to an uncompromising standard of excellence. In the postwar years Sewanee became, as noted by Wilbur Joseph Cash in his Mind of the South, an island for the free pursuit of knowledge amid a stricken area.

Only now are the founders' plans of multiple colleges in the English university pattern being set in motion. The Jessie Ball duPont Library, completed in 1965, was built to meet the needs of two colleges in addition to the present college of Arts and Sciences, School of Theology, and Sewanee Military Academy, and to serve the community at large. The J. Albert Woods Science Laboratories, under construction across from the Library, will also be adaptable for additional colleges.

The expansion by small colleges, sharing major equipment and lecture courses, is planned to preserve the quality that most characterizes Sewanee. By long and close contact with a varied and untrammeled faculty that cares about him, by exposure to a continuum of influences great and small, the Sewanee man has emerged as an entity that can be recognized anywhere, by one who knows the signs.

Is it a mold of thought into which he is cast? Hardly. Sewanee has put her gentle mark on men of such diverse attitudes as the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the chancellor of the University of Texas, the editors of the Los Angeles Times and the Charleston News and Courier, the president of American Airlines and the minister to Canada.

Today less than 1, 000 young men are enrolled in the University of the South. The College of Arts and Sciences enrollment is strictly limited, thus enabling the college to provide small classes and an intimate, personal relation between student and professor. Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science in Forestry degrees are granted by the college. Courses are offered which provide basic training for business, for forestry, and for advanced work in numerous fields, including journalism, law, medicine, teaching, and theology.

The School of Theology is a seminary of the Episcopal Church and was established in 1878 as a constituent college of the University of the South with the status of a professional school.

Sewanee is naturally proud of its unbroken academic prestige, of the Sewanee Review, the oldest literary-critical quarterly in America, circulated in 56 countries; of its inclusion among the top one or two per cent of America's colleges and universities in every qualitative listing made in recent years; of turning out more Rhodes and Fulbright Scholars in proportion to its enrollment than any other institution in the South, more Woodrow Wilson Fellows than any but a half dozen in the nation. Even these gratifications do not form the essence of its uniqueness.

Different as are their thoughts and their ways, most Sewanee men (ruffianly as they may see themselves while in college) after they graduate share a gentility that may be as out of style as the world itself. They are not afraid to express themselves articulately, even lyrically, to dress pleasantly, to bear themselves with grace and courtesy.

Editors - This is number 3 in a series about the eight Episcopal Colleges.

[thumbnail: A student of the Universi...]