Editor’s Note: The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., is an hour-and-a-half south of Nashville on Interstate 24. Its campus is situated atop what is referred to, with some hyperbole, as “The Mountain.” The interstate approach to Sewanee is the steepest grade of federal roadway east of the Mississippi River. However, it does not lead to a mountaintop, in the classic sense. It leads, instead, to the Cumberland Plateau, which is dotted with coves and valleys, waterfalls, springs, and some of the last remaining virgin timber in the state of Tennessee.
Just prior to the Civil War, Nashville started dispatching the sons of its finest families to be educated at this isolated institution. Because of its connections with the Protestant Episcopal Church and its Gothic-style architecture, Sewanee summoned up images of the great English universities; it suggested nobility, serious intellectual pursuit and, most of all, a life of privilege. Nashville still sends many of its privileged sons and daughters to the mountain, but change, inevitably, has brought more diversity to the campus.
Nonetheless, by virtue of its geographic isolation, its close ties to the Episcopal Church and Oxford University, and its long-standing ties to the Agrarian literary movement, Sewanee has developed a unique identity in American higher education. Classes are small. Teachers teach. The basics—the sciences, literature, history, foreign languages—rule. Revisionists might condemn the place as an anachronism. Some have even called it an enclave of racism. Others find it graceful, idyllic, a place of peace in a world of chaos.
Scattered all across Nashville are Sewanee graduates who make their annual pilgrimages to the campus. Some go once a year to throw down a stiff drink at a football game. Others hole up for weeks in a cottage at “The Assembly,” the tiny village-within-a-village that, for well over a century, has provided a patrician retreat from Nashville’s stifling summers.
Jonathan Meiburg was last semester’s editor of Sewanee’s student newspaper, the Sewanee Purple. Jennie Sutton succeeded him in that job this semester. Together, they offer a view of the motionless, yet slowly evolving, life on The Mountain.
Luke's car, 10:30 p.m. Monday
Luke Schrader’s olive-green 1965 Pontiac Catalina is a big car. Three people can fit comfortably in the front seat, with some room left over for a fourth. Tonight, making the trip to the Monteagle Waffle House in Luke’s Pontiac is like taking a cruise on the high seas. Like most other students at Sewanee, Luke taps the roof of his car for luck as he passes through the gates that mark the entrance to The Domain, the 10,000-acre tract of forest owned by the University of the South, the mountaintop bastion of hard-drinking Southern literacy, the sacred training ground of Episcopal priests.
Luke is a junior physics major from Ohio. His head is smooth-shaved, and he has a penchant for the Grateful Dead. Mackenzie Johnson, a freshman from Gainesville, Ga., shuffles through a tape case until she finds a Dave Matthews Band bootleg. “Is this OK?” she asks.
“I can’t see it,” Luke replies. “What is it?”
“It’s Dave.”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s cool. Put it on side B.”
Two years earlier, before Dave Matthews was a staple of Rolling Stone, he played Sewanee twice, and students still take pride in his success. But bands come to the Mountain only once every couple of weeks, and places for nighttime entertainment are few and far between. Most of the time, an excursion into Monteagle is about as lively as Sewanee nightlife gets.
The Waffle House is a place to eat, talk—sometimes with the employees—and waste an hour or two; Pop’s Happyland Restaurant and Truck Stop, a little further down Highway 64, is the place to study. On most nights, clusters of Sewanee students with plates of chicken strips and piles of books are camped out there. Pearl’s, a classier restaurant just off the highway, fills the need for a place to go for a dressed-up date, a place to order bourbon-glazed bread pudding as a dessert. Pearl’s has made a killing.
Shenanigans, the perennial favorite hang-out of many students, is a restaurant in the “town.” The lighting is dim, Dead tunes blare from wall speakers, there is a small art gallery, and there are posters, pottery and road signs on the walls. Every night at 9 o’clock, Shenanigan’s turns into a bar. Students in the baseball-cap-khaki-and-flannel-wearing, Range Rover-driving crowd feel the need to put in frequent appearances there. The food, standard lunch and grill fare, is moderately good and a bit over-priced. Shenanigans is packed every night. On the mountain, there is nowhere else much to go.
Students figure any restaurant is a welcome relief from the Sewanee dining halls. In a much-publicized flap last semester, students discovered squirming maggots inside a frozen yogurt machine. Marriott food service representatives were appropriately contrite; one company exec insisted that “a piece of meat had to have been put in there maliciously.” That explanation wasn’t very comforting to most students. The frozen yogurt machine now attracts fewer customers than it used to.
Still, the university requires that nearly all students be on the meal plan, so Gailor Hall is busy each night. The fraternities and sororities maintain their staked-out eating tables, and the mint chocolate chip ice cream still vanishes faster than any of the other flavors.
At the Waffle House, Luke has just asked for a double order of hash browns—“scattered, covered, chunk, topped and diced. No onions. And a sweet tea.”
“I can’t believe you did that,” Mackenzie says in horror. Luke looks pleased with himself.
“I got hungry,” he explains. “You can have some of it if you want, dude.” She laughs. No thanks.
Someone once quipped that this Waffle House’s motto should be “Good Food Served Fast to People Too Drunk to Appreciate It.” It’s tough to talk about Sewanee without talking about alcohol; the school has a reputation for churning out good students and hard drinkers. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner describes Sewanee—in a line now immortalized on countless T-shirts—as a place where “they don’t even teach you what water is.”
Since kegs were banished from the campus over a year ago, the kind of bacchanalia that used to mark most weekends has been toned down a little bit, but alcohol is still a fact of life, and there’s plenty of weed for students who want it. Meanwhile, the infamous Fall and Spring Party Weekends retain their former glory. On these weekends, most students start drinking Thursday morning and continue straight on into Sunday night. Herds of sloshed alums cruise the streets while kilt-wearing drinking clubs mob the football games; fraternities and sororities try to outdo each other in throwing the biggest parties. It usually takes the campus a week to recover, and someone usually ends up in the Emergency Room.
Even in Sewanee, however, there is plenty to do besides drink. An Outing Program leads expeditions in and around The Domain for caving, climbing, boating and hiking. An Outreach Office organizes crews to build Habitat for Humanity houses in Sewanee and for projects in Jamaica, Honduras, New Orleans, and on Navajo land. And there’s always the Internet; every dorm room has a full hookup.
On this night at the Waffle House, Luke and Mackenzie are stone sober.
Luke’s eyes are also bigger than his stomach. Contemplating the remains of the hashbrowns, he turns to Mackenzie. She anticipates him. “Don’t even think about it, dude,” she says. “You dug that hole for yourself.”
Sully's Room, 10:45 a.m., Tuesday
John Sullivan, looking out the window of his dorm room beneath the Sewanee dining hall, has just decided what he wants to be when he grows up. “A scullion,” he says. “I want to be an Irish kitchen scullion.” In kitchens in the British Isles, scullions do all the menial work—everything but the cooking. In a couple of hours at Convocation, the ceremony that marks the opening of each semester at Sewanee, John, a tall, quiet English major, will be getting his gown. The gown is a mark of academic distinction at Sewanee; only students who maintain an impressive grade point average are allowed to wear it on campus and in class. In preparation for the honor, John, reputed to be the school’s best student writer, is changing his tie. Sitting in a chair in the corner, Jeff Swann, a towheaded volunteer fireman, is reading Thucydides, trying without much luck to finish an assignment before class.
“If you’re gonna be a kitchen slave,” Swann counters, “why not go to France or Italy? I mean, why limit your options like that, you know, when you could be the Italian Scullion?”
“The Italian Scullion,” John chuckles, “great.” Jeff, weary of the Peloponnesian War, puts down the book, picks up John’s guitar, and starts to play a brisk “Cedar Street Rag.” He’s really good. John looks out the window again and picks up a cigarette. He’s got something else on his mind. For the past year and for part of this year, John lived in the house owned by the legendary author Andrew Lytle. Now John is working on an article for The Purple, the student newspaper, about Lytle, who died in December. John is having a tough time trying to sort things out; he’s not used to writing elegies.
John lived in a sort of apartment underneath the main part of Lytle’s log house in the Mont-eagle Assembly, a sort of upscale campground for rusticating Episcopalians. In the kitchen of Lytle’s house, John would sit while the old man, dressed in red flannel pajamas and sipping iced bourbon from a silver cup, would talk, recalling his glory days in the company of Allen Tate, Peter Taylor and John Crowe Ransom, all of whom he had outlived. Sometimes, when John walked by the door of Lytle’s bedroom, John recalls, he could hear Lytle softly singing old hymns.
The Academic Procession, 12:30 p.m., Tuesday
When the bell rings, the line starts to move, setting off a flurry of friendly dogs. Arrayed like a flock of peacocks in their academic gowns, hoods, and birettas, the entire faculty of the University of the South at Sewanee moves through the Gothic-style cloisters of Walsh-Ellett Hall, across the quad into All Saints’ Chapel for the Opening Convocation of the Easter Semester. Sewanee, which is operated by the Episcopal Church, really isn’t much of a university—it only confers graduate degrees in its small School of Theology. Its centerpiece—the College of Arts and Sciences, a small liberal arts school housed in the central campus’ stone buildings—has an enrollment of only about 1,200 students. Yet Sewanee has a sort of ivory-tower mystique. It is stuck in the middle of The Domain, atop the gorgeous Cumberland Plateau between Nashville and Chattanooga, and the school’s promotional material hawks the location relentlessly. The promotional material also talks about the campus dogs, who, although technically restrained by a leash law adopted last year, still run around in packs, as if they owned the place. Sewanee isn’t just a school; it’s dog heaven.
Inside the Chapel, a crowd of students and parents stand as the organ begins a fanfare. The procession files past the stained-glass windows and memorial plaques, the statues and the cracked baptismal font that has survived a fire. The cornerstone of The University of the South was blown up by invading Union army troops early in the Civil War.
Sewanee’s distinction as the university “of the South” still raises heated debates. Until last year, the flags of Southern states—the home states of the Episcopal dioceses that have jurisdiction over the university—hung in All Saints’ Chapel. Many of those flags still incorporate the Confederate flag. Now they’ve been replaced with innocuous cream-colored banners that bear the coats of arms of each diocese.
Sewanee Vice-Chancellor Samuel Williamson, wearing his ceremonial red velvet and ermine robe, follows the procession. Under his leadership, the administration has made attempts to play down Confederate symbolism on campus. Last year, when a resident of the town of Sewanee printed license plates and bumper stickers bearing the university’s name printed over a Confederate battle flag, the university, which owns the land on which Sewanee’s businesses and homes have been built, threatened to revoke his lease.
The school has good reason to be image-conscious. A recent student survey, conducted by The Princeton Review, listed “discrimination against minorities” as an inescapable problem at Sewanee. Looking at the crowd in the Chapel, it isn’t too hard to see why. The students are WASP-ish and well-dressed. They appear to be affluent. The Kappa Alpha fraternity, with its symbolic ties to the Old South, still flies the Confederate flag in front of its fraternity house from time to time.
The University has been the home of a long line of unabashedly Southern professors and authors, including Abbott Martin (who maintained that “Yankees can be reformed if caught early”) and Lytle, author of Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, The Velvet Horn and The Long Night. Some suggest that Lytle’s recent death may have marked an end to some of Sewanee’s Southerness—and an end to its quirky individuality.
For this Convocation, the speaker is Marian Wright Edelman, the president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Edelman is the first black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar, a woman who, according to the vice-chancellor, “marks the changing South.” On this Tuesday afternoon, she faces a tough audience. Several times during Edelman’s speech, one man in the audience harumphs unashamedly.
But the speech ends, and the honorary degrees are conferred, in Latin, with great ceremony. The vice-chancellor presents the students with their academic gowns, as well as “all the rights, honors and privileges pertaining thereto.” Cheers. Cue the alma mater. The procession files out, and the students and parents emerge into an uncharacteristically sunny day. Laughing and blinking, they pose for photographs.
In the Village, 4:30 p.m., Wednesday
The Sewanee Youth Center shares a building with the Sewanee Senior Citizens’ Center. It’s an old, wooden building that has been re-painted many times. The latest coat is a pasty green, and it’s flaking off again.
The Youth Center lacks amenities such as up-to-date playground equipment. When the days are warm enough, the kids make the trek down the street from Sewanee Elementary and play outside on a metal jungle-gym. At one time, it was painted in primary colors, but now the rust shows through. There’s a volleyball net, and there is plenty of room for baseball and football—if playing football were allowed. It has been banned at the elementary school, and it is against Cathy’s rules at the Youth Center too. Cathy runs the Youth Center, 3-6 p.m. on weekdays.
Like any other benevolent dictator, Cathy is both loved and feared by the people in her charge. She says that she works at the Youth Center because she “just loves kids.” Even compared to most other kid-oriented jobs, her job seems like hell. The Youth Center stops just short of pandemonium. The girls’ voices seem to rise an octave when they walk through the double doors. A sign on the half-empty snack food machine warns, “If machine continues to be shaken, it will be taken out.”
The unwaxed wooden floors boom with the thundering of 10-year-old boys running from one end of the hall to the other, over and over, back and forth, playing “Power Rangers,” a distant Internet-age cousin of “tag.” A skinny boy whose limbs are too long for his torso whirs by on a pair of white roller skates. The place has no distinctive smell, except for that odd smell of sweaty children. Right now, even that smell is stale.
A “Vote for Ollie Otter” sign is posted on a locked door in the main room. “That’s me,” a boy says, introducing himself. He is reading a book that’s really two books in one: The half he is reading is Alice in Wonderland; upside-down and on the back is another story.
It must be hard to read in such a noisy place. At the other end of the room is a boom box radio blaring “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Suddenly, the music stops, and the girl jumping next to it looks at the radio, first with anger and then with guilt, as she tries to plug the boom box back in. None of the other kids seem to notice the quiet or to blame her for it, so she joins the running-around-the-room kids the next time they run by. Their feet seem even louder without the noise of AC/DC.
“It’s not usually this noisy,” Ollie Otter says. “It’s just ’cause it’s so cold an’ Cathy won’t let us outside.”
Still in the Village, 4:45 p.m.
The Sewanee Market is built from the same soft yellow stone, the “Sewanee stone,” that was used to build the Sewanee Pharmacy and the Chaplain’s Residence. It is the same stone used to build many Episcopal churches around the Southeast, including Nashville’s Christ Church.
Beside the entrance to the Market hangs an American flag. Beside the flag stand empty kegs. Since the university banned kegs two years ago, students have bought a lot more canned beer—bottles aren’t allowed at parties. Last fall many students stopped buying kegs at the Market. A rumor was circulating that the Market was snitching to the police.
At the Market, fat-free cookies and cereals are overpriced, but the chips sell for a fair price, especially the single-serving size. A man has just bought a Hershey bar, a Sundrop soda and a bag of Doritos. Obviously, he works at the university dining hall. He is still wearing his uniform—black-and-white checked pants and a black baseball cap that says “Marriott.” The man behind the counter wears a pair of light-blue overalls and a long-sleeve shirt. The green thread on the buttonhole of his overalls is frayed. Both men are smoking.
A student puts a bag of popcorn on the counter next to the cash register. The man behind the counter says, “Three dollars.”
“Three dollars?” the student gasps, a little unnerved.
“Seventy-five cents,” the man in the overalls concedes.
“You planned that, to trick me, didn’t’cha?” the student teases back.
“Yeah. That’s right. I just knew you had a lot of money,” the man behind the counter grins. The student pays him from the wad of dollar bills he carries crumpled in his hand.
Flying, 8:15 a.m., Thursday
Timothy Keith-Lucas, professor of psychology, is wiping the windows of his Piper Cherokee 140. He’s just pulled the airplane out of its hangar at the Sewanee Airport. “I’ve already done most of my preflight check,” he explains, “twice.” He hops down from the wing. “You can’t exactly pull an airplane off to the side of the road.”
Inside the plane’s tiny cockpit, he’s taped a reminder to himself: “NEVER LET ANYTHING MECHANICAL KNOW YOU ARE IN A HURRY.” He squeezes his tall, wiry frame into the pilot’s seat and carefully starts the engine. The plane wobbles its way to the end of the airstrip. The chilly temperature is making the plane cranky and a little unresponsive. “Come on now,” Keith-Lucas mutters, “we’ve got a job to do. Now get your butt moving.”
With a bump and a quick rush and a flurry of radio static, the tree line drops away. Outside the window, the Cumberland Plateau is shrinking, an honest-to-goodness mesa covered in trees, all of them bare. The sky is cloudless and the sun is sharp. Fog coming off the Tennessee River has turned the valley to the east into a mysterious archipelago of floating islands; to the west, the fields and pastures near Cowan and Winchester are an earth-tone quilt. Directly below are the roads and buildings of Sewanee, the central campus and the chapel, the town proper and the elementary school. There is The Domain, the huge fingers of undeveloped forest owned by the school.
Keith-Lucas banks into a gentle turn. “I like to come up here to look around and look down,” he says. “Especially after work. Up here you get a certain kind of detachment, a whole different psychological perspective. It really broadens your view.” He dips a wing and skirts the edge of the bluff, cruising Sewanee’s property lines.
On campus it is Keith-Lucas’ job to make sure that “special events,” from dinner parties to graduation, come off smoothly. Convocation, he says, is “a piece of cake. A no-brainer. Nothing compared to Lessons and Carols.” Every year, on a weekend during the pre-Christmas season of Advent, busloads of tourists crowd into the Chapel for five repetitions of the Lessons and Carols service. The crowd triples the size of the town. For 1995, in order to cut down on traffic problems, a special “performance” was scheduled, exclusively for VIPs and invited guests. But some eyebrows were raised at the idea of an invitation-only church service.
Flying over the equestrian center and the golf course, Keith-Lucas considers Sewanee’s reputation as a country-club institution. “It’s not as much as some others are,” he muses. “The way we look at it is this: Good students are our first priority, and many of the students here are on substantial financial aid. But if we can get a good student who can also pay full price, then we’ve scored double, because we can use some of that money to help pay for someone else.”
But what about the stables for the horses, and what about the golf course? “Let’s be sexist for a minute,” Keith-Lucas says. “Say you’ve got a young lady whose daddy went to Vanderbilt and who wants her to go to Vanderbilt. But say that this young lady also loves to ride horses.” Keith-Lucas starts into a slow turn. “If we can get her up here, and show her around, and show her this place where she can keep Sugar Plum, do you think she’s going to want to go to Nashville?” The wings of Keith-Lucas’ plane even out. “I mean, do you think daddy’s got a prayer?” he asks.
Below are the athletic fields, the empty football stadium, and the old dairy, a reminder of the days when Sewanee was truly a world unto itself. The water tower, given a new coat of sky-blue paint, stands alone on a hill next to an old barn. Just the summer before, the water tank was in need of a paint job. Some enterprising students had managed to paint an F in front of the U in “Sewanee Utility District.”
A local election was held to decide what color to paint the tower. The voters wanted purple, Sewanee’s school color. “It turns out purple would have cost about $5,000 more, so we painted it blue instead,” Keith-Lucas explains. So much for democracy.
From the air, the side streets, the streets where many of the faculty live within walking distance of the campus, look like a tangle of spaghetti. “There’s been a lot of discussion,” says Keith-Lucas, “among the faculty and the administration, about what makes Sewanee different from anywhere else.
“The conclusion I came to a while back,” he says, “is that we’ve got this very peculiar student-faculty relationship. It’s a close relationship, it’s a little formal, but it’s based on respect. Students don’t address me by my first name, for instance—and they shouldn’t—but at the same time they know that if they call me at home the night before a test because they’ve broken up with a girlfriend or because they just aren’t prepared, I’ll reschedule it.” Keith-Lucas is right. Students stop by professors’ offices just to chat; sometimes they buy each other lunch or have dinner. And some of the old guard still invite students over for drinks.
What about the Old South dilemma? What about the grumbling parents at Convocation? What about the Confederate flags? “Think of it this way,” Keith-Lucas says: “At least we forced those people to sit down and listen to someone like Marian Edelman for 15 minutes. Maybe some of it’ll get through sometime.” Then he is quiet for a minute.
“During the years that I’ve been here, there have been a lot of things that people thought would kill Sewanee,” Keith-Lucas says. “The end of Saturday classes, the start of the new curriculum, forbidding smoking in the classroom, raising the drinking age, banning kegs, admitting women. But they haven’t killed Sewanee. The only thing I can think of that would really hurt this school is if we started to place an emphasis on research rather than teaching, if we told faculty to ‘publish or perish,’ to close their doors to students. But I don’t see that happening.”
Down on the central campus, the leafless trees give a clear shot of the Gothic buildings and the quad and the Chapel tower. “Hang on,” Keith-Lucas says, “this is probably illegal.” Suddenly, as he goes into a steep, steep turn, the bottom seems to drop out of the airplane. The plane is so close to the ground that it is possible to make out people on the quad, heading for the dining hall. Somewhere down there, Dr. Pamela Macfie’s Renaissance Lit class is meeting around a table to talk about sex and John Donne’s poetry. The Marriott staff is preparing for another lunch rush at Gailor Hall. Someone is probably drinking a beer (even at this hour), and some lad is making his way home from a women’s dorm. In the offices of Walsh-Ellett Hall, the vice-chancellor is making phone calls, looking for another $1 million. Clara and Pablo the dogs are asleep on the Gailor lawn. At the Youth Center Cathy is cleaning up in preparation for another noisy afternoon.
Keith-Lucas straightens up and heads for the airstrip. The approach over the town graveyard is bumpy, due to a nasty crosswind, but Keith-Lucas manages a smooth landing. He does not appear nervous at all. It is the sort of landing he has made before. “About 1,200 times, to be exact,” he says, smiling, taking off his headset.
“During the years that I’ve been here, there have been a lot of things that people thought would kill Sewanee,” Keith-Lucas says. “The end of Saturday classes, the start of the new curriculum, forbidding smoking in the classroom, raising the drinking age, banning kegs, admitting women. But they haven’t killed Sewanee. The only thing I can think of that would really hurt this school is if we started to place an emphasis on research rather than teaching, if we told faculty to ‘publish or perish,’ to close their doors to students. But I don’t see that happening.”
Down on the central campus, the leafless trees give a clear shot of the Gothic buildings and the quad and the Chapel tower. “Hang on,” Keith-Lucas says, “this is probably illegal.” Suddenly, as he goes into a steep, steep turn, the bottom seems to drop out of the airplane. The plane is so close to the ground that it is possible to make out people on the quad, heading for the dining hall. Somewhere down there, Dr. Pamela Macfie’s Renaissance Lit class is meeting around a table to talk about sex and John Donne’s poetry. The Marriott staff is preparing for another lunch rush at Gailor Hall. Someone is probably drinking a beer (even at this hour), and some lad is making his way home from a women’s dorm. In the offices of Walsh-Ellett Hall, the vice-chancellor is making phone calls, looking for another $1 million. Clara and Pablo the dogs are asleep on the Gailor lawn. At the Youth Center Cathy is cleaning up in preparation for another noisy afternoon.
Keith-Lucas straightens up and heads for the airstrip. The approach over the town graveyard is bumpy, due to a nasty crosswind, but Keith-Lucas manages a smooth landing. He does not appear nervous at all. It is the sort of landing he has made before. “About 1,200 times, to be exact,” he says, smiling, taking off his headset.
Creature comforts At Sewanee, Andrew Lytle (right) was one-of-a kind. His dog was not.
