Twenty-seven years ago, the residents of McGill Hall seceded from Vanderbilt University. Students had gathered in the dormitory for an end-of-the-year banquet and awards ceremony, when four people in camouflage uniforms, dressed to look like Cuban revolutionaries, burst through the door and told everyone to be quiet. They barked orders, instructing students to remain seated with their hands on the table. In walked a fifth man, in dark sunglasses. He stood at the front of the room and announced that La Republica de McGillica was seceding from Vanderbilt. The man held a piece of paper from which he read the ideals of the new republic: McGill no longer recognized the authority of the chancellor; McGill would obey no ruling group associated with Vanderbilt; McGill denounced the Board of Trust. The man in the sunglasses then addressed his new citizens and told them not to worry, for he would take care of them. Then, just as quickly as they had come, the revolutionaries disappeared. Later, they hung a flag outside the dorm that read, "La Republica de McGillica."
Since then, not much in McGill has changed. In the past few years, McGill residents have set fire to a picnic table, thrown stale bread rolls at sorority girls, toilet-papered the statue of university founder Cornelius Vanderbilt, placed a giant Santa hat so high atop a flagpole that Vanderbilt had to rent a cherry picker to remove it, skinny-dipped in a Vandy swimming pool, and held wet T-shirt and penis comparison contests outside, in public. "Once, we had a squirrel roast," says Kate Jewell, a 2000 graduate. "We hung a banner outside the dorm that said, 'Saturday: Squirrel Roast, BYOS.' I don't know why we did it. Just to torment people, I guess."
The McGill Project, a living/learning residential program affiliated with the philosophy and fine arts departments, has been irritating Vanderbilt for more than 30 years. It started in 1972 as an effort to bring together the school's largely separate academic and social worlds and to foster interaction between students and faculty. In the process, the program helped to counteract the prevailing sense that Vanderbilt was simply a repository for privileged kids who cared more about status and drinking than learning. Although this bold endeavor officially succeeded, it produced a byproduct: a group of smart, offbeat students inclined to act on their wildest, most absurd impulses. The rest of campus refers to McGill by its unofficial nickname, "The Freak Dorm," and its residents have been called everything from drugged-out hippies to flamboyant, cross-dressing "fags."
While Vanderbilt remains primarily a conservative, Southern environment full of pearl earrings and polo shirts, McGill serves as a safe haven for students who don't quite fit the mold. "I was outed about being gay my freshman year," says Carl Manalo, a New York City high school teacher who graduated from Vanderbilt in 2001. "I'd hear nasty remarks when I walked around campus. People would pull up next to me in a car and yell something. But McGill was safe for me. It was open-minded and very liberal, a place where I could be myself."
Roughly half of Vanderbilt students belong to a fraternity or sorority, and most social activities occur away from the dormitories, along Frat Row or off campus. As one of only three residential programs at Vanderbilt, McGill has a unique community atmosphere similar to that of an extended family. In an average dorm, a student might never get to know his next-door neighbor, but McGillites treat each other like siblings. "Freshman year, I was on a hall with a bunch of Vandy girls and I was miserable," says 2001 graduate Champagne Girten, now a law school student. "I heard about McGill and went over there. It was exactly what I wanted. There were people hanging out in the lobby. One guy was dressed up as a motorcycle gang member. Everyone was having fun. I thought, no one has fun on my hall! This is great!"
The people in McGill are the students who don't want what the rest of Vanderbilt has to offer. After a year in the philosophy dorm, David Mintz became so immersed in transcendentalism and metaphysics that he decided he needed to take a year off, so he lived on a kibbutz and picked bananas. Then he came back to college, graduated from Vanderbilt and became a psychiatrist. Mintz now works at Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts, one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the nation. After living in McGill, Dan Monroe moved into a house off campus, where he and other McGillites built an isolation tank and studied John C. Lilly's sensory deprivation theories. He now runs an ad agency in Alabama. Megan Clancy graduated two years ago. She's working at Vanderbilt now, but says she thinks she wants to start a micronation, like the Principality of Sealand. And Michael Patton, philosophy professor at the University of Montevallo, says he never would have discovered his passion for philosophy had he not lived in McGill. "I look at the whole picture of Vanderbilt, and I'm not sure it's a great undergraduate experience. People are so concerned with image and money. I don't know what dream college I think of when I think of the way Vanderbilt should be...but McGill makes a small version of it come true."
What McGill achieves is a diversity—that all-important catchphrase used by academics to prove open-mindedness—found nowhere else on campus, except perhaps the foreign language dorm. McGillites surge onto campus in their vintage T-shirts, fishnet tights and leather jackets, looking, all of them, like mismatched socks against the khaki pants and sweater sets that pepper the manicured Vanderbilt lawns.
In its most recent rankings, The Princeton Review named Vanderbilt the No. 2 school with the least class/race integration, second only to Trinity College. In its list of colleges with the least receptiveness to alternative lifestyles, Vanderbilt ranked No. 16. But in McGill, homosexual Latinos from the Bronx befriend rural Midwesterners who listen to the Sex Pistols and claim that punk is still alive. International students who can't quite adjust to the American South give the dorm a more cosmopolitan feel; a boy from Africa discovers a fondness for techno, and a Turkish crowd regularly holds loud arguments in the halls.
Yet despite its wide variety of residents, McGill has a very specific reputation as the dorm in which all the freaks, geeks, weirdos, homosexuals and druggies live. While some of its reputation is warranted—the dorm has a significant openly gay population, something very rare at Vanderbilt—other rumors, such as the prevalence of drugs, are no truer than at any other dorm. Campus tour guides have been known to tell freshmen not to go inside McGill unless they want to be branded freaks. Yet these freaks, these bohemian loners in tie-dyed shirts and dirty jeans, will go on to become just as successful as any of the other kids who graduate from Vanderbilt. Maybe it's because the rest of the world looks a little bit more like them with every passing day—or maybe it's the other way around.
The McGill Project began as a monthly lecture series in 1972. Philosophy professor John Lachs teamed up with Casey Potter, then associate dean of residential and judicial affairs, to ask the administration for a program that would somehow connect academia with residential life. Lachs still teaches at Vanderbilt and remembers McGill's inception clearly. "A bunch of us in the philosophy department felt that education shouldn't start and stop in the classroom. McGill was started as an experiment, and the experiment was the living/learning project."
The philosophy department selected McGill Hall, an older dorm in the middle of campus, for the project's location because it already had a reputation as the most radical place on campus. Just as girls in a particular sorority might flock to one dorm, so did the longhaired hippies, bookish intellectuals and Vietnam protesters flock to McGill. By 1974, the monthly lecture series had evolved into an official campus organization, with the dorm's hundred residents as its members. Philosophy graduate students lived in the dorm to promote daily contact between faculty and students. Today, students must interview for membership in McGill, and the grad students are called program coordinators. John Stuhr, the first program coordinator, lived in McGill from 1974 to 1976 and recently returned to Vanderbilt as a philosophy professor.
"The administration was benignly enthusiastic about the program," he remembers, "but there were some people in the Housing Department suspicious of McGill. It was already the center of counterculture on campus, and they thought, 'Yeah, that's the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll house. This is the dorm that gives us the most problems, and now we're going to hand control over to the philosophy department? I don't think so!' "
Stuhr knew that to keep the project going, McGill had to prove itself. When Housing gave him a stack of dorm inventory forms for each student to fill out in the beginning of the year—a formality that most kids didn't even bother paying attention to—he and two other grad students bought some wine and paper cups. They knocked on every door and offered dorm residents a drink in return for the completed form.
"We'd pour them a glass of wine, then pour ourselves one too. By the time we were done, it was the middle of the night and we were extremely drunk. I remember walking around Alumni Lawn outside of the dorm, just going in circles for a few hours, trying to sober up before I took the forms over to Housing. When I showed up in the morning, I handed them to the dean. He was shocked. In most dorms, maybe 20 people would fill out these inventory forms. But I had them all. The dean took one look at me and said, 'I don't want to know how you did this, do I?' From then on, they never gave us any trouble."
Vanderbilt now takes a primarily hands-off policy when dealing with McGill; experience has taught the administration that while the residents may use unconventional methods to achieve their goals, everything typically turns out OK in the end.
Several years ago, late one Saturday night, some students in McGill put up a sign that said, "God is dead, go back to bed." Classmates who woke up for church on Sunday morning passed the sign on their way to services. "Boy, they were mad about that one," Dan Monroe recalls fondly.
McGill doesn't like conformity. After all, it is the art and philosophy dorm. Residents reference obscure philosophical and religious concepts the same way that other people memorize sports scores or movie quotes. When commissioned to create banners for a Vandy-Alabama football game, instead of writing slogans like "Go 'Dores!" McGillites decided to incorporate the word "hermeneutics" into every sign they made. At the game, football fans stared up at signs with phrases like, "Hermeneuticize 'Bama!" and wondered what they meant.
But amidst the pranks and alcohol exists a highly erudite atmosphere centered upon art, literature and philosophy. After all, you can't make silly football signs if you don't know what hermeneutics means. Shannon Cunningham, a 1994 graduate, says that in McGill, it is actually cool to be smart—something that's not necessarily true elsewhere on campus (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter). "There was an enormous amount of intellectual pressure in McGill. Everyone was really smart. The number of people who went on to get Ph.D.s was astounding."
During its first year, McGill's program coordinators instituted a McGill Happy Hour: a time every Friday when students gathered in the basement lounge for wine, hors d'oeuvres and talks given by professors and prominent Nashvillians, such as the mayor. When the drinking age was raised to 21 in the 1980s, McGill Happy Hour was replaced with the sober McGill Hour. Vanderbilt professors give most of the talks today, on topics ranging from obscure philosophical theories to heated debates on race, gender and sexuality.
In addition to the weekly McGill Hours, the program coordinator teaches an annual philosophy seminar, open only to dorm residents. Although the McGill Project is thoroughly grounded in philosophy, most residents aren't actually philosophy majors. The seminar thus exposes them to an area of study they might not otherwise explore. Program coordinators draw students in with topics such as "Prostitution and Sexuality" or "The Nature of Art," and hold the seminar in McGill's basement classroom. Residents take full advantage of its proximity, wearing pajamas or eating dinner during class. But while the jokes, seminars and McGill Hours are fun, they do not represent the entire project experience—that comes as much from the place itself and the people who live there.
As is the case with people drawn to philosophy, McGillites are prone to long discourses. Two or three people may sit in the lobby for hours, intensely debating everything from the way they were raised to the metaphysics of the human soul. "People sat around and discussed politics, religion, sexuality, everything," Elizabeth Cesarini, a 2003 graduate, says of her time there. "And there were a lot of different viewpoints. We even had a few conservatives. That livened things up."
Three years ago, students in the lobby started to debate the philosophical significance of words. The argument ended when someone stood up and yelled, "Words don't mean anything! See this traffic cone? I could call it a polar bear and if we all agreed it was a polar bear, that's what it would be." Since then, residents of McGill have used the term "polar bear" instead of "traffic cone." They steal traffic cones from Vanderbilt's parking lots under the guise of a "Save the Polar Bears" campaign. Last year, Angeline Cione, then a junior, kept an orange traffic cone outside of her room, tied to her door with a piece of rope. The cone had a water bowl and a sign that said, "Please don't feed the polar bear."
Events like this occur daily in McGill; residents live their lives in search of amusement. And above all else, they value absurdity.
McGill started as the Vietnam War ended, and the countercultural sentiment that pervaded the dorm in the mid-'70s has never entirely left. When the ROTC practiced on the lawn outside, residents amused themselves by playing protest music. They snuck behind the dorm, shot off bottle rockets and watched the ROTC break formation. But their antagonism didn't extend just to the military; McGillites treated everyone at Vanderbilt with equal disrespect, especially the fraternities.
When residents learned that Vanderbilt gave the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority expensive, wrought-iron lawn furniture, they stole it. "If sororities damaged their furniture, Vanderbilt replaced it. But they wouldn't give us any furniture, and we thought that was unfair," says professor John Stuhr. "Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, so we formed the McGill Furniture Liberation Front and took the furniture in the middle of the night. The Thetas took it back the next night. They left a note that said 'Theta Furniture Recovery Mission' or something like that. So we stole it again and cemented it in the ground. Vanderbilt gave the Thetas new furniture and then everyone was happy. It was all in good fun. Later that year, they held a Theta/McGill sorority party, open only to Thetas and McGill people. It was such a weird mixture of people, like The Odd Couple or something."
The pranks and fake aggressiveness, however, aren't all in fun. They're a response to a campus atmosphere that many McGillites have at times found shockingly regressive. One fraternity, Kappa Alpha, "used to have this tradition called Old South Day," Michael Patton remembers. "The women would dress as Southern belles and the men wore Confederate military costumes. Graham Matthews, a graduate student at the divinity school, was African American, and so he and some of his friends made up Nat Turner Day. They dressed up in rags and chains and their white friends whipped them along during Old South Day. The administration made them stop so the Confederates could continue. McGill could have protested, but we just sat around, stunned at the whole ordeal. I thought the whole tradition was absurd, so I put on a cap with antlers." Patton says this convinced some frat boys "that I was, in their words, 'a faggot.' So they beat me up."
By the 1980s, the atmosphere at Vanderbilt wasn't as charged, perhaps because America had entered "the Decade of Greed"; university students, McGill residents included, weren't immune to the general mood of self-absorption. "It was a really fun time to go to college," says Brian Huddleston, an Oklahoma lawyer and former McGill freak. "There wasn't a reason to be political, especially at Vanderbilt. We were fairly clean-cut kids who wanted to party and have good fun." Drugs of all kinds became available in McGill, and residents spent most nights drunk, high or worse. For a while, LSD became popular. "It's hard to remember the details...," Huddleston says. "It just seemed OK at the time. I'm glad I survived without any permanent harm."
As Vanderbilt entered the '90s, the university made efforts to tone down its Southern atmosphere to attract a wider variety of students. Traditions like Old South Day were discontinued and the school climbed up the scholastic ranks. The economy was good and students had very little to protest. McGill slowly changed into a more laid-back, espresso-drinking, poetry-reading crowd—one that, if only to a small degree, reflected the evolving Vanderbilt student body as a whole.
During this time, John Lysaker, a philosphy grad student, became program coordinator and instituted the McGill Coffeehouse: an open-mic showcase at which students performed music, spoken-word pieces and experimental theater. "I started it my second year, which would have been 1992," he recalls. "[The] coffeehouses usually lasted about seven hours and they drew people from all over campus. It was a very racially and ethnically integrated experience. About 200 people would show up and listen to local bands, poetry, short skits, stories, things like that. Some Indian girls demonstrated traditional Indian dances. I remember once we had a gospel choir. Another time, a former resident had moved to Chicago, and he and his band drove all the way down to Nashville to play at McGill."
In the late '90s, a group of boys formed the McGill Ultimate Fighting Federation (MUFF) and regularly preformed choreographed MUFF wrestling matches for coffeehouse. Other infamous coffeehouse acts have included exploding grapes in a microwave, playing the guitar with a vibrator, and one student who, covered in duct tape and Saran Wrap, performed an interpretive dance to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
When Stuhr returned last year to give a McGill Hour talk, it was the first time he had visited the dorm in almost 30 years. He didn't know about the coffeehouses or the failed secession attempt. So had the dorm changed during his absence? "Not nearly as much as I would have expected," he says. "The way students talk about the dorm is different; they have a sense of community and tradition now. But I was surprised at how familiar they felt. They seemed very much like the people I knew when I was there, although the issues they face are radically different. These kids aren't worried about the draft. We weren't worried about AIDS. McGill is still the radical side of Vandy, but the significance of that has changed."
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the dorm is the unconscious continuation of traditions. Stories told by graduates in the 1970s might just as well be told by students in McGill today. The 1983 and 2003 issues of the dorm's weekly newsletter, once called Le Philosophe and now The Ugly McGillite, both advertise T-shirt design competitions and McGill Movie Nights. In fact, the only noticeable change in the newsletter is the technological upgrade from the typewriter to the computer.
Most of the time, residents don't realize they are emulating the pranksters who came before them, but little do they know, there are no new college pranks left to try—especially in McGill. Every winter, for instance, the residents build a snow penis. Sophomores watch the seniors create the obscene sculpture in the middle of the lawn, unaware that the tradition dates back to the early 1980s, when David Mintz and his friends created a 7-foot-tall penis out of snow and ice. "There were a number of us reading Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and in it was an image of a giant penis. So when it snowed, we built our own penis, right in front of the dorm. It was about as big as a tree trunk. We poured raspberry Kool-Aid over it to make it turn light pink. It looked very realistic. One girl climbed on top of it for a photograph. Mark Bandas, who used to be an RA in McGill, was the area director and had to come over and break it down with a baseball bat."
The most tangible tradition of all, however, is the mural that runs four stories tall, from the basement to the top floor, along the walls of the building's main stairwell. The work depicts Dante's The Divine Comedy, starting at the lowest circle of hell, with Barney the purple dinosaur as Satan, extending upward through purgatory (the third floor) and culminating in heaven, with images of angels, butterflies and the Simpsons.
The murals started almost as soon as the McGill Project itself. Michael Patton may have inadvertently started the whole thing in his dorm room: "My friend drew a Grateful Dead album cover on my wall with crayons. Soon, everyone starting drawing. When my dad came to visit, he drew a Michelangelo on the ceiling. This was before I learned you couldn't get crayon off. The administration didn't care, they just assigned me the same room for the next school year and told me I had a year to figure out how to remove it."
Later, with administrative approval, students started painting the basement walls. When McGill was completely renovated in 1990, the artwork was destroyed. Students painted four new pictures on the basement walls and then decided to attack the stairwell. Since 1991, McGill residents have added to the mural every other year. When a McGill resident died in a 1998 plane crash, his friends painted an X-1 Starfighter in heaven to commemorate his love for Star Wars. Two years ago, Osama bin Laden was added to hell, alongside Hitler, Idi Amin and a Klansman. The mural has endured much water damage from faulty plumbing within the dorm, and it may be torn down when Vanderbilt fixes the problem.
The mural is not the only thing whose future is in jeopardy; the McGill Project itself runs the risk of elimination within the next 10 years. Vanderbilt University is taking steps to turn the school into a series of residential colleges similar to those at Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. Stephen Caldwell, associate vice chancellor for student life, feels this new system will benefit the university. "When we came up with this idea, we looked at McGill and McTyeire [the foreign language dorm]. The residential college system is designed to emulate the best features of these dorms. Hopefully, we'll attract more students who like the McGill atmosphere. Not only alternative students, but those who like the residential environment."
But however much Vanderbilt has changed over the years, the McGill lifestyle still differs greatly from the rest of the school. Such a tremendous shift in the student body would completely alter the university's image. Susan Barge, associate provost for residential colleges, clarifies: "We won't go looking for people with multiple piercings, but we will search for a more diverse student body with a wider variety of interests."
Each proposed college will have about 300 residents. McGill Hall only holds 100 students, thus the dorm will be combined with neighboring buildings when the change takes place. The McGill Project will survive the transition only if students demand it. It is an organization run entirely by students, and it relies on popularity to continue, so the day may come when McGill is no longer needed at Vanderbilt. When that happens, the project will end.
In a way, McGill and its relationship to Vanderbilt represent Nashville in microcosm. Like the university, the city itself has long sustained a reputation for being a staid and conservative, if genteel, place. But there has always been a creative energy bubbling under the surface here. And as Nashville has moved into the present day, attracting an increasingly diverse, freer-thinking population, that creative spirit has worked its effect on the city. This kind of cultural shift doesn't just play out on the Vandy campus or the streets of Nashville, but in society at large: the "freaks" in the minority end up influencing the mainstream. It makes perfect sense that, one day, McGill might be rendered obsolete.
That day is still a ways off, though. Vanderbilt's residential college system has not yet left the initial planning stage, and the first concrete steps toward its implementation will probably not occur for another few years. Even then, the first step will only affect freshman housing. At this point, the area of campus where McGill sits will be the last section incorporated into the system. This is not expected to occur for another 10 to 15 years. Mark Bandas lived in McGill from 1979 until 1981 as an RA, and is now the assistant vice chancellor of housing and residential education. He was the one called out to destroy the first snow penis and has been around for just about everything McGill has done since then. He sees the residential colleges not as a way to destroy McGill, but rather to bring it to the rest of Vanderbilt. "It takes years to change a culture, change an experience. McGill was an experiment, but now we want to widen the scope of that experience and bring it to the rest of campus."
The dorm that once seceded from Vanderbilt has now become the prototype for the school's residential system. The administration does not love the snow penises and Santa hats that McGill throws its way, but it recognizes the ultimate significance of the dorm: that behind the pranks and overall silliness live a group of students who thrive on intellectual stimulation, value individuality over acceptance, but have a sense of belonging greater than anywhere else on campus. Residents of McGill turn into doctors and lawyers, just like the rest of Vanderbilt, but they do it in a unique way and on their own terms. They still consider themselves anti-conformists, the official hell-raisers of Vanderbilt, and they somehow manage to live up to their reputation year after year.
Bandas laughs when he thinks about the debauchery he has witnessed. After telling a story about a mud-wrestling competition that ended when two students, covered in mud, tumbled into his room and broke his bookshelf, he pauses and smiles. "I'm sure they never thought they'd be the model for the university!"
Editor's note: Claire Suddath graduated in May from Vanderbilt. For three years, she lived in McGill Hall.
