No Tunnel

As an undergraduate at Oxford's Corpus Christi College in the 1880s, Massachusetts-born Edward Perry Warren was bitterly annoyed by the 9 p.m. curfew. He was also annoyed by the fines for curfew stragglers, which sometimes ran as high as -L-5 after midnight. Before he died in 1928, wealthy (from paper mills), eccentric Edward Warren sat down and wrote a 59-page will. One among many bequests: a straightfaced offer of -L-3,000 to Corpus Christi, provided college authorities would use the money to build a tunnel under the walls so that stragglers could get to bed without 1) paying fines, or 2) climbing walls. The will allowed Corpus Christi officials 20 years to think it over.

Last week, after 22 years and still no sign of a tunnel, the money went by default to secondary legatees, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Bowdoin College. Corpus Christi officials were in a no-comment mood about the whole thing. The official attitude: the tunnel had always seemed rather unnecessary.

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