Sewanee, How I Love You . . .

By Ellie McGrath

The University of the South finds a friend in Tennessee

The University of the South, better known as Sewanee, sits high atop a Tennessee mountain, so close to heaven that undergraduates believe the institution has its own guardian angel. Hence the school ritual: when a student drives out through the sandstone gates, he taps the roof of his car to summon the angel. When he returns safely to campus, he taps the car roof again to release his protector. Lately that celestial patron has been off campus on a new mission, fund raising. When Tennessee Williams died last month, the University of the South found itself the principal beneficiary of his estate, reported to be $10 million, despite the fact that the playwright had never attended the college.

Last fall Heiress Clarita Crosby, who had visited the campus once in 1978, left Sewanee $5 million. And in the past two decades the school has received gifts ranging from $1,000 to $113,000 from people with no obvious connection. Williams, in fact, may have had the strongest tie: his grandfather, the Rev. Walter E. Dakin, graduated from the divinity school in 1895. The original Williams will, dated September 1980, created a Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund for creative writers and left the Williams papers to Sewanee. A codicil, dated December 1982, gives the papers to Harvard and puts the fund under the administration of the "chairman of the creative-writing department of Harvard University." Harvard, alas, does not have a creative-writing department (nor does Sewanee), and Dakin Williams plans to challenge his brother's will. Sewanee is intent on keeping the arrangement with Harvard as genteel as possible. Says University Counsel Edward Watson, a graduate of both Sewanee and Harvard Law School: "It will be resolved by these two institutions in a practical, harmonious way, not on a football field or in a courtroom or anywhere else like that."

The University of the South, founded in 1857 by three Episcopal bishops, is a fitting place for eccentric legacies. The campus was destroyed during the Civil War before a student ever enrolled. Afterward, churches in England donated funds to rebuild the school, and Oxford and Cambridge universities gave books for the library. The British influence is still strong. Gothic-style buildings are topped by battlements and covered with ivy. Faculty and honors students stroll along arched walkways in black academic gowns. The bell in Breslin Tower, modeled after Oxford's Magdalen, strikes each hour. The school's 10,000-acre "domain" is something of a feudal fief. In addition to the campus, quadrangle, bluffs and forests, Sewanee owns the town (pop. 1,900). The university's vice chancellor and president serves as mayor and city manager, overseeing municipal services. The students run the volunteer fire department.

"There's still a sense of family and real community," says Andrew Lytle, novelist and English professor emeritus. Almost all 1,000 students are from middle-or upper-class families. About 80% of them are from the South; of those, 25% are from Tennessee. Nearly a third of the 250-member class of 1982 had brothers, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and a few sisters who preceded them to Sewanee (women were not admitted until 1969). Says Dean W. Brown Patterson: "The remarkable thing is that the students are opposed to changes. They are the most conservative element we have here." When the faculty wanted to eliminate Saturday classes, the students overwhelmingly voted to keep the six-day week. (They were overruled.) Undergraduates must meet strict curriculum requirements, including a third-year foreign-language literature course, and must pass comprehensive examinations in their majors. A dress code of jackets and ties for men and skirts for women is accepted by all ladies and gentlemen.

Such rigor exerts surprising appeal. The university annually receives some 1,000 applications for its 280-member freshman class. Alumni have proved the excellence of Sewanee's education: the school has produced 20 Rhodes scholars, and the percentage of alumni listed in Who's Who is among the highest for American colleges. Readers, writers and publishers who have never heard of the University of the South know of the Sewanee Review, the oldest literary quarterly in the country. In the '30s and '40s it published the works of such writers as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, bolstering the Southern literary renaissance.

Even with this reputation, the institution has not been immune to financial crisis. By the late '70s, with a debt of $1.2 million, Sewanee went to its alumni for help. Robert Ayres, a 1949 graduate and investment banker, raised $1 million for the college, became vice chancellor and president in 1977 and retired all debt by instituting strict budget-control measures. Not a single teaching position was lost. Two years ago, the University of the South launched a $50 million capital fund drive, an ambitious goal for a school with only 13,000 alumni. The appeal has already netted $30 million. Obviously, somebody up there likes Sewanee. --By Ellie McGrath. Reported by John E. Yang/Atlanta

With reporting by John E. Yang/Atlanta This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.