The South was the "Sahara of the Bozart"—mediocre, stupid, lethargic. So insisted Supercynic H.L. Mencken. Even Virginia, the "most civilized" state in the South, was an "intellectual Gobi or Lapland," where education "had sunk to the Baptist-seminary level; not a single contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in 25 years."
Since Mencken published his notorious essay in 1920, many oases have bloomed in that Sahara, among them the present-day Universities of North Carolina, Texas and Virginia as well as Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice and Tulane. Nevertheless, when indices of excellence are applied to higher education, the South, in general, comes up short. Slightly more than a quarter of the nation's 3,016 accredited institutions are located there, but a 1970 study showed that the South had only 5% of the nation's best graduate programs and just 8% of the best graduate faculties. In 1975 fewer than 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were associated with institutions in the South.
Why the paucity of an intellectual culture in the South? Historically, according to W. J. Cash in his classic book, The Mind of the South, the causes are in the rural surroundings, which offered few stimulations; the strength of religion, which answered philosophical questions with prayers; and, most of all, the defense of slavery, which "set up a ban on all analysis and inquiry, a terrified truculence toward every new idea." A simple world spawned simple pursuits. "Horses, dogs and guns, not books, ideas and art" were Southerners' "normal and absorbing interests." Or, as Henry Adams wrote in his Education, "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament."
Today, the most distinguished of Southern university presidents, Vanderbilt's Alexander Heard, 59, concurs with Cash on the devastating effect of slavery. In the century since the Civil War, which caused further cultural stagnation, the nation's intellectual ferment has taken place mostly outside the South. Says Heard: "Strength breeds strength. The streams of intellectual creativity coming from Cambridge, Massachusetts, reinforce and regenerate themselves." Centers of intellect, he maintains, are highly concentrated and "tend to be self-perpetuating."
Only in the intellectual fields of history and fiction has the South been brilliantly represented. But most of the luminaries left the South—Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, William Styron went to the North to write. Historians C. Vann Woodward, Julian Boyd and David Donald went to the North to teach. Explains one Deep South professor who moved away ten years ago: "Southern universities were not exactly bastions of freedom. Intellectuals could be severely hassled, and professors who held divergent views had to be either gutsy or masochistic to stay. It's difficult to seek or create mental challenges when you have no peace of mind." As recently as 1972, more than half of the colleges the American Association of University Professors censured for not supporting academic freedom and tenure were in the South.