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.