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"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