Letters

In vain Morgan’s protests that seven thousand dedicated students, housed in tasteful, low-profile buildings on the seven hundred acres of farmland already annexed by MSUC, represented the maximum reasonable burden on the ecology and sociology of the county, and the optimal balance of economic benefits and academic manageability; that Schott’s “Tower of Truth,” like the projected diploma mill it represented, would violate the natural terrain; that the drainage of so much marsh would be an ecological disaster, the influx of so huge a population not a stimulus to the Dorset Way of Life but a cataclysmic shock; that both skyscrapers and ivory towers were obsolete ideals; that even if they weren’t, no sane contractor would attempt such a structure on the spongy ground of a fresh-filled fen, et cetera. In veritable transports of bad faith, the Schott/Cook party rhapsodised that Homo sapiens himself — especially in his rational, civilised, university-founding aspect — was the very embodiment of “antinaturalness”: towering erect instead of creeping on all fours, opposing reason to brute instinct, aspiring ever to what was deemed beyond his grasp, raising from the swamp primordial great cities, lofty cathedrals, towers of learning. How were the fenny origins invoked of Rome! How learning was rhymed with yearning, Tow’r of Truth with Flow’r of Youth! How was excoriated, in editorial and Rotary Club speech, “the Morgan theory” (which he never held) that the university should be a little model of the actual world rather than a lofty counterexample: lighthouse to the future, ivory tower to the present, castle keep of the past!

Cook’s rhetoric, all this, sweetly resounding in our Chambers of Commerce, where too there were whispered libels against the luckless Morgan: that his late wife had died a dozen years past in circumstances never satisfactorily explained, which however had led to Morgan’s “resignation” from his first teaching post, at Wicomico Teachers College; that his absence from the academic scene between that dismissal (by Schott himself, as ill chance would have it, who damningly refused to comment on the matter, declaring only that “every man deserves a second chance”) and his surprise appointment by Harrison Mack II as first president of Tidewater Tech was not unrelated to that dark affair. By 1967, when Morgan acquiesced to the Tower of Truth in hopes of saving his plan for a manageable, high-quality research centre, the damage to his reputation had been done, by locker-room couplets of unacknowledged but unmistakable authorship:

Here is the late Mrs Morgan interred,

Whose ménage à trois is reduced by one-third.

Her husband and lover survive her, both fired:

Requiescat in pacem the child they both sired, etc.

In July of last year he resigned, ostensibly to return to teaching and research, and in fact is a visiting professor of American History this year at the college in Massachusetts named after my late husband’s famous ancestor — or was until his disappearance some weeks ago. John Schott became acting president — and what a vulgar act is his! — and yours truly, who has no taste for administrative service even under decent chiefs like Morgan, but could not bear to see MSUC’s governance altogether in Boeotian hands, was prevailed upon to act as provost of the Faculty of Letters.

How came Schott to choose me, you ask, who am through these hopeless marshes but (I hope) the briefest of sojourners? Surely because he rightly distrusts all his ordinary faculty, and wrongly supposes that, visitor and woman to boot, I can be counted upon passively to abet his accession to the actual presidency of MSU — from which base (read “tow’r,” and weep for Marshyhope, for Maryland!) he will turn his calculating eyes to Annapolis, “maybe even Washington”! Yet he does me honour by enough distrusting my gullibility after all to leave behind as mine his faithful secretary-at-least: Miss Shirley Stickles, sharp of eye and pencil if not of mind, to escape whose surveillance I am brought to penning by hand this sorry history of your nomination.

Whereto, patient Mr B., we are come! For scarce had I aired against my tenancy the provostial chamber (can you name another university president who smokes cigars?) when there was conveyed to me, via his minatory and becorseted derrière-garde, my predecessor’s expectation, not only that I would appoint at once a nominating committee for the proposed Litt.D. (that is, a third member, myself being already on the committee ex officio and Schott having appointed, by some dim prerogative, a second: one Harry Carter, former psychologist, present nonentity and academic vice-president, Schott’s creature), but that, after a show of nomination weighing, we would present to the board of regents as our candidate the “Maryland Laureate” himself, Mr Andrew Cook!