University of the South - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Sewanee, TN)

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- m AND ALL MY LIFE, V r Sfr w INTRODUCTION 19

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Continued from page 17 Dean Laura Drake Gill of Barnard College, whose efforts to found a women ' s college a few years later would not succeed. In the Semi-Centennial volume there was no hint of the difficulties ahead: by 1909 Vice-Chancellor Benja- min Wiggins was dead, law and medical departments closed, the March-December academic calendar aban- doned, and the chapel would wait for another 50 years for completion. George R. Fairbanks had completed his His- tory of the University of the South before his death in 1906, but Arthur Howard Noll was still at work on his Alumni Directory. The 75th Anniversary in 1932 found the University having survived World War I and the earlier part of the Great Depression. An expansion of dormitories had brought most students from private homes into college housing, with the erection of Cannon, Johnson, Elliott, Tuckaway and a new Hoffman. Carnegie had been the only substantial addition to academic buildings. Thomas Frank Gailor made the historical address at the 75th An- niversary observance. As Chaplain, Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor he had lived through most of Sewanee ' s histo- ry as an operating institution. Moultri Guerry published Men who Made Sewanee, and four ladies collected materi- al for the book now called Purple Sewanee, priceless in its firstperson accounts. The Centennial began July 4, 1957, with a return to Lookout Mountain with the flagstaff carried there 100 years before. The House of Bishops met in All Saints ' before it was closed for addition of tower and carillon, narthex, and St. Augustine ' s Chapel ' s wing. Bishop Frank A. Juhan portrayed Bishop Leonidas Polk in the Centen- nial pageant on Hardee Field, produced by Miss Charlotte Gailor. The Centennial closed with a service in Lambeth Palace Chapel, London, for the award of an honorary degree to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Building on a decade of stabilization of the University by Vice-Chancel- lor Alex Guerry, in spite of World War II, the University was in the midst of its greatest period of physical expan- sion. In the Vice-Chancellorship of Edward McGrady were built Hunter, Juhan, Benedict, Gorgas, Cravens, Hamilton, Woods, duPont, both Clevelands, and Courts and Trezevant, situated to be the site of a second college. Walsh and St. Luke ' s were rebuilt, and the lakes con- structed. Centennial publications includ ed as Alumni Di- rectory, Registrar ' s Report, and Reconstruction at Sewanee, a history from 1857 to 1872. The 125th Anniversary finds significant changes: ad- mission of women, 1969, the Academy merged with St. Andrew ' s School and moved off the Domain, 1981, an off- campus extension, Education for Ministry, and the Cen- tury II fund, five times larger than any fund raising goal undertaken. The 125th observance began with the opening of the Easter Semester 1982 and continues throughout the calendar year with a reflective theme, Towards a New Vision of Liberal Education in a Christian Context, and a distinctly academic flavor of faculty symposia, lectures and seminars. Will Sewanee ever be the University of the South? Not yet, but as William Porcher DuBose said at the Semi- Centennial: Sewanee is ever to herself and to her own the great university, not of the actual visible to others, but of the conception and t he idea which is her own real. It is this spirit that Sewanee must not lose as it goes forward toward the Sesquicentennial in 2007. Elizabeth N. Chitty 18 INTRODUCTION

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THROUGH STORM AND STRIFE 20 INTRODUCTION