In Appreciation of Excellence

The University of the South, perched on a plateau in the Cumberland Mountains at Sewanee, Tenn., represents excellence in education wrapped in a tiny package. Only 787 students, all men, in habit its 10,000 acres. Its Sewanee Review is a first-rate literary quarterly. Its English department is one of the best; it has an enviable one-to-twelve teacher-student ratio, and has turned out fifteen Rhodes scholars, one of the best records among colleges its size.

Because of that reputation, and because it is one of the few (8) U.S. colleges operated by the Episcopal Church, Sewanee attracts 20% of its enrollment from outside the South. Many Ivy League alumni send their sons to

Sewanee because, they say, they want their boys to get the same kind of small-school instruction that they had--but which the Ivy League has since outgrown. (If Sewanee cannot match the glories of Ivy League athletics, it can at least boast an illustrious football past: in 1899, before football was confined to Saturdays, Sewanee knocked off Texas, Texas A. & M., Tulane, L.S.U. and Mississippi all in the same week.)

Three years ago, the Ford Foundation decided to offer Sewanee an improvement grant of $2,500,000. In doing so, it indirectly posed the question of whether Sewanee's kind of excellence is really appreciated; for, to get the gift, the school would have to raise $7,500,000 of its own. With only 6,600 living alumni, Sewanee could not find the money on its own. But about 11,000 people who had never attended the school sent donations; 395 of them cared enough, in fact, to give $10,000 or more apiece. Last week Sewanee's fund was past $8,000,000--and the Ford grant was clinched.

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