In the beginning it consisted of a single three-story building just north of the state’s fifth largest town. The legislature agreed to provide funds at the rate of a thousand dollars a year. One senator was skeptical: Why spend money on a university when the state has more jack rabbits than people? The seven students who made up the first class seemed to validate his concerns: four sheep-like boys who did everything together; a small, curious boy who resembled a gopher; another much larger one who walked like a bear; and a single doe-eyed girl who already knew Latin but wanted to learn Greek.
The professors all came from the East, at least in the early years. Some were adventurers who happened on the university while hitchhiking or touring the area in a Hudson Roadster or Buick 26: First, Taos to see the Pueblo, then the high mountain passes of Colorado to breathe the pristine air, and finally western Nebraska where deep ruts made by wagons marked the path of the Oregon Trail. Upon discovering that a university was nearby, they presented themselves and their degrees and were hired on the spot. It was how things were done back then.
For some others, the university was the refuge of last resort. They’d started out teaching at Cornell or North Carolina or maybe a prep school in New England but something untoward had happened and so they went looking for a place that was as far away from their error in judgement, their blunder, their mortification, as they could find. A place to hide out. With luck, a place to make a new start.
Take, for instance, Wilson Weston, scholar of 17th century literature and poet. He’d been dismissed from the University of Alabama. In his case it had to do with money, tuition dollars ending up in his personal account. Or Tom Grimes, a sociologist. He’d ridden the rails across the length and breadth of the entire country and then written a book about it. Except he hadn’t actually ridden any rails. Hadn’t left Ohio. When one of his graduate students exposed him, he had no choice but to flee. And of course Hanna Goff. An immigrant from Eastern Europe, she’d been at—where was it? Vassar? Barnard? No one seemed to know why someone so brilliant would leave there and end up here. Too much of a day drinker some said.
Wherever they came from, they tended to find the university a congenial place. Who’d have thought it possible to build a community of scholars in a small town Out West. But it was. They could still read the same books and subscribe to the same journals as their counterparts at more renowned institutions. They could have cocktail parties and argue about politics and art. Their students presented certain challenges but each new group seemed a little more literate and a little less feral than the one before. As Tom Grimes said, “These youngsters need us. This, my friends, is what education is truly about.”
Naturally, the great majority of faculty members were men. It was that way everywhere, not just on the plains. The wives were expected to be homemakers and child rearers. Yet, like their husbands, they set about creating their own idyllic academic village—perhaps not Cambridge, perhaps not Ithaca, but a facsimile thereof. And as in Cambridge and Ithaca, there was the occasional affair, a faculty member and the wife of another faculty member or a faculty member and a graduate student. In a town so far from a large city, so remote, so insular, such incidents tended to be at once sensational and well-contained. Put another way, when such things happened, everyone knew, but everyone also knew that to make too much of it might tear the fabric of the community. Better to whisper discreetly and look the other way.
It needs to be mentioned that this was in the years before the war, when even colleges that professed an egalitarian ethos weren’t open to everyone. Higher education was exclusive by design, and the great majority of young people didn’t bother to apply. Occasionally, however, some unwashed boy would hike down from the mountains and present himself to the admissions office without any forewarning or academic records in hand. Or some girl in a dowdy dress would show up with her father, whom she had brow-beaten into accompanying her, and he, the father, would place a fifty dollar bill on the table, as if he expected that gesture to answer any questions—but also as if he hoped they’d be told to go back where they came from because just walking into the building had required all the courage he could muster. Such students were almost always admitted and the university grew in size.
Then one day, a pair of mountain lions were sighted in the foothills nearby. Everyone thought such creatures had been eliminated years ago, successfully hunted out. A professor of biology said, “Ah, a subject for my next paper.” Wilson Weston said, “Ah, a subject for a poem.” But the more widespread response was, “What’s to stop them from taking a student? Some of our freshmen have a tendency to wander; some are no larger than an adolescent deer.” The alarm was such that a professional hunter was hired, a grizzled fellow who looked like a frontiersman of the Natty Bumpo type. He disappeared for three months. When he came back he asked for five hundred dollars and said, “You’ll never see them again.” But Hanna Goff said, “Where’s the evidence. A good bounty hunter always brings back the ears and tail.” The frontiersman’s eyes shifted guiltily and the next day he was gone. As for the mountain lions, they continued to be sighted on a regular basis. “Look, it’s the lions,” a student would say and point to a distant ridge. Eventually, they came to be viewed as something like mascots and never harmed a soul.
As the years passed, more buildings were added, all of them made from blocks of sandstone from a nearby quarry. When the sixth building was completed, then-president, Henry Raskow, had an idea. He said, “Rather than maintain a furnace to heat each building, why not construct a single large one and use underground tunnels to distribute the heat throughout the campus?” It was an audacious concept. At that time, they were only beginning to use the term “campus.” It implied scope and scale, permanence and significance. It was like deciding to start calling a small cluster of houses a town.
At first Raskow was mocked—”Henry wants to dig a subway. As if this is London or New York”—so the idea was shelved. But the next president, a visionary fellow named Eli Cross, heard about the tunnels and said “Just wait one minute. We are a place of learning and inquiry. Therefore, no idea, however ludicrous, ought to be rejected out of hand. Think of the savings. That alone ought to make Raskow’s concept worth considering.” Over the next two years, a great coal-burning furnace was built on a vacant plot of land and a network of tunnels was bored with a machine modeled on the one used to create the London underground. In subsequent years, the project was judged to be a great success. One unexpected benefit (or drawback, it depended on who you talked to) was that students discovered they could travel about the campus by way of the tunnels. An especially heavily used branch was the one linking the boys’ and girls’ dorms.
The university didn’t produce Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize winners, or works of scholarship that changed the world, but no one expected that. However, not long after the war ended a student-athlete named Biff Taylor was playing basketball for the university squad when he realized that if he shot the ball by hooking it over his head, even the tallest player was unable to guard him. Incredibly, no one had done that before, at least not intentionally and not on a regular basis. In no time, every basketball player in America was imitating him. Years later, Wilson Weston would write, “You can keep your Nobel Prizes. I’d prefer to teach at the university where the hook shot was invented.”
Through the 1950s, the university continued to grow and began to seem more like other universities. Of the first generation of faculty, only Hanna Goff remained. She was now viewed as a campus character wearing a long wool coat even in July. She had acquired two beagles who went everywhere with her. When a new dean arrived from New Jersey and tried to tell her she couldn’t have her dogs in her office or in class, there was such an uproar among students the dean had to withdraw his complaint. And that got him off to such a poor start that he left at the end of the year.
Despite its remote location, the 1960s roared through the university on the plains as it did through other institutions of higher learning, like a fierce but fresh wind. To give you a taste of the climate, during a single week in 1967, Allen Ginsburg read his poetry to three hundred students, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver spoke to a thousand students, and the band Jefferson Airplane packed the basketball gymnasium more fully than it had ever been packed before. Some historians of popular music claim it was the best concert the group ever played.
Of course there were also protests against the Vietnam War—marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, and events of symbolic power such as the snowy night in November 1969 when the names of all the American soldiers who had died were read from the steps of the student union building, with voices of the various student readers amplified through large speakers—speakers not as enormous as the ones used by Jefferson Airplane but still large enough for the names of the dead to be heard in every corner of the university and even in the nearby town.
On that night a fourteen-year-old boy was crossing the campus on his way to visit a friend. Although the snow was falling heavily and straight down, the names of the dead seemed to rise upward, into the dark sky. He stopped and listened. It was very cold and the snow sparkled in the moonlight. A girl was reading the names and occasionally her voice trembled with emotion. Fifty years later he would remember that night, perhaps more vividly than any other in his life.
I was that boy, and when I was old enough, I attended the university, majoring in French. My mother had told me that the point of college was to study something new, something entirely unfamiliar and French seemed to fill the bill. After I graduated I went to France, thinking my skills would be useful there, but was dismayed to discover that everyone in France already spoke French better than me. So I found a position teaching high school French in a small town in Indiana, not far from Lafayette.
Despite the fact that I now live a long way from the University on the Plains and have no current connection to it, I often think fondly of my time there. I saw the mountains lions—surely not the original ones but their descendants—and I walked through the heat tunnels many times. I can picture with absolute clarity the pleasant afternoons I spent reading on a bench beside a grove of aspen trees near the alumni fountain, and the golden sandstone buildings still occasionally appear in my dreams. However, when I tell people where I went to college, I get odd reactions. They claim not to have heard of the place, or act as though they don’t quite believe it exists—or ever did.
I have no interest in going back there, because I’m told the university has fallen on hard times. Enrollment has decreased dramatically and fully half the buildings are no longer in use. I’m not sure why. Probably the usual suspects. Market forces; decreased support from the state government; the incursion of technology into the educational sphere. The gymnasium where the hook shot was invented and Grace Slick sang her heart out has been torn down. The heat tunnels stopped being used years ago and have begun to collapse in on themselves. Apparently, they’re now filled with tumbleweeds and dust. In the winter, herds of pronghorn antelope migrate down from the hills and huddle against the sides of the buildings, seeking shelter from the icy wind. The few remaining students, looking like ghosts, make their way toward their next classes, laptops clutched to their chests.
Don Zancanella has received the Iowa Short Fiction Award and an O. Henry Prize. One of his stories was cited as a distinguished story of the year in the 2019 Best American Short Stories, and he has published widely in literary magazines. His books include Western Electric (a collection of stories from University of Iowa Press) and three novels, Concord (Serving House Books), A Storm in the Stars (Delphinium/HarperCollins), and Animals of the Alpine Front (Delphinium).